FACTORALY - E18 PHOTOGRAPHY

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

In this longer-than-usual episode, you'll learn how obsessed the world has become with taking images, where it all started, and how many pictures it takes to capture a nuclear explosion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello! Hello everyone! Hello Simon! Hello Bruce, how are you? I'm very well. And thank you for joining us, everybody, listening to Factorily. Hello to all of our wonderful listeners. And we are voiceovers. We are. We use our voices to do all sorts of things, don't we, Simon? Oh, you've been doing another serious corporate read, haven't you? I've been doing another serious corporate read for a museum. Excellent. That's the strangest thing I've ever heard come out of read for a museum. Excellent.

That's the strangest thing I've ever heard come out of your mouth, Bruce. Well, sorry about that. Yes, I'd rather imagine that your voiceover career is full of sensible and slightly suave material. Trustworthy. Indeed, yes. That lovely word, warm. Warm. Do you know of any voiceovers that don't have a warm voice? I think we can probably all put them on. I'd hate to see someone whose resume says cold voice. Cold and uncaring. Marvellous. Anyway, so talking of cold and uncaring,

today we're going to talk about a subject which takes cold hard facts very seriously. Oh, very seriously indeed, yes. And freezes them in time. And prints them out on a piece of paper to be looked at. Or glass. Or glass. Or digital representation. Exactly. Can you guess what we're talking about today, boys and girls? Today, on this wonderful episode of Factorily, we're going to be talking about photography.

I don't know that much about photography. I know a bit, but I imagine Simon has me beat on this one. The oldest surviving photo that we know of was taken in 1826 by a French inventor called joseph nieps uh who called this thing a heliograph rather than a photograph he had a sheet of light yeah helio yes exactly yeah yeah so he had a sheet of pewter um coated with light sensitive bitumen placed inside a camera obscura is bitumen light sensitive this particular bitumenumen was. Okay. Generally speaking, it isn't. This particular variety. So that's why you don't get sort of roads all lit up with sort of asphalt on them. That would be so cool, wouldn't it?

Well, technically, I guess. You could actually have roads with pictures on them if bitumen is light sensitive. Yeah, you could. It could be like the new speed camera. The road itself would take photos of the cars going past. Listeners, if you're hearing this, this idea is copyright Simon and Bruce. Absolutely. So unless your name's Simon and Bruce, you can't have it.

Yes. And so this heliograph taken by Joseph Niepce in 1826 was a picture of the surrounding area where he lived in France. It was a scene of buildings and trees. And it was very fuzzy and it was very vague. But essentially the light-sensitive bitumen hardened more whether the light shone brightest. OK.

And then he scraped off the bits that hadn't hardened and that's how you sort of ended up with this picture. More of kind of like an etching way where you kind of expose and then rinse off yeah yeah very much so like that yeah um and of course everything was inverted because the the the bitumen hardened where the light was brightest and so you ended up with this negative image which is why we have negatives uh talking of joseph nisse forpice. That's a lot better than the way I pronounced it. Yeah.

He's actually better known for other inventions. Such as? Propellers and boats. Ah. So he also invented the first internal combustion engine called the Pierrot Fort with his brother in 1807. Really? Yeah. So, yeah, so that's sort of how the first heliograph worked,

but it carried on developing. So the bitumen is light-sensitive, you get the image, but then when you try to show the image to your friends in the daylight, it carries on absorbing. And therefore the image is eventually erased. So you have to go you have to go like hey would you like to come into a dark room and see some pictures i've got yeah precisely yeah exactly um does that sound dodgy and that is why we have dark rooms you know in in photography

we have dark rooms so that the the images don't get flooded with light and they they have a red light in the dark room which is enough for you to be able to see what you're doing but without washing out the the picture so yeah so you go into a dark room and you develop um the the the film and then you then you print it yeah you what you use is is is two chemicals you use one to develop the picture and then you need to. Yeah. What you use is two chemicals. You use one to develop the picture. And then you need to stop that chemical process from happening, which is called the fix. Yes. So you put it into a bath of fixative.

