Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Spectrographs like astrographs were photographic apparatus attached to telescopes to record the stellar activity. They were similar to the spectroscope except the photographic plate was used instead of the eye-piece. Sydney Observatory purchased its first Hilger spectroscope in 1875 and due to the quality of the instruments maintained their relationship with him into the twentieth century.

Adam Hilger was a German-born instrument maker who opened his first premises at 192 Tottenham Court Road, London, with his brother Otto in 1875. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hilger had a well established reputation for the making of high quality optical instruments, especially spectroscopes and range finders. In 1916 rival instrument maker Cooke’s purchased 6,000 shares in the firm, giving it a six-tenths holding in Adam Hilger Ltd, and most of these shares were in turn owned by Vickers. In 1926 the combined business reformed as Cooke, Troughton and Simms.

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Photography by Albert E Coe Norfolk
Post by Geoff Barker, Assistant Curator

Today’s great image is courtesy of one of the members from our Modern Times group on Flickr. The photographer is kindly sharing, on Photo of the Day, details on how he has achieved this shot:

“This image is comprised of a series of three photo’s taken at three separate exposures, +2, 0 and -2 fstops on my digital camera, the images are then imported into a High Dynamic Range (HDR) program and is then manipulated to give the result as shown in my image of the control tower at Sydney Airport.”

This amazing space-age shot of the control tower at Sydney airport also belongs to a set titled HDR where you can see other images taken by this photographer using this technique.

HDR stands for high dynamic range that allows for a large range between dark and light areas in images. A photographer can use a multitude of bracketed exposures and merge them to one image. This effect can work really well in some situations and not in others but is an interesting method to experiment with. You can read more about this method and see lots of images using this technique on the HDR Flickr group.

Photography by Sutto
License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

St Patrick’s Day is a holiday in Ireland and is celebrated by the Irish diaspora in many parts of the world. St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and, according to legend, used a shamrock for preaching, hence the green that is worn by many on the day. Legend also has it that St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.

Photography and post by Kathy Hackett, Photo Librarian
© All rights reserved

Wave at North Sydney Pool, originally uploaded by Powerhouse Museum.

This image was taken whilst Jean-Francois was swimming at North Sydney Pool using an underwater camera to get shots for a photographic immersive. He was producing this immersive for the exhibition on modernism in Australia Modern Times: the untold story of modernism in Australia. The immersive featured significant swimming pools that were important features of modernism in Australia. These pools included the Rudder and Grout designed North Sydney Pool and Enfield Pool, the Centenary Pool in Brisbane that looks like something from the ‘Jetsons’ and the pool that was home to the swimming for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

Photography by Jean-Francois Lanzarone
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

Watch out for the penguins, originally uploaded by owenfm.

Signs can be a very powerful form of communication and they are everywhere. Signs are a universal and ageless form of communicating something. Signs are designed to attract our attention but perhaps not always in the way that they initially intended to. This sign comes from our new group on Flickr called Sign design in Australia and is one of my favourites. In this group we want to see images of signs that have grabbed your attention in some way, be it funny, strange, mundane, graphic or clever. Our aim is to showcase these images in our new exhibition about signs that will be part of the Sydney Design Festival this year. We have had a great number of images contributed so far but if you have any images of signs you can contribute then we would love to see them in our group.

Photography by owenfm
License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic