Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Free Lecture: The Invisible Ocean - Extreme Time

Join us for a special lecture telling the amazing story behind the Aquarium's TV ad campaign!

The Invisible Ocean - Extreme Time
When:
Monday, August 12, 7:00 p.m.
Where:
New England Aquarium Simons IMAX Theatre  
Who: Keith Ellenbogen, photographer/videographer and Assistant Professor of Photography, Fashion Institute of Technology; Allan Adams, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Physics, MIT Department of Physics
Register: Click here to register for this free lecture.


Description:
The ocean is full of invisible art, balletic behaviors and magical dynamics that are too fast, or too rare, to be seen. In an extraordinary collaboration, underwater photographer Keith Ellenbogen and MIT theoretical physicist Allan Adams teamed up with the New England Aquarium and Tech Imaging Services, Inc. to capture and reveal these extreme moments in exquisite, luxuriant detail as never seen before. Created using the latest in high-speed technology, Ellenbogen and Adams's footage reveals stunning moments of intense, wild dynamics from an oceanic world that few of us ever get to see. It's a world that is, in a very real sense, invisible. (See example footage of a goosefish and cuttlefish feeding.)

Theoretical physicist Allan Adams (left) and underwater photographer Keith Ellenbogen during filming

This lecture will showcase their work on the Aquarium's Simons IMAX screen, showing the creatures and behaviors they captured in breathtaking slow motion at 1,200 frames per second. The footage is being used in the Aquarium’s 2013 summer ad campaign—the Aquarium’s first television commercials since the 1970s. Along the way, Ellenbogen and Adams will explain how an unlikely dinner conversation and a passion for waves led to some of the most charming animal ads to ever hit the airwaves. Here's the final products!

Lionfish

Blacknose shark
Balloonfish

Speaker Bios:


Allan Adams, Ph.D, Associate Professor, MIT Department of Physics
Allan Adams is a theoretical physicist working at the intersection of fluid dynamics, particle physics and quantum gravity. An avid scuba diver and glider pilot, Adams is obsessed with waves of all forms and with the infinitely complicated dynamics of objects moving through liquids—and has spent more time than he cares to admit trying to capture them on film. His latest work, published recently in Science magazine, uses the physics of black holes to study turbulence in superfluids—movies available online

Adams earned his AB from Harvard, his MA from Berkeley and his PhD from Stanford before spending three years at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. In 2006, Adams moved to MIT, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics.

Keith Ellenbogen, Underwater Photographer/Videographer; Assistant Professor, Photography Department, Fashion Institute of Technology
Keith Ellenbogen is an award-winning photographer specializing in marine conservation and underwater environments. A selection of his professional photographic assignments include expeditions with the New England Aquarium to Fiji as well as to the remote Phoenix Islands, Kiribati. Additionally, Conservation International commissioned Keith on a three-month assignment to the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia for the launch of the Ocean Health Index. He joined Philippe Cousteau on an assignment to Sitka, Alaska, to capture images of wildlife within Tongass National Parks. Keith also photographed the endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna with Oceana on a three-month expedition to the Mediterranean Sea.

Keith was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to Malaysia to showcase the magnificent beauty and diversity of the marine environment. His work has been published in magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times and National Geographic News Watch and in a book of environmental photography entitled Oceans, Heart of the Blue Planet. Keith recently completed the fieldwork in French Polynesia for his first book assignment with Houghton Mifflin. Additionally, Keith was also commissioned by the New England Aquarium to capture images for its 2012 and 2013 summer advertising campaigns.

Keith is an Assistant Professor within the Photography Department at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and holds an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design.  He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Collaboration:
This project is the result of an improbable collaboration embracing art, technology and science to showcase the dramatic beauty of marine animals using ultra-high-speed video cameras. Many of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring behaviors of the ocean's creatures are simply too fast and too rare for the human eye to directly observe.

Keith Ellenbogen, an accomplished marine photographer/videographer, and Allan Adams, a theoretical physicist studying hydrodynamics, realized that these awe-inspiring but nearly-invisible moments could be revealed through the lens of an ultra-high-speed camera. Their initial experiments earned crucial support from the New England Aquarium and from Jim Bales, Assistant Director of the MIT Edgerton Center for High-Speed Imaging and guru of the high speed photography community, who introduced Ellenbogen and Adams to Jason O’Connell at Tech Imaging Services, Inc.

O'Connell and Tech Imaging Services, Inc. contributed invaluable technical mastery and high-speed equipment. With all the collaborators excited about capturing never-before-seen images, they descended upon the New England Aquarium with two truckloads of lighting and camera equipment and began their first filming session with a palpable sense of adventure. Each shot was an experiment, with the lighting and camerawork deployed to capture specific behaviors that Ellenbogen and Adams had scouted, studied and imagined. The results dramatically exceeded expectations, capturing the imagination of the advertising team at Connelly Partners, who teamed up with Engine Room Edit in Boston to produce an irresistible television campaign that is now running on cable stations throughout New England.

Technology:
The images were photographed using Phantom V12 at 500 to 1,200 frames per second, approximately 50 times faster than typical film speeds.

Ad Credits:
Footage produced in collaboration with
New England Aquarium
Boston, Massachusetts

Keith A. Ellenbogen
underwater photographer

Allan Adams
Assistant Professor of Physics, MIT Department of Physics

Jason O'Connell
Tech Imaging Services, Inc.

Conceptualized and produced by
Connelly Partners

Video edited by
Engine Room Edit

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