Powerhouse Museum - Photo of the Day

Photo of the Day turns two today!

2009-11-13T09:40:49Z

Today we are celebrating Photo of the Day turning two. I am going to share some of the statistics with you over the next week that I have about this blog, the first being that we there are 141, 000 words associated with the images. The statistics are interesting but more than the stats it is the amazing feedback that we get back from you that inspires us. There is some incredible research going on and connections being made. Thank you for participating with this blog it is very much appreciated.

Photography by Paula Bray
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

William Hetzer stereoviews join the Commons

2009-11-12T05:49:47Z

This week we have added another small collection of photos to the Commons on Flickr and this is one of twelve stereoviews that we are now making available for you to see and use. This original was created by William Hetzer and was published in one of the earlier sets of William Hetzer’s stereoviews, This image is especially relevant to the Powerhouse Museum collections as it is the earliest photographic record of Australia’s first Locomotive. Appropriately named Locomotive No. 1, this train is now part of the Powerhouse Collection. This locomotive arrived in Sydney in February 1855 and worked on the NSW rail lines until March 1877 when it was withdrawn from operation after having travelled more than 250,000 kms.

Flickr member Thiophene_Guy has already made an animated gif of this image and describes this as:

The purpose here is not to duplicate the original image, from the Powerhouse Museum collection but to generate an animated gif to assist viewing.

See the gif here

Stereoview by William Hetzer
No known copyright restrictions

Constructing Artefact H10515

2009-11-11T20:31:38Z

Constructing Artefact H10515, originally uploaded by Powerhouse Museum.

My time-lapse sequence of the Artefact H10515 exhibition was shot with a Canon EOS-1D Mk1 fitted with a 20mm f2.8 wide-angle lens and a Canon Remote Control Timer which I set to trigger every 2 or 15 minutes depending on the amount of activity I thought would occur each day.

The camera was mounted on the lighting-grid in the ceiling of the exhibition using a Manfrotto 3D tripod head on a super clamp. In that location the camera was surrounded by exhibition lighting which would probably be repositioned during the exhibition installation so I added a pair of make-shift ‘barn-doors’ on either side of the lens to minimise lens-flare.

Once I had the camera positioned I connected its AC converter to a continuous power supply and set the camera to manual focus with Aperture-Priority automatic exposure set to f11 at 100 ISO. The exhibition is relatively dark and I knew my exposures would vary between 5 and 30 seconds but that suited me because I wanted to blur the motion of people working on the installation.

The project took about 30 days to shoot using two 4Gb SandDisk Extreme III CF memory cards and every day or two I checked the camera and swapped cards so it would continue its capture while I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to download, edit and process the latest RAW files into screen-sized JPGs.

Altogether I shot about 2000 images, which I edited down to around 1100, and 850 effective shots that could be used in 60-second and 90-second versions of the time lapse sequence. The shorter of these started at the point where the exhibition developers installed new rear-projection material on the inside of the glass cube to achieve better image contrast than the material originally specified.

Finally I used an early version of Apple iMovie software to produce the two time-lapse sequences using a duration of 0.3 seconds for the majority of the images, with longer transitions at the beginning and end where I used titles and some supplementary images to finish off the project.

Photography and post by Geoff Friend
© All rights reserved

Write your own label

2009-11-10T09:15:23Z

This is a label written by one of our visitors to the Odditoreum display that we featured earlier in the year. This display showcased a selection of weird and wonderful curiosities from deep within the vaults of the Museum’s collection. Children’s author Shaun Tan then gave these unusual objects a different story about the objects that blurred the line between fantasy and fiction.

Within this experience the visitor was encouraged to write their own interpretation of the objects and then share them with other visitors in a special display. This is one of the labels that was written by an eleven year old. It reads:

Mutated Moth
This amazing moth was found in the deepest Borneo where it had mutated to the size of an incredibly small lawn mower whilst being dissected by the greatest scientist that ever lived.

Rhona 11.

Photography by Paula Bray
© All rights reserved.

