Stacy Kellner – Page 2 – 60-461/761: Experimental Capture

Typology of Lenses

Many people are completely dependent on corrective lenses without knowing how they work; this project examines the invisible stresses we put in & around our eyes every day.

I have worn glasses since I was 5 years old, and contacts since I was 8, but I’ve never stopped to think about their construction. In learning about polarized light, however, I realized that transparent plastic is not perfect; in fact, it is subject to stress that can be seen clearly when place between two perpendicular polarizing filters.

The goal: view the stresses in corrective lenses.

I: Contact Lenses

What are the stresses on my contact lenses? Is there a difference in stress between a fresh pair and a used pair?

I wear daily lenses, which means I throw them out every night. Rather than throw them out, I saved my used contacts for a week, so I could compare their stresses with fresh ones.

The Machine

The machine was pretty simple:

Soft contact lenses (used & unused)
Linear polarizing filters (2)
DSLR with macro lens
Light table

I was excited to use polarizing filters because of how clearly they highlight points of stress; I hoped to see the tiny stresses in the things I put in my eyes every single day.

So I put a contact lens between 2 filters and…nothing happened.

Thus entered the experimentation phase.

Experiments

First, I did some research – why did this not work? Despite the objective “failure,” it was honestly really fascinating to learn how contacts are built.

Next, I tried a bunch of ideas:

What happens if you squish it? Stretch it?
Let it dry out & shrivel up?
Let it dry out and shatter it?
What about in the packaging?

At least the packaging looked pretty cool!

stretched, dried, and shattered lenses next to a hard plastic “fake” lens (which worked properly)

Somehow, even shattering the lens did not constitute “stress” for it. Crazy, right?

II: Glasses

Luckily, I had also brought my glasses as a backup plan.

What are the stresses on my glasses lenses? What do lens stresses look like for different people, types of frames, prescriptions, etc.?

The Machine:

Glasses (15 distinct pairs)
Linear polarizing filters (2)
DSLR with macro lens; fstop 8 & lowest ISO setting
Light table

These photos were immediately more interesting. The hard plastic of the glasses made for better results with the polarization filters, plus the frames themselves exert those stresses.

To me, the most interesting part of it was not the stresses of a single frame, but in the comparison. Different frames show stress in drastically different ways. Some key interesting ones:

No imperfections at all, save for a tiny dent in the lower left. (Might be because of how the lens is attached – it rests in a little metal shelf, rather than screwed directly into the frame)

Wire frames tended to yield some more colorful results:

Thank you to everybody who donated your glasses to the cause – I really appreciate it!

III: Insights & Reflections

Glasses are a proxy for people. There’s a story to each lens/frame/wearer. Everyone apologizes for their glasses being dirty.
We put a lot of trust on glasses without knowing how they really work. They are not as perfect as we think.
“Experimental capture” is no joke – it truly is an experiment.
I succeeded in keeping it simple. Throughout my masters program, I’ve learned the importance of “doing one thing well” rather than trying to do it all. Especially in this class, there’s a lot of pressure to use all of the tools. I’m grateful I made a relatively low-tech machine; this helped me learn, adapt, and focus on the storytelling.
I failed in anticipating some of the challenges that could arise – I gave myself enough time for plan A but could have left more for plan B.
Selecting which frames to photograph is part of the machine. With more time, I could have been more strategic about location and context for choosing subjects.

IV: Future Opportunities

Now That I’ve learned a lot about lenses (for better and for worse), I’m curious about their imperfections. How might I visualize the stresses I found? Does this stress affect what the viewer actually sees?

Seam Carving

Seeing these distortions through the polarizing filters, I was immediately reminded of a funhouse mirror.

Thanks to a suggestion from Kyle, I learned about Seam Carving and explored this a bit. Seam carving is usually used for resizing an image without losing “important” data; it preserves the spaces with the most “energy” and algorithmically carves away the less valuable things in between.

