Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

The Wheels Peeking In



_DSC5285 (1), originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Since the D300 was announced as having a 100% viewfinder, I was reminded that I gave that up for the 95% view of the D80. The Olympus E-1 had 100%, which was one reason why I chose it over the Nikon D70 at the time.

I compose my images in the camera, generally not cropping during post processing. When I framed this image I was careful to put the top of the frame just below the car that can be seen in the top 2.5% of this image. I could have cropped it out, but it becomes an accidental element in the image.

Caught in the Middle with You



_DSC5001, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

It seems I finally created a photograph so banal that no one wants to look at it. My shots on flickr generally garner a dozen or more views depending on what group pools I post to. Flash images to Strobist generate the most interest the fastest, but usually the big central groups like FlickrCrazy or Central will get a few views just when posted and the image is on the first or second page of images.

In my quest to capture the suburban landscape using layering and selective focus, I’ve honed the subject down to hedge, bushes and tree trunk. A culmination of my work validated by the fact that no one has viewed the image at all.

Or maybe it’s a bug in Flickr’s view counter.

Black and Water



_DSC5264, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This image was one of the first I captured with my new 105 VR Micro. Back when I shot with my N80 I had a 105mm Micro which I loved for it’s sharpness. It was stolen out of my luggage on an international flight. The lens was buried in my bundle of clothes, but it was the last time I put camera equipment in a checked bag.

I’ve wanted to replace it for years and finally bought one yesterday. With the VR I finally get to try some image stabilization technology for my image making. I’m working with the Nikon philosophy that the best VR is in-lens for telephoto. I can handhold my favored 24mm at 1/30th sec without too much trouble.

My thought is that the 105mm is going to be useful in these selective focus images, doubling as a portrait lens. It seems to me that the 105 and the 12-24mm DX will serve as my large special purpose lenses for now.

When Red Becomes Pink



Suburban Landscape 56, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Olympus finally revealed their flagship DSLR last night, the E-3. A year ago I got tired of waiting for a replacement for my E-1 and bought the D80 when it was first released.
My photographic output increased tremendously. I developed a working style within a few months and I’m working on my second year follow-through. For the most part, I’ve used my Nikon film legacy lenses including the 50mm f1.8 (this image), the 24mm f2.8 (which lives on the camera) and the 70-300mm f4-5.6 G. In the spring I added the 12-24mm f4 DX because I had nothing wider than the 24mm, which provided a film FOV of 36mm.
Looking at the E-3, I see no reason to switch back from Nikon. The only real E-3 advantage over the Nikon equivalent (D300) is in-body image stabilization. Since I have little trouble hand holding a 1/30 exposure with the 24mm, I feel comfortable with Nikon’s VR approach at the telephoto end.

Cycling Season End

I decided to call the end of September the end of the 2007 cycling season. With all of the Jewish holidays, I lost momentum and started thinking about how I’d work to maintain fitness over the winter months. I bought the Garmin 305 GPS/Heart Rate Monitor at the beginning of Febuary, but it wasn’t until the last week of Feb that I started riding regularly. So I count March-Sept as my cycling season for the year.

It capped a year of more consistent endurance training than ever before. I made some large gains between March and June. The summer ended up providing less fitness gains because of travel and my own inconsistencies. I also think that I failed to step up intensity sufficiently during those months. Next summer I’ll be doing more rides around lactate threshold for longer periods.I confirmed my suspicions that consistency is the most important aspect to progressive gains. In order to induce physiological adaptation, you need to stress the system. Once adapted to a certain level of exertion, no further gains are made. In the end I’m limited by time, so only by getting faster and putting in more effort in the same time will I ever progress. If I can start March with the same kind of muscular endurance that I have now, I’ll be riding farther in the same training time, forcing more adaptation.

As it turned out, I averaged about 18 hours a month during the season. It’s less than the 6 hours/week that I had targeted. It still puts me on track for a 200 hr training year which I think is pretty good for a first year’s effort.

April was my best month with 22 hours. I got in a few 8 hour weeks, but there many weeks where I had only an hour or two recorded. Still, it’s many more hours than I put in last year, when I was mostly doing long Sunday morning rides and not much else. With a flexible work schedule, it’s only travel that makes it impossible to train.While I’ve experienced gains they are less dramatic than I had hoped for. My usual 2 hour 15 min endurance ride now feels like little effort compared to the beginning of the season. This morning I did it with an average speed of 13.4 and an average heart rate of 130. At the beginning of the year, it would have been at about 12.4 at that heart rate, but more importantly felt like a bigger effort. Tonight I know that I could easily ride the same route tomorrow, it’s now a moderate ride, not a hard ride. If I can hold that kind of fitness over the winter, I can start in March riding at that speed, putting in more consistent miles with less stress. That is why the training is cumulative year over year, I think.

