to conclude the der spiegel space story i visited with george whitesides at the headquarters of virgin galactic. george was born into the field. his father is a harvard chemist, and prior to become CEO and president of virgin galactic he was the chief of staff at NASA. they build their spaceships out in the mojave desert, but maintain an office right in the middle of old town pasadena, next to a fancy soap store and a patagonia shop. you’d never know it unless you paid special attention to the little spaceship drawn on the doorway outside.

when richard branson got done flying balloons around the world he aimed a bit higher – taking private citizens into space, at a price tag of only $200,000 each. get in line, everybody!

ken bowersox, former astronaut, and astronaut hall of fame member was, up until recently, VP of astronaut safety and mission assurance at space exploration technologies (spaceX) in hawthorne, california. it seems he retired from the company at the very end of 2011. what he’s up to now, i’ve no idea, but in his life he’s spent two hundred and eleven days in space. that’s more than seven months. in contrast i don’t think i’ve even spent a collective seven months on vacation in my life, but ken’s hanging out in space.

spaceX was started by elon musk, who, when he grew tired of making money (paypal) decided he wanted to make sports cars instead (tesla motors) and then moved on to spaceships. spaceX’s hawthorne facility is awesome. it’s one of those places i walk into and think “i could spend the rest of my photographic life in this building and probably never get bored.” it’s huge. there are cool things everywhere. hell, even the trash cans are shaped like rocket ships. unfortunately, because of the nature of the work they do it’s also highly, highly restrictive. just getting permission to shoot where we did (in front of the dragon space capsule (above) and the falcon rocket (below)) was really tricky. we had dueling publicists, one said it was okay, one did not. just to be safe, i shot first and asked permission later. there was enough going on that it seemed to work, and ultimately, with the help of the good publicist, permission was granted. (thanks, roger!)

as much red tape as i had to cut through being a photographer, in this case it was far worse being the writer. the client was der spiegel magazine in germany and the writer, being a german citizen, wasn’t allowed within twenty yards of where we were shooting. throughout the facility there were walkways indicated with yellow tape marks. these went right down the middle of the warehouse, avoiding any areas where specific work was being done. apparently these weren’t just helpful navigation -  if you’re not a US citizen you can’t cross the yellow line. period.

when they were showing us around at first i mentioned to roger, the PR contact, that the place looked just like that facility mickey rourke used to build an army of robot drones in ironman 2. he said “oh yeah, that was filmed here. they didn’t really have to change that much around, either.”

this past summer i was very pleased to do a series of portraits for der spiegel magazine on a story about the privatization of space flight. we drove up into the california desert to visit XCOR, a company that makes space ships. more importantly, they make space ships that ordinary people can hitch rides in. well, maybe not ordinary people, but anyone willing to fork over about $95,000 for the chance to get a ride to the edge of space. people like victoria’s secret models. well, to be more accurate, they’re making suborbital spaceships, so they don’t actually go above the earth’s atmosphere. still, they get high enough that the earth looks pretty damn amazing. their lynx spaceship takes off and lands like a jet, on a runway, not vertically, like a rocket. it gets high up enough that you’d have several minutes of weightlessness, and a right to complain about every single other plane flight you’ll ever take in your life.

XCOR is housed inside a giant hangar in a remote neighborhood of mojave where it seems like every building is either abandoned or is housing some tremendously high-tech space gizmo. it’s hot enough outside that you wouldn’t want to leave the air conditioning unless you were going directly into space (where, hopefully, it’s cooler). their facility looks like your neighbor’s garage, if your neighbor was a genius and had way cooler toys than you expected. the vibe inside is very familial. the people who work there love it, obviously. there’s no other reason to live in the middle of the desert. XCOR has a policy where all the employees get rides up to space. how amazing is that? imagine graduating as an engineer and having the option to either work at a desk in some giant company where you probably won’t even have a window,  or going to build rocketships hands-on in the middle of the desert where you are guaranteed a trip to space. sure, it’s hot as hell in mojave and there are no girls around for fifty miles in any direction, but. . . that’s a no brainer.

as we were leaving a couple of the engineers asked if we wanted them to fire a prototype rocket engine for us. i don’t know about you, but whenever someone asks if i want to see a rocket engine i always say yes. this was, of course, a much smaller version of what ultimately goes into their lynx spaceship, but even so, it was very, very loud and very, very hot.

max kellerman and marcellus wiley host the max & marcellus show on ESPN radio 710AM, here in LA each weekday from 10 – 2. i’ve done a few shoots in radio stations and it always proves to be a bit more difficult than it should be. first, there’s glass everywhere. reflective glass. getting rid of reflections can be done, but it takes time. of course, trying to set up and get a decent portrait in the middle of someone’s radio show means that you can only do things during commercial breaks. so, wait around for 20 minutes, set up for 3 minutes. wait around for another 20 minutes, set up for 3 more minutes, and so on.