Yes. Which stops it from going any further. A friend of mine lives in Barbados. It's hard to get photographic chemicals and stuff in Barbados. So he has it shipped from the UK. Oh, ship. Thank goodness for that um but um it's expensive to ship it um diluted into into a liquid and it's also i think illegal to to ship liquid um fixative right in um in that form so he basically has his

fix shipped as a powder oh i see and he once had a had a um one come through and it got stopped by customs and they asked him to come in to collect it and he said fine and they were going through some parcels and um they came across this this bag full of white powder and and luke said oh that's my fix mean, that's not going to get you out of trouble, is it? That's not going to help, really, is it? He had to explain a lot before he managed to get his fixative out of customs in Barbados. So apart from using fixative and stuff like that, you can also develop your negatives. You can use all the chemicals that you want as well.

There is a thing called caffanol. Is there? Caffanol is basically coffee, vitamin C and washing soda. Right. And you can use that to develop your black and white negatives. Basically, you can develop your film in coffee. Wow. That's quite cool.

So basically, the coffee and the vitamin C form the developer. Right. And then the washing soda adds an alkalinity, so that develops the images. You can actually look up caffinol. I'll put a recipe for caffanel concoction on the website. Cookery with Bruce. So then a little later on in the 1800s, we have an English fellow called Henry Fox Talbot

around the middle of the 19th century. So Henry Fox Talbot took this idea of the negative, you know, the light has come in and made the image stick fast where it's brighter and less so where it's dimmer. He then took another light, shone through the translucent negative onto a piece of paper that was treated

with a mixture of salt and silver nitrate. And ta-da, that's one of the earliest permanent paper-based photographs that we get. Very good. I imagine it took quite a long time to expose this photograph. This particular one, I don't know. The one in 1826 uh the french chap he's he he left his camera open for somewhere between 8 and 12 hours wow to make it work um

which is quite a long exposure time can you imagine sitting and posing for a photo for that long well this is something i discovered which i didn't realise, like sitting for a photo for a very long time, an early photography of people, was that you obviously have to be very still and hold your breath. And the best people who can hold very still and not breathe are dead. Sure. So the best people to take photographs of are dead people. Okay. So what you do is you get a dead person, you dress him all up and you make him look as though he's alive.

And then you just leave the camera exposed and it's a perfect picture. Huh. Dead people are the first people to be properly photographed sharp, be pin sharp. Well, that's a twist that I wasn't expecting us to take. So if you have a dead relative in the camera, I think at this point we do have to mention the French. Okay, then. Because there's a chap called Louis Daguerre, isn't there?

There is a chap called Louis Daguerre. With his daguerreotypes. Talk about the daguerreotypes. Well, you probably know an awful lot more about daguerreotypes than I do. I do know that in 1928, he took a photograph that captured a person. We're talking about the photographs of people. And it was accidental. He took a picture which the exposure lasted about seven minutes.

And it was a photograph of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. Right. And there was a man in the photo standing in the street getting his shoes polished. So he's pretty still. And you can actually see this chap having his shoes polished in this picture from 1928. So yeah, he invented a thing called the daguerreotype process. And the entire process from start to finish was really, really complicated. But without it, we wouldn't be where we are today. It was the first image-capturing actual device that captured an image. Right, OK.

And it was made by a French manufacturer called Sous Frères, Sous Brothers, in 1839. And there was one came up for auction in 2007. Can you guess what it sold for? Ooh, a million pounds. Very close, $800,000. Really? For an old camera. Crikey, I was incredibly exaggerating my estimate there.

I was expecting it to be a lot less. Wow, really? Yeah. That's an expensive. But it is an iconic thing. It's the thing that really started the process off. Yeah, yeah. How interesting.

You said that was 1839? Yes. That's the year that the... Well, allegedly, that's the year that the word photograph was first coined. The word photograph is a portmanteau of two Greek words, photo meaning light, graph meaning drawing. And allegedly British scientist John Herschel was the first chap to use the word photograph in 1839.

