Manhattan Beach photographer John Post goes out of his orbit to photograph natural and manmade wonders
It was the first day of July, 2011, and the United States space shuttle program was drawing to a close. The shuttle Atlantis was scheduled to lift off one week later, on July 8. After that, it would be the end of an era, and America would not be sending astronauts into space for the foreseeable future.
“Several weeks earlier I had resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to see another space shuttle launch live,” says John Post.
While his reputation rests largely with his panoramic views of South Bay beaches and piers, as well as his gallery in downtown Manhattan Beach, Post is also a seasoned world traveler with two very special passions. As he describes them, one of these is his “celestial photography of solar eclipses,” and the other his “terrestrial photography of space shuttle launches.”
He’d racked up five solar eclipses, but it looked like his encounters with the space shuttle would end its run at four.
Having already photographed Atlantis four times, “I was a bit disappointed that this last launch of Atlantis and the end of the space shuttle program would have to be experienced only via TV,” Post says.
Then the phone rang. Barely discernable above the clacking of newsroom typewriters was the cigar-chomping voice of publisher Kevin Cody, dangling a metaphorical lifeline: Two Easy Reader writers were originally headed for Cape Canaveral, but one dropped out at the last minute, and so a media slot opened up. Could Post hoof it to the East Coast?
“A hectic July Fourth weekend ensued,” Post recalls, that consisted of trying to book flights and hotels. “Just before we left for Florida I was also able to get Suzanne (his wife) media credentials, so there were three of us at the site for the launch.
“The launch and the whole 24 hours prior to it are always tense and amazing with the many things that have to go right, and be perfect, to get a space shuttle – the most complicated machine ever made – into space.”
As July 8 approached, weather conditions were dreary. However, the god or goddess of shuttle launches smiled, a window of opportunity cracked open, and the spacecraft was off to the races.
“Each launch has its unique features,” Post says, “and this one was no exception. It appeared that the shuttle took a few seconds longer to lift into the sky, and the huge exhaust plume held in a near vertical column – without being windblown and scattered – for almost 20 minutes after the launch.
“It was a sad but bittersweet privilege to share this last launch of one of America’s greatest achievements and a technological milestone for humanity and its future.”
From pillar to Post
Often accompanied by his wife, Suzanne, John Post doesn’t hesitate to journey to remote locations if that’s where an eclipse of the sun will take place. He has stories about all of them, including those in Turkey, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela.
“Whenever we’re doing an eclipse,” Post says, “we just rent a car and drive around. In Turkey we drove almost 2,000 miles all over the place.” Their destination was the town of Sivas, “which is 500 miles from the Iranian border on the east side of Turkey.”
It’s not a town where Westerners tend to congregate, and after they pulled up to City Hall, where the local Turkish media had gathered, Post was feted and interviewed. He shows me his picture in the local newspaper.
After the eclipse came and went, and no three-headed babies were born as usually happens during an eclipse, there was music and dancing in the town square. “All of a sudden they start shooting off fireworks, skyrockets,” Post says, “right in the middle of this huge crowd. So everybody backs up, and that’s the way they do it over there. No big deal. As soon as they stop shooting off the fireworks they start blasting Ricky Martin’s ‘La Vida Loca.’
“The women are in their semi-burkas and whatnot,” Post continues; “it’s a pretty conservative town, and everybody’s dancing to ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca,’ which was sweeping the world at that time. That was so funny. And then after the concert ends, and we’re headed back through the crowd to the hotel, all these people are coming up and shaking our hands. They thought we were Bill and Hillary Clinton.”
Maybe they thought you were Ricky Martin?
Post doesn’t lose his train of thought: “‘La Vida Loca,’ blasting over the loudspeakers; and everybody’s jumping up and down. It was a real special little experience there.”
By contrast, what Post remembers about the eclipse in Zimbabwe is the silence.
“We showed up about three days before the eclipse,” he recalls. The remote village boasted only four or five houses. “This was in literally nowheresville, and we ended up talking our way into a room in a cotton company camp.”
As it turned out, perhaps the most stunning solar eclipse photograph that Post ever shot was taken here.
“As the moon starts blocking the sunlight,” he says, “farm animals [and] wild animals tend to go into their nighttime mode. I’m in the middle of a cotton field, concentrating on getting my cameras set up, and making sure I’ve got everything right, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the sounds around me.
“During the eclipse everything went silent. Then, as the sun started coming out I started hearing little buzzes. Over the next ten minutes the little buzzing became a crescendo of buzzes as the bees came back into the field. It was just the neatest experience to hear what almost turned out to be a roar of buzzing sounds from the silence in such a short period of time.”
It was during this eclipse, which was low to the horizon, that Post was able to frame the silhouette of a lone baobab tree in the center of his picture. It’s an image that’s won awards and been printed in books.
When shooting an eclipse, Post always likes to include some vegetation in the shot, something native to the area. When he went to photograph the solar eclipse in Venezuela the only vegetation he found in that dry area of the country was cactus.
