05 - Chasing Sunsets

Sunset from Swans Island, Maine. Shot with digital internegative method, Kodak Ektar/Phase One IQ3 100MP Trichromatic. More info in article!

Hi friends!

It's been a few weeks since I last wrote you. Lots has happened, and I've got a lot to share.

First things first, I've been writing a ton for work, helping our marketing team as a technical writer, and quite honestly that's left me a bit burned out on the writing.

Phase One, the camera system company that builds the super high-resolution systems we use throughout our company, just announced a brand new camera system that's probably the most radical product they've announced in the past five years or so, so things are super exciting around the office, but it's all hands on deck all the time!

We finally got a couple of prototypes in-house this past week:

If you're interested in more information about that, you can check it out here, or just ask me. Fair warning, I'll talk your ear off. 

Technical writing has made use of a lot of the same skills that I've tried to hone here - making the technical aspects of photography accessible to a broad audience, and in doing so hopefully give them a greater appreciation of the magic of optics, photonics, and image processing.

If you're interested in looking at one of those articles I wrote, you can check one out here. They're intended for a more specialized audience and as such, are a bit more technical and specific to the idea of why megapixels matter, and why a camera might be worth $50,000+. So if you're not already familiar with high resolution DSLRs or medium format, it might not be terribly interesting, but I'm always looking for feedback.

I can say that I've been very proud of the work though, and have gotten several nice messages from company clients, some of whom I've never even met in person! Here's one:

"Hi Arnab,

Well done. I appreciated some of the geometry prior to reading your in-depth plunge, but learned much more and, most importantly, learned how to better present the facts and issues to other club photographers.

Thanks again for pulling all the details into such a well written paper."

It feels great to communicate science and engineering to others, and in this particular case, extend that understanding as they share it further. 

But enough about that nerd stuff that doesn't apply to you. Let's explore something super sciency, that almost every one of you has attempted at some point - sunset photos.

Shooting Sunsets

Everyone's done it at least once. Perhaps you're out on a beautiful evening in the country, or on the beach, or even on a rooftop or by the water in the city. The sun starts to get low on the horizon, the sky starts to change colors, and the sunset commands your attention. 

So you pull out your phone, and take some pictures. Maybe you even try and take a photo of a friend with the sunset in the background. But everything you shoot either comes out too bright or too dark, and the colors don't look as vivid as they do in real life.

Not to worry, Instagram can save the day. Just add some clarity, pump up the HDR, and blast that saturation and we can turn the photo on the left into the one on the right:

Looks great, right?

Right?

Ok, so we’ve gone too far. But our phones are so good at taking photos of pretty much everything. Why is it so hard to take good sunset photos?

The Highlight of the Evening

First things first - the sun is bright. Really bright.

And when it's setting on the horizon, everything you see in front of it is backlit unless there are other lights in the frame with brightness on the same order of magnitude.

This typically doesn’t happen, but if you happen to have a portable light that is as bright as the sun, please notify me so I can steal it and sell it to every energy company on earth.

Anyways, managing a super bright sky or a really dark foreground isn't terribly difficult for our eyes - when we look at the skyline and then back at the foreground, our brain simply adjusts our optics and switches image processing methods.

While we won’t go into it in detail here, that latter bit is actually very complicated and the amount of work that our brain does behind the scenes is mind-blowing (no pun intended). But we're so used to it happening passively, that we don't think twice about it (no pun intended).

So we can handle the foreground, and we can handle the background. The problem arises when we try to capture both in the same image. The dynamic range in the image - the difference between the brightest point in the image, and the darkest point in the image - is crazy high. The sun is over 1 million times brighter than the darkest parts of the foreground in a sunset, and neither our camera phones (nor even most expensive cameras) can handle highlights that bright and shadows that deep at the same time.

So how do get both in one shot? Well, there’s one super simple answer!

The Answer

You can't.

But I want to!

Oh fine. We’ll try and find a workaround.

With a camera with a very limited dynamic range, like a cell phone camera, we're going to either have to choose to save the sky and sacrifice detail in the shadows, or save the foreground for and sacrifice details in the highlights in our photo.

It's a decision of personal taste, and contextual as well. If you're looking at a landscape or cityscape, saving the sky provides great color, range, and a nice silhouette. But if you're taking a photo of a friend with the sunset in the background, you can't get away with that. I've tried, they get mad.

To try and get both in one image, you have to lower the dynamic range by making the shadows brighter, or by bringing down the highlights.

But you can't turn down the sun.

I think.

If you can, again, let's link up and take over the energy sector. 

Under normal circumstances though, you have to find a way to bring up the shadows. This is where HDR comes in.

HDR can refer to a wide variety of things, but in this case, we’re talking about taking multiple frames at different brightness levels, and blending them together.

Chances are if you're using a really nice phone, the newest sensor technology can capture all of the frames at the same time on one sensor. Stacked sensor CMOS technology is crazy. Ask me about it sometime.

This works really well, then, and is pretty much just limited by how good your cameras are and how good your blending is.

These days, both are quite good, so HDR extends the dynamic range of a lot of cell phone cameras in a lot of conditions. Unfortunately, noise is the other factor that can cut into dynamic range, and small sensors tend to have much more noise (this is why your shadows can look grainy or have weird colors), so this method only works up to a point.

Additionally, in situations like sunsets, using three frames (a common number) to capture everything in the scene would require the exposures to be so far apart that blending them would look unrealistic and create erroneous tones, so phones will typically have a limit to how wide they allow HDR algorithms to spread.

There are other ways to get HDR-like effects though, even if you don’t have a phone that has true HDR built-in.

