Film Camera Research Articles

Highlights 2012: camera, action

www.thelancet.com Vol 380 July 14, 2012 93 We are once again accepting entries to our annual Highlights competition, now in its fourth year. We invite anyone working or training in a health-related profession to submit eye-catching and thoughtprovoking images, relevant to an aspect of international health. One need only glance at last year’s winning entries (fi gure) to appreciate what a powerful way this is to focus attention on a health issue, perhaps even revealing it in a new light. It is often said that a photograph captures a moment forever, and wherever you are capturing a moment, be it Sweden, Somalia, or somewhere else in the world, we ask entrants to seize this opportunity and submit original photographs that are visually arresting and engaging. Each entry should be submitted with 300 accompanying words to contextualise the image and submissions should not have been published anywhere else, either in print or online. If a person or patient is featured then you must obtain and keep written consent from the individual or, where this is not an option, their next of kin. Please use the Lancet consent form. We also encourage you to submit any additional media to support your submission online, such as video or audio features. All photographs (including colour and black and white) should be submitted through our online editorial submission system, along with the required text and any supporting material for online publication. Please select ‘Lancet Photograph’ as the article type. If a digital camera is used please set it to the highest possible quality setting and submit images as JPEG fi les. If you are using a fi lm camera please submit an 8 × 11 inch glossy print to The Lancet in the post. The entries will be judged by Lancet Editors and winning photographs published in the fi nal issue of 2012. There will be a £300 prize for winning entries. The deadline for entries is October 26.

Review: Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack

Sydney Pollack, director. Sketches of Frank Gehry . Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Culver City, 2005, 83 mins., DVD, $19.99, http://www.sonypictures.com/ Frank Gehry (nee Goldberg): a man, a genius, an architect responsible for an entire classification of architectural effect (The Bilbao Effect). This is the Frank Gehry that Sydney Pollack’s 2005 film Sketches of Frank Gehry portrays. Providing a familiar outline of what constitutes artistic genius, from discussions of Gehry’s first job (as a truck driver), to his frustrations in school (including an F in his first class on perspective) to his obstacles in his personal life (notably, a controlling first wife) to his early architectural projects and his later, more extravagant ones, Sketches gives a glimpse of Gehry who, despite his setbacks, defies all odds and carves a singular space for himself and his architecture. His genius, cultivated through personal struggle and revealed through his architecture, lay precisely in his ability to prosper from an exceptional position in which he found himself both in life and in architecture—not quite modern, not quite postmodern, not quite artist, not quite architect. Who, we are led to think, but someone with true genius could look at a model of his work, smile, and say, “That is so stupid looking it’s great.” Sketches of Frank Gehry focuses on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as the moment when Gehry burst onto the global scene. A montage of publications …

Nordover med filmkamera - fra Wellman til Nobile

The Heroic Era in Polar Exploration is filled with fascinating stories about interesting men, and the Race for the Poles is richly described in hundreds of books. The Heroic Era in Polar Exploration coincided with the conception of film technology and rise of commercial cinema, and many polar explorers saw potential in utilising this new technology as a research tool. As a result there exists a range of films from the Polar Explorations, but since their making and initial screenings they have received little attention. The story of these films is also an interesting one, although it has not yet been written. A few years after the production of the first film cameras, the explorer Carsten Borchgrevink brought one along on his British Antarctic Expedition in 1898. His main sponsor, a newspaper publisher, wanted to make news films, but the cinematograph, the film reel and the filming skills were not sufficiently developed to capture living images from the polar region. Our record of this first attempt at making a polar film is limited to one scene from when the expedition is leaving London.The first explorer to succeed in filming in the Arctic was Anthony Fiala in 1902, and since his breakthrough the cinematograph became standard scientific equipment on all polar expeditions. The Mechanical Era in Polar Exploration came with the aeroplanes, the airships and the telegraph. Roald Amundsen played a major role here; he claimed his idea about using aeroplanes was as important to the polar exploration as Nansen´s use of skies and dogsledges in the heroic era. This article tells the story about explorers with film camera trying to reach the North Pole from Spitzbergen. Wellman, Amundsen, Byrd and Nobile are the main characters. The story of their fantastic expeditions is told by others; this is the story about their films, and how the films from the Arctic developed from just documenting landscape and animal life until they became proper documentary films. Between those types of film, we have had amateur film footage, newsreels, scientific films, travelogues and early documentary films. The article ends with describing the media event around the Italia tragedy in 1928.