We've been using metal plates. We've been using light transferred onto paper through various different means up until this point. It's only in the early part of the 20th century we start getting camera film. So somewhere between 1905, 1910 is the first roll of 35mm film to be produced. And this is sort of a celluloid, plasticky substance

coated in some kind of light sensitive material that gets rolled up in a film, put inside the camera and the film gets moved on bit by bit by bit with each photo you take and therefore produces a whole load of negatives. Large format is a thing which I don't know much about. So to capture these pictures,

originally you needed sheets, basically a sheet of film. Yeah. And you'd have that to a standard size. And what you would do is you'd put that inside a slide. I mean, they were called slide because you actually had a sliding piece of metal or wood that went across in front of the film. So first of all, you'd have the hood over your head, the traditional thing with a bloke holding a flash thing up and the hood over his head. And you would check the picture with a glass slide. So you would see the image projected from the lens on a glass slide upside down.

So photographers had to be really, really good at looking at things upside down. Then you take the glass slide out and you put the film slide in, which had protective sheets over the film. Once it was in the camera in a lightproof situation, you'd close the shutter on your lens. Then you'd take the slide out to expose the film inside this like 10-inch by 8-inch thing. And then you would click a button

which would open the shutter for a certain period of time, which could be quite quick or quite long, depending. And then you would close the shutter again, put the slide back in to cover the film. And then you could take that slide out of the camera and then send it off for developing. And sometimes they were double-sided as well, so you'd have like two to each frame. They were actually called frames because they were made from a frame, like a wooden frame. So when you talk about the framing and the frame of a

picture, that's why you call it a frame. That's brilliant. So this phenomenon of phenomenon So this process of... Da-da-da-da-da. Phenomenon. Da-da-da-da-da.

You can say it again. I'll keep saying it. It's all right. I'll stop now. So this idea of using film, this uh this came about in uh surprisingly early actually this was in 1885 was the first use of film um and this was created by an american gentleman called george eastman um and he he basically set up kodak the film company the camera film company. Now, they're responsible for so much stuff, aren't they?

Yeah. There's a useless fact about Kodak. Is there? Rather, yeah. I love useless facts. Well, you know how lots of brand names are named after people or things or Latin for something? Yes. Kodak isn't.

Okay. What is Kodak named after then? Eastman liked the letter K. Okay. What is Kodak named after then? He liked, Eastman liked the letter K. Okay. All right. So he thought, I'm going to come up with a company that starts with the letter K, and I'm just going to make this name. Maybe two Ks.

Two Ks have got to be better than one. So he basically came up and said, Koko, Koko, Koko, Koko. So, yeah, so it starts and finishes with a K. And it's just a name that he made up on the spot. Just because it sounded good and he thought it would catch on. Just because he liked Ks. That's fantastic. Isn't that good?

That's a great fact. Kodak. It's a Kodak moment. Yes. Wow. And so then George Eastman, having developed Kodak, he started producing cameras on a larger scale. And he sold this camera that had a series of film inside it. You could take around 100 photos on the film inside this camera.

You had to send the entire camera back to the factory. 100 photos, yeah. Wow. Yeah. i haven't found a photo of this i don't know if this is a roll of film or if it's a you know a number of sheets inside but you could take up to 100 photos goodness on this this pre-sealed camera you'd send the whole camera back to the factory to have them print the photos and then post them to you so this is a bit like those cardboard um cameras that you used to buy that they probably don't sell anymore like for a night out and you would like buy the camera yeah and you take the pictures and then you send the whole camera off yes yes i remember i remember seeing something like that at a wedding a number of years ago every table just had this little cheap throwaway disposable camera

for you to capture the moments on. And then, I didn't realise this until I started this research, but it was actually then Kodak who created the first digital camera. A chap called Stephen Sassoon? Oh, was it? Oh, I don't know if I'm across that name. It was 1975. Very good.

