Speed Graphic at the London Olympics

Renowned large-format photographer David Burnett was spotted with his Speed Graphic at the 2012 Olympics.

It's not often you see a camera like that peeking over the wall at the Olympics.

He was reportedly sporting an Aero-Ektar 178mm F2.5 on his Speed Graphic. Here's an interview from last month as Burnett was preparing to shoot his 8th Summer Olympics. Check out that link for a slideshow of amazing large-format Olympic photography.

David Burnett/Contact Press Images

"The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday"

[Watching the Summer Olympics finally made me want to publish this...]

"The only easy day was yesterday" is a motto of the Navy SEALs.

This idea applies to my own life as a triathlete, as it does for many athletes, because it doesn't matter how hard my workout was yesterday - that was my "easy day." Today, I have to train harder and push my limits even more.* I chose this motto as the title of my first series in which my dual passions for TRIATHLON and PHOTOGRAPHY collide.

I picked up my camera on a random June morning in 2010 and called that "Day 1." My goal was to make a photo on every training day. The idea was simply an exercise: let's see if I can make interesting / beautiful / compelling images during (what often feels like) my daily training grind.

Since Day 1, exciting things have happened in my athletic life. I have raced my fastest Olympic Distance Triathlon (2:15:37). For the first time, I worked with a coach, who helped me reach my goal of a sub-60:00 10 Mile. During this time, my “daily training grind” has taken me to amazing places - some I wasn’t sure I would ever reach.

The images in this series are meant to give a little glimpse into my life of multi-sport training. I had a few self-imposed rules as I started shooting this project, but they evolved as I made more images. The training itself is usually quite fast-paced, so many of these images usually capture the calm moments just before or after the workout. Often you'll see me, my wife, or other friends reveling in that feeling of accomplishment that fills an athlete after a hard workout. These are the moments that athletes train for.

The only easy day was yesterday.

Day 1: 6/4/10: Tempo swim.


Day 2: 6/5/10: Long ride. Calm winds, but a few sprinkles.


Day 3: 6/6/10: Relaxing in the shade after a long run. Last long run before next weekend's oly tri.


Day 5: 6/8/10: Sarah coming to the finish of her first Time Trial.


Day 8: 6/11/10: Easy open water swim to get ready for tomorrow's race.


Day 13: 6/16/10: Foot still really sore, so just did some weights at the Y.


Day 15: 6/18/10: After icing my sore foot in an icy stream in southern WI while camping with my in-laws.


Day 19: 6/22/10: Dangling my feet off of Stout's Island pre-swim.


Day 20: 6/23/10: Celebrating my first non-wetsuit open water swim of the year with a post-swim cannonball.


Day 22: 6/25/10: Chatting in Square Lake after taking Matt for his first open water swim.


Day 26: 6/29/10: Sarah running intervals at dusk as I stretched on the in-field.


Day 34: 7/7/10: First lap around Square Lake without my wetsuit. Beautiful swim.


Day 37: 7/10/10: After a 1-mile open water swim in Lake Monona with 50 other people
in the location of the Ironman Wisconsin swim.


Day 42: 7/15/10: Catching my breath after a long run on a hot evening.


Day 43: 7/16/10: Hot ride. Two bottles of water gone in no time. New fat-wrap worked great.


Day 46: 7/19/10: Collapsed on the porch after a hard, hilly tempo run.


Day 47: 7/20/10: Hopping in Lake Independence for an evening open water swim.


Day 54: 7/27/10: After Sarah and I finished our evening open water swim in Lake Mary.


Day 65: 8/7/10: Pre-swim.


Day 77: 8/19/10: On Summit Ave after a hilly (and sweaty) run.


Day 79: 8/21/10: View down the road after my foggy 7 mile run.


Day 86: 8/28/10: In an ice bath after a long run.


Day 112: 9/23/10: The back of my shirt after running fartleks down the middle of Summit Ave in the pouring rain.

* p.s. I don't actually believe that Navy Seal motto for triathlon training. I tend to get injured, so I'm a big advocate of rest.

Poor Sad Camera....

SD Card's Father

I can't believe he didn't see this coming...

Quick Class

I'm gearing up for a quick and (hopefully) fun class at The College of Visual Arts next week. It's a week-long darkroom photography class for high-school students. Here's what the CVA website says about it:

Instagram Face Palm

Just a little mid-week humor for you all....

Kodak's Secret Nuclear Reactor (not really)

This is making a bit of news in the "photo curiosities" world lately. I found out about it in a report by Yahoo:

How's this for a revelation: The Kodak Eastman Co. had a small nuclear research reactor in a little-known underground labyrinth at its Rochester, N.Y., facility.

And, although locked down and under tight security, it also contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched uranium, reports the the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester. The writer succinctly notes:

That's the material that nuclear bombs are made of. Terrorists covet it.

The imaging company, which has filed for bankruptcy, used the reactor to check chemicals and other materials for impurities, as well as for neutron radiography testing, the newspaper reported. The reactor, acquired by the company in 1974, was about the size of a refrigerator and kept in a 14- by 24-foot cement-lined cavity dug below a basement of one of its research buildings.

"This device presented no radiation risk to the public or employees," company spokesman Christopher Veronda told the newspaper. "Radiation from the operation was not detectable outside of the facility."

Kodak didn't necessarily mean to keep the reactor a secret, the newspaper reported. Rather, it was just never truly public knowledge.

Although it had been mentioned in research papers, Veronda told the newspaper, the company never made a public announcement about it. And he wasn't sure the company ever notified local police, fire or hazardous materials officials that it possessed the reactor.

The newspaper acknowledged it learned of the reactor when a Kodak employee mentioned it.

As for the uranium, it is no longer at the facility. It has been shipped to a federal facility in South Carolina, the newspaper reported.

Eastman Kodak Co.'s californium neutron flux multiplier, known as a CFX, which it acquired in 1974,
in a photo found among Nuclear Regulatory Commission findings.

For the Democrat and Chronicle's first report of this, click here.

The First Digital Camera

Great story of the first digital camera:

"We Had No Idea"

In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. “It” being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera. It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

Vintage 1975 portable all electronic still camera

It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images - a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.

The playback device and TV

There you have it. No film required to capture and no printing required to view your snapshots. That’s what we demonstrated to many internal Kodak audiences throughout 1976. In what has got to be one of the most insensitive choices of demonstration titles ever, we called it “Film-less Photography”. Talk about warming up your audience!

Side-by-side comparison – Hardcopy vs. Film-less Photography

After taking a few pictures of the attendees at the meeting and displaying them on the TV set in the room, the questions started coming. Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like? When would this type of approach be available to the consumer? Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919). I kept the prototype camera with me as I moved throughout the company over the last 30 years, mostly as a personal reminder of this most fun project. Outside of the patent, there was no public disclosure of our work until 2001.

The “we” in this narrative was largely the people of the Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory in the mid 1970’s and, in particular, several enormously talented technicians - Rick Osiecki, Bob DeYager and Jim Schueckler. All were key to building the camera and playback system. I especially remember working with Jim for many hours in the lab bringing this concept to life. Finally, I remember my visionary supervisor, the late Gareth Lloyd, who supported this concept and helped enormously in its presentation to our internal world at Kodak. In thinking back on it, one could not have had a better environment in which to “be crazy.”

Many developments have happened between this early work and today. Personal computers, the Internet, wide bandwidth connections and personal desktop photographic printing are just a few of these. It is funny now to look back on this project and realize that we were not really thinking of this as the world’s first digital camera. We were looking at it as a distant possibility. Maybe a line from the technical report written at the time sums it up best:

“The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.”

But in reality, we had no idea...