Nature as Inspiration in Materials Science and Engineering

Biological systems have been in development for billions of years; solutions for many different classes of problems have been solved through optimization of nature’s designs, development of materials and processes, and adaptation to changing conditions on Earth. Nature is a rich source of knowledge, and present-day human life has undoubtedly progressed because of our ability to be inspired by nature, and to then innovate solutions to our problems through biomimicry. In 2008, Mueller wrote about biomimicry as a ‘‘young science of adapting designs from nature to solve modern problems [which now] may be coming of age.’’ While nature’s designs are well established, our study of nature’s designs in the context of biomimicry and bioinspiration might seem new, as Mueller suggests. In fact, bioinspiration is older than one may think; our inspiration from nature is so pervasive that many aspects of modern life are taken for granted, and bioinspiration thus seems like a newer field. When we consider specific sophisticated, modern conveniences such as traveling on an airplane, we actually find that bioinspiration, which occurred hundreds of years ago, set us down a path for innovation based on nature. Why do airplanes exist? Early pioneers of aviation saw birds flying and wanted to fly as well. One of the earliest records we have of bioinspired design is from Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). da Vinci designed flying machines and artificial wings (see Fig. 1) based on his dissections of birds. da Vinci was well ahead of his time in the translation of nature’s designs for human use, but many of his inventions on paper never became realized in the physical world. Imagine earlier people who also saw birds in flight and wanted to fly, but their technology and knowledge did not even allow for drawing a design (paper was not invented until 105 AD!). Richardson posits that many factors might have been responsible for the lack of materialization of da Vinci’s drafted inventions: a culture that had not yet developed tinkering and experimentation as a means to test designs (a culture better developed later in the Industrial Revolution), the fear of competitors and adversaries stealing his ideas, high diversity of interests, and perhaps a personality that was easily bored once the design had been made on paper. da Vinci also had a reputation of not always delivering on time or, even worse altogether, of abandoning projects. Interestingly, other famous inventors displayed similar behavior with regard to abandonment once a solution was formed. For example, the American inventor of instant photography and Polaroid (Polaroid Corporation, Waltham, MA), Edwin Land (1909–1991), ‘‘lost all motivation to write [down solutions to problems] or prove his vision to others’’ once he ‘‘could see the solution to a problem in his head.’’ In fact, ‘‘his wife, at the prodding of his instructor, would extract from him the answers to homework problems. She would then write up the homework and hand it in so [Land] could receive credit and not fail the course.’’ Nonetheless, Land never received a degree (other than honorary degrees). However, Land’s innovative and inventive nature resulted in production of a great deal of intellectual property and in 40 publications. Who knows how many patents da Vinci would have had if patent law had been formed in his time, but Land was granted 535 U.S. patents (second only to Thomas Edison who had 1097 U.S. patents). Moreover, Land’s dedication to solving problems in commercialization was obsessive and resulted in many years of innovation and realizations of designs in cameras and products—at a cost of sometimes wearing the same clothes for 18 h and forgetting to eat. Hence, being inspired is not enough—one has to have focus as well. Interestingly, Land was also inspired by nature but in the sense of vision and human perception of color. On vacation, Land’s daughter asked why she could not see the photos he was taking with his film camera JOM, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2012

