Science Teacher's Super Bowl

I know.  I know.  The last thing you need on August 22 is another post on the eclipse.  Following NASA on Twitter means I have read so many posts and articles that I can't keep them all straight.  Then, there were the frightened people who kept posting the same article from "an ophthalmologist" (I teach my students if the source is vague, it is suspect.  Don't post something where someone hasn't shared their name.)  Last night, my feed was filled with photos from the path of totality as well as our local 93%.  You've seen everything you can possibly see regarding the moon's path across the sun.  That's fine.  I'm writing this one for myself.

Our school bought every student a pair of eclipse glasses; we even ordered them back in March before they became solid gold.  After spending the first few weeks of school fielding emails about whether we got the right ones, reassuring people that the ancients did not all go blind, and teaching some basic lessons on the cause and frequency of eclipses to my students, the day was finally here.  I'm a science teacher, but I'm also a yearbook advisor, so I enlisted the help of other teachers and parents to take shots of the kids in their glasses or with their pinhole arrangements.  My camera was solar filtered, so I asked the people who couldn't get the eclipse itself to get the kids watching.

I set out a few minutes early to set up my tripod and camera, expecting to get nothing.  Thank goodness, someone suggested bringing out a chair because I would have had difficulty squatting by the tripod over and over.  I took about 75 photos in the hour I was outside, but I didn't want my attempts to photograph the event to interfere with having the experience, so in between shots, I leaned back in the chair with my glasses on and enjoyed the eclipse as a human being, thankful that our administration bought glasses for us.  The experience was so much more real than the pinhole setup I had in third-grade.

The best part of the day, however, was being with and listening to my students.  They hovered around, asking questions of me and each other.  Since we didn't get blackout darkness, they had some difficulty describing what the sky looked like.  To be fair, since it doesn't look like anything else, it is difficult to describe.  Among my favorite descriptions were, "It's like a storm is coming, except it's still blue" and "It's like the beginning of that one Harry Potter movie, where he's on the playground."  I have e-mails pouring in with photos from our elementary students, who went home to watch it with their parents as well as group shots of kids in the glasses.  It's going to be a fun yearbook page, but my memories of enjoying it with my kids cannot be adequately captured.

Why We Should Take Better Pictures

Now that cameras are ubiquitous, so are photos.  Gone are the days when you had to decide if it was worth using the exposure on your roll of film or figure out how many exposures you had left on the roll.  You no longer have to wait to get film developed.  You can now know instantaneously whether or not the picture "came out" and retake it immediately if it didn't.  This should have left us with better pictures, but unfortunately, it hasn't.



This meme absolutely infuriated one of my millennial Facebook friends.  She went on a tirade about how previous generations would have done it if they could have (probably true) and that there was nothing wrong with having fun with her friends this way (certainly true).  She went on and on about the ways prior generations wasted time (yep, got us there too).


She isn't wrong, but neither is the meme.


I have been taking photos as an actual hobby since 1990.  I have taken landscapes, animal photos, architectural photos, and vacation photos.  I teach yearbook, so I take pictures of kids doing work on computers, creating artwork, playing sports, performing in plays, dancing, singing, playing instruments.  I am one of the photographers at a camp during the summer.  I take photographs of kids doing woodworking, crafts, playing games with friends, posing with their counselors, participating in activities, and swimming.  I take about twenty-five thousand pictures every year.

Here are the pictures I don't take.
- Duck Faces - Five years from now, when campers look at the albums we gave them, duck faces will have no meaning.  A picture of themselves conquering a new challenge will.
- Tongue Out Faces - When my students look back on their yearbooks, I doubt that they will believe their tongue was their best feature and really wish that I had captured it.
- Shots of Body Parts You Can Only Take in a Mirror - I know that people who work out are proud of their hard work, but if you have to stand backward in a mirror in your underwear to show it, maybe there's a reason God made it that difficult.
- Selfies - I'm pretty sure even Narcissus would tell us to give it a rest.  He only looked at himself; he didn't force everyone around him to stare into the pool too.

There is a place for silly pictures, and I'm not saying you should have zero.  I am saying mix some meaning into the mix.  I am just asking people to slow down for a second and ask themselves how many identical silly shots are going to want in the future.  I have hundreds of prints in a shoebox in my closet; you have hundreds of thousands of digital photos on your phone or in the cloud.  When I flip through those prints, I'm glad there aren't twenty in a row of the same five people blowing their cheeks out at the camera.  Twenty years from now, when you flip through your photos, you might wish there were fewer of those and more of you actually doing something.  It only takes a second to document something you'll be glad you can remember later.  After all, it's in your pocket for the meaningful stuff just as much as it is for the silly stuff.

Photography Geek Out

I have been taking pictures since I was a child and started really caring about it around the age of 13.  At that time, I was using a compact film camera, so it was really just about composition.

At 15, my parents bought me a Minolta SLR, and I became an addict.  My dad and I would take 8 or 9 rolls of film each during a 5-day vacation.  We had no idea, of course,  what kind of pictures we had until we took them to the drug store to have them developed.  All of this added up to serious money, and we would often end up with two or three pictures that we liked enough to enlarge and frame.