An Australian rabbiter making a living from pests

2009-11-09T04:22:20Z

The release of rabbits into the Victorian bush in 1859 was an environmental disaster. The 24 animals multiplied to plague numbers that are still with us today. Rabbits affect biodiversity and cause soil erosion by tunnelling into the ground and nibbling plants to the roots.

Trapping provided food and income for many people until it was banned in NSW in 1980. Today it is considered more humane, efficient and effective to control rabbits by destroying burrows, building fences and using viruses such as myxoma and calici.

Photography by Henry King Studio
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Sandra McEwen, Principal Curator

Garden Palace organ

2009-11-08T09:07:15Z

By April 1879 the Commissioner’s of the 1879 International Exhibition had agreed to the purchase of an organ for the ‘Garden Palace’ building and appointment of a musical director to oversee the recitals. Alongside traditional works to resound around the exhibition halls over the following six months was a full orchestral work, Sydney International Exhibition March, especially composed by Giorza. Like the International Exhibitions that preceded it there were complaints about the acoustics, and even more about the ‘leathern congestion’ of the organ, but this didn’t stop 30,000 attending one of the performances held in the ‘Garden Palace’.

Photography by Messrs Richards and Company
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Geoff Barker, Assistant Curator

The 80s are back

2009-11-07T09:03:10Z

This is one of the behind-the-scenes shots taken for our upcoming exhibition The 80s are back. This was taken in our conservation photography lab as we were using the photographic studio to shoot the audio-visual content that will be featured in a special display in the gallery.

This exhibition will explore the decade’s styles, trends and subcultures, and how they found expression in fashion, design, music, film and television. Keep an eye on our 80s blog where you can nominate someone who was prominent in the 80s for a Q&A series that we will feature online

Photography by Sotha Bourn
© All rights reserved

Commercial Bank in George Street

2009-11-05T04:01:15Z

This stereoview showing the Commercial Bank in George Street was taken from a building located near to the centre of the city in what we now call Martin Place. It is one of a set of images from William Hetzer’s stereoviews. Barrack Lane, now known as Barrack Street, is on the left and one of Sydney’s shortest streets. The Commercial Bank building is no longer in George Street but the façade of the building was donated to Sydney University in 1923. On the other side of the street is the original David Jones building that was built in 1838.

Stereoview by William Hetzer
No known copyright restrictions

Sydney International Exhibition Album is added to the Commons on Flickr

2009-11-05T03:10:07Z

We have just released eighteen images taken from the Sydney International Exhibition Album featuring images taken of the Garden Palace from around the 1880s. This palace was the main feature of the Sydney exhibition which was over 244 metres long and had a floor space of 112,000 metres.

Geoff Barker has been contributing some posts to Photo of the Day about the Garden Palace that are from this album. Due to the interest in this collection they have since been added to the Commons on Flickr under no known copyright restrictions. Geoff writes:

“The main feature of the Sydney exhibition, like the international ones that preceded it, was an ornate building, the ‘Garden Palace’, which was over 244 metres long and had a floor space of over 112,000 metres. This building, and a number of smaller ones, was erected in the grounds of the Sydney Domain where it dominated the Sydney skyline for three brief years before the ‘Garden Palace’ was destroyed by fire in 1882.

These photographs are significant to the Powerhouse museum because the ‘Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum’, as the Powerhouse was then known, had earmarked objects on display to be among its first acquisitions. In 1880 a committee started selecting specimens and many of these were housed in the Ceylon court in the Garden Palace building.”

These images are also significant because they give us an insight into what this building was like before it burned to the ground.

Photography by Messrs Richards and Company
No known copyright restrictions

George Street Markets, Sydney, N.S.W., No. 1

2009-11-04T02:29:57Z

Sydney’s George Street Markets once stood on the site now occupied by the Queen Victoria building, (QVB). At the time that this photograph was taken, photography of interiors was constrained by lighting conditions and it was the presence of skylights or large windows that often determined the production of an image. Even in the available light, many of the people in this scene are blurred due to the length of the exposure that was required.

Photograph by Henry King. Tyrrell Collection
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Kathy Hackett, Photo Librarian

The biggest radio galaxy in the sky: an Australian first.

