Here’s what I saw when I stopped by my office on the way to my 8:00 a.m. class this morning. Usually the light slanting through the Venetian blind into my office is white, creating interesting patterns of grayscale shadow on my multi-recessed wall. I’d never seen color in that light before, so I snapped this quick photo to document the mix of red, orange, and peach before packing up the gear for my film studies class.
Just as I was about to leave, though, the light changed again—with an amazing last-minute bonus this time to start off my day. Not just color, but a rainbow!
You know it’s spring in Milwaukee when lawns throughout the city are taken over by these lovely carpets of blue flowers. Scilla siberica (Siberian squill) is their official name. They make me so happy!
Apparently, though, this pretty flower is considered “invasive” because it “naturalizes” so well (i.e., spreads outward from the spot where initially planted). These blue carpets are sometimes even referred to as “infestations” of scilla.
A characterization that’s a bit harsh for such a cheerful sight 🙂
I’m teaching film studies this quarter, and one of the small pieces of information I introduce to help students develop a vocabulary for talking about movies is the concept of “tilt shift” photography.
I’m no expert on the technology itself, except to know that what used to be done with camera lenses and movement can now be done post-production using software. For some basic background on tilt-shift photography, check out the Wikipedia article here.
My students are analyzing films, not making them. So when I teach them about lighting and lens focal length and camera movement, we are primarily concerned with the image within the frame—what we see when we view a movie.
A few years ago I noticed something new onscreen that I’d never seen before. It took awhile to learn what it was called (tilt shift), but I’m really intrigued by its use and what it contributes to my experience of a film.
Basically the effect of tilt-shift photography is to create a visual impression that what you’re seeing on the screen is a miniature set, almost like a doll-house world.
The first place I noticed it was in the opening credits of the BBC’s “Sherlock” television series.
Can you make out the miniaturization of London in this clip? I have no idea why the tilt-shift effect (plus a cool use of time lapse) was employed, but I can tell you how I interpret it. That London is Sherlock’s playground, his game board, and he sees the city as just a tiny, blurry setting against which the clarity of the intellectual puzzles he loves can take over as the central focus.
I next noticed the technique in The Social Network, at the Henley Royal Regatta, where the Winklevoss twins are racing for Harvard’s rowing team in the Grand Challenge Cup. Take a look at the opening 20 seconds of this clip. Can you see the miniaturization effect on the longer shots?
I read an interview with The Social Network director David Fincher (here) in which he said the reason for tilt shift here was practical:
We could only shoot 3 races at the Henley Royal Regatta; We had to shoot 4 days of boat inserts in Eton. The only way to make the date for release was to make the backgrounds as soft as humanly possible. I decided it might be more “subjective” if the world around the races fell away in focus, leaving the rowers to move into and out of planes of focus to accentuate their piston-like effort.
But for me as a viewer, ignorant of Fincher’s shooting schedule and creative decisions, the use of tilt shift in that scene was to make the Winklevoss twins—portrayed in the film as holding very high opinions of themselves and their place in the world—appear diminished. The twins think they’re such big shots, but this race is puny in the larger scheme of things. And their influence on campus, which they think is so significant, is actually equally puny, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing (as seen in their meeting with Harvard’s president).
One last movie where I’ve noticed the tilt-shift technique used to great effect is Jack Black’s 2010 Gulliver’s Travels. The “miniature” theme is obvious and literal in this movie, but I especially like the way tilt shift is employed in the title sequence to convey a sense of size distortion from the very beginning.
So this is the kind of stuff I’ve been doing in my work life lately. I hope you find it as interesting as I do!
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I’m fascinated by old signs that have long outlived their usefulness. The resolution in this photo isn’t very sharp—I took it with my iPhone while sitting at the Juneau and Old World Third Street stoplight—but it pulls together several eras in an interesting fashion.
At the left is the F. H. Hochmuth building, built in 1892. The resolution here is too poor for you to see it, but that year is written above the Hochmuth name, just below the facade’s peaked roof. Milwaukee buildings of this era (1870s–1900) all have a pretty similar look: skinny, three or four stories tall, built with Milwaukee’s own Cream City brick, and displaying its year of construction in a stylized banner across the top.
To the right is a luxury condo/apartment building that has been built to appear old. The Moderne has an Art Deco look, or more accurately Art Moderne. Yet it’s actually brand new (four years old).