It's this huge, great thing that looks like a, I guess about the size of a small suitcase. Yes. And it's the world's first digital camera. That's it. That's the one. Yes. I have a picture of it. If you go to factorily.com and you look at the blog and the show notes,

you'll see a picture of Stephen Sassoon actually holding up the world's first digital camera. Factorily.com, was that? I think I said Factorily.com. Oh, sorry. It's F-A-C-T-O-R-A-L-Y. Oh, Factorily. I was thinking Factorily. Right. No, no, it's fine that's uncorrected um and this this wonderful machine that you've just described took 16 double a batteries to operate

and it weighed three and a half kilos so portable ish portable ish um the uh the camera contained um pixels this was sort of the first use of pixels which are little electronic photo sensitive devices that that trans that sort of translate the capture of light into a digital signal which then makes a digital picture yes how many pixels did it take this this this first digital camera this thing had a sensor that had 100 by 100 pixels. So 0.01 megapixel. Yeah, it's not a lot. It's not a lot by today's standards, you have to admit. What we call low res.

Very much so. Very much low res, yes. Given the fact that I've got a phone on the table next to me which has multiple cameras built into it the smallest of which I think is about 32 megapixels and this thing was what did you say 10 kilopixels yeah it's 0.01 megapixels yeah it's not a lot

but still I was surprised to find that that was all the way back in 1975 I didn't think digital photography had come about until much later than that. There's something even more interesting than that. Go on. It recorded the picture on cassette. On cassette? On a cassette. I remember cassettes.

Well, you know how computer programs used to come on cassettes? Yes, okay. Yes. Yeah, so basically a cassette is just a way of digitally recording something sure yeah so it had like a normal like music cassette was the way that it actually recorded the picture that's brilliant i wonder what they did in order to view it you can't just put that in a tape player can i imagine you well some of the old cameras you could actually view the picture that you took through the camera itself couldn't't you? So you'd actually convert the camera

to put a light source so that it shone through the transparency of the film, through the lens and then projected it. You could use a camera well, you can use a projector as a camera and a camera as a projector. so we've we've we've come a long way from the film camera to the digital camera um but we haven't talked about um black and white and color and things like that oh no you're right

we haven't we've skipped right past that because Because I think the first colour photograph was a lot longer ago than you think. It was about, I think, 1861. There was a chap called Thomas Sutton who worked out a way of separating the spectrum into red, green and blue. And then what he would do is he'd project

these onto a photosensitive plate with corresponding filters. And he was a really brilliant um inventor apparently in 1861 he also created the first slr camera really so the first single lens reflex which basically means one rather than having two lenses one which you look through so i had an old uh oh what was it a rolly cord okay and the rolly cord had two lenses on it had a lens above which was the lens that you saw the picture through, through a series of mirrors.

And then the lens below, which was the lens that actually took the photograph. Okay, right. Right. But this guy invented the single lens reflex, which has a mirror inside it, which flips up. Yes. So you can look at the picture through a mirror or a series of two mirrors. Yeah.

And then, or three or three actually wouldn't it be because you'd have to turn it upside down anyway some mirrors some mirrors and um and uh yeah so that so when you went to take the picture this this mirror would flip up to allow the picture to go straight onto the um onto the film fantastic huh he also developed a wide angle lens in 1859 really? yeah that's so much longer ago than I would have imagined very clever man

do you know anything about flash photography? I know that I have used a flash in photography. I don't know much about it. Was it dangerous? Depends how closely you look to the flash.

Could it explode? I think you know something that you're not telling us. Well, it is one of the most dangerous things about early photography, which is basically a photographer who didn't have enough light to take a picture in natural light yeah had to create unnatural light makes sense and um so you didn't need much of it you just needed like a a flash of light okay hence the flash flash um and so what photographers would do is um they would mix potassium chloride and aluminium okay which is very very volatile right so what they would do is they would put it on a a bar yes uh with a usually an electric spark in the middle of it okay they could trigger by hand

so they would they would hold this thing as far from them as they could possibly get it. So they'd usually put it on a pole of some sort, a fairly short pole, but nevertheless, you need to get it away from your person. And then hold it up, and you needed to time it so that you clicked the flash so that the spark would ignite the potassium, chloride and aluminium. But that would always take like a fraction of a second before that happened. So in that fraction of a second, you'd have to wait

and then open the shutter on your camera for when that flash was at its height. And then shut it again almost instantly. It's like a click, click in thatrikey. In that sort of way. It's no wonder you had professional photographers who went around from house to house, event to event, doing this for you, is it? It sounds like quite a process. Then they had these, I don't know if you remember, flashbulbs.