2009-11-03T03:28:11Z

Centaurus A is a radio galaxy that is the nearest active, supermassive black hole in the Universe. This image is the first to show its full extent at radio wavelengths, covering almost 10 degrees from end to end, and twice the extent of the Southern Cross. The huge reddish radio lobes combine data from the Parkes radio telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array at Narrabri. At the centre of the lobes is the optical image of the galaxy known as NGC 5128. This was also discovered in Australia, by James Dunlop, at Parramatta Observatory, in 1826. This inner image (inset right) is pretty stunning too, and includes submillimeter radio data (orange) and Xray data (blue).

Outer image credit: Ilana Feain, Tim Cornwell & Ron Ekers (CSIRO/ATNF). ATCA northern middle lobe pointing courtesy R. Morganti (ASTRON); Parkes data courtesy N. Junkes (MPIfR).

Inner image credit: (Optical), ESO/WFI/AAO (UKST); (Submillimetre), MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al.; (X-ray) NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al.

Inner and outer images combined by David Malin.
Post by David Malin, From Earth to the Universe team.

Street life, Paddington 1969.

2009-11-02T03:08:45Z

This great image, which forms part of the David Mist photographic archive, was taken in Paddington in 1969. This glimpse of daily life around the streets of Paddington was one of the images that didn’t make it into David’s book on the life in around the city titled ‘Sydney’ that was published in 1969. Around this time David produced two documentary style photographic publications that were quite different to his commercial fashion photography, one being on life in and around Sydney and the other about Australian women.

This shot features the Dandy Dog salon that used to be located in Paddington which was apparently one of the first grooming salons in NSW.

Photography by David Mist
© All rights reserved

On board

2009-11-01T20:36:56Z

Group on board ship, originally uploaded by Powerhouse Museum Collection.

This image was taken by photographer Tom Lennon on board a ship on the 2nd March 1934. There was an inscription on the box that this negative was located in that reads ‘Mr Grant [indecipherable] Zealand / D.B.N. 2/3/34′. The magazine that the man in the centre is holding is a copy of the monthly industry magazine, “The Australian Music Maker and Dance Band News”. This was published in Sydney by the Australian Dance Band News Ltd from 1932 and its editors were Eric J. Sheldon 1932-36 and George Hart 1936-40.

There are a few images from the Tom Lennon photographic archive that I have been loading to the Commons on Flickr recently that were taken around the ship and wharf, including this image Group [farewelling Eric Sheldon and band?] on wharf and possibly this one taken on the ship, Eric Sheldon’s bass drum.

Photography by Tom Lennon
No known copyright restrictions

Movember

2009-10-28T02:22:54Z

Welcome to Movember! Formerly known as November, this is the month when thousands of men around Australia bring back the moustache in order to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues, notably prostate cancer and depression. Now in its sixth year, the Movember Foundation has raised almost $62 million globally and continues in its efforts to change the attitude men have towards their health.

Statistics show that men have a shorter life expectancy than women. Though the reasons for this are numerous, part of the problem is the stigma many men associate with openly discussing their health with others. Studies prove that men still access health services less frequently than women, often due to embarrassment in sharing their medical concerns and questions with a doctor. Movember aims to address this issue and change the community’s way of thinking by approaching the subject in a lighthearted manner, encouraging men to feel confident in discussing their health issues with friends, family and their general practitioner.

Curiosity in this upcoming charity event led me to carry out an online search of our collection, which returned several photographs of men sporting some rather impressive moustaches, such as this photograph taken by Hedda Morrison at a folk festival in Stuttgart, Germany in 1931. Wearing a jaunty tri-cornered hat and buttoned vest, I’m sure this gentleman would have had no shortage of admirers.

And for all the men out there wondering about the allure of a moustache to today’s modern woman, please consider the old English proverb ‘A man without a moustache is like a cup of tea without sugar’. On that thought, I’m off to the café.

Photography by Hedda Morrison
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Kate Scott, Assistant Registrar

Happy Halloween

2009-10-30T05:41:57Z

The association of bats with Halloween may have originated with the discovery of the vampire bat in the 17th century.

