After a long, harsh winter, the April ice storm was enough
to leave most Upstate New Yorkers exasperated. But scientific photographer Ted
Kinsman was having the time of his life.
           “I shot 60 images on Friday morning;
then I went out and shot another 200,” Kinsman says. “It was very good. A lot
of ice-covered stuff, power lines down. We didn’t have a good winter last year.
This past winter was great. The more snow the better. Bring it on!”
           Kinsman, who teaches science at
Brighton High School, has carved out a second career in stock photography. His
current specialty: snowflakes.
           “When I see it snow, I think, ‘My
God, that’s money coming out of the sky!’ Every one of those snowflakes; I’ll
be photographing until I can’t even see straight. It’s one o’clock in the
morning, I can barely stand up, and it’s still snowing. All my hard drives are
full. I’ve taken 300 or 400 pictures. I close my eyes and I see snowflakes.”
           In a
world where artists speak of purity of intention and preciousness of imagery,
Ted Kinsman is something of an anti-artist. He creates absolutely stunning
images, sometimes dozens in an hour, but he makes no claims of aesthetic value.
And — heaven forbid — he speaks openly of his continuous desire to come up
with something that will sell.
           “You can go out and take great
pictures but that’s a very small part of photography. The big part is, you’ve
got to sell the stuff,” he says. “I could sell these to a science museum or, if
I was smart, I would probably find a New York art gallery. Get other people to
market it and you’ve got it made.”
           Chances are, you’ve already seen
some of Kinsman’s work. The time-lapse images of a rose blooming at the
beginning of The Bachelor were shot
in his basement. But you’d never know it; Kinsman gets no credit. Nobody
recognizes his shots of microorganisms on a Lysol commercial, or his soap-film
stills used as backdrops in Xerox and Texas Instrument ads. Do stock
photography and nobody knows your name.
           “I don’t even see a lot of the
places it goes,” he says. “I sell to a stock house; the stock house sells to a
producer; the producer sells to a client.”
           Still, somewhere along the line,
Kinsman managed to impress his students with, of all things, pictures of salt
crystals and a fetus. But that was only because they were used on CSI: Crime
Scene Investigation.
           “My students said, ‘You did work for
CSI!’ You could win the Nobel Prize
and it would be minor compared to CSI.”
           Kinsman, 39, lives with his wife
Jennifer and two young children in Brighton. (Another child is on the way.) His
father, who taught material engineering at Monroe Community College, was an
amateur photographer. His mother is an artist specializing in stone mosaics. He
has three brothers in technical fields and a sister who is studying to be a
teacher.
           “None of them ended up in the arts,”
he says. “I don’t even know if I’ve ended up in the arts.”
After earning a degree in optical technology from MCC in 1984, Kinsman spent some time as a bicycle
mechanic in the Yosemite Valley before studying physics at the University of
Oregon in Eugene.
           He spent two years in Washington,
DC’s Naval Research Laboratories as a physicist and worked at Cornell
University measuring the mass of unknown chemical compositions. After earning a
master’s degree in science education at Syracuse University, he took an optics
job in Rochester.
           It was while writing articles for Science Probe magazine sometime around
1990 that Kinsman got seriously involved in photography.
           “You’d write about cool things and
they always wanted photographs, so I got out my old cameras and started taking
pictures of stuff,” he says. “You’d get the paycheck from the magazine and it
would itemize $500 for the article and $1,200 for the photographs. And you
start to realize this isn’t balanced, because the writing is a lot more work
than taking pictures. I got the idea that if I could combine writing with
pictures, I’d have a unique product without much competition.”
           Kinsman learned another valuable
lesson when he wrote a physics textbook for science teachers in the early
1990s. The book had small sales but taught him about making one product and
selling it many, many times.
He had just started
his own publishing business when his brother Andrew brought over something he’d
found tucked away in the far reaches of the Internet: dot patterns.
           “He said, ‘This is really cool —
you stare into these dot patterns and you can see 3D.’ I said, ‘We’ve got to
write a book.’ We spent the summer talking about it and put together a
textbook.”
           Random
Dot Stereograms, published under his brother’s name, explained how these
optical illusions can be constructed. Reviews were mixed.
One editor told Kinsman,
“You’re a moron! Who in the world would buy a book on sandpaper?”
           There were small sandpaper-like dots on most of the pages. But there was
literally more here than met the eye. As people began to understand what the
book offered, the response grew more positive.
