Pilgrimage to the Anthropocene

Two years, a residency at Grand Canyon and 20 geologic sites later, the portfolio of Pilgrimage of Light is three dozen images strong. So far, the pairings of the celestial’s light years and the terrestrial’s age are in the range of a few thousands to a few billions.

Olive’s plan for a pleasure trip to Europe for the first time post-COVID struck me as an excellent opportunity to expand that timeline. With Europe’s rich preservation of classic architectures as old as 2,600 years, a much closer neighborhood, right in the Milky Way Galaxy, can be visited.

How far is 2000 light years? Here are illustrations for it.

The red circle has a radius of 2,000 light years. It is still well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. This image is, of course, not a real photo. No camera has ever been far enough to take a selfie for the Milky Way.

A much further view of our neighborhood. Now the Milky Way is a speck in the middle. Within this “subdivision” we call Local Group, two “monster houses” stand: Milky Way and Andromeda. The latter has been my favorite galaxy to project. (Wiki Common)

What do we have along our European tour? There are quite a few interesting sites, Bastei Bridge near Dresden, on the border between Germany and Czech is one of them.

That’s quite a stunning view, isn’t it? For POL, this would be the first manmade structure to feature, a return to the era of human, Anthropocene. How would this work out? I shall be prepared, with the 60 pounds of equipment and the whole archive of NASA image slides. Little did I know that these burdens have very different implications in Europe

Bastei Bridge

A hike on a moderate difficulty level trail is to be expected near the bridge, so I transferred all the gears into my backpack and tied one tripod to it. Another one with the shoulder strap was passed on to Olive—that’s as much as I would asked my dear wife to carry. The two segment bus ride to be followed by a ferry ride was off to a bad start, with me getting confused with the directions. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. With the delay, Google map sent us to a different route, without the ferry ride and making up all the time lost! This puzzled me until I realized what changed.

Now that the 300 feet climb is dashed, not only I sighed a big relief (mostly for my companion), the “hike” to the bridge has turned into literally a walk in the garden. The granola bar supper while sitting on rocks was upgraded to fine dining in the local best.

Steak Tartare and Schwartenmagen(pork jelly) were much welcome replacements for the granola bars and a cure for my guilt for dragging Olive to a shoot.

Pilgrimage of Light Goes Anthropocene

The term Anthropocene is not clearly defined scientifically, so I will take the liberty to use it poetically as the description of the epoch of human activities. I found Bastei Bridge symbolically and substantially prefect for such activities: a bridge made two centuries ago, with readily available materials onsite, built into nature’s geologic formations and in perfect harmony with it. It is simply breathtaking.

Bastei Bridge is 200 years old. Not that we don’t have any celestial neighbor that’s 200 light years away, but they are all “just stars’. Stars are not that photogenic as seen from a distance, as just a dot can be resolved by our best telescopes. The nearest photogenic object, a nebula, is 700 light years away, well within Anthropocene as defined by me, but not for Bastei Bridge. The formation of Elbe Limestone was shaped in Cretaceous time, 200 to 65 million years ago, which, converted to light years, falls into a rich period for the current archive: plenty of galaxies that are not too far for our technology to handle have been documented.

But, that’s not all. POL is science based, but it’s art by nature. I will still need to project the candidates and see if they look good. Bastei Bridge and its surrounding is a scene with lots of details and textures. Contextually, it’s a rarity, an eye opening sight. This scene, with a strong personality, needs a galactic pairing that has a strong personality too. After some attempts, I found no match from my Cretaceous archive.

Here’s when geology, my new love thanks to POL, comes to the rescue. The rocks at Bastei might be formed over 60 million years ago, but they were shaped, or eroded, in the past few million years. That means I can pull out my big gun: Andromada Galaxy at 2.5 million light years away.