there couldn’t be anyone in the world less interested in sports or less knowledgeable about sports than myself. i’ve tried and i’ve absolutely failed to see any appeal in it. perhaps this stems from my complete physical inability to play sports as a kid. i went to exactly one day of PE class in 7th grade and never went back. the endless arguing that people like to do about sports facts and figures has also been baffling to me. (though i can appreciate the desire to simply argue for arguments’ sake) people choose teams because they like where they’re from, i guess. it seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual team. since players get transferred around all the time, if players that you like move to a different team in a different city, you’d think your allegiance to the team would shift as well, right? apparently, that’s not how it works. the arguments would hold a lot more water to me if someone just said “i like philadelphia. they’ve got great restaurants, and the parking at the stadium isn’t too expensive.”

sitting there waiting for max & marcellus’ commercial breaks i began to realize what sports fans were, though, and what the appeal might be. it’s so simple, i don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. sports fans are geeks. max and marcellus arguing about statistics in baseball sounds exactly like my friend benj arguing about star wars. to someone uninterested in star wars (i.e., girls) benj’s heated and excitable dissertation on the meaning and inflection in greedo’s speech in the tatooine cantina sounds exactly like sports radio does to me. so, i get it. you’re all geeks. jocks are geeks, too. except that marcellus wiley could absolutely crush benj’s head like a walnut if he wanted to. in the meantime, though, i’d rather listen to greedo.

in the giant venn diagram of popular culture there is increasingly more and more overlap between those of us who are exceptionally academic and those of us who are exceptionally nerdy. sometimes this takes us by a bit of surprise (generally the more academically minded – never underestimate the obsessive power of the nerd), but mostly we can see it coming if we stop to think for a moment. i mean, someone, somewhere liked battlefield earth, right? hmm. . .maybe not.

anyway, one of the ways in which this overlap is presented to the general population is in giant science fiction blockbusters. more specifically, giant science fiction blockbusters that contain their own invented alien languages. complete languages. ones that people start learning and obsessing over, and adding to. but before they can do that, someone’s got to come up with the actual words, sounds and grammar, right? that’s where paul frommer comes in.

when james cameron needed to create the na’vi language for avatar his production company sent an email to the USC linguistics department. this email got forwarded to paul frommer, who spent several years devising the language. starting from a couple dozen words that cameron came up with, frommer generated an overall sound palette for the language, a vocabulary of over a thousand words, an alphabet, and a complete syntax. he made recordings for the actors to help with their pronunciation. he coached them on the set.

at the moment there doesn’t seem to be anyone – frommer included – who is completely fluent in na’vi. but that’s bound to change. when the language forms the core of the highest grossing movie of all time, you’re going to get your die hard fans. frommer says that people write emails to him in na’vi, which take some time to translate, even for him. i asked him to tell me a joke in na’vi, on the spot, but he said it’d take an hour or so to figure it out first. too bad. i have to say, it’s a different thing to hear the language spoken from a normal, non-blue human standing in front of you than to see it in the movie. you hear the words more, the sounds (as foreign from english) are more distinct.

all my life i’ve been able to visualize words in my head. if i hear a word, i almost always, instantly, see it spelled in my head. (this is especially true with names.) in school i studied latin and greek, but it was always written, never conversational. i have to say, for someone like me it’s a little jarring to hear na’vi words and then later see them spelled out as totally different than i’d visualized. is it too much to ask to be a good speller in alien languages, as well?

if you want to learn the na’vi language yourself, don’t worry, the internet can help you with that. look here.

there’s klingon karaoke, and i know paul frommer is looking forward to the day when we can hear na’vi karaoke as well. living on a prayer in na’vi, anyone?

i can speak for all my graphic designer friends when i say that the true travesty of avatar is in its celebration of the oft (and justifiably) maligned papyrus typeface.

i probably watch more TV than is good for me. certainly my DVR has more of a backlog at any given point than i can comfortably manage. if i were a different kind of person i’d blame my parents – a showbiz family who, as i was growing up, not only had a television set in every room (including their bathroom), but would sleep with the TV on, too. on several occasions i would attempt to turn it off after they fell asleep, but they’d just simply wake up, turn it back on and go to sleep again. eventually i had to settle for very carefully and subtly turning the volume down. my father claims that he can only fall asleep if there’s something on that he wants to watch.

