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profoundbondfanfic · 6 months

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A Ghost Story by emmbrancsxx0 [Explicit, 257k words]

Castiel Novak has haunted his family's estate for 150 years, awaiting the return of his lost love. Upon their reunion, Dean Winchester learns of his past reincarnation. After the night of Castiel's resurrection, the two try to find out why they've been given a second chance. The answers may be hidden in the forgotten memories of Dean's former life - but sometimes the truth is better left buried.

A Lonely Vigil by saltnhalo [Mature, 34k words]

Castiel Novak is twenty-six years old when he's killed in the Civil War. The first soul to be laid to rest in the grounds of the new Lawrence Memorial Cemetery, his spirit remains in a liminal space—not in the living world, but not passing on, forever tasked with helping other spirits to go where he cannot. His vigil over the grounds of his cemetery is a long and lonely one, unable to interact with anyone who still remains in the land of the living. Until he meets Dean Winchester.

A Million Ways to Go by ChasingRabbits [Explicit, 91k words]

Castiel Novak is a preacher's son living in a world of black and white. Pragmatic and dutiful, he doesn't understand why anybody would want to make waves. Then the Winchesters move in down the street. Soon many of the skeletons in the Novak family's closet are exposed, and as the family faces them, Castiel begins to understand that there are many ways to see the world and so many more ways to live than what he's been told.

Bumper Cars by mansikka [Explicit, 111k words]

Two teenagers are missing from an abandoned carnival, and there’s enough to raise suspicion that their disappearance involves a ghost. Dean, Sam, and Cas arrive in town to investigate, though what they find leads them away from those teenagers, and on the trail of a ghost story that churns up things from their past. Can newly-human Cas, and Dean, with the help of shipper!Sam, work out the mystery behind the abandoned carnival and its ghost, and along the way, figure out the riddle that is them?

Dean Winchester is Not Afraid of Ghosts by Desirae [Explicit, 48k words]

When photographer Dean Winchester is not capturing momentous occasions like weddings and graduations with his Nikon, he is moonlighting as the cameraman for the South Shore Paranormal; a ghost hunting series on YouTube, headed by his brother Sam, and Sam's best friend Gabriel. Despite his brother's adamance, Dean Winchester does not believe in ghosts. And no one is going to change his mind. Certainly not a scam artist like Castiel Novak. Castiel is a self-proclaimed medium... and Gabriel's brother. When a member of the SSP team has to leave the crew, Castiel is the replacement, much to Dean's dismay. But the more they work together, the more Dean is drawn to Castiel, the man stirring up protective instincts usually only reserved for family. What happens when Dean realizes that Castiel is not the fake he always thought he was, but instead, a generous soul that Dean is rapidly falling in love with?

ghosts that we knew by dothraki_shieldmaiden [Explicit, 89k words]

Dean can’t help it. Castiel’s laugh is infectious, washing over him and sweeping him up in its tide. His throat and stomach ache with the feel of it, unfamiliar muscles worked past their endurance. He hasn’t laughed like this in weeks, maybe years. Cas doesn’t stop laughing, and Dean relishes it. It’s such a good sound, deep and throaty. It rumbles over him the same way that Baby’s engine purrs, to where he can almost feel it in his gut. Dean’s giddy, the kind of happy that hunters don’t get to feel, and if it weren’t for the ceiling, he thinks he might float away. Cas’ eyes crinkle when he laughs, and his smile goes wide and gummy. He’s so brilliant, so alive— But you’re dead, Dean thinks helplessly. But you’re dead.

Heart by Speary [Mature, 90k words]

The heart is a funny thing. Some say it loves, and others say that it is just a muscle, keeping you alive for some minuscule amount of time. For Cas Shurley, the heart was a defective reminder that each day was maybe going to be his last. For years he had been in and out of hospitals. For years he had viewed time as something trickling down the drain. Then Sam Winchester died. He died, and Cas got to live. And in what universe was that fair? But he accepted the gift, and told himself that he would live. Each beat of Sam’s heart in his chest was an anthem, a siren song beckoning him back to life. This new heart though, wanted him to do more than just live. This heart had a story to tell. It would wake him up in the night, and visit him with cold drafts and a sense of purpose that would propel him out of bed. But before he could truly live and act on the demands of his new heart, he would have to get out of the hospital, and he would have to meet the Winchester family. And though he didn’t know it, he would especially have to meet Dean, Sam’s brother. And meeting him would remind him of just how much more there was to life than just the living.

