NARRATOR: Welcome to Intersections: The RIT Podcast. From ...

NARRATOR: Welcome to Intersections: The RIT Podcast. From objects that are barely visible under a microscope to snowflakes and the massive RIT Big Shot, professor Michael Peres has made scientific photography a major focus, with his images appearing on CNN, The Weather Channel, and Mashable. Today, Peres talks with colleague Ted Kinsman of RIT's photo sciences program about how one masters such specialized photography.

MICHAEL: I sort of stumbled into science photo by ? I was a biology major. And I had become interested in photography in high school. As a bio student I was interested in taking pictures of my lab experiments ? photographing through microscopes. But I wasn't taught. I was just stumbling my way through making all kinds of mistakes. After graduating, I tried to find a job and couldn't find my way into the field at all because I wasn't formally trained. So, I came back to RIT to get a second bachelor's degree before launching out on my pathway to medical photographer in Charleston, West Virginia and some things I did there. And then I moved to Detroit where I was a medical photographer before coming back to teach here, which was probably not exactly my career path in my mind. But it's been an awesome experience and career.

TED: If only we could plan our career paths out ahead of time.

MICHAEL: So, how did you find your way into this?

TED: I always wanted to be a photographer as a kid. My original goal was to go to RIT and probably take photographic sciences. Except I was very young when I started college and I studied optics at MCC. So, I got a degree in optics and I loved optics and I loved physics. And I decided I would just study physics. I ended up working for the Navy and, after a while, I decided maybe I should go into teaching and I got a degree in science teaching. I taught high school science for 20 years as a physics teacher and, on the side, continued to run my own company in imaging. I got into imaging because I was looking at photography and I really loved photography and I loved science. And wouldn't it be great if I could have cameras taking pictures while I was asleep? So, I thought about time-lapse plants because I have a big garden and I love growing plants. And I set up a time-lapse camera in the basement and had some flowers grow and bloom. I sent it off to some agents in L.A., and they loved it. They said, "More. We need more of these." Ended up very successful with that in the Hollywood environment, selling footage. And I decided that I needed to move into some other areas, so I decided to go into still photography. I ended up hooking up with a company in New York City that was very happy to sell science photography, which I was very interested in shooting, and using image to educate people. So, I had another company running quite well in the background as I was teaching. That sort of got me into the spotlight of RIT somehow. And I think it was in the summer of 2013 you invited me to come teach here full-time.

MICHAEL: I took some high-speed classes when I was here at RIT and then I moved to West Virginia where I was really the only medical photographer in the whole state. You know, there was a lot going on in health care, and this one guy, they were doing a lot of cancer research, just like they are now. And they were learning that a lot of the cancer

medicines were ? they would start, like a forest fire starts a back fire to put out the fire because it consumes all of the forest, well, they were treating cancer in the same way. They would start cancer and then burn it out, so that it would run out of energy. They discovered that, at the time, the nurses that were giving injections, when they pulled the needle out of the bottle there was a back aspirate. And all of the nurses were coming down with skin cancer on their hands that they were holding the bottle in. But they wanted photographic proof that the aspirate was coming out of the bottle. So, it took me a whole two or three days of being there all weekend. Just shoot the film, develop the film, shoot the film, develop the film to see: Did we get it? I think 72 frames, which would have been two full rolls of film later, I think I got one of the 72 frames where the aspirate came out of the vial. Those kind of fun challenges were interesting to try to produce on film because there was a lot of uncertainty to it. You didn't really know what you got. You had to create a system, you had to test the system, you had to test that the system would work and create a result, then you had to develop it, then you had to go back to do the assignment to hope that it would work in the same exact way.

TED: Yeah. There's a lot of those. I did seven-hour exposures of glowing mushrooms to get the glowing bioluminescence of the mushrooms, which is a really long exposure. Those kinds of images are fun to do. There's certain kinds of images you can only do on film, even though film is really just a pain to work with. Radiation was discovered by Henri Bequerel, a Frenchman, who had radioactive rocks on his film by accident. So, I was doing some work for a physics textbook, and they said, "We want you to reproduce this." After I looked at the equations and stuff, I figured, "Well, if I leave these old clock faces with some of these slightly radioactive minerals on a sheet of film for about a month, I'll get a good shot. It's kind of hard to calculate that because there are no tables for it. But a month worked pretty well. You just put it in the closest and forget about it.

MICHAEL: When I came here, people were interested in me making photographs of live materials. Ward's Natural Science is a company in Rochester and they were always looking for catalog photographs of different things ? new products that they would develop. So, they wanted to photograph some Nasonia vitripennis. They're small, tiny parasitic wasps. That was my first serious digital photographic work. But I look at those pictures, and maybe it was '94 or '95, and maybe there were 1200 pixels. Now, nearly 20 years later, you look at it. And, oh. They're almost good, but they're not good. Just because the sensor technology was still evolving, as it is today. The color was not faithful, the resolution was what the resolution was.

TED: How do you feel about going back and doing an old topic like that again? Like years later, you go, "Oh, I should go back and redo those wasps again."

MICHAEL: Sometimes, when you do it the first time, that's the best time. You're more innovative, I find. The enthusiasm and the anxiety that you're not going to get the shot drives your solutions in some ways. Once you know what to expect, the unexpected doesn't happen. It's a different experience, totally. But, of course, any time you do something you get better at it, faster at it, more efficient, because there is no experience like experience.