Native Ground

Native Ground Rob McDonald (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “Jesus,” inside Andalusia, the home of Flannery O’Connor in Milledgeville, Georgia. [End Page 21] As between clear blue and cloud,Between haystack and sunset sky,Between oak and slated roof, I had my existence. I was there.Me in place and the place in me. —Seamus Heaney, “A Herbal” For the past twenty years, I have made a career as a teacher of American literature. For the last twelve, I have worked also, with equal seriousness and passion, as a photographer. My new series, Native Ground, unites these pursuits in an exploration of the role place plays in shaping the literary imagination: the notion that writers compose out of a peculiar understanding and depth of connection to physical space, remembered or immediate. Personal and professional interests have led me to focus on writers who have lived and worked in the southern region of the United States. After all, if convention has it right, these are writers who bear something close to a genetic predisposition to produce a literature suffused with place. It seems to me that Eudora Welty is right in saying that “of all the arts, [writing] is the one least likely to cut the cord that binds it to its source” (“Place in Fiction,” On Writing [Modern Library Edition, 2002], 42). Using a primitive hand-held film camera, for this series I am making images that depict points of origin—meditating on personal spaces and landscapes in light of my familiarity with and curiosity about selected writers’ works and biographies. They are particularly intimate photographs that propose narratives of connection in the development of vision and voice. In this regard, the photographs in Native Ground are themselves a kind of supreme fiction: my imagination of how physical spaces, lives lived, and art converge. [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution “The Shack,” Larry Brown’s farm, the King of Grit Lit’s contemplative space, Tula, Mississippi. Click for larger view View full resolution “Bedroom Bookshelf,” complete with the portrait of Virginia Woolf, at Laurel Falls Camp, which Lillian Smith ran with her partner, Paula Snelling, years after Smith’s father had founded it as a summer camp for privileged girls, Clayton, Georgia. [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution “Cane Rows,” Riverlake Plantation, where Ernest Gaines grew up in New Roads, Louisiana, on land adjacent to the cemetery where generations of his relatives are buried. Click for larger view View full resolution “Angel Reading,” The Old Kentucky Home Boarding House, the boyhood home of Thomas Wolfe that doubled as his mother’s place of business, where lodgers left the young Wolfe without a bedroom he could call his own, in Asheville, North Carolina. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution “Attic Cross,” St. George’s Episcopal Church Rectory, the childhood home of Tennessee Williams and where his grandfather was rector, Clarksdale, Mississippi. Click for larger view View full resolution “Christ,” on a pedestal in Allan Gurganus’s wonderfully cluttered study in Hillsborough, North Carolina. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution “Jury,” where Harper Lee’s father practiced law: Alabama’s Monroe County Courtroom, which was the model for the courtroom in To Kill a Mockingbird. Click for larger view View full resolution “Tobacco Road,” an unintentional double exposure: a poster signed by the original cast of the 1941 film adaptation of Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, inside the modest Associate Reformed Presbyterian manse where the author was born, Moreland, Georgia. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution “Orange Tree,” across the street from Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, where her father was minister at the original Macedonia Church. Click for larger view View full resolution “Childhood Home,” where Alice Walker grew up, Wards Chapel Road, Eatonton, Georgia. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution “James River Dock,” behind Hilton Elementary School, Newport News, hometown of William Styron, who referenced this dock—and made prominent use of the river—in his writing. Click for larger view View full resolution “Fan...

Dental Therapists Are a Positive Innovation

Rather than fantasizing on whether dental therapists might be a disruptive innovation in the United States, one should look to those states and countries with a long history of successful implementation—particularly New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain, and most recently Alaska—without any disruption of dental practice.1,2 To put the matter in perspective, was the practice of medicine disrupted by the innovative introduction of nurse practitioners and physician assistants? Was the practice of dentistry in the United States disrupted by the innovative introduction of dental hygienists? Of course not. In each instance, the mid-level providers extended health care more broadly to the public without any disruption to the professions. It is fallacious to counterpose health care with industrial production, as if mid-level providers compete with and, if successful, replace the top-level doctor-providers in a competitive free market. Innovation in health care cannot be compared with disruptive innovations in industries such as the effect of the Internet on newspapers, or the digital camera on film cameras and film manufacturing, or the automobile on the horse and buggy. In no instance has the introduction of mid-level providers disrupted the practice of medicine or dentistry or harmed the status or income of doctors. The only disruption has been in the politics of the professions that oppose the innovations. Mid-level professionals neither replace nor diminish doctors, but rather assist and enhance their practices. In the case of dental therapists, it is only in the minds of traditional dentists and their trade organizations, principally the American Dental Association, that there is disruption. Edelstein presents the views of both opponents and proponents of dental therapists, as though they have equal credence. But almost all the arguments in opposition are based on assertions that have been shown to be false. For example, opponents still say that dental therapists provide substandard care when their quality of care has been documented time and again in objective studies to be equal to that of dentists. They question if the public will accept or be satisfied with dental therapists when studies have confirmed a high level of acceptance and satisfaction.3 Giving equal space to false arguments can only have the effect of diluting the evidence that innovative health care providers such as nurse practitioners and dental therapists do not disrupt the professions, much to the benefit of the public.

