When we first moved to New Jersey I was taking a walk in an area known as The Great Swamp - a place where it is possible to get a mile or so away from other people if you pick a quiet time and a very beautiful and peaceful place. About two miles in I found a guy intently studying a flower from behind the view glass of a beautiful wooden frame four by five inch view camera. He had lugged in an enormous tripod, the camera and quite a bit of kit. Very impressive as he was not a very large person. Normally I would stop and ask questions, but he was intensely into the moment and I was enjoying my walk too much.
I continued for a few hours and turned around finally coming back to the meadow and the photographer. He was still at it, now working on an old fallen piece of tree. This time he was hunting for something in a gear bag, so I stopped and chatted for awhile. It turned out he had taken three photos and his goal was five or six for the day. For someone who was used to a much smaller camera that lacked the control of a view camera I was amazed as he showed me what he could do.
Recently Om started me thinking about images again in one of his blog posts. I’m strongly taken with motion as well as still photography - but for very different reasons.
I have tried some video, but it generally is very much youtube friends waving at the camera work. My still photography is better and I’m more comfortable thinking about an image and setting it up than shooting and editing segments of video. Both can be the basis for good stories and I’m in awe of people who can do both.
For recreation I love to draw. Some of you - Nancy, Jessica and my sister Corinne - are much better artistically than I will ever be, but I enjoy losing myself in an image. A moment of time can stretch into hours and I frequently achieve flow. When I do physics I tend to be visual and much of the early stages of work are playful with me drawing or imagining drawing images in my mind’s eye.1
When flow occurs time seems to move at a different rate.
Time
I’ve been thinking a lot about it in the past two weeks as it is the subject of my mini-sabbatical. How do relate to time and how has that changed over time? How important is it to change itself? My suspicion is that we are living in a period of change where our current notions of time are outmoded and we’re inventing new conventions and relationships even now.
We think we have a good view of our natural world through our senses, but in reality they are very limited. We only hear a fraction of the sounds around us - much of it is too quiet and much of it has wavelengths too long or too short for us to perceive and much of what we might see is far too dim. Our sense of smell is limited compared to other animals. Our vision only covers a very narrow fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum. What we do have is still very impressive as animals go, even though some overtake us in one or more of them, and have served us well. But science exploded when we started to build tools that allowed us to extend our senses. We found a much larger and richer Universe and improvements on these sensory extensions continue to drive the sport.
We also live in a world defined by time. A mountain range may take millions of years to push up, a flower takes hours to bloom, a bullet striking a balloon leaves a rich record of the collision. We see the results of these processes, but the details are lost to us unless we build tools to somehow live in their time.
Leland Stanford was into race horses in a big way and was particularly proud of his trotter Occident. Stanford had a real interest in studying the motion of horses so as to improve breeding and training techniques but a better, albeit manufactured, story is that he bet John Isaac $25,000 that Occident always had at least one foot on the ground at all times.
In other words - there may be horseflies, but horses do not fly...
Stanford was approximately richer than god and hired Eadweard Muybridge (a most unusual name and not a spelling error) to create a photographic record of the behavior of the horse. He used a dozen cameras spaced 21 inches apart. Each camera had a shutter speed of a 1/1000th of a second and the shutter was connected to a trip wire. The horse effectively had a series of closely spaced slices of time created at different portions of its stride.
As you can easily see, horses do fly...
If you arranged the photos in a pack and flipped through them at the right speed - the lag between images being about the time it takes the horse to travel 21 inches from camera to camera - your mind stitches the still images into a reasonably smooth motion and we perceive the flow of time. One of the earliest forms of the movie...3
There is a lot to talk about the perception of time and I will, but I want to keep this post short. Movies and video are all about the illusion of combining still slices of time.
Oddly we all live a tiny bit in the past - our perception of now is inaccurate, but it works for our biology and most of the interactions with our world that helped chart our evolutionary path.
We worked very hard to synchronize time over the years. First for relating to nature and agriculture, then for studying the stars and prayer. Time was critical to sorting out the sky and navigation and later we found ourselves synchronizing ourself to its flow for work and travel.
Time is everywhere and as we find our way through the fabric of space and time we have a sense that there must be a master clock of sorts - that time must be universal.
Except it isn’t. With high school geometry and algebra and the knowledge that light has a fixed speed you can convince yourself that time is relative. Walk down the street and the clocks in the buildings along the way tick at a slightly different rate than your watch - an act that gives me great pleasure at times when I am on a long walk in Manhattan.
It turns out athletes - the really good ones - are expert at shutting off much of the thought in their minds that is extraneous to the task at hand, They can quickly put together solutions to the kinetic problems they face a few tenths of a second earlier than the rest of us as a result. An artifact is that they become immersed in a state of psychological flow - that Csíkszentmihályian flow that is so addictive that I find sketching and doing physics and a few other things.2 Athletes also seem to create mental movies of the likely future - “forward models.” A volleyball player notices the position of the other players and gets a sense of how the ball will be returned so she can position and launch herself with timing good to the hundredth of a second. There are midcourse corrections to these movies that take into account the spin on the ball and local wind conditions. These predictions are consistent with Bayesian decision theory that combines previous experience with a stream of new information. The brain gets to focus on sorting out what is likely and telling the muscles to act on it appropriate. It is not a simple lookup mechanism and the magic in sport often arrises when the mind comes to a novel solution and gives the ok to try it. Elite athletes are sometimes good at finding these novel solutions for interacting with a complex situation as time flows.
And my encounter with the photographer in the Great Swamp years ago? It turns out he worked for Bell Labs too and we became friends fifteen years later. A few years ago we worked on a project that required us to watch for a motion that we knew was happening, but was too fleeting to observe. We rented time on a camera that took video at 8000 frames per second - sort of faster than the roughly 30 frames per second our vision uses.
Here is some popcorn popping at 6200 frames per second - the motion is "slowed" down a bit over 200 times ...
What fun!
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1 Well - sort of visual. I have synesthesia and vision for me is a mixture of images and sounds - or sound is a mixture of vision and sound. I can’t cleanly separate them and would love to feel what it must be like to have cleanly orthogonal senses. You begin to understand why it isn't terribly common as many synesthetes are uncoördinated.
2 ok - I know what you're thinking. It is mee-hy cheek-sent-mə-hy-ee-an
3 At least the photographic form of movie. Earlier experiments and toys played with the persistance of vision too. Roget published the first paper on the subject in the mid 1820s and neat machines like this appeared shortly afterwards. Yup - that's the same Roget who did the Thesarus.
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