Living

Aug 7, 2012 2:40 PM   Sports photography is usually home to the highest-of-high tech camera technologies, because its subjects move so swiftly, and in such limited bursts. It's not the place you'd expect to find, say, a gigantic old 4x5 large format view camera. And yet! The photog in question (so many questions) is David Burnett. He's actually been going to the Olympics since 1984, and was featured recently in the NY Times. Here's a quick except from his interview: Q. There's no room for a mistake with a 4×5. Maybe it should be an Olympic sport: photographing moving events with a 4×5. A. I always remind people that every four years it's the photographers' Olympics, too. You have the best photographers in the world, all in one place, shooting the same thing. You know what happens on the last Saturday night of the Olympics, right? Q. They have a closing ceremony. A. No, that's Sunday night. Saturday night, at the end of the last event at track and field...

The simple act of turning a shirt from white to blue—or any color—requires 25 liters of water and enough harmful chemicals that every clothing manufacturer should be looking for safer methods. Like this fantastic CO2-based DryDye technology that Adidas has started using which doesn't require a single drop of H2O. But it's not like the color dyes are blasted at the shirts with a pressurized CO2 canister—although that would be pretty awesome. In reality, the fabrics and chemical dyes are placed in a large sealed chamber, and CO2 is pumped in to a pressure of about 74 bar. The tank is also heated to 88 degrees fahrenheit at which point the CO2 behaves like a gas and a liquid, allowing the colored dyes to thoroughly permeate the fabrics without the use of excessive chemicals. The DryDye process actually uses about half the chemicals as traditional water-based dying methods, and requires about half the energy too, so it seems like an all-around better way to go about tinting cloth...