These two taxidermy specimens are Australian flying-foxes, otherwise known as fruit bats. They are mammals, and are members of the Pteropodidae family, found mostly on the eastern coast. Flying foxes are very social animals and often roost in large numbers. A cloud of dark winged creatures travelling across the evening sky is a familiar sight in Sydney when members of the Royal Botanic Gardens’ flying-fox colony venture out from their permanent camp in search of nectar, fruit and pollen in the local area.

There is more about the Australian flying-fox at the Botanic Gardens Trust

Photograph: Australian flying foxes, by Henry King. Tyrrell collection
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Kathy Hackett, Photo Librarian

Crux

2009-10-29T02:24:16Z

Crux, the Southern Cross, is the smallest constellation in the sky yet one of the most distinctive, at least to those of us who live in the southern hemisphere. It was once part of Centaurus, where the bright stars Acrux and Mimosa could easily be imagined as the rear hooves of the rearing mythical centaur. However, when Christian sailors began to explore southwards in the 16th century, this memorable asterism took on a new significance.

Alongside the Southern Cross is a very distinctive dark shape known as the Coalsack, much used by southern hemisphere astronomers as an indicator of a dark sky. The Southern Cross is visible from most of Australia at some time every night of the year. Its long axis points towards the south celestial pole, so the Cross itself acts as a very convenient circumpolar clock, compass and calendar.

Credit: Akira Fujii/David Malin Images
Post by David Malin, From Earth to the Universe team.

Garden Palace

2009-10-28T02:53:40Z

The Sydney International Exhibition opened the doors of its main building the ‘Garden Palace’ on 17 September 1879. 130 years later the event still represents a milestone in the development of Sydney and over the seven months it was open 1,045,898 visitors that passed through its gates.

The main feature of the Sydney exhibition was an ornate building, the ‘Garden Palace’. This photograph was taken from Macquarie Street looking towards the gates on the western face of the ‘Garden Palace’ exhibition building. The architect James Barnet had designed the east, rather than west, face to be the main frontage. But the grandeur of this building, sketched out in a week, is still evident even from this angle. The exhibitions which first greeted visitors entering from this side were the New South Wales Court, on the left, and the Queensland and New Zealand Courts, on the right.

Photography by Richards & Co; 1879 – 1880
No known copyright restricitons
Post by Geoff Barker, Assistant Curator

Grecian Court

2009-10-26T22:25:28Z

This stereo photograph is of the ‘Grecian Court’ at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. It is one of the many taken during the 1862 ‘International Exhibition’ by the photographer William England. Two men who have been carefully posed between the pillars on the left can be seen looking directly at the camera.

Photography by William England
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Geoff Barker, Assistant Curator

Fishing at Lake Conjola

2009-10-26T10:28:43Z

This image, showing a group of people holding fish, was taken on the 21st February 1937 on the south coast of New South Wales at a beautiful area known as Lake Conjola (see Google Maps). This lake is located 10 km north of the town Milton and is a very popular holiday destination where the lake opens up to the sea. This is another image from our collection titled Lake Conjola shore that was probably taken slightly further up the lake, plus some others that were taken by the same photographer in this area.

They were shot by Sydney born photographer, Tom Lennon, who operated a commercial and portrait studio at 64 Victoria Road, Drummoyne, NSW during the 1930s and 1940s. We have 1796 negatives in this collection that showcase social scenes in and around Sydney including balls and dinners held in Sydney, but also include weddings, funerals, work events, parties, portraits, pets, fashion and horse races.

Photography by Tom Lennon
No known copyright restrictions

From Earth to the Universe

2009-10-25T06:31:57Z

This was taken during the installation for our exhibition From Earth to the Universe. This exhibition celebrates the International Year of Astronomy celebrating 400 years since the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei first used a tiny telescope to observe the night sky. There are some incredible images in this exhibition that showcase the beauty and mystery of our Universe. David Malin has been sharing stories about these images with us on Photo of the Day on an ongoing basis and has been selecting these from over 100 large-scale images that make up this exhibition.