this week, of course, the big TV news is that lost is finally over. yes, i am a die-hard lost fan. it covers absolutely everything i love about fantastical stories, and everything i hate about real life (i.e., camping, being stuck outdoors). nick warner is a theoretical physicist at USC, but you can find him on the DVD extras of lost’s fifth season, espousing on the physics of time travel. it’s something the producers put together called “lost university”. it consists of warner and a couple other physicists talking about some of the theoretical science that gets woven into the show.

so, is there real science on lost? eh. . .mostly not. just things stretched and used as plot devices or to make characters sound smart, or (my favorite reason) to show a sense of wonder that could come from actual things applied in a fantastical manner. for nick warner, i think that’s the point, too. they’re not discussing lost as a serious scientific treatise, but i think the hope is that the show (and the “lost university” DVD extras) might get people who would otherwise ignore such things to be interested in science. at the theoretical level, physics really could sound indistinguishable from magic to some of us.

warner says that the key factor in deciding whether he contributes to things like this (or anything involving the intersection of science and the entertainment industry) is the question: “will this make me look like an idiot?”

good advice. perhaps i should apply the same thinking to photography.

[and just in case any of you are paying attention and have become annoyed with the subject heading for this (and similar posts). . .yes, i am aware that i've hardly kept up the scientist posts weekly. in my defense it was entirely my intention to do so, and trust me, i've got a long, long backlog of scientist pictures to do it . . . but, you know. . .things get in the way. so they're not going to be weekly, of course, but i'm keeping the damn title. just because.]

steven pinker is a psychologist at harvard who specializes in the evolution of language. in an appearance on the colbert report he was asked to explain how the mind works in five words or less. his answer: brain cells fire in patterns.

he is a charter member of the luxuriant and flowing hair club for scientists. and yes, that’s a real thing, if not entirely serious.

you can see steven’s brain here.

you can see steve’s genome here.

buy steve’s books here.

in many photo shoots there exists a moment when it becomes possible to drastically shift the whole dynamic, tone and message of the picture. sometimes this shift happens in a decidedly weird or silly direction. then again, i’m a big believer in the idea that you can do very absurd things in photographs just so long as you play it totally straight.

i don’t generally like smiling pictures. you may have already noticed this by now. that is to say, i don’t like it when people smile because they’re being photographed. at it’s very best that’s disingenuous. people are usually not particularly happy about being in a picture. at it’s worst it’s just plain insincere. i always tell my subjects that they are absolutely free to smile in my pictures if the smiles are real – if something is funny, let’s say. very often things are funny, i’d like to think my subjects usually end up enjoying our sessions, though at the end i find that the serious pictures resonate with me much more. perhaps this has to do with my inherent cynicism or pessimism. that’s possible. perhaps it’s got something to do with people often grinning like idiots. hard to say.

anyway, we were photographing brandon for a serious publication, for a serious article; about lawyers who had been laid off of their jobs. brandon was recently let go from his firm and instead of going after a new law job he decided to take his legal talents into the music industry as artist management and promotion. the idea was to photograph him at home (where he conducted most of his new work) and see what life was like for the out-of-work lawyer.

once we were partway through the first set up i happened to notice that on the top of his bookshelf brandon had a plastic optimus prime robot helmet. sometimes you just have to ask. i mean, really. you have to ask. you’ve got nothing to lose. so i asked. and brandon said yes. he put the robot helmet on and got back into the same shot, and everything changed. the helmet even had a voice modulator so that when he talked it sounded like a cool plastic robot voice.

paul and i both knew that the magazine was highly unlikely to ever use these pictures. even brandon knew they were unlikely to be published. maybe that’s why he was so agreeable. but damn if that didn’t make the day a whole lot more special than i thought it was going to be when i loaded up the car in the morning. at the very least i thought the photo editor would have a chuckle going through the take.

the funny thing is brandon said he loved wearing the robot helmet. why, you ask? he said:

“i can smile in here, and you can’t tell.”

and just to reassure any current or future clients who may be thinking of hiring me (you’re saints, each and every one of you. . .) don’t worry: i did variations without the robot helmet, too. ultimately one of these were published, as the picture was just one of many in a larger story, and for some totally unexplainable reasons nobody else was wearing a plastic optimus prime mask on their heads. i know, hard to believe.

a couple weeks after these pictures were taken i was at a target and i saw a whole display with about two dozen optimus prime robot helmets. they were $30. i have to tell you, in all honesty, i stopped in front of that display for a very long time and thought long and hard about buying one just to keep in the light case. i mean, you never can tell.

my thanks to the indefatigable maggie for continually hiring me despite silly things like this. you’re a saint among saints, indeed.

(music by merle travis, available here.)