The Garmin 305 worked. I have a full journal of speed, heart rate and time for the past few months. No escaping the truth about what I’ve done. And there is the evidence of the progress there.

Adding shorter daily rides worked. Getting out for just 45 min or an hour maintains the status quo. If those short efforts are hard and frequent enough to be a training stimulus, gains are possible.

Rest and moderation worked. I had no injuries and little in the way of viral illnesses. Steady incremental additions with every third or fourth week being easier kept me pretty eager to get out and ride.

Having running as a backup worked. When I traveled I either did very long walks combined with photography or morning runs before work. In years past, it was either use the hotel gym equipment or go without. It’s almost always possible to run.

The Pink and White, Grating



_DSC1037, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

It’s a little over a year with the D80. It’s been the key to my developing a visual and technical style over the last year. It’s responsive and provides great data for creating the images I see out there. Mostly with the 24mm prime, I’ve developed this high contrast, high saturation visual style which works well with the kind of unimpressive subject matter I photograph. I feel like I’ve broken out of my rut of 2-D formal compositions and into portraying the suburban landscape either as fragment (as here) or as more integrated landscape. I’ve begun to use flash as an expressive element, which I’ve always wanted to do.

Capturing the Hydrangea for the Second Time

_DSC5224, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Over at “The Online Photographer”, Michael Johnston has been writing about artistic and technical style. I certainly have a technical style of working that I adapted from George DeWolfe’s writings. I take the image to monochrome and create the best image that I can without the distraction of color. The I bring the saturation back up as high as I can stand. It creates high contrast images, both in the tonal contrast and in color contrast. My artistic problem is that I have abandoned subject matter. It’s about light and objects for me at this point. It’s the response of the medium. It’s a modernist approach that’s not particularly photographic.

As the temperatures drop and the sun stays lower in the sky during the day, I find the light more inspiring. I’m picking up the camera more now. I’m hoping to do a portfolio review from the last year’s work and set some direction for the coming year. I’m beginning to feel like I’m narrowing in on subject and stye, with these selective focus compositions at one end and the empty suburban/city scenes on the other. There will always be the flat abstracts, but I don’t feel I’m getting anywhere with them.

 

Finally Finding the “Evidence”

When I was in college I remember reading a review of a photography book called “Evidence.” I vaguely recall seeing an image or two from the book that made an impression on me. At that time I didn’t photograph, didn’t own a camera that I can recall and certainly wasn’t particularly interested in the art of photography. It was a few years later that I started taking images, using my graduate lab’s darkroom for developing and printing and learning exposure techniques. But I never “Evidence” in a book store. To this day, when in a large used book store, looking through the photography selection, at some level I hope to see that elusive volume.I was suprised then when on the 2point8 weblog, I found a reference to it, complete with authors and a link to Amazon. The book apparently was almost impossible to find, having been a limited edition, but has now been reprinted.

2point8 » Sultan Does Landis, Matter of Factly:Two great things about Sultan’s work. First, his collaborative book “Evidence” of found gov’t photos was the first book that showed me how art might be developed through editing and selection, and that great pictures are everywhere, it just depends on who’s looking (both at the moment of capture, and later on, with a new frame of reference, perhaps).

Will it turn out that my artwork has also been chasing this conceptual work of art this past year? The internet may not be changing much of our lives, but it certainly is providing connections we would otherwise miss.

_DSC5091

_DSC5091, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Science of Magic – New York Times: Dr. Van Gulick had come to the conference to talk about qualia, the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells. The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind.

It troubles us deeply to consider our physical nature when we have to reconcile it with our higher qualities of thought, ethics and free will. Bringing together magic and cognitive science is a great idea. How better to demonstrate that our experience is not physical, but made of something else entirely, an emergent phenomenon from the activity of neural elements in networks. It’s not seamless and continuous like the physical world, but rather a confusing, contingent, shifting probabilistic experience. Like other complex, emergent phenomena, its likely to forever remain obscure in its relationship to the elements that produce it.

_DSC5100.NEF



_DSC5100.NEF, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Summer is winding down. I’ve picked up the Nikon D80 to take advantage of the cooler, overcast weather. It’s nice lighting for these kinds of images even in the middle of the day. Intermittent rain and mist bring out the colors in the asphalt and gravel.