TED: Sometimes, I have to work with an art director, and they really want odd things. When I was freezing grapes for a project on ice wines, the art director was like, "No, no, no. Those crystals are too small. We need much bigger ice crystals."

MICHAEL: They don't get to control that.

TED: Physics doesn't work that way. "But I need bigger ice crystals!" No, that doesn't work.

MICHAEL: That's an interesting sort of concept or observation. They have an image ? the art world has an image of what you can produce. And I was trying to explain, I'm not in charge of this process. I get these compounds and I take them apart. I mix them up with alcohol or water or nail polish remover and see what grows out of it. But I'm not really going to be able to influence. I can try to coax it along a little bit, but, at some point, it's going to be what it's going to be, and I have to interpret the outcome. And I can't really interpret it if you want it to be science-y. If you want art, then we have to do it in a different way. If you want science, I have to be literal and narrative and can't impose my own biases. In science, we approach things very analytically, we're trying to be deductive in the way we approach it and create a neutral sort of everything. The lenses and the lighting and the aperture choices. There's all these things that influence the process that are not subjective, that are objective. Picking the lenses and picking the aperture, things of that nature. And then trying to make a photograph that's an absolute facsimile of the object to the extent that the process will allow. I think, to be successful in this field, you have to be curious. You can't just accept that what you saw or what you heard is enough. You need to have, how do you get to the next place with this? What's really underneath driving the reaction? Or what's driving the mechanisms? Or how do I use the lens to perform in a way that it doesn't really want to perform or has been designed to perform? And you help...

TED: That's the whole area of creativity. And I don't know how to teach creativity to my students. But I can show them. And we keep our fingers crossed.

MICHAEL: So, by chance, I learned about snowflake photography after having been here for almost 20-something years. One of the students went to the Buffalo Museum of Science and she wanted to photograph snowflakes. And I didn't know how to do that.

TED: This is an interesting story because I was featured in that show in Buffalo.

MICHAEL: Was it at the Buffalo Museum of Science?

TED: Yeah. The Buffalo Museum had these big pictures on display there, which I had shot on film and scanned.

MICHAEL: And that's what Emily came back to Rochester for. And so, in that point in my career here I was primarily just biomed photo ? preserved specimens that were cut

and stained and put on glass. So, I said, "I don't know how to do that. I'm not sure." But then, I thought, there's something interesting about them. They're tiny, they're transient, they're difficult to see. And that's how, really, you and I met in my driveway. Because I tried to do it here in our breezeway and I learned how airborne they are in a breezeway. There's extra wind, so you try to catch them, and they blow away. You put them on the microscope, and they blew away. Immediately, I realized that there's a lot to this process that doesn't meet the eye. In 15 years now ? or more ? I look at you, I look at pictures of you, and I go, "You made me into this mess." I have become obsessed with it. I love it. It's such a challenge.

TED: I think about challenges in photography. That's one of the things that brought me to time=lapse photography. Along with that analysis, I realized there were certain things that were really interesting in photography that hadn't been done. If they hadn't been done in 50 years or 100 years, then it's time for someone to redo them. And snowflakes came to mind, so I started shooting snowflakes. And people react to snowflakes. It's, as far as I know, the only thing you can photograph underneath a microscope that the common person will care about.

MICHAEL: And recognize.

TED: Because it has poetry. There's poetry in snowflakes. It just stirs up something inside an individual ? photographing snowflakes. And I don't know any other object or organism that you could photograph underneath a microscope that has poetry to it.

MICHAEL: It's interesting you say that because Instagram is a social media platform, of course, that people share photographs on. I, like many, use Instagram to share my work. It's a nice feedback mechanism, and the instantaneous nature of it is exciting. But I have followers in countries where it doesn't snow, and they are so fascinated with snowflakes. It's like a cult. These people cannot wait for me to post photos of snowflakes. Then the comments and the reshares in Iran and Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Brazil. I think we all need outlets as people. We have our careers and we have things that keep us engaged in other stuff. It broadens your horizons. For me, I think I equate it with, people like to fish and people like to hunt. I like to hunt for the next great snowflake.

TED: Have you ever photographed the perfect snowflake?

MICHAEL: Never! Never. That's what keeps me coming back ? like the person that plays golf. They want to get a hole-in-one or they want to get a birdie. And they keep going back even though they never get that. They just keep going back because there's a cycle there, there's a challenge, there's a personal interest. I haven't made any money on snowflake photography. But I think it's broadcast my work on CNN and others because, as you said, people are interested in them. As a science photographer, that's one of the hardest things you have to do is get your work out in front of people. Most of the time people work in laboratories or behind closed doors, and no one knows what they're doing. So if someone were interested to get into this field that's somewhat

special and somewhat not well known, I think perseverance is hugely important. For me persistence and patience and continually trying to find the doorway in. And even though most of them were closed at the time, I still maintained my interest in science. Over time you build contacts, you build relationships, you build a network. One of those persons is going to open a doorway for you. But if you get rejected on that first invitation and you don't get what you want, you can't stop, because you'll never get in. It's not that kind of field.

NARRATOR: Thanks for listening to Intersections: The RIT Podcast, a production of RIT Marketing and Communications. To learn more about our university, go to rit.edu and to hear more podcasts, find us on iTunes or visit us at rittigers or at rit.edu/news/podcasts

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