You can fix that in Photoshop, right?

Apps like Instagram (and for that matter, Capture One, Photoshop, and Lightroom) allow you to adjust the dynamic range of an image after it’s taken. But when you use the shadow and highlight tools when you're editing an image, you're pushing and pulling data around, which makes images start to fall apart unless they’re extremely data-rich, like a camera RAW file.

In phone images (or even some higher end camera images), this leads to the infamous “halo effect” we've all seen, among other things. (If you don’t know what I mean, I’ll point this out in an image in a minute.)

So using built-in HDR in your camera app is almost always better than adjusting the shadows in an app.

And the same goes for you DSLR and mirrorless photographers - getting it right in camera is always better than fixing something in post-production software like Photoshop.

But the best solution from a technical standpoint?

Use flash. It genuinely brightens your shadows without digital trickery, decreasing the dynamic range of the scene. 

But despite being a perfect engineering solution, it’s often a terrible artistic solution. 

So our phone can't handle all that dynamic range. What happens when we get a better camera?

Better Cameras Make Better Pictures

Despite the much maligned and mostly untrue statement above, sometimes better cameras do make for better pictures.

On a DSLR, mirrorless, or medium format camera, you can shoot raw images, which are more malleable and maximize dynamic range in a way that lets you push and pull data much further before the file falls apart. They also shoot in higher resolution and greater precision in digitizing brightness values, making transitions from shadows to highlights much smoother.

So the best of these cameras don't have to shoot multiple frames, because they can capture that wide dynamic range in one shot with their specialized sensors. And there are a lot of techniques you can use to make this work better (polarizers, graduated ND filters, bracketing, foreground strobes, etc.) but let's leave all that aside.

Realistically, with a raw image from the new $51,000 Phase One XF IQ4 150MP (isn't that a mouthful?!), I can take one shot of a sunset and modify it to bring my shadows up, and my highlights down, and still have a good looking foreground and sky. 

But it's going to look all wrong to our eyes! We know that there are certain relative intensities of light and darkness, and if we were actually able to fit a scene as wide in dynamic range as a sunset into a particular medium, it would just look wrong.

Our eyes can’t capture the entirety of a sunset all at once, and that fits into our perception of the experience of a sunset. Show me a sunset image with full foreground detail and sky detail and it won’t look real, or even good.

So the real secret is that a good sunset image lies in understanding that you’ll lose some detail, and carefully deciding where to place it.

So without further ado, let’s look at one of my sunset images from my recent trip to Maine:

Oh whoops. Let’s try that again:

There we go. Click for full resolution!

This image was shot as a negative on film and scanned on the DT Atom, which uses a Phase One 100MP camera to image the film. I processed it in Capture One to make a positive image!

This is a process that I use for a lot of my serious images now, and there are a lot of benefits and downsides to it. I call it the digital internegative process, and I think it grants the patient user extraordinary results if they’re willing to spend days working on their images.

As you can see, I elected to keep they sky all within my dynamic range, except for, of course, the sun, which is “clipped,” or “blown out” - different terms for describing a piece of the image that goes beyond our dynamic range. There is also a bit of that “halo” effect around the border of the leftmost tree. That’s more of an artifact of the internegative process and the fact that this is a low resolution JPG, but I do address this in Photoshop and it’s certainly has a mild similarity to the halo artifacts on over HDR’d images.

While I could image the sun in such a way that it wasn’t completely blown out, everything else in the image would be pitch black, and there wouldn’t even be any detail in the sun to draw out anyway.

That’s one of the key considerations when working around dynamic range. I can confidently leave the sun outside of my dynamic range because there’s no image content or information in it that I care about in rendering my image. The same goes for deep shadows, as long as there’s nothing in them that I want to show to my audience. But in this case, I do want to keep that shadow detail where I can!

So how do I shoot my image to make sure I get this right?

One straightforward method of shooting in a high-dynamic range situation is to choose what you absolutely want to keep in your image, and center your exposure around that. The sky and particularly the color in the lower regions of it are where I chose to spend a great deal of my dynamic range, so that’s what I centered my exposure around here. I was alright with the trees and rocks losing some detail as they’d create a nice silhouette.

Now all of that is true of digital photography, but by using film to capture the initial image, I can actually cram a ton more content into my highlights than I can on any digital medium. So this image is severely overexposed by digital standards, but thanks to the film, I don’t lose any highlight detail, and that leaves me a ton of nice shadow detail as well. When I scan the film, I can keep all that great highlight detail, and I can draw out all of the shadow detail associated with high-quality digital cameras. It’s the best of both worlds.

The shadow detail was really important to me in this image. While a hard silhouette of the rocks and trees in the foreground would look fine, but the texture and detail in the rocks and branches, and the orange-gold glow on the cliff face yield a three-dimensionality to the image that would otherwise look flat.

Also, having seen a lot of incredibly talented landscape photographers, I’ve learned that the shadows carry an inexplicably intimate subplot in the best images, taking a monument that may have been photographed millions of times and adding depth and emotion to it. Oftentimes this can be done with clouds as well, and so stormy days can be more dramatic than clear ones.

But I really just love the look of the rocks, glowing, and fading in and out of shadow. They’re like a soft melody that forces you to lean in and listen carefully. Take a look at the image in full resolution here.

The last note I’ll make is that there are elements of art and science, but there are also elements of practicality and resilience. Behind every good sunset photo, there are at least a dozen not-so-good ones, and personally I’ve taken hundreds. Here are just a few of the not-so-great ones from that shoot alone:

So to wrap up, it’s been a long, long month, but a good one. I hope you enjoyed hearing about what I’ve been up to, and I’m looking forward to catching up with you all too!

