Mike, tell us something about yourself and your Academy Award... and let's hope most people will be able to understand the rest.
I was born in the mid 1960's to "Overly permissive" "hippy" parents. Real counterculture hippies. My uncle was a member of the Hog Farm a group of hippies that started out as merry pranksters. What this meant is that I was surrounded by artists. My father used to do light shows at the Shrine Auditorium (Acid Tests), and my aunt gave me a Brownie camera when I was 8 years old. Everyone painted, drew, did collage... Being a visual creator was in my blood.
The "overly permissive" part comes into play in that I was allowed to use whatever tools I wanted at an early age. By the time I was 5 I was soldering, using a knife to carve, and using basic hand tools. By the time I was 8 I was using my father's acetylene torch, drill press and his power tools.
My parents had a hobby shop situated around a lot of the special effects studios. Their customers would come in and see this little kid making things out of wood and metal and mentor me. They taught me mechanics and electronics. The guy that invented the Furby taught me how to do animatronics like for cinema puppets.
When I was 13 I got a job in cinema designing mechanics and electronics, and making parts on the mill and the lathe. I was paid $5 an hour in cash (that is ~$21 today) and I used the money to buy lasers, computers, printers, plotters, synthesizers etc. I started borrowing my father's nikkormat and doing experimental images with lasers and analog controlled LEDs. I also got into holography.
I worked a bunch of different jobs, hated school, didn't attend college.
I met my wife, tried to work in special effects while she tried to become a cinematographer. There wasn't enough time for us to spend time with each other so she got into film distribution and I got a job at a camera rental house called Clairmont camera.
I started there repairing lenses, but quickly started designing things.
I invented the image shaker and squishy lens there. (I later received an Emmy sci-tech award for them for my contributions to television) additionally, I was nominated for an Academy Sci Tech Award for the squishy lens, and won one for the image shaker. The image shaker and squishy lens are important devices for several reasons. They allow the director and cast to interact in a more dynamic way. Special effects are done in post production (though LED walls are gaining popularity) and being able to act and react with an effect is important. The squishy lens is a device that acts on 3 dimensional content before the sensor flattens it out. This means that it can defocus or refocus information. A digital effect cannot take a real world image and correct it. The image shaker is in constant use today, more than 25 years later. You have seen it in Saving Private Ryan, First Man, Star Trek Picard and Voyager as well. The squishy lens is more niche. A notable scene it was used for was in the first X-Men movie when Mystique sabotages Cerebro and Dr. X tries to use it.
I stayed at Clairmont for 7 years and then worked at Panavision .
I did some cool stuff at Panavision, the coolest was a velocity based motion control system.
I then went to work at a think tank called Applied Minds. I invented a lot of cool stuff there. Color night vision systems, sensing systems, lots of different things. I got to work with all sorts of different cameras as well. Phase one, Sony, Nikon, Canon, and so many lenses. I built a 20 gigapixel camera there as well. In 2018 I decided I wanted a degree so I started to work on a photography degree. Covid also stopped that. In 2023 we moved to Bergerac France from Los Angeles. Currently semi-retired, I am writing a lot more, thinking about things like how to better teach composition, and if color theory is actually relevant (look up the Himba tribe from Nairobi) and also we learned color theory with red, blue and yellow pigments, not it is often taught with an RGB palette, L.a.b. is likely more technically accurate, but the evolution of names for colors in languages tells us that blue in terms of human recognizability is a relatively new thing, and the Himba can't really distinguish cyan from green because their language makes no distinction, so what is color theory really worth. I do play with weird lens things or weird photos from time to time, digital camera obscura with intermediate surfaces made of paper and other things.
Film vs digital?
That is a deep one. Today, very little practical difference. Film slows you down, makes you more intentional. I think that is the most important aspect in play today. I think everything has its place. The squishy lens, blink filters (I made for the movie Blink, DP Dante Spinotti), and things I helped develop like the Swing and Shift lenses are things that not only defocus and image but since they have optical power, can refocus something. This is something special compared to CGI which is working on an image that has been "baked flat".