Oh, yes, of course. So flashbulbs used to pop and they were really heavy and sometimes they would explode too because they put out an enormous amount of light very quickly um and when they were one use only so they would basically burn themselves out the first time you use them yeah and i remember sort of being at things where there used to be a button on the back of your um flash that you pressed in the and the flash bulb would pop out and just fall on the floor. Ah, right. And if there was a lot of photographers, you'd just have a floor full of flashbulbs. I can picture this from various movies sort of set in the 1920s,

the press gathering around a glamorous movie star and all of these explosions and pops and pings and smashes going on. Yes. these explosions and pops and pings and smashes going on yes um we talked about digital photography and you talked about your phone oh yes of course yeah so i mean people these days take an awful lot of pictures, don't they? They do, yes. It's odd, isn't it? We've sort of come from a place where people would stop in the street and take a look at this person with a camera, and it would be a huge event, and it would be a monumental thing. You'd gather your entire family round to have your one annual photograph

taken with your family. And now we're in a position where every single meal every single sandwich every single cup of coffee you've ever drunk gets photographed and shared on social media i know i remember somebody saying once that the average role of film has christmas at either end and a holiday in the middle. Yeah. Okay. That sounds about right. Yeah. But nowadays, as you say, any excuse, you see something in the street you find mildly amusing that you want to, you think your friends and acquaintances will also find mildly amusing if you take a photograph of it.

When you had to pay to have a roll of film developed and printed, there was a value to photography, a kind of value to photography. Yes. A quite literal value. Yes. So you looked at something and, is it worth me taking a picture of that or not? Yes.

Yes. When you've got a roll of only, they used to come in 24s or 36s. Yeah, that's right. Yes. And you sort of sent your film off to the local chemist and waited a handful of days to pick it up again. And you were really disappointed if one was slightly overexposed or underexposed because that's

and there were a whole load of shops that were set up just to do this just you know things like snappy snaps yeah i mean some of them are still going yeah there used to be a wonderful there's a lovely story about a snappy snaps in in ha Hampstead, which is on a corner going down Havistock Hill. And a very, very stoned George Michael in a Range Rover. Right. And the very, very stoned George Michael drove straight into the wall outside the Snappy Snaps, damaging the wall quite severely. Yeah. outside the snappy snaps, damaging the wall quite severely. And within 24 hours, there was graffiti on that wall.

And do you know what that wall said? Wham. Oh, of course it did. Of course it said wham. I was trying to think of all sorts of witty things, but of course it said wham. But nowadays people take digital photographs. Do you know how many digital photographs people take? No, I don't.

I have a feeling that it's about 100 million photos a day on Instagram. Goodness me. And it's about 300 million photos every day onto Facebook. 300 million. I think every 10 minutes there are more photographs taken than were taken in the entire 20th century. Wow.

Well, that makes you think, doesn't it? Yeah. How much of that? It's just a waste of digits, really, isn't it? You can also have a large collection of cameras as well, can't you? There's a chap called, did you read about Dilish Parekh? No, I did not. So Dilish Parekh is a photojournalist from Mumbai in India.

Right. And he reckons he owns about 4,500 cameras. What? So it makes your collection cameras look a bit like modest well i've only got three wow yeah that's amazing he's he's quite quite something i don't know whether he actually is any good at taking photographs but he does i mean with that many cameras you'd like to think he's had a bit of experience wouldn't you of course we're talking about sending photographs off to be developed yeah you didn't always have to do that did you um not if you had your own private dark room i

suppose no or a polaroid oh of course so there was a camera manufacturer called Polaroid. And they're basically famous for the instant camera, instant film. And in fact, the first Polaroid cameras were autofocus. Really? Yeah. Did not know that. So they were amazing. And what they did was they had like a chemical inside that would develop an exposed image that gave you an immediate picture. That's right. And it was like the noise of a Polaroid is just – I'll see if I can put it in, but it's like a click whir noise.

