Seeing Beyond the Human Eye

[music playing] MIKE NICHOLS: We're allowed to see now interesting natural phenomenon that we couldn't see with the naked eye.

LIZA A. PON: There's so much that's just beautiful in their capture correctly.

JONATHAN BREGEL: Being able to show people a mass amount of time in a short piece I think is really beautiful.

Having that power with the format is something that's extremely beneficial for people to appreciate what is already there.

PETER LIPSCHUTZ: Science can be beautiful.

Art can be scientific.

Some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen are produced either through a telescope or through a microscope.

LIZA A. PON: At its heart, the microscope will basically allow you to see something that you cannot see with the naked eye.

Photomicrography began in the 1830s.

William Talbot basically took a light microscope, removed the eyepiece, and projected the image that he would have seen with his eye onto a white wall.

He then took a photograph of that image.

And that was basically how it began.

Today, photomicrography is relatively easy to do.

In the simplest case, you can basically just attach a camera to the eyepiece.

And so that's actually used very commonly for imaging things like crystals, to insects, to fluorescent images of intracellular particles of virtually every single cell and tissue within the human body.

When you spend your time staring at images, you can't help but think about the aesthetic of what you're looking at and how best to present that image.

So a lot of the issues people think about when they're taking a conventional photograph also apply to photomicrography.

The only difference is that we may be looking down a microscope as opposed to looking at a macroscopic object.

PETER LIPSCHUTZ: You can photograph the moon, any of the planets in the solar system.

You can photograph the sun, stars, galaxies, the biggest and most numerous objects out there.

In the late '50s, early '60s, everybody wanted to see the stars, and so did I.

And that's how I started in photography.

Most of us are using full-spectrum cameras, like a Canon or a Nikon DSLR.

In case of the Hubble images, they're looking at narrow-band filters of iron, sulfur, oxygen, hydrogen, and trying to pick up the light from different nebulae that are fluorescing in these narrow-band colors.

The sheer art of the images, the colors, the dynamic range and the shapes and the beauty, that's one level of attraction.

And the other one is the science, the knowledge those same images provide.

They teach us things.

The photographs and the general study of the night sky shows us our true place in the universe as little, tiny things of not much consideration or significance.

Basically by looking back out into space, we're in a way looking back at ourselves.

MIKE NICHOLS: The element that draws you in to slow motion is it's a moment that slows down the action and presents it to you in a much more clear fashion.

The technology behind slow motion is allowing the lens on the camera to open up and see more frames in a condensed period of time.

In terms of slow motion exhibition, I think the most interesting aspect of it is the fact that we're allowed to see now things we've never seen before.

For example, the hummingbird's wings flapping, you couldn't see that under any other circumstance besides high speed slow motion acquisition.

JONATHAN BREGEL: 8 Hours in Brooklyn was almost an experiment.

Coming from a documentary background, I always thought it would be really cool to shoot docu-style with the Phantom.

The subject matter was all just us driving around on a Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn in the summer.

My favorite clips in the whole thing are the clip of the basketball screaming and the clip of the kids in the sprinkler, because those are actually moments of raw spontaneity, raw emotion.

And that kind of stuff can't really be staged.

In India, we shot a festival called Holi.

It's a celebration for Indian culture.

It's just these beautiful colors and things being thrown around.

It's really awesome to see people coming together in this atmosphere, where without the colors it's very depressing.

But once the colors go in the air and the smiles are on people's faces, it was a very spiritual experience.

I think why I love shooting slow motion so much is because it adds this beautiful aesthetic, to where people actually want to look.

I'm just passionate about making people aware of the beauty of life.

I like the idea that photographers work their entire life to capture a few hours of time.

There were 40,000 images in The Manhattan Project.

And it took me five months.

It was an idea of slowing down the rest of world while speeding up the people around it.

When I first moved to New York City, it was extremely intimidating, the grandiosity of it.

There's so many talented people.

There are so many things happening that it's hard to feel like you're anything better than anything else.

You want to do something big and you're going to make it.

And you get here and you feel like a tiny little speck.

This project for me was a way of wrapping my arms around the city and being able to feel more than this city made me feel.

I wanted to show the humanity.

I had to stop focusing on the pretty buildings and tons of cars.

I wanted it to have that wave from the humanity of it up into the grandiosity of it and back down into the humanity of it again.

PETER LIPSCHUTZ: What the camera allows us to see is what people call the beauty of nature or the symmetry of nature.

LIZA A. PON: New technologies allow us to see things that we could never see before.

MIKE NICHOLS: What that appeals to and what that speaks to is just the curiosity of the human mind.

JONATHAN BREGEL: I think it's cool for people to see things they've seen so many times before shot in this different format, and get people to appreciate what is actually already there.

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