Much love,

Arnab Chatterjee

04 - Art in the Service of Society

A feeling of usefulness and worth, purpose and conviction, self-acceptance, and general contentment. 

If you asked me to define self-actualization, that's probably what I'd say. 

I'm fortunate enough to have been there now and again, and it's a great feeling.

Those times can be few and far between (it's an ideal to be worked towards, not a permanent state to be achieved), but when I do feel that way, there's one common denominator - service. 

Put On Your Oxygen Mask First

There's an interesting aspect of the simplistic "Hierarchy of Needs" paradigm (if you're not familiar, here's a brief explanation) that supports the link between service and self-actualization.

If doing service is a form of self-actualization, I need to have my other needs met first. And as someone who hasn't always been the best at self-care, I've run into this problem head on many times.

Even if I'm drowning, I still want to help the people I'm close to, but taking time to take care of my problems seems selfish when someone else clearly needs help. 

But I've been a lot more mindful and deliberate about self-care lately, and in particular, discussing it with friends has helped re-shape my mindset towards it.

I don't necessarily find dedicating time for recharging, saying no to things, or asking for help from others selfish anymore. Taken to extremes, those things can be problematic, but I find that more often than not, people are understanding, respectful, and appreciate honesty if you tell them that you need to take a moment to sort out some personal business.

And if they're not, well screw 'em.

Of course you also have to learn to communicate it better than "if they're not, well screw 'em."

Baby steps though.

Kids These Days

For a long time, I had the misconception that all service work was either done by selfless saints trying to save the world, or ruthless ladder climbers trying to build social capital.

I'd argue that that mentality was relatively logical because quite frankly, since high school I've been absolutely surrounded by ladder climbers.

Not that any of them were particularly bad people - we were all an unwilling part of the accolades arms race that was necessary to get ahead. With respect to service, the winning formula looked something like:

Volunteer 80 hours a week, play it up in college applications, and get into a top school

I've been reflecting on this more lately since my brother recently graduated from the same high school I did, and things haven't changed - in fact, they've really only gotten worse. 

But of course it doesn't stop in high school. Once you get into that top college, you're likely at a school full of high school valedictorians. Statistically, on a bell curve for any metric, half of them are below average and the level of competition gets exponentially higher. Now the winning formula looks like:

Study abroad and save the world, charter a new superficial service organizations on campus, pad your resume with enough self-designed leadership positions, and get into top Med/Law/Grad school or go for gold and land that job at Goldman Sachs

Then you can finally forget about all that nonsense service work and just make mountains of money.

The Wrong Service is a Disservice

Forcing kids to do service work to get ahead in the world might not sound like the worst idea in the world. There are by far worse ideas, like snuggies, and investing in Theranos.

But it can easily backfire. Placing a burden on someone to put in extra work (remember, school is a full-time job) towards something they're not passionate about is a recipe for breeding resentment, or at least indifference, towards it.

I volunteered at my local public library in high school, not because I was wild about books or felt particularly passionate about the Dewey Decimal System, but because it's what most of the other kids I knew were doing to pencil in the service component of their college applications. And as you might imagine, I hated every minute of it.

But it's not like I hated the institution - public libraries are wonderful, and the Westbank Library system has an excellent collection of DVDs. And allegedly books too.

I think that a lot of my resentment towards the commitment had less to do with what the work it involved than with what the work didn't involve - namely, anything I was interested in or exceptionally good at.

But what if, instead of rote tasks like organizing books, we pushed ourselves (and our kids) to do something good with the skills we pride ourselves on?

A note here - I'm still thinking about the value of doing rote work for its own sake. The bottom line is that someone DOES have to get it done, and an article I read on "low-skilled labor" gives me pause on this. I think my knee-jerk answer is that if someone's doing work for another person or company's benefit, it's within their rights to ask for compensation.

Show to Tell to Sell

When I fell in love with photography three years into college I didn't ever expect it to be anything more than a foray into visual art. But strong images are one of the most compelling assets to any persuasive campaign.

Whether you're trying to sell a multi-million dollar apartment in NYC or used (whoops, in sales we call there "certified pre-owned") socks on Craigslist, if you want to be successful, you need good images. 

This applies broadly beyond sales too - political campaigns, news reporting, and even showing off to your ex on social media requires solid image assets. 

Of course it doesn't have to be done through images if you have near infinite resources - the Girl Scouts are perhaps the finest example of this - there are millions of them, they hunt you down, and you just can't say no to kids selling cookies.

But if you can't bring your client to the product, or your product to the client, images are the next best thing.

So if you're a photographer, you have the incredible gift of being able to give something a voice and share it with people that might need it. 

Or perhaps share something that needs help with people that might be able to help.

Puppies

Austin Pets Alive! (the exclamation point is actually a part of their name, it drives me nuts) is a no-kill animal shelter in my hometown, Austin, Texas. They're able to keep up with demand for animal housing through a strong network of foster families, but eventually these dogs (and cats) need to find a forever-home. 

Good photos make a huge difference in increasing adoption rates, and they really resonate with people. Just look at social media pages with hundreds of thousands of followers, like Susie's Senior Dogs (warning, cuteness overload).

So when I was given the opportunity to shoot images of the dogs at APA!, it was a no brainer. I didn't even think of it as service work.

Hell, I didn't even think of it as work - I was literally running around with dogs and cameras, getting amazing, vivacious images relatively effortlessly because these little fur babies were just so photogenic.

For the adoption images though, I wanted to tell more of a story than a snapshot of a dog at play, so I opted to take the images while they were in their cages. Take a look:

Most of them were pit-bull mixes with huge, beautiful, soulful eyes that just made your heart melt. I aimed to make sure I didn't cut these out in the chain-links.

I kept the exposures on the high side because going too dark made them seem too much like those intentionally depressing commercials you see that try and guilt you into donating money.

I think the brightness adds an element of hope to the images, and also really brings their facial expressions to life. I kept the depth of field thin to make the dogs the clear focal point of the image, but left enough in focus to provide context - what is referred to as an "environmental portrait."

And even though this meant taking time out of my day to come and do work for free, it didn't feel anything like volunteering at the library.

Even as a small project, it made me feel useful and of value to others. It also gave me a purpose and allowed me to use the skills I'm most proud of to further it with creative freedom. And finally, it made me feel good about myself and alright with my place in the world. 

It's amazing how empowering it is to be able to tell yourself that you've done one good thing today.

I compare myself to others making more money, getting more prestigious awards and positions, and advancing faster in their careers far too often, but when I do that one good thing, it reminds me that I am worthy of my own place in the world and can make a difference in a few lives close to me by doing the things that I'm good at.

Rewards - money, power, prestige, etc. - can be taken away, but the knowledge that you may have made a difference in the life of others can't be. That's why I think that the right kind of service work is just as good for you as it is for the people/puppies you're trying to help.

So you, the reader, are among my many talented friends, and surely have some skill that you can use for good. If you've already done so, what did that look like? If you haven't what do you think you could do? 

If you say "nothing" I'm going to e-smack you, because we both know you're talented.

Excited to hear what you have to say!

Much love,

Arnab

A huge note here - as I said before, it's hard to be of help to others around you if you're struggling yourself, and self-care is just as valuable as a form of service work because it puts you in the best position to be of the greatest help when you're needed. If you're struggling and want to talk about it, reach out and let me know <3

003 - Heme

This week has been unusually busy, and quite frankly I underestimated how much work writing was.

I figured that doing something that I've done every day since I was five years old couldn't be that difficult, but cohesive storytelling is hard.

And the sad thing is that I'm not even doing the cohesive part.

Nevertheless, I wanted to write something and I thought a short vignette on an old favorite image of mine might flow easily - a piece of science, art, abstraction, and mystery.

Meet Heme.

Breaking the Scales

Photography is so often associated with literalism that its name alone has become indicative of infallible reproduction - from photographic evidence to photographic memory, the camera has come to be seen as the impartial arbiter of truth.

But as a medium of art, the ability to reproduce a scene or subject exactly as it was does not always result in an image that is easily recognized and understood.

Macro (high magnification) photography is fascinating because it can provide a perfect rendition of a subject that means absolutely nothing to the brain.

As we saw in 002 last week, looking closely enough at any object can yield unexpected results - in that case, the woven, alien landscape of the human eye.

Heme, the image you see above, is an example of one of the earliest macro images I created with such an intent.

Through macro photography, something in the real world can become inscrutably abstract, and when one's sense of scale is sufficiently lost, all that's left behind is a frame of tones and colors for the mind to interpret freely.

When first sharing these images, I wondered whether not to tell the viewer what they were actually looking at.

I found that providing these simple answers were a frighteningly strong deterrent to active imagination, so I typically chose to hear their interpretation and thoughts first.

Later, I might share the relatively inconsequential truth of what it was they were actually looking at.

So in that respect, let's agree to this - if you're curious to find out or confirm your guess as to what the image is send me a reply or leave a comment and we can talk about it.

But for now, forget about trying to figure out what you're physically looking at, and tell me about what you see.

There's no right or wrong answer - I'm genuinely curious to see what you have to say. But here's what I saw.

The Notorious RBC's

The name itself ought to give some suggestion - the heme group is a chemical structure critical to life. As the functional component of hemoglobin, hemes allow red blood cells (RBC's, hence the forced subheading) to carry oxygen from our lungs to every part of our bodies.

I talk a lot about physics, but in reality I was trained more heavily as a biochemist. Biomedical engineering is a blend of every quantitative subject you can think of, and while I eventually landed on optics and photonics as my specialty, it wouldn't have been biomedical engineering without an extra-heavy dose of organic chemistry, biochemistry, and general biology.

When I captured this image, I saw a roiling mass of red blood cells, tumbling over one another, spilling outwards and rushing towards the viewer.

The brooding shadows added a mysterious tone, where a murky solution seemed to pull away from the surface of the image over unknown depths, while the highlights brought out hidden ridges and patterns on the surface of the stream.

Looking at the image long enough even made it look three dimensional. Try it. 

No really, try it.

Heme has run through several iterations, mostly based around color. The original, of course, was the color of the subject (that's right, the color you see here is artificial). The second iteration, which was shown above, was made bright red, as blood might be.

While it caught attention as a 36" x 24" glossy aluminum print during SXSW 2016, in retrospect, it felt more than a bit tacky.

The current and final version lives in black and white, and you can see it below.

The image was shot on my Nikon, not one of the super-cameras I use today, so the resolution is not nearly as jaw dropping as the eye, but you can zoom in on some of the details below.

So with that context, all that I have left for you are questions.

What do you think? What do you feel? Do you see what I see? Do you see something else?

Busy week aside, I always intended to use this medium as a space for stylistic experimentation across a variety of subjects and media, and today I'm satisfied with leaving more questions than answers. 

Looking forward to what I hope will be an active discussion!

Until next time, much love.

Arnab

002 - Stealing Stars

Last week, I argued that vision is the most important human sense in part because light is the most efficient way to transmit information in the universe. That's why you hear cable providers talking about fiber so much these days.