Hope and Clay by tabulaxrasa [Explicit, 20k words]

The museum is haunted, the security guard is dead, the ghost has an alibi, and Dean is… worried about his relationship status with Cas (currently: It’s Complicated). A Winchester family hunting trip threatens to go awry from the weight of too many secrets– and an unstoppable killer from the dawn of time.

Rest in Pieces by xylodemon [Explicit, 22k words]

"Goddamned ghosts," Dean snaps, stabbing his shovel into the dirt. "Goddamned Heaven." (or: the one with the Ghost Apocalypse)

Under Construction by thestarsarefalling [General Audiences, 42k words]

Castiel's been quietly haunting the house in which he's met his untimely demise for a long time. Up until this moment, he's only had to deal with squatters and adventurous teenagers, who were easy to drive out with some spooky moans and creepy words scratched into walls. But when his building is slated to become a construction site, Castiel encounters Dean, the contractor and new owner of the home, someone who doesn't scare easy.

Winchester's Haunted House by deansmultitudes, Kitmistry [Teen and Up, 3k words]

For the Halloween evening, Dean turns his new home into a haunted house for neighboring kids. But once all the guests are gone, is when the real haunting begins.

#destiel #group rec #halloween #ghosts

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cactusspatz · 8 months

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July recs

It might be the very last day of the month, but that means I'm not late! Five Sandman recs under the cut, and one each for Batman, Murderbot, and Biggles.

SANDMAN

What Manner Of Creature by @ro-moray (Dream/Hob)

Hob's had a number of theories about his strange friend over the years. They are all, of course, completely incorrect.

Great through-the-years look at Hob and Dream, with humor and understanding.

to dream you was remembering by @cuubism (Dream/Hob)

Hob understands now both why Dream created this nightmare, as well as why doing so was an unconscious rather than conscious act, and the thought hurts more than the nightmare itself. After all, Hob has had four hundred years to grapple with his own loss. He's not sure that, even after so much time, Dream has grappled with his.

Short scene with Hob and Dream and a baby nightmare, but it packs a hell of an emotional punch.

The Dread and Fear of Kings by @maybemalapert (gen)

"I'm afraid I'm not much into charcoal sketches," Hob said, taking in the crude rendition of himself and his Stranger that he'd last seen in the hands of Johanna Constantine. "Now, oil paintings on the other hand--" "Mr. Gadlen," the man interrupted. "I have gone to great lengths to find you and to confirm that it was indeed you who met with Dream of the Endless in 1889 and every century prior. Let me assure you, I do not make a habit of kidnapping people on a whim."

Deliciously whumpy fishbowl rescue with Burgess being a real bastard (what else). Happy ending, but mind the tags.

Yours for the Taking by @signiorbenedickofpadua (Calliope/Dream/Hob)

When Hob spots a sad woman in white through a window of a famous author's house, he gets a bad feeling. Further investigation reveals that she's in need of rescue, but what Hob isn't prepared for is the fact that the woman he sets out to save turns out to be a literal Greek goddess, the ex-wife of the Stranger he keeps waiting for, and a rather lovely person to boot.

SUCH a good and satisfying read, with a skillful build to the three-way romance.

more sky comes and more days by Chrome/@catalists (Calliope/Dream/Hob)

In the aftermath of her imprisonment, Calliope is determined to learn to trust humans again, so she finds a roommate and settles in the mortal world. Meanwhile, her former husband has been on another quest that ended in grief, and he seeks her out for solace. What could possibly go wrong? or, “Hey, Zed,” Hob answered. “Something the matter?” “Yes,” she said. “Calliope’s ex showed up and he’s fucking terrifying.”

Really enjoyed this way of them all colliding - funny and bittersweet at turns - and the resolution.

MISC

Birdwatch11 by @smilebackwards (Batman, gen)

Tim hadn’t actually meant to start a popular Batwatch blog. He hadn’t meant to start a blog at all honestly but by the time he turned eleven he’d accumulated hundreds of pictures of Batman and Robin on his Nikon DSLR and it had just seemed inefficient to go through the trouble of printing them and storing them in a box under his bed when BlogSphere had a perfectly adequate platform.

Short, funny, sweet story about someone trying to claim credit for Tim's pre-Robin photo habit, and his A+++ response.

in recognition by isilee (Murderbot, gen)

Volescu's first communication from SecUnit, once it had pieced together its brain again and settled into Preservation a little more, appeared in his feed inbox right as he took a sip of his morning coffee.

