Samuel Ullman Quotes

Samuel Ullman once said

Youth is not entirely a time of life – it is a state of mind. It is not wholly a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips, or supple knees. It is temper of will, a quality of imagination, vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your confidence, as old as your fears; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.


Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.


Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.


Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.


Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.


When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

Film...photography

One of my digital color photos done as greyscale.

Fade to Black

The twilight of film photography.

BY DOUGLAS GANTENBEIN
Tuesday, March 14, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Weston Naef sounds almost misty-eyed when discussing Kodak Tri-X, a black-and-white 35mm film first made in the 1950s and a staple of photojournalism for decades. "It was a wonderful 400-speed film," says Mr. Naef, curator of photography for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, referring to Tri-X's ability to capture an image in low light, known as its "speed." "And then it could be 'pushed' [chemically altered during development] to 1200, or even 2400"--meaning it could be used in even lower light.

Tri-X--along with Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Fujicolor and all those other mellifluously named films--and the Nikon, Minolta and Canon cameras long used by amateur and professional photographers alike are becoming anachronisms. According to the Photo Marketing Association, digital cameras are likely to account for 90% of all cameras sold in 2006. In January Nikon, one of the most revered names in photography, announced it was largely abandoning the film camera business. Days later Minolta (now known as Konica Minolta) followed suit. Kodak now earns more from digital photography than film, although so far it hasn't profited from that trend.

Film was magic--the process of pushing a button to open the shutter, forming an invisible image on a strip of coated plastic, then making that image visible by bathing it with chemicals and projecting it onto a sheet of paper that in turn was soaked in more chemicals and sometimes rubbed and massaged to manipulate the image.

Now, I still press a button on the Canon PowerShot I often carry. But it's a digital image that appears instantly on the camera's LCD screen, and in a few seconds I can transfer it to my Dell computer, to crop and change it in seconds with Photoshop, then email it anywhere.

The sentimentalist in me wants this to end, everyone to go back to film, and to hell with Photoshop. The practical person in me asks, where would I set up a darkroom these days? And when would I use it? Besides, notes Mark Federman, who teaches at the University of Toronto's McLuhan Program, there's no point in labeling a change such as film-to-digital as "bad" or "good." It's just a change.

Which isn't to say this particular change is without damaging impacts, despite digital's obvious win in the marketplace. Mr. Federman, who thinks often about how societies "remember," sees digital photography as a disaster for historians. People delete pictures from their cameras' memory cards. Hard drives crash. PCs end up in the dump, photos still on board. And CDs full of pictures will become unreadable when their surfaces deteriorate (you heard that right--CDs are incredibly unstable). With all that, says Mr. Federman, we're on the verge of losing billions of pictures. "We will not have a record of the individual stories that are told by families from one generation to another through pictures," Mr. Federman says. "That is a wealth of human history that will simply be lost."

Look at it another way: When survivors of Hurricane Katrina returned to their devastated homes in New Orleans or Mississippi, almost without fail they sought family photographs--that one tangible link with their past. Today we're ensuring that in the future those photographs won't even exist. True, prints made from digital photos can now last as long as their film equivalent, but that's still only a few decades compared with the hundreds of years a black-and-white negative might last.

Mr. Federman is even-handed, though, and says that while we lose something we gain something else. A decade ago, photography beyond the Instamatic or Polaroid stage was fairly complex, and merely loading film could sometimes flummox a picture-taker. Today digital photography really is point-and-shoot. So we're democratizing picture-taking, and with a digital camera (or even camera phone) and a PC just about anyone can produce a high-quality photo (technically, if not artistically) and publish it however they see fit, via an Internet blog or one of the digital photo services such as Snapfish.

As for the aesthetics, let's for now call it a wash.

Some photographers continue to insist that film yields a better result than digital. "I still think a beautifully exposed [transparency] is more beautiful than a digital image," says Lisa Quinones, a New York-based commercial photographer. "Digital always seems to be missing something--there isn't quite as much depth to it."

Mr. Naef of the Getty notes that film photography has elements of human error and accident that sometimes can result in surprisingly beautiful results not possible in the mechanically precise digital world. "Digital cameras produce a massively predictable result," he says. "And for amateur photographers, we see fewer of the 'delightful mistakes' that could yield such wonderful pictures."

Mr. Naef likes to cite, on behalf of film, a series of photographs taken in 2001 by California photographer Robert Weingarten. Every day that year, at 6:30 a.m. sharp, Mr. Weingarten took a picture from exactly the same spot, aiming in the same direction, with a Hasselblad camera loaded with color transparency film. The results, seen in a gallery show called "6:30 AM" and now in a book of the same name (Hatje Cantz Publishers, $49), are a revelation: the early morning light of Santa Monica shifting from luminous oranges and reds to muted blues and grays, clouds either etched in brilliant sunlight or suffused into formless fog.

Not only are the images beautifully captured on film in a way that digital might not achieve, says Mr. Naef, but they prove the ineffable beauty of nature. No digital manipulation here--the camera (and film) literally did not lie.

"For '6:30 AM' it was important to use film, in part because of the aspect ratio [the shape of the picture as recorded by the camera--the Hasselblad shoots geometrically neutral square images] and because, with digital, there is always a question of authenticity," Mr. Weingarten says. "And in some cases curators would ask to see the originals, just to ensure there was fidelity to the prints that were displayed." But for the photographer, who is 64 years old, "6:30 AM" was perhaps his last all-film project.