And in between is the “ghost” sign. I regret not taking a photo of it before the new building blocked it. It’s some kind of pest control ad, from a company that used “K”s like a New York Post headline. The text on the sign reads something like “Killed Kleen” or “Kleen Killed,” if memory serves.
I figure the sign is from the 1940s or 1950s. Note the “K” on the cartoon exterminator’s hat, as well as the cape unfurled beyond his shoulders. The lower half of the sign, now obscured, reveals that the man is wearing some kind of superhero outfit, a leotard-and-tights look that’s a cross between Superman and Peter Pan.
One last thing: I found this photo on eBay and discovered that the F. H. Hochmuth building was home to a musical instrument store by that same name.
I found the October 21, 1972, Milwaukee Journal obituary for Otto Hochmuth, “retired operator of the old Hochmuth Music Store,” who was found dead at age 75 in his room at the Abbot Crest Hotel.” Otto’s father was the “F. H.” of the building’s name: Franz Hochmuth, a German violin maker, founded the store in 1892 after immigrating to America. Franz’s son Otto operated the business from 1940–1969.
So, I don’t know. That sign itself is nothing special, apart from its surprising durability. I could actually see it becoming, given its cheesy prominence in any photo taken from the wrong angle, a thorn in the side of Moderne building management. But there it is. And there it will likely remain until years of Wisconsin weather finally erases it.
There’s a special gallery two doors away from my office in the Grohmann Museum that houses a collection of paintings by a 19th-century German painter, Carl Spitzweg.
“The Bookworm,” by Carl Spitzweg, 1850, via Wikipedia (public domain)
On the wall outside that gallery is a painting by American painter Norman Rockwell, The Bookworm, which pays tribute to the similarly-titled painting by Spitzweg.
So, anyway, today I noticed a brand new addition on a shelf to the right of the Rockwell painting.
This little Danbury Mint figurine replica of the painting.
“The Bookworm,” Danbury Mint replica figurine
Too adorable! It reproduces every detail, right down to the basket at his feet with the note from the painting: “Don’t forget matches and cheese.”
An errand I fear our “Bookworm” will not complete, given his apparent propensity to be lured away from practical realities via the enchantment of a good book! 🙂
If I have a small class, I’ll occasionally take my students up to the rooftop sculpture garden on a warm spring day. We carry benches from all corners to sit together for discussion. To keep track of our time, we need merely glance over at the enormous clock on the City Hall tower.
Obviously warm weather is some ways off.
Those apartment buildings at the left and center background (slightly obscured here by a thick curtain of wind-driven snowflakes) caught my eye when I first moved to Milwaukee. To me they looked like old Soviet bloc housing, although I had no vocabulary in my twenties to understand what I was seeing beyond Cold War imagery.
A few years ago I took students studying architecture and the rhetoric of public space up to the sculpture garden for class. One style we were discussing that day was Brutalism. Most examples in our text were European buildings. Someone asked if there was any Brutalist architecture in America, because they had never seen any. How totally cool it was just to point over at those apartments from our rooftop perch.
And we all had a good laugh over how invisible the things we see every day become!
I saw this “image” in the rear window of the vehicle in front of me over the weekend. Even though it’s just where the washer fluid flowed down and the wiper (poorly) swished across the window, to me this looks like an evil spirit of some sort.
Sketch by moi to give you an idea of what I was seeing
Do you ever do this kind of thing? (Like, look at a doorknob and see a face?)
Dark snow clouds forming over Lake Michigan and moving west toward Milwaukee
A high-pressure system to our north is causing a strong breeze to come in from the northeast. As the cold Canadian air crosses over the warmer water of Lake Michigan, it is picking up moisture, forming it into dark clouds and then dumping it as snow again once it hits shore. This is what they call “lake effect” snow.
Milwaukee’s weather usually moves in from the west, so lake-effect snow is not quite the issue here that it is on the Michigan shore across the lake.
Buffalo, New York, is on the northeastern end of Lake Erie and a little southeast (and south and southwest, too!) of Lake Ontario, so those poor people have about triple the odds of winding up on the receiving end of the “lake effect,” which explains why they get such crazy-high annual snowfall totals.
Just today’s little weather tutorial, offered as a public service for everyone who doesn’t live next to a large body of water in a place that has cold winters and, thus, hasn’t had an opportunity to learn all of this the hard way😄
Katherine Wikoff 