Photographers Blog

Outside Hanksville, Utah

By Jim Urquhart

I may be a Red Shirt but I made it to Mars.

According to Urban Dictionary (the finest source of American literature), a Red Shirt is defined as; A character in a science fiction or adventure story whose sole dramatic purpose is to get killed by the story’s villain and/or itinerant monster. Taken from the propensity of security officers on the original Star Trek series (who typically wore red uniform tops) to be killed in the episodes’ pre-opening-credits teasers.

GALLERY: LIFE ON MARS

When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut but I never had the discipline to follow through. At one point I wanted to be a scientist but I barely made it out of high school and later dropped out of college but not until after I learned a little chemistry for recreational use in my younger days.

Even with my Red Shirts I have always been wanted to be around people that put their minds and bodies to the test. I even married a woman that has three Master’s degrees and is working on her Ph. D. I have always prided myself in consuming as much science news as possible. To me, the mind and the search for tangible knowledge is the fuel for dreams and will lead you to adventures in life.

So with that said, when I heard about the Mars Desert Research Station in the desert of southern Utah I knew I had to go. I had tried for years to go but my story pitches never made the cut, maybe I wasn’t an experienced enough photojournalist at the time for an agency to trust me with an assignment that took quite an investment to tackle. At times I had thought this place was going to be my Red Shirt assignment.

But now it seems in recent years science and space exploration have become sexy again. I made the story pitch and then I was on the road. Traveling through the desert of southern Utah is always a treat. It is a stark and naked land that has not seen much of the touch of man and at many places is devoid of any life. And as a fan of science, I have always been a fan of movies that dealt with space is some way and Utah has played host to many of my favorites. With those images in mind, I have often found myself pretending in my head that the trail I was hiking was actually on a distant planet and I was searching for signs of alien life.

By David Gray

The alarm woke me at 6am so that I could catch the sun as it rose slowly above the buildings to the east. But this was no ordinary sunrise. This was the morning when the sun had a black dot slowly moving across it, and that black dot was the planet Venus.

SLIDESHOW: VENUS JOURNEYS ACROSS THE SUN

Photographing the ‘Transit of Venus’ as it is known, was something that I was not at all familiar with. For a start, the total time would be around 6 hours. This was extremely slow in comparison to the eclipses I had previously photographed, with ‘totality’ (when the moon completely covers the sun) lasting on each occasion just 11 and 90 seconds. These celestial events, of course, involved the sun and the moon, but this one amazingly would involve a planet. The difficulty of this was that the sun would remain at its normal brightness the entire time.

So, I figured this could be dealt with in two ways. As the transit began in Beijing at sunrise, it would be possible to photograph it just as it appeared above the horizon due mainly, believe it or not, to the pollution that blankets Beijing on any normal day. This would reduce the brightness of the sun enough to allow direct viewing and thus making a photograph possible without the need for any filters. So I awoke at 6am, walked onto my balcony, and to my surprise, could not even see the sun. The haze was so thick in the morning, that the sun was totally obscured. So I waited. 6.30am came and still nothing. 7am rolled on with the sky completely lit up but still with no sun visible. Then at 7.30am, I could just make out a small circle of red peeking through the grey. I grabbed my 400mm lens, added a 1.4x converter, and took some frames. At first I didn’t see anything, but when I magnified the image on the back of my camera, there it was, a black dot that was very obviously not the same as the 3 sun spots also visible.

By Benoit Tessier

France has a launch pad 7,000 km away from Paris in French Guyana, an overseas region located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America.

For the first time in spatial history, two satellites from the Galileo navigation system program are going to be sent to space using the mythical Soyuz rocket which, during previous launches, sent the first satellite (Sputnik) and the first man (Yuri Garagarin) into space. The event is historic and shows the progress made in space exploration since the end of the cold war. The launch was delayed by three years from its original launch date and I was at last going to be the lucky one to cover the launch, designated “VS01”.

The only problem was that I had never set foot in French Guyana nor previously photographed a rocket launch!

The first time I saw the Soyuz rocket, I could not believe that this “construction” could take people into space. Even ten years later, after covering many launches, it still surprises me the level of determination with which people wanted to go into space that led to the building of a huge complex called the Baikonur cosmodrome.

Every visit I am overcome with mixed feelings. On one hand, even 50 years after the first manned space flight, space remains a sphere of high technology and garners special attention. But the storm of the Soviet Union’s collapse left its indelible mark on the map of the spaceport. Abandoned and rusting construction, giant structures and mechanisms are silent witnesses of the space complex’s era of glory. Nostalgia resonates in every story about the history of Baikonur. Space exploration has never been a simple technological development. Everyone who served personally conquered space and the service is overgrown with tradition cherished to this day. There is no policy or ideology in it. It is rather a particular style of the Soviet, now Russian, cosmonautics. Simple and quick solutions were chosen in the race for supremacy in space. Sometimes it seems to me that there is no nanotechnology that can force these cherished orthodox methods to be abandoned.

Only here is the giant rocket assembly hangar with precious technology cleaned with the help of a simple handmade swab; exciting a creative impulse in approaching photographers.