Mr. Weingarten has converted completely to digital for his new "Palette Series," which opens March 15 at the Marlborough Chelsea Gallery in New York and consists of close-ups of paint palettes of artists such as Jasper Johns and Chuck Close. For his part, Mr. Weingarten doesn't dispute Mr. Naef's assertion that film can yield results that are surprising and wonderful. He simply believes that digital has too many advantages to pass up. "My cameras were like old friends," he says. "But with digital I find the tones are better, the subtleties are more, the depth of what you can do is much deeper." He has donated his beloved Nikon F5 film camera to the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., to reside forever as a museum piece.

Film isn't dead yet--one billion rolls of the stuff will be used this year--but it's on the way out, save for the odd fine-art photographer, the technophobe, or a sentimentalist like me. But even I have to admit that my Canon PowerShot is always on my desk and ready to go; my Canon film cameras rest in a camera bag in the attic, along with boxes of old slides and negatives. All history. But maybe that, eventually, will be their salvation.

Mr. Gantenbein is a writer and photographer living in Port Townsend, Wash.

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

New Stamps

The Postal Service will issue Crops of the Americas definitive stamps in five designs, on March 16, 2006, in New York, New York. The stamps, designed by Phil Jordan, Falls Church, Virginia, go on sale nationwide March 17, 2006.

Artist Steve Buchanan, of Winsted, Connecticut, created each of the five stamp designs. As reference, he used slide photographs made by his wife Rita Buchanan's research in the late 1970s on indigenous agricultural methods in the southwestern United States. The crops depicted in the stamps - corn, chili peppers, beans, squashes, and sunflowers - had been cultivated in the Americas for centuries when Europeans first arrived in the New World.

Climate Change?

Handout photograph shows fish swimming above bleached coral near Miall Island in the Keppel island group about 550 kilometres (340 miles) north of Brisbane February 22, 2006. Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels. Sea temperatures touched 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahreheit), the upper limit for coral. Picture taken February 22, 2006. Australian Institute of Marine Science/Damian Thomson/Handout

Ghostly coral bleachings haunt the world's reefs

By Michael PerryMon Mar 13, 8:13 PM ET

When marine scientist Ray Berkelmans went diving at Australia's Great Barrier Reef earlier this year, what he discovered shocked him -- a graveyard of coral stretching as far as he could see.

"It's a white desert out there," Berkelmans told Reuters in early March after returning from a dive to survey bleaching -- signs of a mass death of corals caused by a sudden rise in ocean temperatures -- around the Keppel Islands.

Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels. Sea temperatures touched 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit), the upper limit for coral.

High temperatures are also a condition for the formation of hurricanes, such as Katrina which hit New Orleans in 2005.

"My estimate is in the vicinity of 95 to 98 percent of the coral is bleached in the Keppels," said Berkelmans from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Marine scientists say another global bleaching episode cannot be ruled out, citing major bleaching in the Caribbean in the 2005 northern hemisphere summer, which coincided with one of the 20 warmest years on record in the United States.

The rest of the article can be found here.

New Crustacean

This photo released Tuesday March 7, 2006 by the IFREMER (French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea) shows a new crustacean, called 'Kiwi hirsuta'. The eyeless shellfish, about 15cm long was discovered in March 2005 during a diving mission led by American researcher Robert Vrijenhoek, of the MBARI Institut, Cal., in hydrothermal vents of the Pacific Antartic Ridge, south of Easter Island. (AP Photo/A Fifis; IFREMER)

PARIS - A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet deep at a site 900 miles south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.

The new crustacean is described in the journal of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The animal is white and just shy of 6 inches long — about the size of a salad plate.

In what Segonzac described as a "surprising characteristic," the animal's pincers are covered with sinuous, hair-like strands.

It is also blind. The researchers found it had only "the vestige of a membrane" in place of eyes, Segonzac said.

The researchers said that while legions of new ocean species are discovered each year, it is quite rare to find one that merits a new family.

The family was named Kiwaida, from Kiwa, the goddess of crustaceans in Polynesian mythology.

The diving expedition was organized by Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Lost World

This is the first photograph ever taken of what scientists are calling New Guinea's "lost" bird of paradise.The bird—known as Berlepsch’s six-wired bird of paradise—had been collected only once in the wild since its discovery more than a century ago. Its precise home range was unknown until now.

"Lost World" Found in Indonesia Is Trove of New Species

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
February 7, 2006

To boldly go where no one has gone before, one group of scientists didn't have to venture into space. They found a lost world right here on Earth.

"It really was like crossing some sort of time warp into a place that people hadn't been to," said Bruce Beehler of the wildlife expedition he co-led in December into the isolated Foja Mountains on the tropical South Pacific island of New Guinea.

During a 15-day stay at a camp they had cut out of the jungle, the conservationists found a trove of animals never before documented, from a new species of the honeyeater bird to more than 20 new species of frogs.

"We were like kids in a candy store," said Beehler, a bird expert with Conservation International in Washington, D.C. "Everywhere we looked we saw amazing things we had never seen before."