Wayback Machine: Sideline photo fun when Badger football press passes were easier to come by

I looked back through some old slides in preparation for the Super Bowl, because I was going to try shooting some motion blur off the TV. (In the end I got far too caught up in the game to bother.) But I enjoyed the trip through the wayback machine to a different time.

In the late sixties and early seventies, when the University of Wisconsin football program was still trying to rebuild after the impact of the tumultuous sixties, sideline passes for still photographers were much easier to come by than they are today, when major college football is a big business more geared to the needs of television. Just about any pretext would get you on the sidelines back then. One year I was doing a weekly newspaper sports column I called "Instant Replay." Another year I said I wanted to take photographs for a current events filmstrip program for schools (and we did eventually use one shot). Perhaps the most far-fetched excuse was to illustrate a magazine article, "The Management Game," a roundup of management experts offering business tips in the form of football metaphors. (Today, of course, such an article would be illustrated with iStock photos -- but, hey, we were still using film back then.)

Since I wasn't shooting for a daily newspaper, I wasn't concerned with capturing peak action or the most significant moment (except perhaps for the sports column), and in any case I didn't have the right equipment like a fast motor drive and super-long lenses. Instead, I went for arty motion blur photos.

Kodachrome, with its slow speed and great reds and whites, was perfect for the purpose. When I was trying to capture the overall flow of action, as in the photo of the running back above, I usually used 1/4-sec. as the exposure. A lot of the photographs combined two kinds of motion blue -- both the subject and the background, as I panned with the action. Sometimes, if I got lucky and used a slightly higher shutter speed (1/15-sec. in this photo of the defensive back), I could blur only a detail, like the legs. I had a ball.

Madison's winter geography -- new mountain ranges everywhere, sculpted by wind and weather.

For days after the blizzard ended, we watched new mountain ranges of pure white form and shift around us. The snowfall ended Wednesday morning, but the drifting kept on for the better part of two more days. Even where it had been plowed, new drifts would start to reach out across the road. The wind sculpted the fine white snow into intricate mountain peaks, cliffs, ledges and valleys. There was something fractal about it, the way that -- in a few short hours -- the wind copied on a smaller scale features normally formed by geological forces over millions of years.

The abstract patterns formed by the drifts were a photographer's delight. I began by shooting in color, but I soon found the results overly domesticated -- just too pastel and pretty. The color photos didn't really suggest the incredible power of the storm, its savage, inhuman beauty. So I switched to black and white. (More photos in this Flickr set, Blizzard of 2011.)

Speak2Tweet: Like messages in bottles launched into an electronic ocean by the citizens of Egypt

The Million Man March has started in Cairo, and I've been listening -- unfiltered -- to one of the most extraordinary things I've ever heard -- a succession of voice messages from ordinary Egyptian people on Speak2Tweet the Google/Twitter voicemail service using ordinary land lines for a people deprived of their internet service.

These aren't the voices of journalists, government officials or other intermediaries. These are the voices of ordinary people, most speaking in Arabic, a few in English. Click on these links and you'll hear the voices of people caught up in a great popular uprising. Even if you don't understand the language, the emotion comes through. It's almost like a direct connection with the soul of Egypt in its time of hope and turmoil.

There's also a blog, Speak2Tweet Translate, where volunteer translators are translating as many of these messages as they can, as quickly as possible. Just one example:

Hello I’m Egyptian
And I’m calling out to every human being on this planet.
We are not the only ones who need to take this guilty one to trial, this killer, the entire world needs to because he is killing the people. Because we are all people, we are all human beings, the entire world needs to judge him. The entire world needs to. The people need to because he is killing the people.
He kills the people. i beg you all to judge him
Link to play message

The voicemails are like messages in bottles launched into an electronic ocean by the citizens of Egypt at this incredible time in the history of their country and the entire Middle East. Thanks to a functioning internet outside Egypt, we are able to pick them up as they wash ashore and to experience directly some of the emotions of this incredible time.

The link also promises to keep one more line of communication open as a workaround while virtually everything else gets shut down by the Egyptian government. Thank you Google and twitter!