For scaling down, this pretty much looked like a “crop.” Not very interesting here. But for scaling up, I started to see some fun distortions.

UV Experiments

In trying to figure out why the polarizing filters didn’t work, I also learned that some contacts have UV blockers. Here’s what a few different brands look like under UV light:

With a UV camera, some interesting future experiments could arise. If I took a UV self-portrait, what would my eyes look like?

Typology: Contact Lenses

For my typology machine, I’m going to look at my contact lenses!

I have worn contacts since I was 8 years old, so there’s plenty of questions I could come up with (for example, how many daily pairs have i worn in my entire life? What is the amount of packaging waste I’ve generated through this? Yikes.)

They’re a really cool material to play with – transparent, squishy, very different wet/dry textures, etc. For the purpose of this assignment, it’s an awesome opportunity to experiment – what can I capture about this material that I have never been able to see otherwise?

My machine will look at them between polarizing filters, using a DSLR, macro lens and light table.What kind of surface tensions are there on different pairs? How much does each lens differ from the next? (despite quality standards, there’s an occasional lens that is not the right shape. What does this look like?) What does an inside-out lens look like, compared to one that’s right-side-out? If I look at every pair I wear for a week, how does each day differ? Does a fresh lens look different from one I’ve been wearing all day?

example of polarizing filters to see surface tensions in transparent objects. Source: https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/TTT-polaroid/TTT-polaroid.htm

It’s a pretty simple concept, which is fine by me and leaves opportunity for some fun discoveries & experimentation.

Beyond just using polarizing filters, what other things could I capture about my contact lenses? For example, is there some way to “see” how dirty they are at the end of the day? I’m open to suggestions and excited to get started.

Postphotography

An example of “nonhuman” photography that you have either experienced or read about

Reading Zylinska’s “Postphotography” excerpt, the first project that comes to mind for me is Deep Dream. I’m not sure how well it fits into the “photography” category, but the method of creating these images mirrors Zylinska’s accounts of “algorithmic and computational” means of capture.

Respond to Joanna Zylinska’s observation that, “Photography based on algorithms, computers, and networks merely intensifies this condition, while also opening up some new questions and new possibilities.

Zylinska says this when discussing the recent “reconceptualization of photography in algorithmic and computational terms,” arguing that photography has always, in a sense, arisen through human-nonhuman collaboration. She seems to argue that this modern intent is as close as it has ever been to its origins in “fossils, analog snapshots, and liar-produced photomaps.” I would agree that both this modern sort of “algorithmic photography” and its analog counterparts are methods of experimental (yet literal) capture, aimed at taking an accurate snapshot of what’s “out there.”

It’s just that this time around, what’s “out there” can be less subjective than ever before, because we can capture things that completely evade human perception. “Nonhuman photography can allow us to unsee ourselves from our parochial human-centered anchoring, and encourage a different vision of both ourselves and what we call the world.” From a cognitive science standpoint, that’s incredibly satisfying to me. I hope to do more work that challenges our species’ limited view of the world.

SEM – Chia Seeds

For the SEM workshop, I scanned a few chia seeds.

even the “familiar” version looks foreign

To be perfectly honest, even after reading and hearing and even seeing how the machine works at a high level, it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around the way an electron microscope works, and how it produces a picture. It figures, since I can’t even reliably describe how a camera works, but that’s okay!

It was awesome to see how vastly different one seed could be from the next. Some seeds have a sort of flaky/bumpy coating, while others are perfectly smooth. Donna and I were trying to guess why this might be the case. Maybe the smooth ones were older, and had already “molted”? Maybe the smooth ones were younger and hadn’t dried out yet? It was great getting to experience the total perspective shift that comes with seeing something so small so clearly.

Lastly, here is my first attempt to make an anaglyphic display.

