M Y LIFE AT POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY

When I lived in Queens between the ages of 15 and 18, attending Flushing High School, I lived on a street called Kisenna Boulevard.  Today the co-op apartments on the street are inhabited by Chinese people.  When I went back to Flushing a couple of years ago to settle my mother’s affairs, I discovered that the neighborhood was a more interesting place with Chinese restaurants and shops, and now Main Street was teeming with people, like downtown Shanghai, I imagined.  When I was a boy I lived in what was primarily a Jewish neighborhood and  I spent a lot of time visiting my school mate Michael Miller’s apartment, also in the co-op. Michael’s father and mother were well-educated lefties and their home was filled with books and magazines.  What attracted me most was the pile of Popular Photography magazines, which I devoured.  I knew only a little bit about photography, but I had started taking pictures when I was 12. I became a surrogate member of the Miller family and hung out there many hours – and a good part of the time I spent reading those old copies of Popular Photography which, by hook or crook, taught me a lot about technical photography.  Little did I know that someday I would be an editor at Popular Photography.

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 2

Silver screens, if they are well made and installed, can have minimal hot-spotting, but they still have what I call shading.  I make a distinction between hot-spotting and shading.  Although they may come about from the same reflective characteristics of the screen, shading has to do with an asymmetrical change in brightness across the screen and is typically dependent upon where you are sitting.  Shading happens quite noticeably when sitting in the worst seat in the house, say in the front row way on the extreme left or the right. In fact, the worst seats in the house for viewing a 2-D movie on a matte screen become even worse when viewing a polarized light stereoscopic movie on a silver screen from a bad seat. 

THE SILVER SCREEN: Part 1

Ah the silver screen: searchlights scanning the Hollywood sky, glamorous premiers, gorgeous actresses….  The silver screen is a term that has denoted the glamour and excitement of Hollywood since Chaplin twirled his cane. While to some it is the most visible sign of hope for the cinema for others it is a dreaded surface upon which to project those old standby 2D movies.  But there’s so much more to it than glamour – there’s dreadful science.  It’s a technology that ought to command the industry’s keenest minds, because, after all, that’s where a hundred and fifty million bucks wind up as a vibrating veneer of a hundred billion photons reflected into the eyes of tens of millions of photon consumers. That’s one big point in favor of the film industry – they have not dehumanized the customer to the point where he or she is called a consumer.  The customers are still the audience, people with feelings rather than human maws born to consume piles of chazarai labeled made in Chinese. 

SIDE-BY-SIDE FOREVER

Lately there has been a lot of interest in two formats for stereoscopic multiplexing:  The above-and-below, resurrected by Technicolor for theatrical projection using film, and the side-by-side for multiplexing left and right images for television.  Here’s some background from a personal perspective. 

THE DIGITAL RELIGION

The announcement by Technicolor of a film-based 3D system, which would cost exhibitors comparatively little money to install, was provocative to say the least.

Link to MacVideo Part 2

http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/interviews/index.cfm?articleId=117128

Surrendering to the Flu

Monday and Tuesday I lay in bed,
Wishing I was very dead.
What I preferred to getting worse,
Was that final ride in a big black hearse.

Link to MacVideo Interview

http://www.macvideo.tv/camera-technology/interviews/index.cfm?articleId=116729

Yoda Beware

Yoda, a grungy puppet,

Demonstrates the worthlessness of charm and wisdom.

A shrill caricature of a wise man,

A shmata paper-maché piece of crap,

Who spouts cliché Eastern philosophy.

Yoda, I deplore your Lego lightsabre,

Your Jedi bullshit.

You punky poseur,

You mock the ephemeral nature of the path.

Of the dharma and the sanga.

You false squeaky voiced phony bodhisattva,

I stand before you naked.

I condemn you.

 

And you, corrupt puppeteer,

Remove your hand

To reveal the broken lifeless spirit of a doll

Without a spine.

The Truth about 3D TV, Part 7

Questions:

Can stereoscopic TV gain a foothold in the midst of a world-wide economic catastrophe?