This stunning image by Hubble, with extremely high definition of the stars, the spiral bands and high contrast, never fail to compete in the composition. This is the result of a night’s hard work, after another few hours of post production:

Late at night, there was no escape from hiking out and down 300 feet to the ferry for the train. We didn’t think about the issue of the last train for the night, but we were lucky to be able to catch it! Or we had to experience a night of homelessness. At the deserted platform, we got playful and did a few video selfies with Hover.

I liked this! So I did more, until the platform wasn’t so deserted anymore…

At the end of this one, you can see me talking to an invisible person. “Not a good idea!” In perfect English, this dutiful citizen reprimanded me for flying a drone at the train station. Oops.

A flash back of my childhood memory went over my head. A story told by my friend Deyu Kao, that “in Germany, every adult can educate every child. If little kids were caught misbehaving in the public, everyone can give them a spank.”

I guess there’s a truth in this legend! Luckily I wasn’t spanked.

Vienna, Spaceship

Our next leg of journey brought us to Vienna, Austria. Having great museum to see and exquisite concerts to listen to, I didn’t find a destination for POL here. Instead, I made an image for the series Spaceship in our Airbnb.

Earth is a spaceship; you and I are astronauts riding on it.

When in Rome, Project on The Roman

Fast forward, passing through Prague where we enjoyed the performance of Macbeth at Prague State Opera and visited burial sites of Dvorak and Smetana, two of my most admired composers, we arrived at Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia and where the convenient European train travel’s power fades. From there we drove and arrived at the first roadtrip stop: Pula.

We liked Prague but we found the city infested with people like us: tourists. Pula offered a wild departure. With a Roman arena at it’s center, it’s a bonafide attraction, yet, it’s not Coliseum, therefore a much smaller magnet for the tourists. The arena was no less impressive than Coliseum, though.

Touring the Pula arena without the being shepherded around by tour guides

I surveyed the ruin inside and out, paying attention to the locations of spot light, where they point to will probably ruin photo opportunities if they were too strong for my projector to compete against. I found a few ideal spots. Off we went on to more sightseeings.

After dinner, we hauled the equipment to the predetermined spot. Making projections in an urban setting is still a novelty to me, as people strolled, chatted, smoked and occasionally threw some curious glances at us.

It worked! PoPP won the arm wrestling against the spot light:

Orion Nebula and the 2000 year old Roman arena in Pula, Croatia.

The light we see today from Orion Nebula, or M42, was emitted when this arena was built. This famed nebula has a distinctive shape, texture and colors. Though the shape is now mostly taken over by the architecture, the texture and color still shine through, quite literally. Riding on the success, I replace the slide with a drawing of crinoid by Colleen Maynard, my collaborator for the series Phantoms of the Great Dying.

The ghosts from the planet’s largest event of extinction, the Permian Extinction, or The Great Dying, came back to haunt us.

The Many Stairs of Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik, Croatia was a major stop for us, not just because of its stunning scenery, but also because of our fandom for Game of Thrones. Fellow fans would know that this is the backdrop where they filmed the famed scene of the Walk of Shame, where Cersei was forced to be stripped naked and walked to her palace while a nun struck a bell every few steps and announced “shame!”.

Little did we know we were going to experience the traumatizing walk in our way. As Uber dropped us off outside the gate of the ancient fortress, we started our walk, mostly on stone pavement and going up, and up, and up. With Olive’s cellists arms and tennis elbow(no, she doesn’t play the sport but she contracted the sickness), I took over most of the load, one luggage in each arm and a back pack behind me, totally 120 pounds. Half of it, of course, is photographic stuff. Finally, we arrived at the Airbnb after stepping up 200 steps. Panting, we open the door to the balcony and saw these views.

The walk was worth it! Later, when we went to the view point on Fort Lovrijenac where I will make projections, we realized that our Airbnb is part of the stunning skyline.

That’s when we felt completely rewarded for the 200 steps. Having scouted the site, we went on to enjoy a good dinner with Risotto al Nero di Seppia, or Squid Ink Rice. It was delicious!

The next day, we went on the walk on the wall. Dubrovnik is a city of red roofs.