*dies laughing* In which Murderbot recognizes Volescu for having the sense to retire. Cute look at the friendship of the whole survey group.

Biggles in Sarawak by @philomytha (Biggles/von Stalhein)

Biggles is asked to help the CIA transport a Soviet spy they've captured in a remote jungle location. The trouble is, the spy is Erich von Stalhein. And that's only the first problem.

Excellent adventure jam-packed with tropes from hurt/comfort to teaming-up-with-your-nemesis to sex pollen (with said nemesis, of course).

#fic rec #monthly recs #sandman #hob/dream #hob/dream/calliope #calliope/dream/hob #the sandman #batman #murderbot #biggles #biggles/von stalhein #gen

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makaira-art · 10 days

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I was lucky enough to be near enough to take a road trip with some friends to view the solar eclipse in the path of totality!

Here are some shots I got on my DLSR:

Wrote about how the process went below the cut, if you’re curious:

Camera setup

Camera info: I used some second-hand old DSLR camera to get this shot. If you want to take a photo, try to find a camera with a electronic viewfinder/live view— I used a Nikon D200 which has an optical viewfinder that you cannot look through during the partial eclipse unless you want to laser concentrate the sun into your eyes. So, I had to keep trial-and-erroring photos then looking at the LCD screen’s playback to line up the shot during the partial eclipse. I accidentally broke part of my tripod 30 minutes into partial, so big shoutout to my friends for team effort helping me deal with that.

For protection: obviously, eclipse glasses for viewing the event. (Look away every so often for your own safety— it is the sun, after all). For the camera I used a solar filter Mylar sheet that I cut into a circle, glued to some cardboard I fitted into an octagon and slipped over my camera lens. That’s why everything except the sun is pitch black! I gave the camera a break from the sun by covering the lens up every few minutes, just in case. I use a special lens that I couldn’t fit a solar filter over, even if I spent $60+ on one. DIY for the win.

The lens: A 150-600mm lens. As I mentioned, my tripod had a little incident so I couldn’t stabilize it enough to use past 500mm without some serious motion blur, but around 150mm and 350mm the photos looked good enough for me. At this point I ripped off the tape on my optical viewfinder and the protective lens and took photos as normal. I kinda just set a fixed aperture with f-stop at 16 and ran with it. I think I also turned the ISO up. You’ll forgive me for not documenting the whole process of the sun and the entirety of totality— some things you just want to see with your own two eyes.

I am not a professional photographer, solar or otherwise, so don’t take what I say for what you should do, but everything seems to work, so if you are looking to photograph a solar eclipse, these are a few things to start with! Though, don’t break your tripod and make sure you can easily find the sun with an electronic viewfinder. Then you can just press your remote-shutter button and stare at the sun at the same time.

#solar eclipse #eclipse 2024 #eclipse #photography #not art #but like idk what I’m doing I just have my dad’s old camera #so cool #my photgraphy

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phoenixyfriend · 6 months

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Ko-fi prompt from Becky:

I actually would love to hear where ticket/concession/merch money for concerts go. If someone has already asked about that, can you do something similar for a sports game of your choice?

Already got a request for concerts, but I can do the sports game!

So, let's go with... baseball. I've been to professional baseball games ('twas the Ducks), even if it's been a Very Long Time, so that's the one I have some perspective on. Who is in control of the money any given game (as in, who owns the stadium and the home team) varies by place and sport, so let's use the Mets and Citi Field as our example when we need a specific.

Mostly, this is because I'm in New York and so it's down to either them or the Yankees, and between the two... the Mets, through a wholly owned subsidiary, Queens Ballpark Company, are the ones that actually own their ballpark, which makes a few things easier and includes a Fun Fact about the naming. It also means that I can treat the team and the stadium as one singular entity instead of waffling over who gets to be the Main Character of this simulation. It's not exactly uncommon for teams to own their own stadiums, but it's not most of them.

(The Mets, btw, are owned in large part by a hedge fund manager. Like, 95% of the team stock is owned by this one guy. Why can't more sports be like the Packers and just belong to the city.)

In this case, I will be referring to the Forbes article on Citi Field's revenue for 2022 as a guide or framework, as they have an actual image of the financial report; they don't do much explaining of the actual data, though, so my part will be explaining the less-obvious things and doing some maths. A few other articles will also be cited as they come in useful.

I'll also note that the Mets are a very expensive team operating at a loss, but they still work for our purposes.

