Everyone check out this website with photography by my VisCom friend Yanina Manolova from Ohio University– she’s a fantastic photographer who has won many awards! Her site has some amazing shots, my favorite is the one featured below…
A 102-year old deaf woman, rests on the balcony of her apartment in Havana, Cuba. Photo by Yanina Manolova.
By Matt Soniak
MentalFloss.com
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Photo from MentalFloss.com
Grab a partner and look into his or her eye – or stare deeply into it, if appropriate – in a normally lit room. The quick and dirty version of how you’re able to view each other is this: Light enters the eye through the cornea, the clear outer dome, and goes through the pupil. Then it travels to the cornea, which focuses it on the lens. The lens further focuses the light and spreads it across the retina. The retina receives the light and transmits signals via the optic nerve to the brain, which interprets the image.
As light enters the eye, some of gets reflected back, but the amount of light in most situations is so small, you wouldn’t even know it. Right now, your partner’s pupils look black and everything’s normal. Now grab a camera and take a picture of your partner with the flash on. There’s that demonic red eye.
Here’s what happened: When you took the picture, the camera flash sent a lot of light into the eye in a very short time, the light reflected off the back of the eye and out through the pupil and, because the camera lens is close to the flash and able to capture images very quickly, it caught the light reflecting back out.
Seeing Red
So why is that light red? Because the fundus, the interior surface of the eye that includes the retina, is loaded with melanin, a pigment that gives it a brownish-reddish color. Was that anti-climactic? Sorry.
Red eye is fairly easy to curb by using the “red eye reduction” setting found on most digital camera flashes. This setting causes the flash to go off once before the picture is taken, which causes the subject’s pupils to contract and let less light in and out, and then another time to take the picture. Cameras with a flash farther away from the lens also reduce red eye because the flash hits the subject at a different angle than lens captures it.
Of course, red eye isn’t all bad. The same mechanics of light reflection that ruin photos also allow doctors a non-invasive way to see inside the eye. Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physician, discovered in the 19th century that he could examine the retina by holding a bright light near his eye and shining it into patients’ pupils.
By Chris Higgins
MentalFloss.com
May 21, 2008
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Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found.
In 1979 the photos start casually, with pictures of friends, picnics, dinners, and so on. Here’s an example from April 23, 1979 (I believe the photographer of the series is the man in the left foreground in this picture):
Throughout the 1980s we see more family/fun photos, but also some glimpses of the photographer’s filmmaking and music. Here’s someone recording audio in a film editing studio from February 5, 1983:
In the late 1980s we start seeing more evidence that the photographer is also a musician. He plays the accordion, and has friends who play various stringed instruments. What kind of music are they playing? Here’s a photo from July 2, 1989 of the photographer with his instrument:
In 1991, we see visual evidence of the photographs so far. The photographer has been collecting them in Polaroid boxes inside suitcases, as seen in this photo from March 30, 1991:
Throughout early 1997, we start to see the photographer himself more and more often. Sometimes his face is obscured behind objects. Other times he’s passed out on the couch. When he’s shown with people, he isn’t smiling. On May 2 1997, something bad has happened:
By May 4, 1997, it’s clear that he has cancer:
On October 5, 1997, it’s pretty clear what this picture means:
And just a few weeks later he’s back in the hospital. On October 24, 1997, we see a friend playing music in the hospital room:
The next day the photographer dies.
What started for me as an amusing collection of photos — who takes photos every day for eighteen years? — ended with a shock. Who was this man? How did his photos end up on the web? I went on a two-day hunt, examined the source code of the website, and tried various Google tricks.
Finally my investigation turned up the photographer as Jamie Livingston, and he did indeed take a photo every day for eighteen years, until the day he died, using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. He called the project “Photo of the Day” and presumably planned to collect them at some point — had he lived. He died on October 25, 1997 — his 41st birthday.
After Livingston’s death, his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid put together a public exhibit and website using the photos and called it JAMIE LIVINGSTON. PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence. The physical exhibit opened in 2007 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College (where Livingston started the series, as a student, way back when). The exhibit included rephotographs of every Polaroid and took up a 7 x 120 foot space.
You can read more about the project at this blog (apparently written by Crawford?). Or just look at the website. It’s a stunning account of a man’s life and death. All photos above are from the website.
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(All photos property of their original owner)
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