The red roofs tiles of Dubrovnik are mostly bright and new, but some are faded and old.

Dubrovnik, a UNESCO site, was attacked by Serb forces in 1991 as the cold war got hot at its end. Majority of the buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged. The mix of the new and old roofs are an understated monument of this war.

Back to work after a relaxing day’s sightseeing. Here’s an Google Earth view of the projection scheme:

Projecting from the view point on Fort Lovrijenac

600 feet wide projection is far less than my current record at 3000 feet, but the city light would complicate the matter. After some testing, I settled on NGC 2336, 100 million light years away, to pair with the age of the rock formation at the base of the city.

From my archive, I dug out the two slides for NGC 2336. Two, because it’s a split of left and right half of the galaxy. What you are seeing is a stitched image of two projection. By doing this I could use a more concentrated beam of projection through a 85mm f/1.2 lens twice. Each one was multi-exposed 8 times.

I went on to make two images for Phantoms of The Great Dying.

A Palatial Party

A drive to Split, Croatia brought us to Palace of Diocletian, built for emperor Diocletian 1700 years ago for his retirement. The oculus provide an unusual backdrop for the projection.

Both objects’ light were emitted at the height of the Roman Republic and both are super nova remanent. While we spent an hour at this quiet corner with a street musician that didn’t make much money(we helped, after listening to his classical guitar for an hour), loud, live music of the 80’s permeated from the neighboring quad, mixed with loud noise of drunken people. I had a flash back of my wedding photography days. This quad, with an great architectural view and superb projection options, was my first priority of the night. But setting up equipment in the middle of the crowd bares so much resemblance to photographing a wedding party. I felt the acid level rose in my stomach. But hey, the crowd, they might provide an unusual context! I bit the bullet and went straight into the middle of the party, and I got this.

1600 years old Diocletian's Palace, 1400 light years away M42, and tonight's party.

Of Heaven, Earth, Ghost and People

Our last leg of the tour brought us back to Ljubljana. From there, we visited Predjama Castle. Built 700 years ago, this view was love at the first sight for me.

“I have to come back tonight to project on this!” I said.

“Making another 1.5 hour round trip?” Olive questioned. Hmm, I sensed a bit of reluctance. Luckily, the humble restaurant introduced us to Prekmurska gibanica, a local dessert that could energize any less-than-enthusiatic mood.

Art, life and food. One can’t survive, missing any of the three.

Coming back before dusk, the place was deserted. The buzzing tourists were replaced by chirping birds. The restaurant which served gabanica was now closed. We were completely alone. Taking my time to set up, I once in a while remembered to document the process.

Projector PoPP is on the left and the camera with a wireless trigger is on the right. Later on I moved the camera to a more forward view point, visible here to the right side of the castle.

PoPP can deliver most of the projection I’ve envisioned so far. But it can’t focus. Look at the number 2 on it: this is version 2.0. I had a 1.2, on which I kept the mirror of the dSLR functional, so I could lower the mirror and focus. But, this requires the camera, now converted to the projector, to be powered with a battery. This battery doesn’t last long, and became a critical part, a NASA term for any part in a complex system, that if it fails, the whole system fails. So, out with 1.2. Now what I have to do is to put the lens for projection on the camera, both with Canon EF mount, to pre focus the lens, then transfer the lens to PoPP. But this procedure requires another detail—the slide needs to be pressed against the camera back with just the right amount of pressure. Too much or too little, causing the slide to be just a fraction of a mm too close or too far, will make the projection’s focal plane off for tens of feet.

I’m cursed by complications. I can’t do anything simple. Nonetheless, two years of accumulated techniques and experience made this projection quite easy.

NGC 7293 is the nearest nebula at 700 light years away, a perfect match for the 700 year old structure.

Sea Scorpion, Eurypterida Campylocephalus, then took the stage.

Two days later, we flew back home on an Austrian Airline flight. Having dozen additions to my portfolio and a truly enjoyable trip, I look at Olive, already in dreamland, and fell asleep with a smile.