the naked eye. There's so much that's just beautiful and their image will capture correctly.

Being able to show people a massive amount of time in

a short piece, I think is really beautiful.

Having that power with the

format is something that's extremely beneficial for people

to appreciate what is already there.

Science can be beautiful. Art can be scientific.

Some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen are produced either through a

telescope or through a microscope.

At it's heart, the microscope will basically allow you to see something that you

cannot see with the naked eye. Photomicrography began in the 1830's. William Talbot

basically took a light microscope, removed the

eyepiece and projected the image that he would've seen with his eye

on to a white wall. He then took a photograph of that image

and that was basically how it began.

Today, photomicrography is relatively easy to do.

In the simplest case, you can basically just attach a

camera to the eyepiece. And so that's actually used very commonly for

imaging things like

crystals to insects to fluorescent images

of intracellular particles, of virtually

every single cell and tissue within the human body. When you spend your time staring at images

you can't help but

think about the aesthetic of what you're looking at

and how best to present that image.

So a lot of those issues

people think about when they're taking a conventional photograph, also apply to photomicrography. The only

difference is that we may be looking down a microscope as opposed to looking at a macroscopic object.

You can photograph the moon, any of the plants in the solar system. You can photograph the sun,

stars, galaxies: the biggest and most numerous objects out there.

In the late fifties, early sixties everybody wanted to see the stars and so did I and that's how I

started in photography.

Most of us are using full spectrum cameras like a Canon or a Nikon DSLR.

In the case of the hubble images, they're looking at narrow-band filters of iron,

sulfur, oxygen, hydrogen and trying to pick up the light from

different nebulae that are fluorescent in these narrow back holes.

The sheer art of the images, the colors, the dynamic range, and the shapes and the beauty.

That's one level of attraction. And the other one is the science, the knowledge those same

images provide.

They teach us things. The photographs and the general study of the night sky

shows us our true place in the universe as little tiny things of

not much consideration or significance.

Basically by looking back out into space, we're in a way looking back at ourselves.

The element that draws you into slow motion is it's a moment that slows down the action and

presents it to you in a much more clear fashion.

The technology behind slow-motion is allowing the lens on the camera to open up and see more frames in a condensed period of time.

In terms of slow-motion exhibition I think the most interesting aspect of it

is the fact that we're allowed to see now things we've never seen before. For example

the hummingbird's wings flapping. You couldn't see that under any other circumstance

beside high-speed slow-motion acquisition. Eight Hours in Brooklyn was almost an experiment. Coming from a

documentary background, I always thought it would be really cool to shoot docu-style with the phantom.

The subject matter was all just us driving around on a Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn in the summer.

My favorite clips in the whole thing are the clip of the basketball players screaming and the clip of the kids in the spring yard because those

are actually moments of raw spontaneity and raw emotion and that kind of stuff can't really be staged. In India we shot a festival called Holi. It's a celebration

for Indian culture.

It's just these beautiful colors and things being thrown around. It's really awesome to see people

coming together in this atmosphere where without the colors it's very depressing.

But once the colors go in the air and the smiles are on people's faces, there's a very

spiritual experience. I think why I love shooting slow motion so much is because it adds this

beautiful aesthetic to where people actually want to look. I'm just passionate

about making people aware of the beauty of life.

I like the idea that photographers work their entire life to

capture a few hours of time.

There were forty thousand images in the Manhattan Project and it took me five months.

It was an idea of slowing down the rest of the world while speeding up the people around it.

When I first moved to New York City it was extremely intimidating. The grandiosity of it.

There's so many talented people,

there's so many things happening that it's hard to feel like you're anything better than anything else.

You want to do something big and you're going to make

it and you get here and you feel like a tiny little speck.

This project for me was a way of wrapping my arms around the city and being able to feel

more than this city made me feel.

I wanted to show the humanity. I had to stop focusing on

pretty buildings and tons of cars. I wanted it to have that wave from the humanity

of it up into the grandiosity of it and

back down into the humanity of it again.

What the camera allows you to see is what people call the beauty of nature or the symmetry of

nature.

New technologies allow us to see things that we could never see before.

What that appeals to and what

that speaks to is just the curiosity of the human mind.

I think it's cool for people to see things they've seen so many times before shot in this different format

and get people to

appreciate what is actually already there.