When light enters a lens after striking the elements in a scene, most of the 3D information is intact, the elements that are occluded by other elements in the scene don't make it since they are hidden. The image information goes into the lens and is modified by the peculiarities of the lens. Chromatic aberration and other distortions change the light of the scene, but most of the dimensionality of the scene is preserved. It isn't until you place a flat sensor of some kind behind the lens to intercept the light that the scene is flattened. Devices that affect the information from the scene do so on the light that in effect is still 3 dimensional. A diopter, for instance, has the effect of refocusing the light from the scene that would normally focus at a point further from the mount of the lens. If you break that diopter into several pieces and place them in front of a lens, then parts of the image that were focused behind the lens (parts close to the camera) now travel through the diopter, then focus where the rest of the image falls. A digital effect cannot do that on real content, it has to be synthesized. There is a sort of reversal here with the value of analog and digital. On an analog film set you used to use a video tap to capture an image of the ground glass the camera operator looked at and "pipe" that image to "video village " where it was recorded and played back. The image was good, but today you can take the output of a digital camera and wirelessly put it in the cloud and do color grading and rough edits on set.
Conversely, when you do digital effects, they take place weeks or months later. If you want to interact with digital elements like rendered characters or buildings, then that is not instantaneous, film or digital. This is why quality animatronics are so useful. The actors get to act with them. real sets are useful, the actors get to act in them. When Sir Ian McKellen broke down crying during the production of the Hobbit , it was because he was not working in or with an environment and characters that did not exist. Somewhere in the middle are LED walls. You generate rendered and real background elements and you get the magic of real reflections in real time. LED walls turn the effects pipeline "upside down" in that now the rendered scenes have to be available the day of shooting.
Up until recently I shot film and digital. I had a Bronica GS1, some nice lenses and a small fleet of Agfa Isolettes I had restored. I was either sending my film to a professional lab or "stand processing" in Rodinol (R09)
I shot Fuji ACROS almost exclusively, so much so that when fuji cancelled ACROS I sold my Bronica. When they re-released it... I was pissed.
I always gravitate to film or heavier cameras when I sense internally that I am shooting too fast. When I stop being as mindful, as intentional as I should be, my brain attempts to slow me down by getting into film or large formats, it does so instinctively.
Can you name some old (classic) films that you think have outstanding cinematography and then some new (21st century) films with outstanding cinematography. I love the Powell/Pressburger movies.
It would have to be film noir, or not specific episodes of Game of Thrones.
Can a well directed film turn out bad? Can you say - good directing, bad film? I heard that from a member of a jury at a film festival in my town and couldn't really think of many examples of that, maybe Boom! (Joseph Losey, 1968) and Caligula (Tinto Brass, 1979). You think that's possible and can you think of such films?
I am not "finely tuned" like a filmmaker. I am not exquisitely aware of the different elements of a film and how they affect me. It is hard to answer questions about direction simply because I am ignorant to and therefore blind to the finer elements. What I can say is that I feel story is crucial and direction is essential to communicating the story, so direction must, at a bare minimum be unoffensive, but ideally it is done to help drive the story.
How did you, or how do you think of your inventions, how do you get the ideas? Is it like - oh, we need this, let me make it. Or does it start like an unspecific vision that you then work on to see where it gets you, or maybe it's both? I think the most interesting thing here is your mind and the way it operates.
Sometimes I invent something "out of the air" or sometimes it is a response to a customer's need. The Image shaker came from a request to improve a current system, for instance. Clairmont camera had a platform you mounted the camera to and motors shook the camera and lens. The customer wanted something that was random. I invented something that was random, silent, and shook the image, not the whole camera and lens.
The squishy lens was different. I was taking a walk and I wondered what if you redefined one of the properties of a lens element. Optical lens elements are rigid and precise, so what would happen if it were not rigid?
Often, the way I come up with inventions is to look at something and look for interesting "axes " to change. In the image shaker that axis was, how can I do it optically? The color night vision system I developed was similar, it had been tried with red, green and blue filters, I figured out how to do it with cyan, magenta and yellow filters.
The motion control crane I developed was similar, just because it is done a certain way doesn't mean that it must be done that way.
One of the elements I always try to provide for a filmmaker's tool is fun. Fun is crucial to fostering creativity. A user interface should be simple and easy. At 3:00 in the morning, when you have been shooting for weeks, pushing long days is something easy and enjoyable to work with. The squishy lens for instance has a label on it: "Warning, unmerciful crushing force" to warn people of the moving parts. The label could have been less fun, but unmerciful is a fun word in English.
What about photography and getting that degree?