And it's absolutely – you can recognize the noise. Can you give us an impression of it? That's perfect. Absolutely spot on. And here's what it actually sounds like. I preferred yours. I think yours was better. More guttural.

Do you want to talk about pictures that are taken from the air? Yes, I'm sure you could. And the first, guess what nationality the first aerial photographer was? British. No. The other one. American. No. The other one. There's another other one. American. No.

The other one. There's another other one. French? Yeah. Of course. There's an inventor called Gaspar Félix Tournachon. You know, you're very good at your French pronunciations. Thank you very much. You should be a voiceover artist.

I should try that, shouldn't I? But he went up in a balloon in 1858 above Paris. Right. And apart from his name of, I shall say it again, Gaspard Félix Toulachan, he was also known as Nadar. And he was actually a balloonist. And he took his camera on a trip. And he took pictures, but they don't exist anymore.

But we know that he did. Right, OK. But another Frenchman took pictures from above the Earth called Artus Petron. Right. And he had a coffee table book called The Earth from the Air or La Terre vue du Ciel.

Okay. And I was actually part of the exhibition that exhibited those pictures. Right. Now I know exactly what you're talking about, because I've seen that exhibition. Have you? Outside the Natural History Museum? I've seen it outside the Natural History. I've seen it in Waterloo. I've seen it on the South Bank. Oh, fantastic. And it went all around the world as well, so that's brilliant. Did you buy lots of merch? Because that's what we really wanted people to do.

I bought the book, yeah. Oh, there you go. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. So, Hank, the universe astounds me sometimes. So this is X number of years before you and I have ever even met. I have seen an exhibition that you curated and bought a book that you helped to publish. Yeah, I didn't actually curate the exhibition, but yes, I was part of the management team that put it on. Fantastic.

But that toured around a lot, but it wasn't the most popular picture. Wasn't it? What was the most popular? Can you guess what the most viewed photograph in history is? I'll bet you've seen it. Everybody listening to this show has seen this picture. It's that popular. I'm impressed that you got this

because I really wanted to find out the answer to this question. So I went researching some of the most popular photos in the world and I couldn't find a definitive answer. Okay. It was taken by a guy called, believe it or not, Charles O'Rear. Okay. It was taken by a guy called believe it or not, Charles

O'Rear. Okay. In 1996. Right. And it's a view of fields and a blue sky with clouds in it. Yeah. And it was the default wallpaper for Windows XP. Oh, you're kidding me, Bruce. So that picture of

the sky in the field is the most viewed photograph in the world i kind of love slash hate that fact that's really depressing so i looked at some of the most popular photos in the world and you know we've got things like the student standing in front of the tank in tiananmen square we've got a photo of the sailor kissing the lady on the street at the VJ Day celebrations in Times Square. We've got that photo of the workers sitting on top of a girder suspended at the top of a skyscraper.

We've got all these fantastic photos. And the most seen photo in history is the desktop of Windows XP. That's so depressing. Sorry about that. So the world's oldest surviving photograph was just a little thing he did on the side. Yeah. That's fantastic. I had a look at the most photographed celebrities. Now, given the fact, as you've said, you have however many millions of photos being posted on Facebook every single day.

Yeah. These figures have probably changed in the last five seconds that I've been talking. But at the point of conducting this Google search, number one most photographed person was Donald Trump. Oh dear. With 463,574 photos taken of him. Followed by Barack Obama, 336,823 photos taken, followed by Queen Elizabeth II, 230,495 photos taken of her. And I don't really know how that makes me feel.

No, it makes me feel slightly dirty, I have to say. I have another fact about cameras. Oh, go on. So I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but always a good way to start a story. I heard that when Alan Shepard went up in the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7, he, without telling anybody, took a camera on board with him to take pictures out the window. And so he had the very, very first pictures of the Earth from space.