First, the stereo pairs:

And now, the attempt:

Maybe it worked? the red on the outside right edges looks promising, but the blue on the left, I’m not sure.

perception reigns supreme

As a NON-photographer, it was really useful for me to get this history lesson from “Photography and Observation,” to learn how the “purpose” of photography has sort of co-evolved with its capabilities over the last couple centuries. There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll mainly focus on:

the concept of “objectivity” and “reliability” in these evolving methods
how this plays out in typology

Objectivity & Reliability

I like the way this reading describes the shift from photography as a (extremely cumbersome) way of capturing what we see, to a way of allowing us to see new things entirely. In other words, a shift from photography as a method for documentation to a method of perception. By showing us the “un-seeable” we are forced to reconsider entire philosophical frameworks about what is “real” and what is “fake.”

My background in cognitive science makes me particularly interested in the ways in which all of human perception is essentially a lesson in experimental capture – everything we see, feel, hear, smell is an image, passed through the “lenses” on the skin and in the brain into something we can understand. What we experience is not the “real thing” (and many philosophers argue that there is no “real thing” anyway). Lots of people think this is scary. I think this is awesome.

Capture & Typology

In the latter half of the reading, the author begins to talk about photogrammetry and stitching images together, and then arrives at breaking images apart. This is where typologies really come in.

“The use of the strobe or spark for instance, when applied to photography… is a powerful tool for the isolation of single elements in the stages of motion.”

“[The arrival of] high-speed photography…broke human and animal motion down into finely distinguished moments.

I love this idea of typologies as a way to break something down into more digestible pieces. We see Muybridge’s “Animal Locomotion” of the running horse. This also reminds me of the Time Magazine examples from class, where the artist blacked out everything but the faces on the front page.

This deliberate break-down of gestures, events, and interactions usually taken for granted is an opportunity to reveal things “too small, too fast, too comples, too slow and too far away to be seen with the eye.” I’m curious how this idea can continue beyond the obviously visual and break into our other senses.

I like how the reading ends. It brings us full circle, describing how “x-ray photography arrived at a time when the reliability of photography was acutely questioned.” This was a time when the impression of photography as an “objective” source of truth was “beginning to wear thin” due to photo editing, staged events, etc. Are we not in a similar place today?

X-rays in this way reconnected the world with the dominant Western, scientific, truth-seeking discourse of the time. We are in an era today where politics, technology, etc. have likewise disconnected us from that discourse. Will we as a society find a “new x-ray” to cling back to that fleeting vision? Or is the discourse simply changing for good (and maybe for the better)?

Photogrammetry – Crystal Bird

I brought in a crystal bird figurine to use in the photogrammetry workshop, before I found out that shiny & transparent things are literally the worst possible thing to use. Whoops!

You can see the thumbnails of the real thing in this photo:

And here’s how it turned out:

So…kind of a failure, but also kind of fun that there’s at least a little stump-like thing showing where the bird is *supposed* to be.

Ervin’s “The Camera, Transformed by Machine Vision”

Christian Ervin examines how the relationship between camera and operator has evolved over time in a way that mirrors a lot of the current conversations we’ve been having in HCI about the evolving relationship between users and products.

“Cameras that use ML have the potential to both automate existing functions of the camera as a tool for human use and extend its creative possibilities far beyond image capture.”

I coincidentally just walked out of a design class where we talked about this shift from tool to medium to material; from being something manipulated by humans to something that predicts and manipulates human lives. Today’s “smart products” take the interaction from something user-driven to something that drives itself (and I’m not just talking about self-driving cars!). For cameras, Ervin describes this as “the full dissolution of the camera’s physical form into software.” These products tend to work towards efficiency, drastically minimizing the human effort required to operate them by aiming to remove that effort altogether.

On one hand, this is terrifying, and it’s easy to slip into some sort of sci-fi dystopic nightmare where our devices take over the world. However, the part of Ervin’s quote about creative possibilities is what gets me the most excited. We are in the early, early days of this sort of autonomy, which means the rules are not defined. I see this as a wonderful opportunity to bring philosophy and ethics into the conversation and ask ourselves what we’re really doing.