Today, I took my parents (who are visiting) to the Dallas Museum of Art, specifically to the Thomas Struth photography exhibit. It was better than I thought, and I was looking forward to it in the first place.
The exhibit features dozens of prints. But, many of the prints are 3’ x 4’ or larger — so, many of the landscape-type prints are like looking out a window (into Tokyo or Singapore). And, the man’s sense of composition was astounding. Much like a designer, he selects the optimum balance between the elements in the photograph, and he makes it look so natural, almost as if you’re standing right there.
It was a great exhibit, and I’d recommend it to anyone, especially those who appreciate photogtraphy. Perhaps my only complaint was that the captions only featured the title, year, and date of the photograph. As a novice photographer myself, I would have appreciated information about lens size, film stock, and camera body.
Incidentally, I noticed that the exhibit halls had one characteristic common to almost all museums — echo-y halls. Or, more accurately, revereration-filled halls. That is, should anyone talk, the sound magnifies and bothers all present. Really, why not install some sound proofing so as to allow the public to hold conversations without disturbing others?
Thus spake Alexthustra:
“Or, more accurately, revereration [sic]-filled halls. That is, should anyone talk, the sound magnifies and bothers all present.”
1) You misspelled reverberation.
2) Sound really can’t be magnified by walls or anything unless you’re speaking (or singing) at or near resonance. I don’t have my vibrations text book with me, but in a room the size of a standard museum room the resonant frequency of the air column would be well below speaking range, if I remember correctly.
What is happening, I think, is that the flat and ridged walls reflect the sound with little loss of power and you hear back the original fairly soon and with lower, but still present, volume. This is for you speaking while facing one wall. What happens when a person across the room talks is that the sound spreads out fairly fast, reflects off of many walls and reaches you a different times and different volumes because it took many paths of different lengths to reach you. That just sounds muddled, though you can probably make out what the person was saying because the most direct path of sound would probably also be the loudest and reach you first.
Speaking of sound-proofing. I was in the the acoustic testing facility here at work the other day and one of the testing rooms is a rectangular room with cones of soundproofing stuff on the walls very close together such that you couldn’t see the flat wall anywhere. The effect is that when you talk or clap or make any sort of noise there, only 7-10 dB reflects. It’s a really strange effect, because when I’m indoors, I’ve come to expect at least a little bit of reverberation, but in this room, I was talking and there was absolutely no sound (that I could detect) coming back. Visually it was like I was in a room, but auditorily–is that a word?–it was like I was on a complete flat plain.
In the last line the “complete” should be “completely.”
Oh and HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALEX!