Tag Archives: Photography

The Vancouver Marine Building

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An art deco overhead lighting fixture featuring shipping and ocean themes.

I am not the only one who enjoys encountering unique examples of architecture. I was accompanied in my quest to find the Harvard Biology Building with its intriguing doors, sculpted façades, and anatomically exact statues of rhinoceroses, by my (newly married) wife Poldi. That was the culmination of a scavenger hunt to locate a novel architectural feature that had been captured in an old photograph my grandfather had taken, soon after the building had been inaugurated. We really enjoyed the experience.

Recently, Poldi, while planning a trip that would take us through Vancouver British Columbia, learned of another unique building, built at about the same time. Our destination was Banff, but we had a day before our train’s departure, to explore this famous port city of western Canada. She encountered references to the “Marine Building”, an art deco monument completed in 1930. At the time, it was the tallest building in the city (22 stories), and it was intended to be a grand statement of the value of Vancouver, especially its importance as a major seaport. They thought of it as their version of the mighty Chrysler building in New York City, completed earlier that same year.

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Franconia Aurora

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The moon sets behind an outdoor sculpture while auroras light the sky at Franconia Sculpture Park.

Even if light pollution were not an issue, we’d rarely see the northern lights because our latitude in Minneapolis is outside the normal auroral oval.  But last week, Earth experienced a strong geomagnetic storm and we were suddenly in the middle of it!  Here was a chance to see aurora without traveling to Alaska or Manitoba! And it was the perfect opportunity to photograph them with my wide-angle lenses, one of which I call my “Milky Way/aurora lens”, a 2-1/2-pound monster for just this purpose! But we needed to get away from the city lights.

There is a sculpture park, Franconia, that Poldi and I have enjoyed and contributed to for many years, and it was less than an hour from home. We arrived before sunset and sought permission to take photos, even after the normal park closing time. As I was scouting for locations and setting up tripods, a trickle of other visitors arrived with the same purpose: to see the predicted northern lights. As twilight faded, the aurora tourists expanded to dozens of vehicles, all of which had headlights that swept across the sculpture park grounds, interfering with my carefully selected compositions.

I have learned not to react to unexpected lighting situations. Oftentimes, they make for interesting photographic results. One of my favorite examples is when I was shooting reflections on a calm alpine lake and a group of partiers arrived and went skinnydipping, breaking up the smooth lake surface. Rather than close the shutter and move on, I kept it open for the duration of my planned exposure. It created a wonderful blend of reflected and scattered light!

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Eclipse Party 2024 – preparations

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The Rio Frio, beneath Old Baldy, a beautiful spot to await an eclipse.

Two years ago, in anticipation of the 2024 eclipse, I made a reconnaissance trip to Texas, where the historical odds of clear skies were the highest in the US. I located a similar campground to the one we had enjoyed in Idaho, this time along the Frio River in the “Hill Country” of Texas. Zuber’s River Camp was a few hundred meters from the centerline of the eclipse and would yield over four minutes of that bizarre condition we wanted to experience again. I didn’t know two years ago who might want to join us, but I made a guess and put my name on a waiting list for campground shelters.

I sent out an invitation and attracted the attention of several of those who had joined us in 2017. Word spread to relatives, friends, friends of friends, and friends of relatives, and soon we had a full roster. Many in the group had not seen the total eclipse in 2017, or ever.

We secured the campground reservations and plans came together. Poldi, who seems to have a natural desire to feed groups of people, became the camp quartermaster and took on the challenge of planning a menu, pre-cooking and preserving, and the logistics of acquiring fresh provisions on our route to the Texas site. She did reconnaissance and training runs at the local Costco store. She estimated the capacity of coolers and containers and stockpiled all the necessary cooking supplies and staples.

While Poldi was creating and refining her plans for food, I was making other plans. Despite the widespread advice to not spend the precious few minutes of totality fussing with camera settings, I wanted to take pictures. Pictures of the sun’s prominences and corona and maybe even a timelapse of the eclipse. Expert advice or not, it is what I do.

In addition to planning for my photographic goals, I wanted to do something to help bind this group of people, none of whom knew everyone–  even the hosts had not met them all! This inspired two more preparation projects: “name card projections” and the creation of a t-shirt design, to be described next.

Poldi assesses her cooler options.

Thor and Poldi’s Eclipse Party 2024
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Retirement Inauguration

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The logo for a project called Mongoose, an early system that was able to compute and send images to color copiers and printers.

Today was my last day of employment, and I will now be exchanging the two major foci of my creative time. 

My interests in photography and astronomy and art was always secondary to my full-time work as a color scientist, an occupation that has provided a long and fulfilling career. 

But this particular outcome was something of a fluke; the education I pursued was a hodge-podge of art, science, and engineering, and my early career was filled with jobs at not-quite-successful entrepreneurial startups that caused my dad to inquire where I was working next, because he wanted to avoid investing there!

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