August, 2010

83-5

"I will do my utmost to be punctual with my postings"
Five days from now is the 83rd anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti (and Madeiros). In 1997 I had a dinner party at my loft in Chicago to commemorate the 70th anniversary. We had a forty foot long table with maps associated with the crimes drawn on the table cloths. Wooden ladders were suspended above the table, and candles were attached to make chandeliers. We ate green beans, that I think Dolores brought. This has nothing to do with anything.
During that same time period I developed a workshop show of Sacco and Vanzetti with the performance group Lucky Pierre. Lucky Pierre consisted at the time of : Michael Thomas, Mary Zerkel, Noah Loesberg, Vince Darmody and me. We had just completed a version of I Married Wyatt Earp and dedicated the next block of time to working on Sacco and Vanzetti. In part of my research I had found that Sacco and his wife would often perform in educational plays at labor and anarchist meetings. I used that fact to make the performance a blend of historical details with a fictionalized play within a play written by Sacco. Though we only presented a work in progress (called Take off your Eyeglasses), there were a number of elements that were strong that will continue or is influencing the present work:
I asked Noah to grow Vanzetti's mustache. The mustache growing has developed into its own story. I would love to figure out if I can make this blog break into branches so you could follow each subject matter separately.I developed the section involving the letter "S" described in the previous Blog post.
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Joe Silovsky's picture

inverse square law : will changing the lens make my image brighter?

I think that is a common misunderstanding of the inverse square law, I've heard it before. People ask if they get a short throw lens if it will make the image brighter because it's closer.
The answer is NO, it's not the distance it's the size of the image which the brightness is proportional to.

I see where the confusion happens, if you have two matching projectors (with the same lens) and one is 5ft away from the screen and the other is 10ft away from the screen: then the one that is 10ft way will be twice and high and twice as wide, therefore 4x the sq feet of image surface.
The same amount of light is spread over 4x the area making it 1/4 as bright.

It's the increased area that makes it dimmer, but it's the distance that makes the area larger, thus the mistaken connection.

So lets clear that up, by taking one of those projectors and putting in a wide angle lens, one that makes the image 5ft wide from 5ft away. The other has a long throw lens that makes the image 5ft wide from 10ft away.
Now both images are 5ft wide, from the same lumen projector and ... both images are the same brightness.

We move the short throw projector back to 10ft away, and it's now got a 10ft wide image, and is 4x the area and 1/4 as bright.

so we can change distance, or the beam spread of the lens, and both things change the area of the projection. Now distance is decoupled from area, but we see that it's area that is proportional to brightness not distance.

 

Now just for fun in case anyone needs it lets look at the inverse sq law and how it is about Area.So far that was nice and easy with 5ft and 10ft, lets put the long throw lens back in both projectors and put one at 5ft and one at 15ft. Away from the screen.
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Hal Eagar's picture
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