Streak Observation System for DC Pre-breakdown Using an Image Guide Scope

A light delay path and a streak camera are combined as a dc pre-breakdown optical observation system. The light delay path in this study is a 20-m-long image guide scope (IGS). The IGS will delay the pre-breakdown light for 100 ns before reaching the streak camera. During this time, the streak camera will be triggered and a streak image of pre-breakdown light can be obtained. Previously, either an image of pre-breakdown light (weak discharge light at either one of the electrode or in the bulk of liquid sample) or an image of complete breakdown light (strong discharge light bridging across the electrodes) could be obtained by using an old system (IGS and a film camera photographic observation system). The transition process from pre-breakdown to complete breakdown light was unknown. The study is dedicated to setup and clarified the combination of the streak camera and IGS system, so that it can be used to clarify the transition process.

How Many Pixels Does It Take to Make a Good 4"×6" Print? Pixel Count Wars Revisited

Digital still cameras emerged following the introduction of the Sony Mavica analog prototype camera in 1981. These early cameras produced poor image quality and did not challenge film cameras for overall quality. By 1995 digital still cameras in expensive SLR formats had 6 mega-pixels and produced high quality images (with significant image processing). In 2005 significant improvement in image quality was apparent and lower prices for digital still cameras (DSCs) started a rapid decline in film usage and film camera sells. By 2010 film usage was mostly limited to professionals and the motion picture industry. The rise of DSCs was marked by a “pixel war” where the driving feature of the cameras was the pixel count where even moderate cost, ∼$120, DSCs would have 14 mega-pixels. The improvement of CMOS technology pushed this trend of lower prices and higher pixel counts. Only the single lens reflex cameras had large sensors and large pixels. The drive for smaller pixels hurt the quality aspects of the final image (sharpness, noise, speed, and exposure latitude). Only today are camera manufactures starting to reverse their course and producing DSCs with larger sensors and pixels. This paper will explore why larger pixels and sensors are key to the future of DSCs.

Physicalizing the Image, Physicalizing the Digital

Radically shifting personal experience of the visual image from virtual worlds like Second Life, from flat screens, cinema, and paper to physical forms, subverts the predominance of the digital realm. Living on the surface of the screen minimizes the tactility of materials and the resonance of memory and meaning embodied in objects. Digital 3D cinema, 3D television, and 3D cameras are precursors at the threshold of transforming digital into physical. The image flexes from screen to object with 3D printers and CNC machines. In the medical profession, computer 3D images from CT scans are transformed to remotely controlled, physical surgeries. Recently thinking experiments use brain activity to remotely control robotic arms. Vehicles for physicalizing the image from paper, screen, and from one’s imagination and thinking in the brain, manifest three-dimensional, palpable, sensory, tactile, objectified experiences. How will this phenomena transform modes of digital communication, physical interactions, and production on both the global and the personal scales? How will the material role of the computer prescribe new creative activities, new modes of artistic expression?

Digital Video Image Processing from Dental Operating Microscope in Endodontic Treatment

Recently, optical microscopes have been used in endodontic treatment, as they offer advantages in terms of magnification, illumination, and documentation. Documentation is particularly important in presenting images to patients, and can take the form of both still images and motion video. Although high-quality still images can be obtained using a 35-mm film or CCD camera, the quality of still images produced by a video camera is significantly lower. The purpose of this study was to determine the potential of RegiStax in obtaining high-quality still images from a continuous video stream from an optical microscope. Video was captured continuously and sections with the highest luminosity chosen for frame alignment and stacking using the RegiStax program. The resulting stacked images were subjected to wavelet transformation. The results indicate that high-quality images with a large depth of field could be obtained using this method.