MONEY COMING IN:

Tickets, most obviously

To quote the wiki article on Major League Baseball:

"MLB is the second-wealthiest professional sport league by revenue after the National Football League (NFL). [...] MLB has the highest total season attendance of any sports league in the world; in 2018, it drew more than 69.6 million spectators."

I didn't know that until I started researching for this post, but it makes sense. After all, baseball is "the American pastime." The Forbes article cites average attendance of 33,000 per home game. The stadium seat about 41,900, so we're looking at roughly 79% attendance. This is fine, because attendance is not the only stream of revenue.

Advertising

If you have seen a professional sports game in the past however many years, you have seen that, depending on the type of court, they are plastered in advertising. Let's take a look at Citi Field:

(Image Source: MLB website)

The Forbes article states that the stadium makes about $48.5 million per year from advertising. About $28.5 million of that comes from the various 'temporary' and long-term ads, the Nikon and Geico and Toyota and Coca Cola, etc.

$20 million of it comes from one company. I'm going to quote Wikipedia again:

The naming rights were purchased by Citigroup, a New York financial services company, for $20 million annually.

This is not uncommon! ESPN has an article about it, and some standout examples are Bank of America Stadium, Coors Field, Delta Center, FedEx Field and FedEx Forum, General Motors Place, Gillette Stadium, Heinz Field, and the list just goes on. I'm not even sure if the list is up to date, because I'm seeing even more articles elsewhere with higher figures.

Concessions

The financial report that Forbes cites has $22mill in concessions. This is not entirely surprising. Going by this page, we're looking at... 84 home games in that 2022 season. Let's assume that 33,000 average cited earlier. That's 2,772,000 attendees over the course of the season. So, what, a little under $10 per attendance tick? Entirely plausible. A hot dog plus a soda is $15, so... that tracks.

Parking

Apparently parking is, collectively, about $13mill annually. That's... genuinely a little concerning to me, for uh. Reasons. Also parking is $40.

(A lot of people go to games via train, if anyone's interested.)

Luxury Suite Premiums

I had to google this one, but uh. Turns out those fancy private box seats are even fancier and more private than I thought, bringing in over $10 mill a year.

Other Revenue - Stadium, undefined

"Other Revenue" and "post season revenue" are not given any further information, but they're about $16.5 mill so. They're definitely doing their part? Wish we had more information.

One guess is that there are events in the vein of the Citi Field Spring Carnival that contribute to the revenue through either fees to the stadium (if this is a carnival that rents the parking lot) or concessions and tickets (if the stadium rents a carnival).

Other Revenue - to the team that is not direct operating income of the stadium itself

Not counting the "other revenue" section of the financial statement, the Forbes article tells us that:

National broadcasting deals with Fox, ESPN and TBS that pay over $60 million a year to every MLB team, as well as the local cable fee the Mets get from SNY, which is over $80 million a year.

That's another $140mill in addition to the $244mill that the financial report cites.

Merchandise - not direct stadium revenue.

Get your Mets hats here! And your jerseys! And your logo bats! And your commemorative plushies! And--

MONEY GOING OUT

Operations

This one's easy: you have to pay wages to your employees, from the players themselves to the food sellers to janitorial to security to field maintenance, etc. Also, you have to pay for utilities (those billboards and floodlights aren't cheap), product to sell (frozen hot dogs), supplementary materials for products you sell (plastic cups, paper for the ticket machines, bags for garbage cans, and so on), and repairs/maintenance for the stands themselves (can't imagine they get through a season with all 41,900 seats intact).

Player salaries (and a few others, like the coach) aren't actually included in stadium revenue, but since the stadium is owned by the team, we're bundling them together for the sake of this case.

Payment in Lieu of Taxes

So this is an interesting one, and while the Forbes article does touch on it, there's a bit more detail to the story.

Citi Field was built in 2009, and the process cost $850 million. Of that, $615 was public subsidies. A lot of this was municipal bonds, which the Mets have to pay back with interest for the lifetime of the park; those municipal bond repayments are an offset, and in return for paying tens of millions in municipal bond repayments each year (the 2022 report shows about $43.5 mill), Citi Field does not have to pay property taxes.

Wikipedia only cites property taxes, but the financial report doesn't include any other taxes, so I'll assume the only other taxes they're on the hook for are sales and payroll, which aren't displayed in the financial report.