No, Verizon's not trying to give you supplements to regulate your digestive system.

In this case, fiber refers to fiber optics: thin, flexible glass tubes that replace traditional wires and carry light from point A to point B. Because photons (the particles that transmit light) can carry much more information than electrical signals, fiber optics allow us to send and receive information faster than ever.

Translation: you can now literally send memes at the speed of light.

What a time to be alive.

Since we're talking about using light to transfer information again, I want to go into a little more detail about what that means, and why it matters. I know it sounds science-y and intimidating, but don't worry - I've come up with a way to make it easy to understand.

We're going to make a completely original reality TV show to demonstrate how sending messages and information with light works.

Here's the run-down.

The Good, the Bad, and the Chad

Originally, I had planned to pick one devilishly handsome engineer (probably a 20-something year old Indian guy from Brooklyn, to keep the key demographics happy) and 25 well-educated, age-appropriate, emotionally sensitive women that were very much attracted to him as the show's cast.

Our lovable nerd would get to know these women on a series of dates each week, and find true love by narrowing down the cast until he found the woman he liked best.

Again, I'd like to reiterate that this show is 100% original and NOT a rip-off of a 20+ season ABC series.

Unfortunately, while I knew just the right guy for the show, I couldn't even find even one woman in the greater NYC area that met that description (and I've triiiiied. Mom please just arrange something already). 

So I scrapped that idea and just got 25 of the weirdest girls I could find, and some dude named Chad.

I found him vaping in an ironic t-shirt at the gym. Imagine that.

All Chad would have to do is choose which girls he wanted to keep seeing, and eliminate some of the girls he didn't like as much. But there was a serious problem - Chad was terrible at communicating his feelings.

So how would he tell the girls who should stay and who should go?

Roses are Red, Lasers are Redder

This is when I came up with a brilliant, totally original solution. Instead of handling the situation like mature adults and having the cast talk it out, we would have a dramatic weekly ceremony in which Chad would use a visual signal to communicate his feelings to the girls he liked best.

Functionally, it would be the same as sending a written or verbal message, but instead of using written or spoken words, he'd use an object or simple visual cue to tell each girl to stay or go. 

If a girl received the message, she would stay, and if she didn't get one, she was out. Real simple stuff.

Now for the big question though - what should this visual signal be?

In a flash of inspiration, it came to me. Red roses. No one had done it before. It would be groundbreaking. I started preparing my acceptance speech for the inevitable primetime Emmy.

Unfortunately, roses are expensive, and this is when our budget ran out.

So instead, I gave Chad a sweet red laser pointer I found on the sidewalk and told him to just shine it into a girl's eyes if he liked them.

He said that was "dope" and that he'd done something similar in high school.

Top-notch stuff, Chad.

Love, Lasers, and Lawsuits

Before we start filming our pilot, let's take a quick look at how this whole laser pointer business works.

All a laser pointer does is shoot a high-powered beam of photons at the speed of light in one direction.

A quick note here - if the word "photon" is intimidating or confusing to you, just replace it in your head with "light". Talking about light is like discussing a stream of water, whereas talking about photons is like discussing the individual droplets in the stream. Just different ways to explain the same thing.

So shining a laser pointer at someone is pretty much the same as giving someone a rose, but instead of handing them one flower, you're throwing 16 quintillion flowers moving over 600 million miles per hour at their face.

Like I said, basically the same thing.

Anyway, these photons stop when they hit something, and if that something happens to be someone's eye, they'll see it and get the message!

Invariably, after this is all over, Chad and I will see some lawyers and OSHA compliance officers and get a slightly less positive message. 

But we'll deal with that later. For now, Chad goes down the line, one by one, burning retinas and making dreams come true...for most of our contestants.

Of course there are the few unlucky ones - no photons for you, friends. They go home, while the girls that got the lovely red photons move on to the next week.

So that wraps up our pilot episode. In theory, the season will end several laser-ceremonies later, when Chad has finally narrowed his selection down to one debatably lucky girl with some undebatably serious vision problems. 

Now this laser business might seem ridiculous and unnecessary. Chad could just as easily point, grunt, or dig into his trust fund and buy actual roses.

But what Chad is actually doing is sending very simple binary information - stay/go, yes/no, 1/0 - with just a few (quintillion) photons! From an engineering perspective, that alone is actually a pretty big deal, as it gives us a way to design really complicated things. Remember that the software on your computer or phone is just a fancy series of zeroes and ones, as is the entire internet, and your precious lightspeed memes.

I Love You to the Moon and Back

More importantly though, using photons actually gives Chad and I some cool options for the rest of the season, because as I keep saying, photons have other special properties we can use to carry more complex information.

While we were waiting for the network to greenlight the rest of the season, Chad sought counseling at my request and is much more in tune with his emotions. But these breakthroughs in therapy have been quite exhausting, and he says he needs some space.

So we decide to put Chad on the moon for the rest of the season. Because light is wicked fast and can travel through empty space, he can still send the exact same messages he did before, and they'll only take one extra second to get to our contestants.

He definitely couldn't do that by pointing, grunting, or handing out roses.

But there's a new problem. Chad has been so inspired by his recent progress in therapy that he's determined to articulate his emotions in as thorough a way possible, and our trusty red laser pointer indicating a simple yes/no isn't enough anymore.

Fortunately for him, photons come in a huge variety of colors, and we've sent him up with a veritable crayon box full of lasers. Now he can use a whole rainbow of photons to express his emotions. 

This works for a few episodes, but Chad is truly a multifaceted man now. Even all the colors in the crayon box aren't enough to share his tumultuous inner condition.

