Rich Robinson: Photographer

(light music) - I've always been fascinated with the camera and with how it stops time essentially.

But I started getting more and more into it in my graduate years at Columbia.

I entered a contest.

I took a series of pictures of my father and I.

And I set up in a box and it was a self timer and it was him and I together.

And for some reason, the rest of the pictures were both in full frame.

But the first picture I'm kind of out of the frame but he's giving his all to the camera.

And that's the one I entered the contest in and I won after entering just one photo.

(mysterious music) There's this moment in photography, it is kind of like how the ancients talked about capturing someone's soul in film.

You can look at a picture and if they are giving you themselves, you can see that.

It's that magical moment.

For me I think of it as the truth, that person when they finally show themselves, when they finally show up in that print, that tells so much about that person.

And it's really, really rare.

I take three or four rolls and it could be one picture where the person shows up and all the other times they don't show up.

(upbeat music) I think the connection between science and photography at that level is perseverance.

If I stop for a second and I think, oh, I need to come up from a higher angle, or I need to get this person's attention, then you can get a better picture.

And that's the same thing with science.

You have to stop and kind of put your intuition into it and then look at it from a slightly different angle.

I think that's what I've been doing with science.

And I think that's kind of helped my photography and vice versa.