On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Brendan MacRae <[email protected]> wrote: > I've offered up a couple of pithy aphorisms to this list by Will Connell, > Sr., the photographer who founded the photography department at the Art > Center College of Design in Pasadena. His son, Will Jr., is married to my > aunt and we've become fast friends recently. > > When Will Jr. was in college studying engineering in the late 1950's, he and > his peers were big into rocketry. They built their rockets, 7' long, 150lb > monsters (some with two-stages), and launched them in the high desert above > Los Angeles. If you've seen the movie October Sky about former NASA engineer > Homer Hickam, well, Will's is a similar story. After college Will went into > the aerospace industry and worked on the X-15 rocket plane among other > projects. > > He asked me recently if I would scan some old 6x6 and 6x9 color negatives of > his rocketry launches. I don't know what emulsions were used but it was some > form of Kodak Safety Film from the late 50's. There were also two (2) 6x9 > color transparencies. I don't know what kind of cameras were used for the 6x9 > images, but the 6x6's were made on a TLR of some type. You'll notice that the > pressure plate of this camera was not keeping the film flat at the time of > exposure as the edges are uniformly soft. The negs were scanned on my Nikon > 9000ED at 2000 dpi. The photos were taken by a friend of Will's. > > I asked Will if I could share these with y'all and he thought that was fine. > Enjoy! > > http://www.primelensphoto.com/wills_rocketry_photos/index.html >
Wonderful!! I love the beer can (or is it a soda can?) taped to the bottom of the launch tower - they really did improvise, eh?: http://www.primelensphoto.com/wills_rocketry_photos/large-6.html Thanks so much for presenting these to us! cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
