Alan Friedman is a fascinating guy. By day
he’s a maker of greeting cards and
a lover ofhats, but in his
spare time he’s a self-proclaimed space cowboy who points a telescope skyward
from his backyard in downtown Buffalo, directly into the light of the sun.
Using special filters attached to his camera Friedman captures some of the most
lovely details of the Sun’s roiling surface. The raw images are colorless and
often blurry requiring numerous hours of coloring, adjusting and finessing to
tease out the finest details, the results of which hardly resemble what I
imagine the 10-million degree surface of Sun might look like. Instead
Friedman’s photos appear almost calm and serene, perhaps an entire planet of
fluffy clouds or cotton candy. From his artist
statement:
My
photographs comprise a solar diary, portraits of a moment in the life of our
local star. Most are captured from my backyard in Buffalo, NY. Using a small
telescope and narrow band filters I can capture details in high resolution and
record movements in the solar atmosphere that change over hours and sometimes
minutes. The raw material for my work is black and white and often blurry. As I
prepare the pictures, color is applied and tonality is adjusted to better
render the features. It is photojournalism of a sort. The portraits are real,
not painted. Aesthetic decisions are made with respect for accuracy as well as
for the power of the image.
Although the photos above are amazing, Friedman offers extremely
high-resolution views of his work on his Tumblr and
you can pick up some prints over on Photo-Eye.
He also recently gave a TEDx
Talk.
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