Parking

Right, so, parking as a bundle is about $7.5 mill in expenses, which means that parking alone has a marginal profit of about 42.3%, given the earlier figure of $13mill in parking revenue. I'm not finding any solid information on where that money goes, but it seems very like that New York City's taxes on land use for parking is not included in the property tax exemption we discussed above, and that most of the $7.5 mill is in that regard.

Post Season Expenses

I'll be honest, they don't define this $1.8 mill, but given what is and isn't included in the other sections, I'm going to hazard a guess that this may be about upgrades (more than maintenance) or replacement of physical billboards that are also not included as regular maintenance but require a lot of manpower to get up and set if complicated enough.

General and Administrative

This is the other possible allocation of the utilities and related payments. This is also where back of house activities like accountants, lawyer fees, payroll clerks, facilities managers, and so on are bundled in. It's about $5.5 mill.

Publicity and Promotions

This one's easy, it's just marketing that doesn't fall into General Mets Things and is rather for home games specifically.

Depreciation and Amortization

Bit trickier, but you know how a car loses value the second you drive it off the lot? That is depreciation. You paid $20,000 for a car, but two years later it's worth $16,000; on a financial report, you put that down as a $4,000 loss to depreciation. Amortization is similar, in that it lowers values of various assets in relation to time and relative value to what it was when new.

Interest Expenses

Expenses related directly to interest rates tend to get their own line separate from regular debt repayments. This isn't really relevant beyond 'loans are more expensive than when you first get them.'

Travel and League Expenses

Since this is a traveling team, being professionals, and a Major League Baseball Team in particular, money has to be spent on the plane rides, team bus, and of course, the league fees. I wanted to end that a bit more pithy, but it turns out it's not easy to find league fees for the MLB.

(A new team joining would have to pay about $2.2 billion, according to one article, while previous new additions were a couple hundred mill, so... 100 mill? Maybe?)

Hope that answers your question!

#economics #capitalism #phoenix talks #ko fi #ko fi prompts #research #baseball #the mets #citi field #sports #business #financial reports

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justforbooks · 2 months

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The writer-activist Wendy Mitchell, who has died aged 68, won hearts and minds by advocating for living positively with dementia. She was determined to remind people that those living with the disease are not “sufferers” and that there is “a beginning, a middle and an end to the disease – with so much life to be lived in between”. She held strong beliefs that people should have the right to choose their own death, and campaigned for assisted dying laws in Britain – one of the subjects of her final book.

Wendy wrote three bestsellers, Somebody I Used to Know (2018), What I Wish People Knew About Dementia (2022) and One Last Thing: How to Live with the End in Mind (2023) – I was fortunate enough to be her ghostwriter on all of them. They were translated into dozens of languages, and her advocacy work won her honorary doctorates from Bradford and Hull Universities, and a British Empire Medal last year.

When I met Wendy in 2016, she was writing a daily blog, Which Me Am I Today? ,which she had started simply to document her day-to-day life, though it soon had tens of thousands of followers. After her diagnosis of young-onset vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in July 2014, Wendy was shocked at the lack of information and support available to those newly diagnosed.

In Somebody I Used to Know, she wrote about her own depression at the diagnosis, until she realised: “I was still the same person I had been the day before my diagnosis.” She threw herself into academic and medical research, speaking to doctors, nurses and other professionals. What I Wish People Knew About Dementia chronicled how the disease affects different parts of daily life, aside from memory, including taste, smell, hearing, gait and vision.

Her tips, such as draping a scarf over a flat-screen television to avoid it looking like a hole in the wall, or sticking photographs of clothes on wardrobe doors as a reminder of what is inside, made all the difference to those who were newly diagnosed.

Wendy enjoyed finding ways to outwit dementia. As she wrote in her final blog post: “Yes, dementia is a bummer, but oh what a life I’ve had playing games with this adversary of mine to try and stay one step ahead.”

Born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, to Violet and Ken Draper, Wendy described growing up in their pub in her first memoir. She went to school in Pontefract and was a keen sportswoman, excelling at tennis and running – after her diagnosis, she swapped running for fell-walking in the Lake District. She described the Lakes as her “paradise” and Friars Crag as her favourite place to sit.

Wendy raised her two daughters, Sarah and Gemma, alone after her divorce from their father in the early 1980s (although she continued to use her married name). For many years she earned her living as a cleaner, until she started working in administrative roles within the NHS, gaining promotion to become a non-clinical team leader. Eventually she was forced to retire from her job as a rota manager at Leeds general infirmary, and later campaigned for workplaces to support those newly diagnosed with dementia to continue working: “We don’t lose all our skills overnight just because of our diagnosis,” she said.