When digital photography began, I was a little resistant to it.  Strike that; I was a lot resistant to it.  Strike that, I said I would never use a digital camera.  Early digital cameras were TERRIBLE.  You would have been better of taking a writing class so that you could vividly describe what you were looking at than taking a digital photo of it.  They were 2.1 Megapixels.   Even when I started teaching yearbook (12 years ago), I had a tiny 4 Megapixel camera that was more or less useless for volleyball and basketball.  It was difficult at dances, and it couldn't zoom in at a soccer field worth anything.  I found that I was still frequently using film and then having it developed onto a CD in order to use as a digital file.

My first yearbook camera ($110 in 2005)

Digital photography has come a long way since those days.  I now have a Nikon D3100 DSLR, a wonderful camera with 14.2 Megapixels.  While this isn't the highest end camera I could own (I will never be able to afford or justify a Hasselblad for instance, and the 24-megapixel cameras that are currently available are outside of my price range), it has almost seven times more pixels than that first camera!  Please also note that I am not a victim of the megapixel myth. I do know that a megapixel count isn't the only thing that affects photo quality; I use this simply to illustrate how far the technology has advanced in this short time.

The most important feature of a DSLR is the lens quality.  It is actually better to invest in a good lens on a lower megapixel body than the other way around.  The lens determines the stability of your image, the coherence of refractions, and the amount of light gathered.  This is why I always recommend either Canon or Nikon when people ask about cameras to buy.  Neither of those companies will put their name on bad glass, and the glass is important.

This leads me to my most geeky post.  During Christmas break, I bought a new lens specifically with light gathering in mind.   It is not about the zoom as it goes from 50mm to 150mm, but it has an f-stop of f/2.8!  My lowest f-stop prior to this lens was f/3.5.  If you are not a photo geek, that probably means nothing to you, but it is a big deal.  The lower that number is, the more light the lens can take in.  This means I can shoot at a swim meet without annoying officials with a flash (I'll get to test that out next week).  Today, I'll take it into our school gym and take pictures that I won't have to edit for exposure.  This is exciting for me.  I bought it used at Peace Camera in Raleigh, which made it significantly less expensive than buying it new from Nikon.  I'll post more after I've had time to play with it.  So far, I've only used it for pictures of my cat.

I may have to do some weight lifting to strengthen my hands
and wrist because glass weighs a lot!

Our Shared History

Yesterday was World Photography Day.   You didn't get a long weekend, and there were no fireworks to mark the occasion.  Photography has become so much a part of our normal lives that we don't even think about them any more.  Most of us have thousands of photographs stored on a phone or computer.  They are as normal to us as our speech.  I want to take a moment to reflect on why photography matters.

No one who is alive today remembers a time when there was no photography.  This is because usable photography was developed in the 1820's.  There was image capture earlier than that, but it took too long to be usable.  If you are interested, here is a good summary of the history of photography.  People over the age of 30 will, however, remember when it wasn't as easy to see your photos as it is today.

Remember film?  My father and I are both shutter bugs.  We would go on family vacations and take about 8 rolls of film each.  At 36 frames per roll that meant, we were taking over 280 pictures each, not knowing until we got home whether any of those were worth having.  We took our rolls of precious film to Eckerd Drugs and put them in envelopes that were dropped into a slot and sent to "the lab."  Four days and a hundred dollars later, we would pick up our prints.  After sorting out the blurry, the overexposed, the underexposed, the finger in frame, and other such errors, we often found two or three pictures that were really worth enlarging to 8 x 12 (that's right) and hanging on the wall. In an interview, a National Geographic photographer said he took 300 rolls of film to get enough for a spread (usually 8-10 photos), so I didn't feel so bad.

That little walk down memory lane is not what I want to write about.  I want to write about the meaning of photography.  Our history as a people was once passed down by oral tradition.  Then came writing.  The ability to capture an image is just a progression in sharing history.  Photography gives all of us a shared history.  Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong are the only people to see each other on the moon with their own eyes, but we share that historic moment because they took photos.  When the concentration camps were liberated, the instruction was given to take as many pictures as possible.  Otherwise, no one could believe how bad it was.  Unless you were in New York City on September 11, your memories are shaped entirely by the pictures taken by those who were.

These events all took place when photography was the realm of professionals and hobbyists.  Even on 9/11, phones with cameras were not as ubiquitous as they are now.   The people who took the photos of those historic moments meant to capture something big.  Now, almost everyone can capture what is happening in front of them at the moment it happens.  They can also share it almost instantly with everyone in the world.  This may or may not be a good thing.  On the one hand, ease leads to lack of thought.  Twitter doesn't require that you think before you post.  Instagram never asks if you are sure about what you are sharing with the world.  When film had to be developed, no one would have wasted that frame on a shot of their lunch.  Also, more people doing something hasn't always made us better at it.  People post a lot of blurry shots.  On the other hand, the shared history of photographs means that we now have a visual record of more things than we have ever had before.  What the printing press did for writing, cameras on phones will do for imaging.  It is too soon to know what this will one day mean, but I feel like it will mean something.

The next time you are looking through a history book or an old National Geographic and see a familiar image, think about the connectedness that image brings.  Everyone else who see that image shares it with you.