As it happens though, there's not a whole lot to do on the moon, so Chad has started reading science and engineering books on his Kindle (Amazon please pay me now) in his spare time and has discovered time-varying signals.

Perhaps we underestimated you, Chad.

Using Morse code, he's now spelling out words by flashing different patterns over time. Combined with using different colored light, he's even created the universe's first two-dimensional alphabet. 

In yet another few days, things have progressed even further.

We need to get Chad out of therapy and into rehab because our boy is hooked on photonics. 

He's now using even more complex properties of light signals - phase-delays, polarization shifts, and dynamic pulse-width modulation to name just a few - to send increasingly complex messages to his potential soul mates on Earth.

We're not really sure what he's saying anymore, but we sure are proud of him.

Now we don't need to know any of the details behind these nerd words - but I hope that you'll believe me now when I say that there are many different properties of light that we can use to encode information and pass it from one place to another. 

On Earth though, we've run into one final snag - the network didn't particularly care for the show, and we won't be filming any more episodes. 

We just couldn't bring ourselves to tell Chad. So we'll just leave him up there, shooting lasers into the night. Maybe he'll find love out there, somewhere in the universe.

That marks the end of our heavy science for today -  I promise this is going somewhere photography and art related. The key that connects it all is in how we receive the information light carries.

Remember, photons travel at the speed of light in one direction until they hit something. Once they get there, that's when the real magic happens. 

An Eye for Detail 

We've talked about it a lot, but we're finally going to take a look at it in today's picture: the human eye. The image below is a picture of my eye, shot by my coworker Doug Peterson on one of the cameras I work with daily, the Phase One IQ3 100MP. This might look pretty high resolution already, but clicking or tapping on the image will let you zoom to full size. This actually works really well on mobile too, so go on, and take a look around.

This image is pretty polarizing in that people either find it awesome and beautiful, or awesome and super gross. If you're among the latter half, just try and bear with me.

They're just eyes. They're beautiful. 

I love macro images like this because up close, you begin to lose track of scale. Zoom in far enough and the edge of the pupil could be easily mistaken for an alien crater. Up close, you can even see the feathery texture and woven pattern of the iris, and the subtle folds of the circumferential band of deep brown melanin around the pupil.

Blood vessels look like tiny tendrils of scarlet ink suspended in solution, and the few eyelashes in focus look like solid steel rods.

Also yes, my skin was flaky as hell when this picture was taken. Sorry.

Our eyes do a lot more than just look pretty though.

When light enters through our pupils, it passes through a lens and forms an image on our retinas, where specialized light sensitive cells (called rods or cones) live. These cells contain special types of receptors not found anywhere else in the body, called opsins. 

These opsins catch photons as they arrive and absorb their energy, beginning a process that ultimately informs your brain that you're seeing something. 

But what happens to those photons?

They actually just disappear. You absorb them fully. They don't exist anymore.

To be 100% accurate, the photon energizes the opsin, causing it to vibrate and dissipate an astronomically small amount of heat, so energy is conserved. 

But that photon is no longer aimlessly roaming the universe.

It's arrived at its final destination - you.

Soaking in Starlight

That disappearing photon has a lot of interesting consequences. It means that every time you see something, you're not just passively observing it - in fact, passive observation is impossible.

Observation is necessarily an active process because every time you see something, you're actually blotting a bunch of photons out of existence and turning them into brainwaves. 

So when you look up at the night sky, you're not just looking at the universe, you're participating in it.

You're literally absorbing photons that were star-fuel, millions of years ago. That light travelled across the universe to ultimately become a part of you. And every time you look around, you're fundamentally changing the state of the universe.

That should make you feel special.

By capturing a photon, you've guaranteed that it will never go anywhere else in the universe. You are the only person in the universe that has ever, and will ever experience that moment. 

Moreover, light is information - it tells you that there's something there. So in seeing and absorbing it, you now know something that no one else in the universe does. It might not translate to much more than the fact that that particular star existed in the moment the light you saw was created - but it's still a secret kept between you and the cosmos. 

One final thing. You didn't just experience that moment - you were the reason it existed at all. If you hadn't been there to interact with that star, that moment would never have been consequential to the human race.

It would be just another beam of starlight shooting through space and falling to earth, never to be seen.

Sharing Art, Bridging Gaps

So remember, no one can ever experience a sight exactly as you did - that information is literally gone from the universe as soon as you see it or capture it with a camera. So even if you're seeing the same Empire State Building and taking the same selfie as millions of other people, those visions you have and moments you make are necessarily special and unique. 

And even though those experiences can't be exactly replicated, we can use words, art, and other sorts of media to try and share that moment with others. 

Photography is particularly good at this due to its similarity to human vision. It captures photons as we do, just through a slightly different chemical or electronic methods. And to me, another part of the beauty of photography is in its literalism and reprographic qualities. It even has a particularly poetic reciprocity by having light as both its direct input and direct output.

Producing art and sharing it can also be a collaborative experience that brings people together, across boundaries of all kinds - political, cultural, or generational.

On that note, I'll leave you with one of my favorite pieces of audio - a collaboration between father and son named "Delam," Persian for "my heart," by Hiatus. 

It explores life and death, our rights and our wrongs, and our place in the universe.

Hiatus, AKA Cyrus Shahad, is the musician and producer, providing a soft, ambient backdrop over which his father, Bahram Shahad reads and translates several poems by the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi.

It may seem a tad pessimistic, but I think it suggests that there is beauty in living life in the moment, making the best of what we have, and trusting that our legacy will be based on the acts we performed for others, not what we achieved materially. Link, lyrics, and dubious Google auto-translated Persian below. 

