Figure 1 – Stairs from the beach, Stage Fort Park, Gloucester, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

So far we are having a truly wonderful September light, and I took the image of Figure 1 in Gloucester, MA last weekend looking up the stairs from the beach at Stage Fort Park. On the one hand this is meant as a simple geometric study taken in an intense fall light – a chance to practice a black and white photographic art and to lovingly and magically give it a subtle sepia tone. This recalls the best moment in analog printing, when, with lights on, you bathed the print in selenium toner and watched with growing anticipation for that magic moment of perfection. It was all so like baking a cake! But at another level there is the sense that stairways always give of climbing up metaphysically to a higher plane. Often when you walk along a difficult path you wonder about the people that hewed the path from nature’s grasp, here a sea wall and a place to climb out of it.

Canon T2i with EF 70-200 mm f/4.0 USM L Lens at 98 mm, Aperature Priority AE Mode, ISO 400, 1/1000th sec at f/8.0.