Just look at yourselves: The face and the ethical event in Israeli cinema

ABSTRACTIn his writings (Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being), Emmanuel Levinas points out the affinity between the ‘other's’ face-proximity and responsibility. In this article I focus on the way in which the ‘I’ challenges the physical border demarcated by a checkpoint, in order to reach ‘the other's’ face, and our own. Following Levinas, I trace the cinematic writing of the face of the ‘I’ and the ‘other’, which are subject to a dual disciplining—that of the checkpoint, and that of the cinematic camera. The transition sites in Israeli cinema function as a recurring meeting point between the military and optic regime. These sites serve as an intersection that discloses the changing positions of Israeli film, and through it that of the Israeli collective unconscious, in its attitudes towards ‘I’ vis-à-vis the ‘other’. My reading will be guided by four films: Ben-Gurion (1997), a short film directed by T. Grad and G. Levenberg, with a screenplay by A. Dayan; and three documentary films all made during the 2000s, Borders (Riklis and Keidar, 2001), Checkpoint (Shamir, 2003) and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (Mograbi, 2005). I contend that the shifting—from a gaze attempting to bring closer the other's suffering towards a gaze focusing on our own Israeli faces, and from fiction films to first-person documentaries—is intended to expose the face concealed by the mask, and, through this disclosing, to intensify the doubts concerning our responsibility as observers and witnesses.

<em>Introduction:</em> Behind the Camera

A n interesting question for film and media historians might be this: Who is the most crucial person involved in the production of a film? A likely answer could be the director. Other responses might include the scriptwriter, the leading actor, or even the producer. Yet surely one could not claim that any of those roles are essential in making a film, for films have been made without directors, producers, actors or scriptwriters. Ultimately I would argue that there is only one person who is essential in making a film, and that is the cameraman, for a film could not be made without anyone to operate the camera (apart from the rare cases where the images are painted directly onto the film stock). That does not mean, of course, that the cameraman is the principal determinant of a film’s audience appeal or artistic quality, merely that there would be no appeal or quality without the person who shoots the moving images in the first place. There is already considerable film historical scholarship on the cinematographer, including quite a number of books by or about individual cameramen or collections of interviews with them, and – right from the early era – books about how to do the job. So it would not be correct to claim that my subject has been “unjustly neglected” (as is customary to say in scholarly books and articles). What I might claim more modestly is that this journal has somewhat neglected the work of the cinematographer, for it has published only a handful of articles over the years, and never until now an entire issue on the theme. And this despite the evident interest of the editorial team in the subject. So with this issue we try to make amends. I might also add that this issue of the journal comes at a very appropriate point in time. Next year marks the hundredth anniversary of the founding, in 1913, of the first cameramen’s organisations in the USA: the Cinema Camera Club (in New York) and the Static Club (in Los Angeles), which were the forerunners of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). Actually, though, the profession of cameraman stretched back well before the founding of these organisations; indeed one might argue that it originated even before the invention of cinema. In accounts of the early period of cinema it is sometimes stated that this medium developed “astonishingly fast”, for within the first twenty years all the major genres had emerged and many or most filming techniques had been invented, and in some cases had reached quite a sophisticated level. Furthermore, an entire industry of distribution and exhibition had been created from nothing, and thousands of cinemas had arisen in neighbourhoods all across the world. Yet, as film historians are increasingly realising, this rapid pace was not as astonishing as it seems at first glance; it was possible because cinema did not come out of nothing. The new medium was built on – and was strongly influenced by – pre-existing media and entertainment traditions, and cultural and technical practices. This evident fact of cinema building on earlier experience is nowhere better exemplified than in the case of cameramen, especially with regard to their inheritance from, and debt to, still photography. In its early days, cinema was sometimes thought of as little more than a newer branch of still photography, and indeed was often known as “animated photography”. There was, in fact, a direct line of descent between the two forms of photography in the heritage of shared practitioners, for many of the earliest cameramen had worked in still photography before going into the movies. In a recent article I have made some rough calculations as to the extent of this career background. I looked, for example, at biographies of cameramen in the Motion Picture Studio Directory of 1918, and found that almost a third of the 245 individuals listed had previously Film History, Volume 24, pp. 255–259, 2012. Copyright © 2012 Indiana University Press ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

Demonstration of a Zone Plate Working at the Wavelength of Visible Light by Using Film Camera