I think intentionality is crucial to photography. If you aim the camera without knowing why, then you are essentially random. When you can press the button with intent, then you are going to be a better photographer. Sometimes I like to aim my small pocket camera out the window of the car and just snap the "mood." Things are blurry from motion and lack of focus, and noisy from poor ISO performance, but I know that is what will happen and it is an element I want. What is important to me is to capture my mood at the time, not anything else.
Education is something that has been near to my heart for a while. I ran a photo club in the past, and have mentored a handful of students, mostly gay, women, or other minorities that may have been underserved. They all have stories that need to be told. This is where the Isolettes come in, I would restore them and give them to young people with the understanding that unless they were starving they can't sell the cameras, they have to give them to someone with the same understanding. There are 5 or 6 floating around, I have no idea where.
Presently I am the secretary of education for a small photo club. I spend a lot of time generating content for lessons there. I recently did a piece on color composition and realized that color is so dependent on your experience as a human, that you should just be mindful of color, mindful of the emotional response, the cultural response we have to color. When you think that the Himba tribe of Nairobi cannot distinguish between green and cyan, not because of their eyes but because of the linguistic programming of their brains, then you start to wonder.
I have dealt with human perception for a long time professionally, worked with neurologists, vision scientists, and the notion of composition has always been something that was "tugging at my brain" but when I started working on color, I realized more formally that different elements of composition trigger different elements of the brain. I realized that thinking this way may be easier for my class at the photo club. Instead of remembering dozens of different compositional techniques that were not formally related to each anything in a meaningful way, I wondered if I could group things into areas of the brain and how the brain acted on them.
The article I wrote in Petapixel is short and casual, but there is a lot going on in our brains. How different senses integrate into our view of the world, and when different parts of the brain arrive at their conclusions and make you, the"driver" of your own body consciously aware of image elements that have already been working on you before you were actually conscious of them. Random, but interesting - dogs' noses are connected to their visual cortex, but ours aren't. This gives dogs a spatial awareness of smell we simply do not have.
I am happy to answer more questions or clarify things.
I love when people love to talk about their work, especially professionals who do not try to gatekeep, but want to share
their experience which can be literally life-saving for those who cannot afford education and have to educate themselves on their own. I think the most vulnerable group of people are the poor and they are the majority now, it seems. At least here. I live in the poorest municipality in Serbia. There are absolutely no programs for young people, nothing to help develop their talents and a lot of them become drug users or leave.
A photo club is a great way for like-minded people to be social, learn and share ideas. The club I am now meets weekly for 2 hours. There is a mixture of activities, a lesson from one of the club's committee members, a lecture from an external photographer (which we have to pay), a challenge (like spooky), a critique of the challenge, and a judging of the challenge. To me, giving critique is so important because it teaches you to look, really look at your own work. Critique is great for your own work when you feel "undefined" or need some external input because you are stuck. Positive critique is also great if you want to create images with mass appeal. But if you follow all the positive and negative critique, then when is a photo you took no longer yours, but a reflection of the public's taste.
We have judged competitions, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I personally am not sure of the value of judging. Photography is subjective. When you look at this image, what do you see? Do you see a man with a far off stare, holding onto a once functional banjo? Do you see a rubber dummy with a missing finger propped up in a chair?
My views on critique and judging are "fringe" in that I don't really care about the positive things people say about my photos. I like my photos and I don't need others to like them. What I find useful is negative critique. I like critique that is like acetone on an open wound. I want to know what you dislike about my images. That is interesting to me. The only exception is that if you are a skilled photographer, and give "neutral" critique that is "mechanical" then I find that a useful insight.
Photographers should judge their own work. Because when you have curators judging it, or any kind of authority above artists who are today rendered helpless without curators who will "explain" their art to the plebs, it opens the door to corruption. I have a friend photographer who is more like a mentor to me, and he was mentored by Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus. He's very good at giving the "mechanical" critique that also feels like acetone on an open wound. He will even answer what you would never think of asking, he's gonna know what you needed to know before you were aware you didn't know it. What do you enjoy shooting?