In early retirement Wendy discovered other skills, including writing, and enjoyed her “trundles” around the village of Walkington, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where she lived, capturing local wildlife with her trusted Nikon camera. She revelled in the fact that villagers unaware at first of her diagnosis described her as “the lady with the camera”.

She met many dementia advocates, and was inspired to take up campaigning when she heard Agnes Houston talk at a women and dementia event in York. Wendy became a guiding light to others, a regular contributor at Innovations in Dementia and York Minds and Voices, part of the DEEP UK Network of Dementia Voices.

She gathered her own formidable team of friends living with dementia, who produced video content chatting about the issues they encountered and nicknamed themselves “the Four Amigos”. She advised on the BBC TV series Casualty and the movie Still Alice (2014), and received a mention from the Hollywood actor Julianne Moore in her Bafta acceptance speech.

Wendy raised tens of thousands of pounds for Dementia UK with her annual “wacky challenges”, as she called them, daredevil stunts that included walking across hot coals, skydiving, wingwalking and, last autumn, a swim in Derwentwater after she was forced to abandon her abseil down the Leadenhall building in London (the “Cheesegrater”) due to technical issues (theirs, not hers). She insisted that she was fearless after her diagnosis, having already faced the worst.

Wendy was a force of nature, but dementia made her life harder and harder. She ended her life by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), a subject she discussed in One Last Thing. In her last blog post, written in advance, in which she announced her death, she said: “Adapting to this life with dementia is over, but I don’t consider dementia has won, as that would be negative … it’s me calling time on my dementia – checkmate – before it plays its final move.”

She also pleaded for people to campaign for assisted dying laws in her memory.

Reviewing Somebody I Used To Know for the Sunday Times in 2018, Jackie Annesley wrote: “The world could do with more Wendys.” I couldn’t agree more, but there was only one wonderful Wendy, taking people by the hand and showing them how to live a good life with the disease in tow, or indeed how to talk about the end of life so they can instead focus on living.

Wendy is survived by her daughters.

🔔 Wendy Patricia Mitchell, writer and campaigner, born 31 January 1956; died 22 February 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Wendy Mitchell #in memoriam

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opelman · 8 months

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DUCATI / JACK MILLER / AUS / DUCATI LENOVO TEAM by Artes Max Via Flickr: Gran Premi Monster Energy de Catalunya de MotoGP 2022 / Circuit de Barcelona

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ismaeljorda · 2 years

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Frecce Tricolori (2022) by Ismael Jordá Via Flickr: AirPower 2022 - www.ismaeljorda.com - Nikon D850 + 600VR @ 1/1250 f4.5 Iso64

#Frecce Tricolori #Display Team #Italy #Smoke #Flag #AIRPOWER22 #Airpowwer #ismaeljorda #Nikon #600VR #D850 #Aeronautica Militare #flickr

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xtruss · 21 days

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Meroë Marston Morse joined Polaroid just weeks after graduating from Smith College—and quickly rose to become one of the iconic company's most visionary leaders. She's seen here in a test photograph taken by Polaroid laboratory staff in the 1940s. Polaroid Corporation Records, Baker Library, Harvard Business School

Meet The Woman Who Made Polaroid Into A Cultural Icon

Meroë Marston Morse, an Art History Undergraduate, Led and Transformed the Camera Company into a Brand Beloved by Photographers to This Day.

— By David M. Barreda | March 27, 2024

Polaroid. The iconic camera brought photography into the hands of millions beginning in the 1940s. It made anyone a photographer with a push of a button, developing the pictures right in front of your eyes.

At a time when camera innovation was led almost exclusively by men, Polaroid was different in another way too: During her relatively short time at the company, a young art history grad named Meroë Marston Morse was one of Polaroid’s most important visionaries, ultimately rising to be director of the Special Photographic Research Division with 18 patents to her name.

As a senior photo editor at National Geographic, I have had a lifelong love for photography. Since I was a child, I remember watching family members use Polaroids to record the mundane moments of a vacation, while I used a Nikon camera with 35mm film. But when a photographer friend later showed me how to use a toothpick to push the dyes of a Polaroid that was mid-development—resulting in a more painterly, more impressionistic final image—I became a fan.

I know a fair bit about Polaroid and its founder, Edwin Land. But when I read Morse’s name for the first time recently, I was intrigued to learn more about role she played during her two decades there.

