AS A FISH SEES US.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LVII, Issue LVII, 9 April 1910, Page 3

AS A FISH SEES US.

SINGULAR PHOTOGRAPHS. Professor Robert Williams Wood, of the chair of experimental physics of , I Johns Hopkins University (U.S.), has just received, word from, the officials of , the International Photographic Exposition at Dresden, Germany, that there has been awarded to him a prize for his , striking exhibit of photographs made with his fish-eye camera, and which ' show how the world appears to the fish. i Professor Wood's camera does not have the usual flat lens (says tho New York herald), but a projectivo bull's-eye, L \t photographs everything in ' sight, ih. 1 the feet to the sky overhead ana iron. "ound the horizon, covering an * l I ai "* r ISOdeg. It will photograph ingle i. 'iove water or while submerged objects a s or pond. Tim professor has in a lake "k on s camera for three been at woi " as unknown to the public fears, but it v ' a series of photographs antil ho slwwea »al show at Dresden, at the internatio marked attention, irhere they attract*. '>a reproduces only Tlie ordinary camei ' <front of a smal] what is immediately ih lens. If Pi-o-circle represented by it. " Placed on a fessor Wood's device bt "" mll photofloor, the projecting fish-eyt. roo _ m , an « graph all four sides of the ," tho celing at tho same flash. "'om his close to a man, say a half-foot X "^thei waist, it will photograph all on *." anc! side of him and all above his head ! below his feet. Should it be suspended from a Balloon, it would make a panorama of 3 , city oxit to the horizon. Other camera* i ' are limited to single views in one direction or to a semi-circle of the landscape, ! and this is the first that will photograph all that the human eye may see in a , sweep in all directions. Its usefulness in war, it is believed, will be very great. SOME COMIC EFFECTS. The photographs that won a prize at the international exhibit are unique. One shows a string of Johns Hopkins students that Professor Wood lined up on a curbstone. ■ The result has a concave effect, but the camera caught every man in the line. Another shows several students in a circle. The camera caught every one of them, and included the sky and the cobblestones in the street. They appear, it is explained, just as they would to a fish looking up from a pond at a group of men around a circular railing. Another photograph of a single individual shows him distended forward, much like the comic effects seen in the concave mirrors at excursion resorts. The photograph taken from under a bridge is remarkable, because it takes ,in all details of the bridge out to botfh land ends. Professor i Wood says < there is practically no end to tho variety of novel effects he may obtain. Weird results were obtained t by a climb to the top of the gigantic Doric column that forms the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon place, Baltimore. The camera was held over the edge of the observation platform, 1185 ft1 185 ft above the ground. It caught not only the sides pi the pile of marble down to its base, but the broad asphalt streets about the foot of the shaft, the park walls and squares to the north and . south, and the fashionable residences j and public structures on the widelyseparated street corners.