A year later, Petzval went on, not to an apprenticeship in shoes, but instead to attend a lyceum in preparation for university study at the Institutum Geometricum, in engineering. The same year he earned his degree, Petzval started a graduate program and was appointed chair of the physics department. He worked as an urban engineer in Buda, applying his studies of mathematics, mechanics, and practical geometry to flood abatement, dam construction, and sewer issues for the city. After receiving his PhD, he was invited to join the professoriate, as a mathematician, at the University of Vienna. He lectured there, some say arriving to class each day on the back of a black Arabian horse. He rented an abandoned Piarist monastery north of the city at Kahlenberg Mountain, overlooking the Danube River. And it was here, in the ruins of this religious center, that he changed the course of photography forever.
Within the stone walls of his monastery, Petzval built his own glass-sharpening workshop and crafted the lenses that would revolutionize how people create photographs. Before Petzval, the most commonly used technique for capturing personal portraits was the daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were those hauntingly shadowy and often blurred images of stoically posed figures. They were very difficult to make because they required the subject to remain still for thirty minutes or so, while the copper plate onto which the image was being etched was exposed to light.
In 1840, Petzval crafted a lens and an aperture that could allow more light into the camera, quickly, so that people didn’t have to sit still nearly as long. But it’s what happened in the background of Petzval’s photographs that still fascinates photographers today. Though the subject in the foreground is sharply in focus, whatever is situated behind is softly and lusciously pixelated. The backdrop is blurred and seems to swirl like a whirlpool. The effect is mysterious and alluring, so much so that the lens, now 180 years old, recently saw a resurgence in interest with a Kickstarter campaign to finance its remanufacturing, exactly to Petzval’s original specifications, for the commercial market.
Petzval had invented a way to shoot with what photographers call open aperture, where the foreground is in focus while all that serves as the backdrop is blurred. The effect highlights the subject at the expense of any surroundings that might otherwise distract from it. Petzval’s nineteenth-century optical breakthrough serves as the basis for the best-designed portrait lenses today—and the visual effect it produces is the basis for one of the most inspiring strategies to motivate our goal pursuit: narrow focus.
Narrowing the Focus of Our Visual Attention
It was an early spring blizzard that had led New Yorkers to batten down their hatches. The city’s streets were sprayed in a thick white snow that few people dared to disrupt. Despite the weather, I headed out for what ended up being an “only in New York” kind of adventure. I had been invited to speak about visual attention and optical illusions to an eclectic group of individuals. They drank bee-pollen-spotted vodka cocktails and noshed on beet focaccia while I talked science. There were more Academy Award winners floating around the room than I had handbags in my closet. Business cards came wrapped in bespoke paper you could plant in the ground and watch bloom. I am pretty sure the guests had flown in from every continent but Antarctica.
I arrived early to set up but had loads of time to kill before any of my responsibilities kicked in. I started up a conversation with a guy, Jeff Provenzano, who I thought was assigned to be my tech assistant. I was wrong. He is a professional skydiver. He is heavily sponsored to put on a leotard that makes him resemble a flying squirrel and jump off cliffs in Norway. He has strapped on parachutes and has fallen, intentionally, off the Princess Tower in Dubai, the second-tallest residential building in the world. He has been launched out of the back of a cargo plane at 10,000 feet while sitting on a couch playing video games. Once, Provenzano jumped out of a plane and, swooping in on a lake in Texas at a hundred miles an hour, landed on the back seat of a moving Jet Ski driven by a guy he’d met only the day before. He was challenged by a Ford F-150 off-road truck called the VelociRaptor 475 in an episode of the television show Top Gear. They raced for five miles, the truck crossing the Arizona desert horizontally versus Provenzano falling headfirst vertically. Provenzano won.
As we waited for the event to start, he took out his cell phone. The screen was cracked, which, with a career like his, comes with the territory, I suspect.
We started sharing stories about our jobs. As the list of his achievements above can attest, his were far more interesting. But there was one story in particular that piqued my curiosity, speaking directly to the power of perspective and the value of narrow focus.
Provenzano and his skydiving teammates Luke Aikins and Jon Devore were challenged to jump out of a plane at 25,000 feet and land in a net—without a parachute. Their first reaction was to pass on the chance to widow their wives and semi-orphan their children, but then they changed their minds and decided to give it a try. Aikins would be the designated jumper.
The trio amassed a team: the stunt coordinator for the last Iron Man movie; lighting designers who created bulbs for airport runways; a GPS systems engineer; a costume designer of sorts, who could make a flight suit that minimized drag but still allowed room for the spine protector and neck brace needed for landing; and NASA engineers used to computing the force-of-impact of things that hit the earth, like meteors or, in this case, humans.
Together, they designed and built a 100-by-100-foot net that weighed six hundred pounds. They suspended it from cranes. At three tension points, a portion of the suspended net could be released at precisely the right moment before Aikins’s impact, to soften the blow. Release too soon, and the net would have too much give. Release too late, and the net would be too stiff. Nick Brandon, an expert stuntman who specialized in timing systems, controlled the release buttons manually with guidance from two team members calculating fall-rate information and an experienced skydiver acting as a spotter, watching the smoke flying off Aikins’s heels.
The net was also attached to air pistons to create what was billed as a gentle braking system, though I wonder how gentle the stop could be when scientists calculated that Aikins would experience 2.4 g’s of force in his fall, just under what astronauts experience during rocket launches.
Aikins planned to jump with a bailout oxygen bottle that prevents hypoxia, the condition of cognitive confusion, ringing in the ears, color blindness, and blue lips that arises from insufficient oxygen at extreme heights, like at high camp on Everest, cruising altitudes for airplanes, or the place in the sky from which he was going to jump. Aikins’s cousin planned to jump simultaneously, meeting Aikins in midair to take away the bottle when they hit an altitude where he could get enough oxygen from breathing the air itself.
Provenzano and his teammates planned to wear live-streaming cameras so that the event could be televised from 25,000 feet up through the full descent. There would be witnesses. Lots of witnesses.