The Name’s Sprocket!

Play a video game (Skyrim! Portal!), phone game (Bejeweled! Candy Crush!), or online game (CandyStand, Dress Up, Neopets, Big Fish, Robot Unicorn).

Draw. Scribble away and feel how solid the materials are in your hands. Focus on the pressure of the utensil against paper. 

Write. Write one phrase over and over again if you must. “I am here,” is a good thing to write. Use a hard pen. Feel the pen slide over the page as you write. 

Close your eyes and breathe. Focus on your breathing. Count how many seconds it takes to breathe in, and then out. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Then again.

While breathing deeply with your eyes closed, try and recall five things you could see when you had your eyes open. Picture them vividly. Try to describe them.

Concentrate hard on the things you can currently feel. Try and pinpoint at least three distinct sensations.

Concentrate on the taste in your mouth, and what you can smell.

LIsten for any sounds. Concentrate on them.

Sit in a chair, with your back straight and your feet firmly planted on the ground. Feel how the ground feels under your feet, how the chair feels, how your body feels. Focus on the sensations from your body touching the ground and the chair.

Meditate! Lie down. Get comfortable. Close your eyes. Try to clear your mind and let all thoughts go through without paying attention to them. Acknowledge the thoughts, but don’t let them gain control. While you meditate it helps to do the deep breathing exercise at the same time.

Pet your animals. Cats, dogs, guinea pigs, whatever.

Hold an ice cube in your palm. It’s cold! Embrace the cold.

Listen to loud music. Metal and heavy rock can be especially good for grounding yourself.

Try to make a phone call to a friend. Focus on their voice. Holding a conversation is a great way to force yourself to stay grounded.

Try to find familiar smells. Sniff your pillow, your old stuffed animal, your parent’s perfume/cologne, your OWN perfume/cologne, deodorant, even garbage works. 

Find yourself a chant, such as “I’m here, and I’m real.” Chant this to yourself, over and over again, until you get tongue-tied.

Practice mindful walking. Walk very slowly around the perimeter of the room you are in, feeling every step as you go, and recognizing the solidity of the ground beneath your feet.

Visually ground yourself. Stare at objects. Touch them if you have to, but really look at it. Don’t stare downward, but look up and out and around. Notice the world around you. Focus on each individual aspect of it. Try listing the colors you see.

-having a job

-not having a job

-applying for jobs

-the job market

Corksniffing losers have to sully an awesome new space photo just to erroneously claim film is inherently superior.

I think this version is the original color processed version, which is still not as saturated or contrasty.

That's still an amazing result just from darkroom processing, but the deep blue version in the tweet definitely needed some help from Photoshop. And, personally, I think they overdid it.

The new photo was actually taken in darkness. It is a moonlit photo taken at extremely high gain (ISO 52,000). They did a long exposure to make it appear as if it were as bright as day. But without significant editing, that is going to make the colors less saturated and reduce the contrast.

The same thing would happen with film.

This is another version they did with a more accurate-to-eyeballs exposure.

Film is great.

Digital is great.

But it was not a great medium for space.

Most astronauts are fighter pilots. And there are only a few who are genuine photographers. You can train a fighter pilot to competently use a camera, but becoming a good photographer during the days of film usually took years of practice.

During the Apollo days they would send them up there with the best camera available. Usually a 70mm Hasselblad medium format. But the astronauts proved that the only way to get amazing photos without being a photographer was mostly down to luck.

We see the best photos they took, but those only amount to a handful. And as you saw above, NASA often had to do a lot of darkroom magic to make them aesthetically pleasing.

If you look at the Apollo archives, you can find hundreds of photos like this.

I'm fond of this one.

There was no instant feedback. They didn't have any instincts for settings or focus or composition. Most of the time they were just collecting visual data.

But every once in a while the stars aligned and they took absolute bangers.

That flag one is amazingly composed. But it took them a few tries.

Digital cameras give you a better baseline of quality. They can focus for you. They can meter for you. And they have high ISO gain that film could never touch.

They are... fighter pilot friendly.

With digital, they can look at the back screen and see if they bungled the exposure.

If they take a photo like this...

They get instant feedback and can be like, "Houston, where is exposure compensation?"

There is an undeniable ineffable quality that film sometimes delivers. But the medium is far less important than the skill of the person taking the photo.

Don Pettit is my favorite astronaut photographer. A true artist.

He really makes you forget about whether film is better than digital. He makes one remember that the person taking the photo is the paramount variable.

There is a great interview from Smarter Every Day where Don talks about how he captures amazing photos from space.