Right. OK. Wow. And when he got back, he sort of said, I have to admit something. I took a camera up with me and I took some pictures. And they went, we didn't allow for that in the weight allocation. But OK, it wasn't very much. Developed the pictures, said, these are wonderful pictures. We have to develop a space camera. And so they developed this camera.

They spent a lot, I mean, a lot of money, an awful lot of money on getting this camera made. And one of the guys in charge of the project had a prototype on his desk. Right. And a friend of his came for lunch one day and went and sat in his office while the guy sort of nipped out for a bit and he saw this prototype. And when his friend came back from wherever he was, he said, why have you got a Hasselblad on your desk?

Right. And he said, I'm sorry? He said, that's a Hasselblad on your desk? Right. And he said, I'm sorry? He said, that's a Hasselblad, isn't it? And what had happened is that the NASA scientists had looked at what would make the perfect camera for space, and they had basically reinvented this Hasselblad. Wow. So they scrapped the whole project.

And when Apollo 11 took off, they had 12 hasselblad cameras yeah and they left them on the moon really there are actually hasselblad cameras on the moon oh that's brilliant so they basically swapped them out because they decided they were too heavy so they left them and they took 25 kilos of rock back and they did bring the film back with them obviously but you would hope yeah cameras yeah so there are cameras on the moon do you know what when you first started talking a while ago about um the most seen image i thought it was probably going to be that that photo of an astronaut putting the american flag oh what the faked one i can't say that you can't say that on this podcast bruce we don't know who's listening no i should say here now that it wasn't faked.

You should. You really should. Because the Russians, if it had been faked, the Russians would have made a really big deal out of it. But they didn't. Now, since we've just veered into the realms of scientific photography, I recently found out that a gentleman at Caltech called Li Hong Wang, who's a medical engineering and electrical engineering professor,

he has developed a camera to take photos of nuclear fusion and radioactive decay and all that sort of stuff and this camera takes a staggering 70 trillion frames per second that's slow-mo it's really really slow-mo really slow-mo isn't it um it uses lasers and all sorts of i did have quite an in-depth look at how this thing worked, and I still don't understand it, so I'm not going to go too far into it. But 70 trillion frames per second. I think my Canon 700... Second. Sorry, 70 trillion frames per second. Per second. Wow. Given how instantaneous a nuclear reaction is,

if you're going to take slow-mo photos of that, it's got to take an awful lot of frames per second yeah i think my canon 700d slr takes about um 50 frames a second that's quite a lot though that's that sounds like a sort of like a whiz doesn't it go yes yes that is always i would imagine this thing is even is inaudible high-pitched wine probably even beyond beyond the levels of ability to hear i should think so there were probably probably dogs nearby going going nuts goodness me yeah that's crazy and we haven't talked about things like you know the way they film the matrix with that sort of bullet time thing as well oh yeah used used like

a lot multiple uh cameras yeah absolutely um that's for another day we probably haven't talked about um a lot of things actually it's one of those subjects well i'll tell you who could talk to us about them who's the people who are listening to this podcast because they know probably a lot more about cameras and photography than we do of course the factora lights oh that's a good one. That just came off the top of my head. Shall we use that? Shall we use that one?

Factoralites. The factoralites. Ooh, factoralites. There you go, listeners. You have a theme tune. They're like electrolytes, but better for you. Brilliant. Okay, so the Factoralites will hopefully let us know

what they think of the show. Yes. They'll like us. They'll subscribe. They'll tell their friends, all of their friends, not just the two. No, all of them. Yeah.

Four. And just tell everybody that this is an interesting thing to listen to. And also, you know, you get like one-star reviews, two-star reviews, three-star reviews. Yeah, rubbish. We're not interested in any of those reviews. No, we're not. We just want the full-on, full-fat, five-star review, please.

Thank you. We appreciate it. We do. We really, actually, no, seriously, we do, because it helps enormously with getting our rankings up on the podcast players and making sure that more people can enjoy the stuff that you enjoy. So on that note, we're all out of facts. You're all out of listening capacity.

So thank you all for listening. I've been Simon Wells. And I haven't. That was snappy.