“They weren’t real pretty cactus,” he points out. Not only that, but “the eclipse happened real high in the sky and so it took me half a day of wandering around to find a cactus that I could get an angle on for the sun.”
He found one at last on the top of a ridge.
“It was a primo viewing spot, and so I knew there were going to be people coming up to see the eclipse the next day and this place was gonna get crowded. I thought, Well, somebody’s gonna try and put the cactus in their picture, too. So what I did was I took one of my business cards and I stuck it on the cactus. I wrote on it: This is my cactus to shoot during the eclipse, so don’t set any cameras up here.”
Did you write that in Spanish or in English?
“In English because it was just going to be English-speaking people. And I took a picture of my business card stuck onto the cactus because that was my eclipse, so nobody think about taking my cactus.” He laughs as he says this.
The next day when he returned, the entire ridge had been bulldozed for a new highway.
Well, actually not. Rather, Post and his wife had picked up some fruit from the local market and carried it with them to the viewing site, the primo viewing spot as he called it.
“We’re here on this ridgeline, four or five hours before the eclipse – just hanging out, eating watermelon and fruit – and waiting for the eclipse to start happening. And then I’m thinking, gosh, I guess nobody’s gonna show up. All of a sudden we see this [mass] of people starting to move up towards where we are. By the time the eclipse happened there was this whole group of astronomers – people bringing those big telescopes and all kinds of stuff.”
Post whips out some charts with timetables and trajectories for each eclipse through 2020.
There’s one that’ll beat a path across the Congo. “If you want to go see the gorillas that’s a good time,” he says, “except it’ll probably be raining so you won’t see anything.” He indicates another, but it’s way up around the Arctic Circle. Then there’s one in Borneo, with much of the eclipse occuring over the ocean. Now we’re up to 2017, but what’s nice about the eclipse in 2017 is that it will be viewable across parts of the United States – and, for most of us, isn’t that preferable to traveling to Borneo or the Arctic?
Reaching for the stars
The above examples vividly convey why John Post is so drawn to the natural spectacle of the solar eclipse, the first one he experienced dating back to 1974. It was just a few years earlier, in 1969, that he witnessed his first man-into-space launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Those two events, he points out, “set an unknown course that was going to come back,” repeatedly, up through the present time. Post, of course, sees a strong connection between the two.
“The space shuttle is all terrestrial, but crosses over to celestial, especially the launch with the Hubble telescope. And then the eclipse is all celestial but it touches terrestrial.” In both cases, the magical moment is brief. Blink, and you miss them.
“Eclipses and space shuttles have similarities in that they are both very sensory,” Post says; “they both have a spiritual quality, a sound quality, or lack of sound quality.” And an emotional side, too: “People cry at space shuttle launches; you can see people jumping up and down and crying and yelling and screaming, and the same thing happens in the eclipse. People go into a whole other side of their being.”
There’s also a sense of the supernatural. Post reminds us that his photograph of the baobab tree during the Zimbabwe eclipse was reproduced in a book titled When the Crocodile Eats the Sun. We may not go all supernatural at a shuttle launch, but Post does cite the “raw emotion and soul spiritual magic” that attends the liftoff. No crocodiles snapping at the sun, perhaps, but an alligator snapping at your foot if one isn’t careful.
For himself, Post says, “this past launch was a completely different experience than the other launches. This launch was so serendipitous in the way it came about. I had not applied for credentials, and had decided that we just couldn’t afford, frivolously, to go down and watch the launch from 12 miles away (in Titusville). If you don’t have press credentials, if you can’t be close, watch it on TV: You get the replays and everything else that goes with it. And then the week before the launch the apple fell from the tree and bounced on my head. It said, ‘Do you want to eat this apple? You can take it if you want.’
“And so it evolved to where we made it down to Cape Kennedy 24 hours before the launch. In pouring rain. And, serendipitously for the crowds that showed up, it also went off on time.
“It was a good closure,” Post says, and a grand send-off considering how sparsely attended the space shuttle launches had become.
“On these past launches, from ’96 and ’97 through 2006, the majority of people had lost interest to where, even at the press site, very [few] people attended these launches. In the last two launches we attended I counted between 70 and 100 people at the launch site, and half of those were NASA people, and half of the other ones were foreign media. The U.S. media would cover the launch, but that was it; there was not much enthusiasm.
“At this launch, just like so many other ends of things, everybody shows up, and so there were approximately 1200 to 1500 media people at the press site.”
Most of them got stories to file, and photographs to commemorate the last hurrah, and John Post now has behind him an equal number of shuttle launches to solar eclipses. What happens next?
“Due to the remote locations and marginal weather conditions at the next few solar eclipse sites,” he says, “there is a good chance that I will not be seeing any more solar eclipses until August, 2017, when the Grand American Solar Eclipse takes place.
“Coincidentally, if all goes well, around 2016-17 the United States plans to again start launching humans into space from the Kennedy Space Center.” If that happens, Post says, he’ll resume his quest to follow and document the celestial and the terrestrial – solar eclipses and space shuttle launches – for as long as possible. ER
