Photography
Dr. John Nash Ott began his career as a banker, but he soon became interested in photography. His interest in time-lapse photography led to a well-known career in cinematography and, as a result, Dr. Ott performed important research about the effects of natural lighting on plants, animals and humans.
Initially, Ott’s interest in time-lapse movie photography, mostly of plants, was just a hobby. Starting in the 1930s, Ott bought and built more and more time-lapse equipment, eventually building a large greenhouse full of plants, cameras, and even self-built automated electric moving camera systems (the first movie camera motion control systems ever built) for moving the cameras to follow the growth of plants as they developed. He even time-lapsed his entire greenhouse of plants and cameras as they all worked, a virtual symphony of time-lapse movement. His work was featured on an episode of the second incarnation of the request TV show, You Asked For It in the late 1950s.
Ott also discovered that the movement of plants could be manipulated by varying the amount of water plants were given, and varying the color temperature of the lights in the studio, with some colors causing the plants to flower and other colors causing the plants to bear fruit. Ott even discovered ways to change the gender of plants merely by varying the light source color-temperature.
By using these techniques, Ott time-lapse animated plants “dancing” up and down in sync to pre-recorded music tracks. The film, completed in the 1950s, was titled Dancing Flowers.
His cinematography of flowers blooming in such classic documentaries as Walt Disney’s Secrets of Life (1956), pioneered the modern use of time-lapse on film and television. Ott wrote a book on the history of his time-lapse adventures, My Ivory Cellar (1958).
Ott’s experiments with different colored lighting systems and their effects on the health of plants led to experiments with colored lights on the health of animals, then humans, then on individual cells, using time-lapse micro-photography. Ott's experiments led him to believe that only a full spectrum of natural light (including natural amounts of infra-red and ultra-violet) could promote full health in plants, animals and humans. Ott made a second film, Exploring the Spectrum, completed in the 1960s.
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Famous quotes containing the word photography:
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”
—Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)