Category Archives: Photographs

MIT

Colleges, Photographs

Where Slide Rules rule.

Traveling home for Spring Break my son’s school bus got him as far as Logan Airport in Boston, and in Boston he remains, for now. Brutal weather and high winds saw to it that all flights from BOS were cancelled, and can you wonder when you contemplate the sheer idiocy of the location? Quarterly flooding? You bet. High winds? Guaranteed.


Boston Logan. A third world airport in the greatest nation on earth.

I have flown in and out of this miserable airport many times and my ‘on time’ experience comprises maybe 10% of those occasions. As does my son’s.

Still, not all is bad as our good friend Santo, who lives in nearby Lexington, offered to put Winston up for the night while we rebooked flights a day later. And what with Lexington being but 10 miles from the center of the engineering world, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Winnie and Santo decamped to MIT to check out the museum.

And just think. Without MIT we would all be speaking German, would not have walked on the moon and there would be no microprocessors or iPhones. Without a shadow of a doubt this is the premier engineering school in the world.

One pleasant outcome of their visit was a host of images Santo sent over and one in particular caught my imagination.

Santo used a Samsung SM-G930U cell phone to make the image which I slightly enhanced in Lightroom.

The two giant slide rules (how did they do that?) took me back to my days as an engineering student. At that time the only calculating device permitted in the exam room was the slide rule. A couple of rich kids had the fancy American Texas Instruments calculators but the British sense of fairness and desire for level playing fields (unless you were in one of their colonies) prohibited these magical devices at exam time. Appropriately, two of TI’s four founders were MIT men.

The two slide rules in the above image are a Pickett, top and a Keuffel and Esser. The Pickett is distinguished by its all metal construction, making it lighter and more durable, so much so that it was Buzz Aldrin’s tool of choice on the Apollo 11 mission which saw men first walk on the moon. Yup, MIT got us to the moon but the microprocessor had yet to be invented.

Slide rules are beautiful things and you can pick up normal sized versions of either of the above on eBay for pennies. My Faber Castell remains on display at home:

Thank you, Santo, for bringing back those pleasant memories when my net worth consisted of one Leica and three lenses along with one change of clothes! I rather imagine my son will have an easier time of it.


Winston at the unromantically named ‘Building 10’and Great Dome, on Killian Court, MIT.

Gambel’s Quail

Photographs

Fat and happy.

There’s a bushy tree in my front yard which is home to maybe two dozen Gambel’s Quail. Startle them and they explode out of their cover, flying noisily. Quail are poor fliers – as many a dinner plate confirms – and much prefer walking to flying. One hour before sunset they make their way to the back yard and invade the small ground level feeder I have placed for them, filled with feed high in sunflower seeds. Typically a dozen or more of these communal chaps have at it.

My covered patio is some forty feet from the feeder, so some serious reach is called for if photos are to be made.


Panasonic GX7 with adapted 500mm f/8 Reflex Nikkor.

The Reflex Nikkor is capable of delivering excellent results but there’s no way you are going to keep it steady or focussed on an MFT body – where it’s effective focal length is 1,000mm – without sturdy support. To that end I use an old but massive Linhof tripod. Sorry, lightweight, poncy carbon fiber does not cut it. You need weight to stop vibration. To further help matters, I use the vibrationless electronic shutter option in the GX7 which has the added advantage of being silent. The Panny GX7 is attached to the no less massive Sirui ball head using an Arca-style QR plate bolted to the Nikkor. The weight and bulk of the support hardware greatly exceeds that of the very compact and lightweight lens + camera combination.

The Reflex Nikkor is a manual focus lens, a focus movement which is a delight to use, light and stiction free. For critical focus I depress the ribbed (programmable) aperture wheel on the back of the GX7 which greatly enlarges the central area; click again and that enlarged central area fills the viewfinder. With depth of field – even at this optic’s modest f/8 aperture – just a few inches at forty feet, this focus aid is invaluable.

Here’s the result:


The male quail has the red head.

You can just make out the typical mirror lens doughnut rings in the out-of-focus area, caused by specular reflections of the bright evening sun from the gravel in the garden.