Yeah, I said, start.

He said:

سعدی مردی است که نام او خوب است و مفید بوده است

Where's my glasses, hold on. Ready?

سعدی مردی است که نام او خوب است و مفید بوده است
او هرگز نمی میرد فردی که "مرده" نامیده می شود شخص است
چه کسی آنها را در یک عمل خوب یا رفتار خوب ذکر نکرده است.

He says,

"Sa'di the man whose got good name and has been helpful,
he never dies. The person who is called ‘dead' is the person
who they don't mention him in a good deed or good behavior."

Another one he said:

مادر! گناهه زندگیام را به من ببخش.
زیرا اگر گناهه من این بود، از تو بود.

He said,

"Mother forgive me for sins of my life.
Because these sins which I've done is
mainly result of your work in the past."

هرگز نخواستم که تو را سرزنش کنم.
اما تو را به راستی از زدن چه سود?

I never wanted to blame you for anything.
But really what was the benefit of
producing me to the world? And to the life?

Then he says:

زندگی مانند یک توپ درهم از پشم است
که ابتدا از هیچ چیز شروع می شود و به هیچ چیز پایان نمی یابد.

He say, "life is like a tangled ball of wool,
which the beginning it starts from nothing, and ends to nothing."

I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this episode, and on "Delam" as well. I hope it got you thinking, and gives you a stronger appreciation for the world and your very important place in it. 

Until next time - much love,

Arnab 

001 - First Light

Welcome to the inaugural edition of my periodical publication! Before we get to the pictures and the stories, I'd like to take a quick second to talk about what this publication is, and what it isn't. 

It IS intended to be a series of essays focused on the art, science, and magic of photography. That means that we're going to explore a lot of things, some of which you might expect, and other which you might not. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• pictures I've taken, and the associated who/what/when/where/why's
• the aesthetics of photography and why I love it so much as an art
• an accessible look at the science, engineering, and history of imaging 
• the philosophy of image making as both a science and art form
• and jokes. Lots of really bad jokes.

One point I want to drive home is that this is NOT intended to be a one-way communiqué. Though 99% of you won't respond (and that's ok), I'm looking to start conversations. I want to get your feedback, hear about what you liked and learned, what you disliked and disagreed with, and perhaps most importantly what you felt and identified with.

In this particular edition there's going to be a fair bit of exposition before we get to the photo, and it will get a little technical but I'll do my best to make it as simple and entertaining as possible. So after you read this, let me know how I did. Or if you gave up halfway through, I want to hear that too.

Or just don't say anything at all. It'll only break my heart.

Where to begin?

I spent a long time trying to decide where to begin this story. Starting in the present made sense, and it's hard to imagine a better beginning to a photographic adventure than where I am now.

I'm living in New York City, the photographic capital of the world, using my engineering education and photographic passion to work with the sharpest minds and most cutting-edge technology in the imaging industry. Through my work I've met world famous photographers such as Patrick Demarchelier and Albert Watson, gone behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, and tested millions of dollars worth of equipment, some in production and some unreleased, in just a little over a year.

But then I considered starting somewhere more personal — with my discovery of photography during my sophomore year at Duke, where I was studying biomedical engineering. It was the beginning of an unlikely love affair that began my drive to create images and share the narratives around them, and warped the path of my studies and career to steer towards biomedical imaging, and then scientific and industrial imaging at large. 

In the end though, I figured the best approach would be to start at the very beginning of the story. After all, while some of you have known me since the moment I was born (hi mom), others among you may have only known me for a very short time, and I think that context is important. 

So that's what we're going to do. Start from the very beginning. 

Which, in this case, I've chosen to mean about two million years ago, when the first humans roamed the earth.

Yes, I'm dramatic. Deal with it. 

Let there be light!

Roughly two million years ago, when our first bipedal ancestors rose up in Africa, there was only one reliable source of light on Earth — the sun. The moon doesn't count, because it's just reflecting sunlight, and the earliest evidence for human control of fire only dates back about a million years ago. 

Now even if you're unfamiliar with how light works, you may know that it can be grouped into several different types. Visible light contains all the colors we see every day. UV light can uncover hidden details in crime scenes, or just give you sunburn at the beach. X-rays allow doctors to make critical decisions, and the TSA to see all the embarrassing things in our luggage. These are a few examples.

The sun puts out a good mix of light from most of the major types, and while some of it is visible, there are lots of interesting, invisible, esoteric kinds of light produced, too. However, most of these invisible types of light don't make it through the Earth's atmosphere.

This is fortunate because a lot of that light is very high in energy, and would basically flash-fry us. But our atmosphere protects us from the bad stuff, and the light that makes it to us on Earth is pretty safe, abundant, and has just enough energy for us to interact with. 

So the first and most important imaging system in the history of the human species — our eyes — developed alongside the sun, as would the first photography systems — the camera obscura and silver nitrate film — millions of years later.

Since photography so often seeks to capture what we see, it's important to think about why we see. And I'll make a bold claim here — I think that vision is unequivocally the most critical of the senses to human communication, expression, and survival.

I can give you a few arguments to try and back up that claim so I'll start with this one — light is the best carrier of information in the universe.

And I can prove it to you. 

The roof is on fire!

To demonstrate this, I'd like you get up and do a quick experiment. Just follow these quick steps:

1. If your building is up to code, you'll have a fire alarm installed somewhere in your house. If you don't have one, please stop reading this and go buy one. 
    
2. Stand directly underneath the alarm.
    
3. Get a measuring tape and mark a spot where you can stand exactly 10 feet away from your current position. Then go back to the spot under the alarm.
    