Photographically I like to shoot things that are different from what is out there. When there is an eclipse I am not out there trying to take photos of it. There are people with better lenses and more skill who will do a better job. I would rather look at the shadows of leaves change shape because the sun is occluded. Because I build what I want to for a hobby, building something that captures images differently is part of making a photo, the line is blurry for me. The trashcam I wrote about in Petapixel is an example of that. I was curious if the diameter of the aperture and focus distance were important. I had a theory that if the aperture diameter were similar to human interpupillary distance and the distance to the aperture were close to that in a human conversation that I would make a portrait that was more "human" I failed to prove anything because the trashcam was so heavy (cinema style tripod) and could not achieve a close enough focus... but it produced unique results and i built other varieties. I don't have a college degree, and aside from a few classes in the fields of engineering and game design, my only college experience is from 2018 when I went to college to take photography classes.
So, we have no degrees but we know how to do certain things and that's enough. I would go back to the Renaissance when every artist had one or two disciples, the most talented ones, and they would learn how to do things well. Knowing the craft is crucial.
Photography and image creation in general have been a calling all my life, but it wasn't until my early 50's that I really shared any of my work with others. Photography is a personal journey, and one I just didn't really share, but also one I don't like following in terms of the work of others. Part of my success in life has been maintaining an ignorance of what other people have done, freeing me to create my own path. This has been true professionally, allowing me to invent and solve unhindered by other's work. I call this approach the 10,000 foot(3000 meter) idiot. I come in ignorant and solve problems. I actually earn money this way, so I keep it for my photography as well.
Around 2018 I started to attend school, I wanted a degree to prove to myself I could do it, and photography seemed like something I would enjoy. The local community college had a black and white darkroom as well as digital capabilities. I enrolled in a lab class, and just shot film, processed it and earned college credit. I proved to myself I could do it, so I enrolled in a beginner photography course. I had been shooting for longer than the instructor had been alive, but I learned some stuff. Mostly what the youth of today expect from camera equipment, how they use it, and understand the medium of photography. I took intermediate and advanced courses, lab courses, then Covid hit. That sort of made it difficult to continue my studies.
I am not a fast thinker. I don't really like street photography. When I go on vacation I don't bring nice camera gear. Stopping, finding the shot is something I need my own time for, and holding people up isn't cool.
OMG I KNOW!
I do like landscapes, but mostly I like creating images that are new and unique. There is that shot of xxx in front of yyy while the sun is setting... There are 10,000 shots out there of that same setting by 10,000 photographers. There are those that will put in the time and preparation to ensure they get the best place to shoot xxx so it perfectly blocks yyy just as the sun sets. There are those that will spend a lot of money on equipment like telephoto lenses. I am not one of those people. I find myself building things to get a shot I like, either a prop like miniature dinosaurs or skulls or something, or an optical device like a filter or a bracket or whatever.
I build miniatures, too. With paper dolls. I make the whole scenery. I'm not very techincal, I just want to capture what I arrange, I do not photoshop it, there's zero post-production. I just try to do all the "effects" in front of the camera.
I have been accused of being a technical photographer in that I am all about the hardware. I was insulted. There are people that shoot, they will talk at great length about the flash, f#, focal length, etc. For me, the camera, lens, light and subject are all part of the creative process. It is just that my knowledge allows me to adjust things that are inaccessible to those people that don't want to make their own filter or a lens, or write their own software to make an image.
I wrote some software to drive a small LED panel and used manual,in camera motion to capture this.
A miniature set I built, lit with an LED flashlight and smoke effects via maple bacon vape pen (cheapest they had)
4x5 camera converted to an intermediate image camera with rice paper capturing the intermediate image.
Synthetic autochrome image emulating a color process from the early 1900, created on software I wrote for the purpose.
Shot with a zone plate I made at very high ISO, edited in L.a.b. color space to address color and luminance separately
I made a rig to more easily capture seagulls. this is a composite of what I hoped to capture.
I recently was thinking about how difficult composition is for some people, especially some beginners. I was wondering if there were any organizational structures I could apply. One thing led to another and now here I am doing research into human perception, neurology and the function of different areas of the brain. I broke it down into 5 layers of brain activity: The Attention Layer: Use things like brightness contrast and motion The Organization Layer: Use structure, spatial elements and symmetry The Emotion Layer: Use lighting to control emotion, texture, color The Narrative layer: Use the relationship of subjects, recognizable elements and details to stimulate the intellect. The Symbolism layer: Use cultural elements, visual metaphors and juxtaposition. Read the Petapixel article here. https://petapixel.com/2024/10/18/photography-composition-looking-under-the-hood/
How is this for a start?