A New Kind of Camera Company

Morse joined Polaroid in 1945 just weeks after graduating from Smith College, having studied art history with Clarence Kennedy. A friend and associate of Edwin Land, Kennedy often recommended his best students to work at the camera company.

American scientist and inventor Edwin Herbert Land demonstrates his instant camera or Land Camera, manufactured by Polaroid, circa 1947. Photograph By Sam Falk, The New York Times/Redux

For Land, Morse became “a soul mate, a work mate, and a protector,” writes Victor K. McElheny in his biography of Edwin Land, Insisting on the Impossible. Morse was a natural to the Polaroid method, which McElheny quotes one of the company’s inventors as saying was, “to propose the hypothesis, to test the hypothesis, to modify the hypothesis, to test with another experiment—a sequential train moving at high speed, several hypotheses and experiments per hour.”

A few short months after her arrival, Morse was managing the black-and-white film division, where she led her team through round-the-clock shifts to transition the company away from monochromatic sepia prints to truly black and white Polaroid films.

The process was full of challenges. Not only did the crystals in the darkest areas of a print become reflective, but the paper they used collected fingerprints easily. Perhaps worst of all, some of the prints would fade after a few months. Chris Bonanos, whose book Instant documents the camera company’s history, writes that Land called the creation of black-and-white film “among the toughest things Polaroid ever pulled off.”

And Morse was at the center of it all, former Polaroid employees John and Mary McCann told me on a recent call. Morse’s team would analyze tiny incremental variances from a standard exposure Mary said, and Morse herself “had an eye for these differences” thanks to her art history training. “She and Land built it from the first experiments in the lab, all the way through the billion-dollars-worth of film they sold,” John adds.

A Marriage of Science and Art

John McCann tells me his time at Polaroid reminded him of the Renaissance, when “the best scientists were the best painters, and they did everything.” Artists at Polaroid were integral to science and experimentation, and their perspectives were as important as those of trained chemists.

Within Morse’s lab, there was a strong dedication to making technology to suit artists. She served as the liaison between scientists and the photographers who consulted for the companies—building relationships with fine art photographer Minor White, color art photography pioneer Marie Cosindas, and landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

Photographer Ansel Adams consulted with Polaroid in various capacities. In a letter to Morse in 1953, he complained about the company’s ads, which he said had, “served to place emphasis on the casual, amateur use of the camera and process which has, I think, minimized the more important aspects. Most people think of it as a semi-toy.” Photograph By Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images

Adams was already a well-established, large-format, black-and-white photographer by the time he began to consult for Polaroid in 1948. His image, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, made in 1927, had landed him on the photography map. Yet Adams was very interested in Polaroid’s technology, particularly the cameras and the black-and-white film that Morse was developing. The two were in nearly constant contact.

Adams helped establish a process that photographers in the field used for feedback long before the advent of the digital camera: He would take a Polaroid to test the composition and exposure of an image before making a final image on the negative.

Legacy

Morse died from cancer in 1969 at the age of 46, before Polaroid had expanded into a global brand and cultural touch point, before the toy camera craze had peaked, and long before Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

In a companywide memo announcing her passing, Polaroid executive Richard Young wrote, “To those who knew and loved Meroe, our lives were enriched and enlarged. Her kindness, concern and interest in everyone were exceeded by her generosity.”

By the 1970s and 80s, other camera companies started to emulate Polaroid’s point-and-shoot approach and aesthetic. In the late 2000s, photographers around the world went into mourning when the last Polaroid films hit their expiration dates after the company’s bankruptcy.

"9-Part Self Portrait," a collage of large-format Polapan prints by artist Chuck Close, is displayed at Sotheby's during a preview of The Polaroid Collection, a collection of fine art photographs that Land launched in the 1940s. Morse was key to building the company's relationships with artists in the collection. Photograph By Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images

But in early 2008, as the last factories were winding down, Polaroid enthusiasts Florian ‘Doc’ Kaps and André Bosman raised over half a million dollars to rescue the factories, the film, and most importantly the chemistry knowledge of the company—and eventually they brought Polaroid film back to market.

Today, in a photography world where digital is king, the spirit that Morse and others brought to the company still lives on for photographers everywhere.