           Kinsman was soon getting phone calls
from people who would ask, “Can I buy a few cases? And how soon can you get
them to me?” The book took off, and went through four printings.
Far from sandpaper, the Kinsman brothers’ book provided the groundwork for the Magic Eye craze of the 1990s.
“We
taught the world how to make random dot stereograms,” he says. “Everybody that
bought this book initially started their own publishing companies and put out
posters. The posters sold like crazy.”
           So how come the Kinsman brothers
didn’t make a fortune?
           “We didn’t do it in color,” he says.
“We couldn’t copyright it; it was invented in the 1960s. It was a pretty
obscure technique that was floating around but nobody had applied really good
mathematics and computer programming to it.”
           A stereogram appears to be a random
dot pattern, but is actually a fusion of identical pixelated images viewed at
different distances. Each eye sees a slightly different image and, when viewed
correctly (in a somewhat cross-eyed or unfocused manner), a single 3D image
emerges from the dots.
           Does Kinsman regret the fact he
provided the code that taught others how to get rich?
           “No. That’s what teachers do, isn’t
it? I’m still doing this with other technologies.”
           Though he and his brother did not
make as much money as the publishers of the Magic
Eye books and posters, they did well. Kinsman laughs about another benefit:
All of the companies they helped start sent hundreds of posters.
           “I have one of the best collections
of random dot stereograms in the world!”
           And the book attracted some
fascinating buyers. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, called Kinsman from his home in Sri Lanka
and said he wanted to buy some books. Kinsman, a big fan, sent him some, for
free, and received a nice thank-you note in return.
Around that same time, Kinsman got a call from the head
of Brighton Middle School’s science department. Stressing that the stereogram
craze was a passing fad, he convinced Kinsman to come in for an interview.
           Kinsman began teaching at the middle
school in the fall of 1993 and eventually moved to the high school.
           Looking for a summer project,
Kinsman turned back to photography in 1994. Like a good scientist, he did a
systematic analysis of different forms of photography in an effort to
“eliminate the competition.” He settled on time-lapse photography, bought a
camera, and rigged it with computerized controls so he could time the
photographs.
           Kinsman took pictures of flowers and
insects. The need for new equipment led him to the conclusion that he’d better
sell something. So he projected his results onto a screen in his kitchen and
videotaped the time-lapse sequences. He sent the results to 10 stock houses;
eight wanted to represent him.
It wasn’t long before Kinsman began to understand the stock photo market. His agents wanted
time-lapse traffic and time-lapse clouds for backgrounds in television
commercials. Kinsman built bigger and bigger systems to shoot a variety of
subjects.
           Equipment often had to be modified.
When Kinsman was asked to shoot ice crystals, he had to go out and buy a
refrigerator.
           “I go to Sears and go through all
the specs and wattage and check it for vibration. The guy says, ‘I haven’t had
anyone come in and buy a fridge and check it out as thoroughly as this.’ I
said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to cut a 20-inch hole in the side.'”
           Today, he says, anybody can buy a
digital camera and create time-lapse images at little expense, but people still
call Kinsman to provide images.
           As for his trademark snowflakes, he
shoots them in his garage.
           “You collect them, photograph them,
and then set them free again.”
           But not every snowflake is worth
shooting. In fact, the perfect ones don’t come down very often. Kinsman can
count on maybe four of five days of wonderful snowflakes per year. If he calls
in sick on a snowy day, don’t be surprised to find the principal at Brighton
High looking through a magnifying glass by his office window to see if this is
one of Kinsman’s “perfect” snow days.           Kinsman
has no doubts about the quality of his snowflakes.
           “My goal was to corner the market in
snowflake photography,” he says. “I have the largest modern collection. Anybody
who sees these, if they go out looking for a snowflake picture, they will buy
these. They won’t even touch anyone else’s.”
           So who better to ask the big
question? Is it true no two snowflakes are alike?
           “I have a hard drive of 2,500
images. If I threw in a new one, you wouldn’t know it. There are beautiful
hexagonal snowflakes; you can’t tell them apart. There are ice columns; they
are all identical.”
           But there are some that are not only
unique, but simply extraordinary.
           “I saw this snowflake,” says
Kinsman, pointing to a magnificent picture, “and I said, ‘Let’s take about 30
pictures of that!'”
           After all of this observation,
Kinsman is even more in awe of the wonders of nature.
           “It’s amazing! Everything is
amazing! You can photograph anything and show something unique about its
structure. You’ve just got to look closely enough.”
           Not surprisingly, Kinsman has found
the snowflake market to be somewhat seasonal. His latest call came from a
museum in Latvia. It wants some snowflake photos, but doesn’t have much money.
Kinsman struck a trade: snowflakes for Russian dolls.
Kinsman’s time-lapse photography is not confined to nature. He is one of the world’s experts
in the construction and maintenance of time-lapse photography systems, and has
served as a consultant on every continent except Africa. He does most of this
work over the phone, at a rate of $100 an hour. But he is available to go
on-site for $1,000 a day.
           Just for fun, he supervised a
time-lapse film of a Monroe County Water Authority construction project that
lasted for more than a year in Brockport. The result is a wonderful five-minute
re-creation of the entire process.
           Kinsman’s
time-lapse experiments have also led to some innovations, including his own
variation on peripheral photography. The process, an old technique he stumbled
upon, involves photographing a sequence all the way around the outside of an
object.
           In Kinsman’s computer-generated
variation, thin slices of up to 3,000 images are reconstructed to make an
abstract whole. Through software he designed, a squash or pineapple become
something otherworldly. An iris is transformed into an intriguing abstraction.
           “Now I’ve got to sell them, so I can
get more time-lapse equipment,” Kinsman says, jumping back to the idea of doing
one thing and selling it many times.
           “I can do one set of time-lapse
sequences and sell the time-lapse,” he says. “Then I can apply this technique
to the whole data set and sell it twice more. Then I can take that image, move
it just slightly in time, take the difference between those two frames
mathematically, and sell it again. Then you blow all the color away, apply
false color, and sell it again. If I can find another way to sell it, I’ll be
there.”
           He’ll try almost anything. When
slides don’t come out correctly, he’ll “hit them with a match; you get
beautiful patterns.”
           Kinsman holds up a series based on
Queen Anne’s lace, weaving and bobbing in time-lapse photographs.
           “Time-lapse, especially biological
time-lapse, is like a poor man’s animation,” he says. “I don’t want to be
sitting there moving a little plastic guy’s head for every frame. Let the plant
do it.”
Where does most of this magic happen? A claustrophobic basement in Kinsman’s house, crowded with
equipment, plants, cameras, and computers.
           Dominating
the space is a Schlieren optical rig, a board with two giant lenses on either
end held up by two tripods. A light beam shines through at one end. This
contraption is normally used for visualizing air patterns around jet rockets in
a wind tunnel; Kinsman will use it in a project that involves filming smoke.
           Kinsman shows me around his
basement, taking care not to jar a camera that’s perfectly positioned to take
time-lapse shots showing the growth patterns of castor beans.
           In
another area he pulls apart two carefully positioned strings to transform a
drop of dishwashing soap solution into a rainbow of psychedelic paisley
patterns.
           His basement is full of
microorganisms. He’s got vinegar eels, microscopic animals that secrete
vinegar, and a container of organisms filtered out of nearby Irondequoit Creek.
“Little tiny animals that might be cool to photograph.”
           Nearby he’s growing tobacco, which
secretes nicotine on its leaves. “Flies get stuck in the nicotine and die. I
want to take pictures of flies stuck in there.”
           He recently shot a series on blood
coursing through veins. He used goldfish tails (which are transparent) rather
than dissecting a frog.
           Sometimes the work he does for
clients leaves him with unlikely pets. He had a tarantula left over from a
shoot for a while, but thought better of keeping it anywhere near his kids.His daughter did fall in love with a 16-inch-long millipede.
           While doing all of this unusual work
he sometimes listens to an equally eclectic mixture of music: the techno sounds
of Sash, 90.5 WBER FM, or the first Barenaked Ladies album.
           His next project: human eyes. “The
iris, close up, looks like a gem!” Kinsman says with a childlike sense of
wonder.
           Others may call it art, but
Kinsman’s intentions remain firmly down to earth.
           “You come up with really interesting
pictures and you end up teaching people and getting them interested in
science,” he says. “If it’s a cool picture and it grabs your attention, then
people call it art. I’d just like them to say ‘Wow, that’s great! That’s what I
want to show in my textbook.'”
More of Ted Kinsman’s
photos can be viewed on his website, www.sciencephotography.com.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2003.