Demonstration of a Zone Plate Working at the Wavelength of Visible Light by Using Film Camera

EARLY ASTRONOMICAL SEQUENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHY, 1873-1923

In 1873 Jules Janssen conceived the first automatic sequential photographic apparatus to observe the eagerly anticipated 1874 transit of Venus. This device, the 'photographic revolver', is commonly considered today as the earliest cinema precursor. In the following years, in order to study the variability or the motion of celestial objects, several instruments, either manually or automatically actuated, were devised to obtain as many photographs as possible of astronomical events in a short time interval. In this paper we strive to identify from the available documents the attempts made between 1873 and 1923, and discuss the motivations behind them and the results obtained. During the time period studied astronomical sequential photography was employed to determine the time of the instants of contact in transits and occultations, and to study total solar eclipses. The technique was seldom used but apparently the modern film camera invention played no role on this situation. Astronomical sequential photographs were obtained both before and after 1895. We conclude that the development of astronomical sequential photography was constrained by the reduced number of subjects to which the technique could be applied.

High/Ultra-High Speed Imaging as a Diagnostic Tool

The ability to see what is happening during an experiment is often critical to human understanding. High and ultra-high speed cameras have for decades allowed scientists to see these extremely short time-scale events; starting with film cameras and now with digital versions of these cameras. The move to digital cameras has invited the use of computer analysis of the images for obtaining quantitative information well beyond the qualitative usefulness of merely being able to see the event. Digital image correlation (DIC) is one of these powerful and popular quantitative techniques, but by no means the only possible image analysis method. All of these analysis techniques ask more of the camera technology than simply providing images. They require high-quality images that are amenable to analysis and do not introduce error sources that compromise the data. Possible error sources include image noise, image distortions, synchronization and spatial sampling issues. As a minimal starting point, the introduced errors must be well understood in order to put error bounds on the results. This is because in many experiments some result is better than no result; with the caveat that the error sources and the relative confidence of the data are understood. The concepts will be framed in relation to ongoing ultra-high speed work being done at Sandia. A call and challenge will be given to begin thinking in more detail about how to successfully turn these cameras into diagnostic instruments.

“Tangible as Tissue”: Arnold Gesell, Infant Behavior, and Film Analysis

From 1924 to 1948, developmental psychologist Arnold Gesell regularly used photographic and motion picture technologies to collect data on infant behavior. The film camera, he said, records behavior "in such coherent, authentic and measurable detail that ... the reaction patterns of infant and child become almost as tangible as tissue." This essay places his faith in the fidelity and tangibility of film, as well as his use of film as evidence, in the context of developmental psychology's professed need for legitimately scientific observational techniques. It also examines his use of these same films as educational material to promote his brand of scientific child rearing. But his analytic techniques - his methods of extracting data from the film frames - are the key to understanding the complex relationship between his theories of development and his chosen research technology.

Science and Cinema

This issue ofScience in Contextis dedicated to the question of whether there was a “cinematographic turn” in the sciences around the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1895, the Lumière brothers presented their projection apparatus to the Parisian public for the first time. In 1897, the Scottish medical doctor John McIntyre filmed the movement of a frog's leg; in Vienna, in 1898, Ludwig Braun made film recordings of the contractions of a living dog's heart (cf. Cartwright 1992); in 1904, Lucien Bull filmed in slow motion a bullet entering a soap bubble. In 1907 and 1908, respectively, Max Seddig and Victor Henri recorded Brownian motion with the help of a cinematograph (Curtis 2005). In 1909, the Swiss Julius Ries was one of the first to film fertilization and cell division in sea urchins (Ries 1909). In that same year in Paris, Louise Chevroton and Frédéric Vlès used a film camera to observe cell division in the same object (Chevroton and Vlès 1909). As early as 1898, the Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen began filming several of his operations, among them the spectacular separation of the Siamese twins Doodica and Radica (Bonah and Laukötter 2009). And in England, the scientist and zoologist Francis Martin Duncan produced an array of popular-scientific films for Charles Urban: “The unseen world: A series of microscopic studies” was presented to the public in the Alhambra Theatre in London for the first time in 1903 (see Gaycken in this issue).