#Photography #Women #Arts #Visual Arts 🎭#David M. Barreda

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spacetimewithstuartgary · 1 year

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Landslides in Türkiye The magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes that shook parts of Türkiye and Syria on February 6, 2023, caused widespread destruction, some of which extended beyond urban areas. In the days since the earthquakes struck, many new landslides became visible in satellite images. The Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 acquired an image (centre image) that shows a group of small landslides along a valley east of Sarıseki, Türkiye, on February 14, 2023. The other image (top), also from OLI-2, shows the same area on February 11, 2022, about a year before the earthquakes. Also on February 14, 2023, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station took a photograph (below) of a landslide in a canyon near İslahiye, a town in Gaziantep Province in southeastern Türkiye. İslahiye is one of several towns and cities where large numbers of homes were damaged or destroyed by the earthquakes. NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Disasters program area is tracking developments related to the earthquakes and their aftermath and sharing maps, data, and scientific expertise with multiple stakeholders to aid ongoing response efforts and risk assessments. One part of the team based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center identified more than 100 landslides, including several in the valley near Sarıseki, using high-resolution data from Planet Labs. The landslide data were included in maps provided to World Central Kitchen to help the aid group deliver food and water to earthquake victims. As new information becomes available, the team is posting maps and data products related to the earthquake on its open access mapping portal. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Astronaut photograph ISS068-E-53831 was acquired on February 14, 2023, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using an 1150 millimeter lens and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 68 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Adam Voiland.

#space #science #earth observatory #turkiye #earthquakes #disaster

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abimee · 1 year

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people always tell me my art style remindse them of childrens book illustrations and i rarely make kid friendly stories anymore but you know what i need to make some so here

Aria Wewason is a freshly indoctrinated middle schooler of the Island Cities Elementary School in the disastrous and opportunistic year of 2008; smartboards and chunky computers have just been rolled into the classrooms, and on-line video-hosting websites have just taken off in the public conscious, and Aria has one dream set in her mind above all else --- to start a media production club in her final years at her school, and become the host of her own web series!

However, she lives in a secluded and slow-to-the times town tucked in the farthest reaches of Wisconsin; where iPhones are still coveted between the rich kids, and most kids her age still lived off of their parent's landlines and slow-running computers and have little to no access to the world wide web. Aria herself has little knowledge of technology herself, but is determined to become the most tech-savvy kid in her school and show the world her creativity and imagination through video!

Luckily, she's got a team behind her set to help her out;

her best friend since they were in preschool, Bell Mabel, who has access to the latest home computer through her parent's at-home jobs, and even owns her own Nikon handheld

the most popular --- and richest --- girl in school [name here], who after a rocky start in elementary school spent picking on Aria came to consider Aria her best and only friend, with an obsession for trading card games and with one finger on the pulse of all things gaming

a strange and energetic 4th grade who asks everyone to call her ''Tock'', who has a school-renown habit of causing trouble and gaining the ire of the teachers around her, yet is unmatched in her artistic and roleplay skills, and her through place in special education has a curious and strange level of knowledge of the inner workings of the school.... including where their budget goes?!

two IT techs crammed into a small closet the school calls their ''server room''; highschool dropout Ryder MacNamara, the second in command and often the one running around from classroom to classroom helping with the daily disruptions and presentations. Also known to moonlight as the Friday Popcorn maker, and routinely known to interrupt gym class to ''borrow'' the use of the gym teacher's microwave stashed in their room, which usually brings no less than five minutes of her picking on the teacher in front of the kids and making them laugh.

Ruyan Wozniak, a married woman and the showrunner behind everything plugged into the walls of the school. Often only found crammed into the small closet with her army of cables and screens, and known for her unending amount of kindness and patience for the students of the school when seemingly nobody else would listen to them, she has grown to become the kids' favorite ''teacher'' of them all, but when asked if it's true that she's married to the gym teacher she will often lie and tell them that theyre siblings, and she's actually married to a famous football quarterback for some reason

Seth Wewason, Aria's younger brother and classmate of Tock, whos always following around Aria and talking about wanting to be a weather forecaster on their local channel some day.

With the support of her friends and two IT nerds behind her, Aria is dedicated to seeing her goal achieved, and to leave the lasting legacy of the founder of the media productions club at her school! But when the Charter School section of her school --- a hallway blocked off from the rest of them, and spoken to in hushed whispers as ''holy curriculum'' full of classrooms with bean bag chairs and no homework --- begin to talk about forming their own media productions club, will Aria and co be able to defy their odds and be the ones to first the school's first-ever video-based morning announcements, or will Aria's only shot be taken away by the prestigious elites of the school?

#comes included with a very obvious bit about middle school currency wars and going to the nurses office etc etc #ocs #what to call it. hmmmm. lights camera classroom there #Lights! Camera! Classroom!

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