Millions of us sat in rapt attention last summer as we watched the Curiosity landing. Hopefully later this century we'll be glued to our yet unknown media devices when astronauts finally blast off for Mars – or better yet, when life on an exoplanet is discovered. Until then, the most impatient of us will have to make due with Photoshop and some rusty fire hydrants.
Adam Kennedy uses both to tap into our celestial fascination with his new photo project called Planet Universe. In the project, he photographs the tops of old fire hydrants around San Francisco and then, with some Photoshop magic, turns the bulbous shapes into newfound planets by converting the rust spots into oceans and the remaining paint into continents (and vice versa).
"We are constantly looking for evidence that there may be life out there and I hope people get a little sense of discovery when they look at these planets," he says. "I hope it also makes them think about what there is on earth that they might have been missing all along."
Up until February the photos were mostly a side project for Kennedy. But then he posted on Reddit and readers went wild. He got hundreds of thousands of hits on the post and nearly 1,100 comments. Since then he's been going at it more seriously. He started a website dedicated to the project and says he has plans to start making posters and a calendar as his fire hydrant solar system grows.
Kennedy usually finds the hydrants when he walks from his home in the Glen Park neighborhood to school at San Francisco State, where he's a junior studying cinema. To get the texture you see in the water and continents he also photographs dirt, moss and rocks and overlays parts of those pictures on top of the hydrant bulbs.
Kennedy has been shooting the hydrants for about a year and is fortunate to live in San Francisco, which still has an older generation of hydrants with round tops. One of those hydrants at 20th and Church is particularly famous because it was the only working hydrant in the area when neighbors in the Mission District were trying to battle the famous inferno that broke out after the 1906 earthquake.