Calling all photographers: Highlights 2011

Clowns, windowpanes, prostheses, and footdrop have all been the subject of winning entries in The Lancet’s annual Highlights photography competition (fi gure), now in its third year. Images can transcend barriers of language, demography, and status, and off er the viewer an unparalleled opportunity to share another person’s experience. As perinatal bereavement photographer Todd Hochberg wrote in his Art of Medicine essay earlier this year, a photograph can also validate—in his case “life and loss, affi rmation of parenthood, and confi rmation of...death”. We invite you to share your experiences, in photo graphic form, of life as a health professional or student, whether from a personal, clinical, or global health perspective. Photographs should be striking, thought-provoking, and of course original, and should not have been published previously online or in print. For photographs of people or patients, the person’s written consent to publication, or that of the next of kin, must be obtained and stored with the photographer. Please use The Lancet’s consent form. To accompany the photograph, please write 300 words that put the image in context. You can also include additional media, such as a slide show, video, or audio feature, to accompany the photograph online. Colour or black-and-white photographs, accompanying text, and any additional material for online publication should be submitted through the journal’s electronic submission system, specifying Lancet Photograph as the article type. If using a digital camera, set your camera to the highest quality setting and supply JPEG fi les. If using a fi lm camera, supply an 8×11 inch glossy print, which can be posted to The Lancet. Winning photographs will be selected by Lancet editors and published in the fi nal issue of 2011 with an award of £300. The deadline is Oct 17.

Comparison of Digital and Film Grading of Diabetic Retinopathy Severity in the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial/Epidemiology of Diabetes Interventions and Complications Study

To compare diabetic retinopathy (DR) severity as evaluated by digital and film images in a long-term multicenter study, as the obsolescence of film forced the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial/Epidemiology of Diabetes Interventions and Complications Study (DCCT/EDIC) to transition to digital after 25 years. At 20 clinics from 2007 through 2009, 310 participants with type 1 diabetes with a broad range of DR were imaged, per the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) protocol, with both film and digital cameras. Severity of DR was assessed centrally from film and tonally standardized digital cameras. For retinopathy outcomes with greater than 10% prevalence, we had 85% or greater power to detect an agreement κ of 0.7 or lower from our target of 0.9. Comparing DR severity, digital vs film yielded a weighted κ of 0.74 for eye level and 0.73 for patient level ("substantial"). Overall, digital grading did not systematically underestimate or overestimate severity (McNemar bias test, P=.14). For major DR outcomes (≥3-step progression on the ETDRS scale and disease presence at ascending thresholds), digital vs film κ values ranged from 0.69 to 0.96 ("substantial" to "nearly perfect"). Agreement was 86% to 99%; sensitivity, 75% to 98%; and specificity, 72% to 99%. Major conclusions were similar with digital vs film gradings (odds reductions with intensive diabetes therapy for proliferative DR at EDIC years 14 to 16: 65.5% digital vs 64.3% film). Digital and film evaluations of DR were comparable for ETDRS severity levels, DCCT/EDIC design outcomes, and major study conclusions, indicating that switching media should not adversely affect ongoing studies.

Droplet deposition measurement with high-speed camera and novel high-speed liquid film sensor with high spatial resolution

A sensor based on the electrical conductance method is presented for the measurement of dynamic liquid films in two-phase flow. The so called liquid film sensor consists of a matrix with 64 × 16 measuring points, a spatial resolution of 3.12 mm and a time resolution of 10 kHz. Experiments in a horizontal co-current air–water film flow were conducted to test the capability of the sensor to detect droplet deposition from the gas core onto the liquid film. The experimental setup is equipped with the liquid film sensor and a high speed camera (HSC) recording the droplet deposition with a sampling rate of 10 kHz simultaneously. In some experiments the recognition of droplet deposition on the sensor is enhanced by marking the droplets with higher electrical conductivity. The comparison between the HSC and the sensor shows, that the sensor captures the droplet deposition above a certain droplet diameter. The impacts of droplet deposition can be filtered from the wavy structures respectively conductivity changes of the liquid film using a filter algorithm based on autoregression. The results will be used to locally measure droplet deposition e.g. in the proximity of spacers in a subchannel geometry.