Hello world

My name is Atlas Aldus Aether and I’m an experimental photographer. Atlas comes from the Ancient Greek titan who was condemned to hold up the sky for eternity. As a part of being alive and conscious I bear the weight of my reality for as long as I live. Aldus comes from the Italian printer Aldus Manutius. His print mark was a dolphin and anchor which was adopted from Ancient Roman coinage where it was associated with the saying “Festina Lente” or “Hasten Slowly”. Aether comes from Ancient Greek mythology and was the primordial deity of light. Light means everything to me and my work is entirely dependent on my ability to manipulate light. Light is something between a probabilistic wave and a deterministic particle. It is something that we do not fully understand yet and we can only naturally see a very small window of the full spectrum of light. I reflect on those concepts heavily in my work though my pure and abstract images. I grew up in Cincinnati and I’ve always been interested in photography, science, and exploring. Growing up I would spend days exploring the creek in my backyard paying attention to every detail of the environment that I could. I went to school for mechanical engineering and though my internships I’ve been able to save up enough to barely fund my creative visions. Currently I’m struggling to figure out what will come next for me. I want to be a photographer, explorer, and teacher but without any support that doesn’t seem possible.

My journey as a photographer started during one of my internships when I was looking into a solo trip to Canada to reach perfectly dark skies for the first time in my life. I fell down the rabbit hole of astrophotography and settled on getting a Canon RP and as many versatile lenses as I could get my hands on. My early work progressed fairly slowly but I knew I had found something very special to me. With the right gear, technique, and process I had realized I could see things invisible to my eyes. The first lens I used was a budget 500mm lens that I could turn into a 1000mm lens with a teleconverter. That lens allowed me to turn objects right at the edge of my eye’s resolution into a still picture full of detail that I could study whenever I wanted. After some time I bought the largest and cheapest telescope and star tracker I could. They were barely compatible and the telescope’s optics were very poor for photography but I was able to open the door to properly learning astrophotography with that and I knew it would only be a matter of time and resources before I could start making images that would completely transform my understanding of the world around me. The next major event for my photography was a trip I took to NYC. I had never felt more inspired in my life and some of those images are still among my favorites. After that I recorded the 8th April 2024 eclipse which was a lifechanging experience but made my realize that I desperately needed to upgrade my skills. Over the next couple months I did improve my skills significantly and saved up some to buy a new 11” telescope and some other gear. Although during this time I was living in almost complete isolation and was working a terrible factory job. I ended up falling into a very deep depression that I’ve only recently been able to start to break free from. At the start of that era I had dived very deep into full spectrum photography and I was instantly obsessed and understood the potential it held for me. At the end of that era I attempted to convert my Cannon RP to be full spectrum myself and partly failed. I was left without a fully functional camera for 6 months until I could create a tool to align my sensor and buy a clear glass filter to fix the optical path. After fixing my camera this was probably the biggest turning point in my journey, and I felt like there were almost no limits to what I could create and see. During the alignment process I had scratched the edge of my sensor which didn’t majorly impact my imaging as it was easy enough to hide or edit out, but there were many other issues with my Cannon that were holding me back. As a result I set my sight on upgrading my camera. I ended up settling on building my own camera designed specifically for the photography I wanted to do. It was fairly easy to for me to do the research and weigh my options for my next camera. It still took months of research and saving up, but soon enough I had 8 very special high quality filters, a QHY600PH-M, and what I had hoped would be everything else I needed on the way. Naturally nothing really went together as I had planned. I was able to assemble my filter wheel with minimal difficulty, but the adaptor I bought for connecting the filter wheel to my lenses was not the right size. The threads were too small and it was too thick. I struggled with finding a solution to this problem for almost an entire semester. I finally settled on creating two adaptors for the filter wheel and my lenses. It was very daunting modifying my lenses but it has given me more confidence and understanding of how my camera works. I made the adaptors myself using my 3d printer. They aren’t ideal as they are weak. low tolerance, and produce dust when changing lenses, so I’m planning to make adaptors out of machined aluminum asap. I also still need to scientifically test the ideal backspacing for each of my lenses for astrophotography. I’m planning on finishing all of this over the summer. I’ve been taking pictures with my new camera for only a few months and it has completely transformed my photography. I also just graduated college for mechanical engineering and built another really exciting camera for my senior design project. I’ll be talking more about that sometime in the future ;)

Being creative costs nothing but heart and practice, but to achieve specific qualities of work in some mediums requires significant time and resources. It’s possible to create a picture with a literal potato, but there are technical limits to what you can get out of that based purely on optics. I need all the support I can get to continue to develop my work. Even support for editing would go a long way in freeing up time for me to take more pictures and go more places. I hope that my work inspires you and encourages you to think of photography as free and open of a medium as I have come to learn it.

Life’s a wave

Festina Lente

AAA@AtlasAldusAether.com