4. Set your house on fire.
    
5. Walk out to the spot you marked in step 3, and continue reading.

Done? Good. 

Sorry about your house, but I'm trying to prove a point here. 

A good fire alarm has some sort of visual signal (a flashing strobe, perhaps), and an audio cue as well (some sort of annoying siren that goes off every time you try and make a hot pocket). If you've done everything correctly and are standing at the right distance, here's what's probably happening right now.

First off, you smell smoke. While there are a lot of factors that go into how soon you smell it, a rough approximation puts the speed of smoke particles traveling towards you at about 3 meters per second. So your sense of smell detects the fire in about a second. Pretty quick.

That said, whether you know it or not, you actually heard the fire alarm before you could smell the fire. Sound travels through air at about 343 meters per second, so you'd hear the alarm in 8 milliseconds — around 125 times faster than you'd smell the smoke. Now THAT's fast. Take into account that sound travels even faster in hot air, and you could even cut that time down to 4 milliseconds if you're a skilled arsonist.

But that's NOTHING compared to how fast you saw the alarm light flash. 

Light travels through air at nearly 300,000,000 meters per second, over 400,000 times faster than sound over a hot fire and almost 100 million times faster than the smoke. That means that the light from your fire alarm would reach you in about 10 nanoseconds.

And in general, the speed of light is the universal speed limit, so nothing else could have informed you that your house was on fire any faster. So while our senses of smell and hearing are often quick enough to help us avoid danger, when you can't afford to waste a (nano)second, vision provides us with our best chance of survival. 

Take some time to think about just how neat that is while you're filing your fire insurance claim.

How does any of this relate to photography?

We're almost there, I promise. Believe it or not, all of this circles back together - the sun, ancient humans, the fact that light carries information so well, and photography.

There's just one final thing to discuss before we get to the art — we now know that light travels really fast, but what do I mean when I say that light carries information?

In a nutshell, it's just a complicated way of saying that when we sense light, it can tell us a lot about what's going on back where it came from. That can mean anything from showing us the expression on someone's face to providing evidence that gravitational waves exist, but the most important piece to consider right now is that it shows us color.

The ability to identify color has helped us avoid dangerous situations for millions of years. For example, it helped the first humans determine what berries or fruits might make them sick, and it helps modern humans determine which flavor of communal LaCroix might make their roommates angry.

I swear to god if one of these guys buys coconut again, I'm going to scream.

Sparkling water aside, when we look at today's photo, I want you to think about how incredible color is, and how different the image might look without it. It's precisely because so much information is available to us simply by looking at something that visual art can be so complex and compelling, and color is a huge part of understanding the practical and emotional components of an image. And so finally we've arrived at today's photograph.

Modern, ancient art

As we look at today's image, here's an exercise I would suggest, and I promise that this one doesn't involve burning down your house. Think of it as a sort of guided meditation.

First, close your eyes, take deep breaths, and take 30 seconds to clear your head of all this science nonsense I've been spouting. It's art time now.

Then, bring to mind some of the things we discussed — our first ancestors, the sun, the power of light, vision, color, and visual art.

Now take a look at the image below for 30 seconds or so. Think about it and see what emotions it evokes. Then read the passage below it and look at the photo again. Do they fit together? Does it change the way you think about it? I'm curious to hear personally.

Graffiti, unknown title and artist. Castle Hill, Austin TX.

"It takes the light two point eight million years to get here.

So we're looking at two point eight million years ago.

It might not be there. It could have died by now.

So who's going to see that?

It might not even be people by then. The sun's only eight minutes.

In the morning let's wait eight minutes and see if it's there now."

— STAR, from "Love and Information" by Caryl Churchill

This is a piece of graffiti I shot in 2017 in my hometown, Austin, Texas. I found it in a place called Castle Hill, an ever-changing outdoor graffiti park with dozens of beautiful, vivid art pieces varying wildly in size, color, and content. But what drew my attention most amongst the complex tags and massive photorealistic murals were two small, simple figures, tucked away in a corner of a crowded concrete canvas, looking not unlike a cave painting one of our ancient ancestors might have drawn.

The color drew me in as well, as red always does. Red is my favorite color because it has a comforting weight and finality to it. While traditionally a warning color, rare in nature, in the artistic world, it symbolizes to me the metaphorical boundaries of its subject, and has a uniquely intentional personality — where other colors might flippantly appear anywhere in a sequence, red is never there by accident. It shows us where things begin, or where they end. 

With such a strong attraction to the piece, it was a foregone conclusion that I would use it to make an image of my own, and while the content of the image was already there, to me, framing was the key to transforming the drawing into a story. Isolating the figures from the surrounding clutter was an absolute necessity, but the use of negative space in the image was the most important element of the image in my mind, as it left a crucial void for the viewer's imagination to fill. 

To me, the image presents the conclusion of a journey — a story of two companions arriving and sharing a sense of awe and wordless wonder in the face of something cosmic, unseen, and infinitely vast. Personally I fill the void with a glorious ancient sunset, or a breathtaking sea of stars. What do you see? 

The "Love and Information" passage I included felt like a perfect way to conclude a discussion of light, information, the sun and cosmos, and the emotions visual art evokes. As an avant-garde play, it even feels structurally similar to the image - a brief vignette, captured and frozen in time amidst a collection of seemingly unrelated works and moments (you can explore more on this aspect of the play here).

I could go on and on, but I think I'll conclude here and listen to what you have to say. Send me a reply with your thoughts and feedback, or use the link at the bottom to provide feedback anonymously. I'm looking forward to seeing where this journey goes, and I hope you are too. 

Much love,

Arnab

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