On the subject of hackneyed and over wrought, I’d like to express my opinion about the over use of color.  In my view color is too often used in a vain attempt to compensate for mediocre subject and composition.  I have seen far too many flower pictures.  Isn’t this beautiful?  Not really, please wake me up when it’s over.  Nature’s done a wonderful job of creating a beautiful flower, your photography, not so much.

And it’s an important point that color is so dominant to our sight that nature has used it in creating flowers.  So it’s a pretty easy way to go if all you want to do is create the illusion of dramatic photographs.  Sit back please, analyze what is your subject?  What is the composition of your image?

To me, photography is first and foremost about form and composition.  Then if you want to throw in a bit of color that works for me.  Don’t over power me.  Certainly some pictures work best in color.  Sometimes one of the coolest things that you can do is take a color picture, which is just so subtle, just a touch of hue beyond black and white.

I am definitely a black and white kind of guy.  I choose my subjects, usually for form and composition.  The first thing that I do in my workflow is discard the color information.  I then create the image and finally, a bit resentful of the added megabytes in the color plane, I often then return to RGB color; so that I can digitally tone the photograph.  Almost always I tone sepia, trying to catch the pleasure of the selenium toning that I used to do in my analogue days. I find that sometimes this toning adds just the right amount of ump to the image.  Maybe that’s a cop out. I worry about that  Maybe I tone too much.  Maybe my sepias cross the line to the muddy.

And do I need to emphasize again that this is my personal view of photography?  I can share it with you.  But you have to set your own rules, and if all you want to do is run around the garden taking snap shots – well wake me up when it’s over.

Figure 1 – “Old New England Barn in Spring, Stow, MA,” (c) copyright DEWolf 2013

Snow came late to New England this year.  But then it came with a vengeance and stayed around for a very long time.  I will have to add that the snow was truly beautiful, and blissfully for the most part occurred on weekends, when it could be enjoyed and photographed – and you didn’t have to drive to work in it.  People who don’t have garages are a lot less charitable about it.  There’s nothing worse than chipping you car out of an iceberg. Anyway it now appears to be over.  Hopefully there will be no more snow pictures for another year.

We had lunch at the Nancy’s Stow Airport Cafe, and everyone was abuzz about the single blooming crocus in Nancy’s garden and the daffodils and hyacinth just cracking the ground.  We marveled for a while as we watched the little planes land and take off on a perfect Sarurday.  The sun has crossed the celestial equator on the ascendant and definitely taken on a spring brightness and cast.  And we approach all things with renewed expectation.

So it is time for new photographic studies, and with my little Panasonic Lumix I took the cliché, yet hopeful, “Old New England Barn in Spring.”  It’s nothing special but does warm up my shutter finger,

Please have a look at this link.  It is a live feed from the Amundsen-Scott International Research Station at the South Pole.  The image is dull and, frankly, kind of boring from a fine art photographic perspective.  Still it gives one, or me at least, a little thrill, raising the hairs on the back of my neck with some sense of interhuman pride.  It’s like we are standing there, and I cannot quite get the image of Roald Amundsen standing at the South Pole with his men on Dec. 14, 1911, just over a century ago out of my mind.  What does it all mean?

Does it mean that photography, in a mad quest for immediacy and “take me there” bravado, has trivialized everything?  I don’t think so.  If we look at the development of photography as a continuum, as an evolution, we start with the nineteenth century.  In the nineteenth century photography enabled us to capture precise and accurate images of places and people in a matter of minutes.  The daguerreotypist would disappear into his magic world of iodine and mercury fumes (OSHA would not have been happy) only to reappear with something truly marvelous.  And we could then retain a certain intimacy with loved one’s across oceans, time, and even death.  That’s pretty remarkable.  Operatively, it brought us closer to one another.

As that century progressed people demanded “be there” images of wars and historic events.  The world shrunk further, we became closer, and it became no longer possible to hide the atrocities of war and other evils, like slavery and genocide, from us.

As the world entered a new century, the twentieth, there was more and more of a demand to “be there”, at the front in wars, at the site of discovery at the poles, and even with our robots and ourselves as we began to leave the bounds of Earth.  The significant fact continued that the world was ever shrinking, we were getter closer.

And now in our own century, the twenty-first, there are cameras everywhere: in our cameras, in the cell phones of hundreds of millions of us, and in robot eyes.  They are truly everywhere and nothing goes unrecorded.  We are in constant communication with everyone else.  Nothing remains hidden for long.  So therein, I believe, lies the point of the South Polar webcam.  It increases, rather than diminishes, the significance of the photograph of Amundsen’s party, because both are symbols of the human quest to shrink and bring the world closer together.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) may have said it best in his poem “Ulysses.”

“I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.”

Figure 1 – Vortices on the Charles River Beneath the Watertown Bridge (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Two physicists were crossing a bridge…  Yes it sounds like the start of one of those physicist jokes that end with the punchline:  “Well first you have to assume that the chicken is spherical.”  Anyway my colleague and I were taking a walk at lunch and on passing over the Watertown Bridge we noticed that there was an excess of sudsy pollution on the river.

This is very foul for the waterfowl (sorry).  But it does highlight the flow patterns of the river.  And what we noticed was that as the water goes under the bridge where it narrows and then releases into the wider river below (right hand side in Figure 1), there is a back-flow (left hand side in Figure 1), resulting from Bernouilli’s principle that causes little whirlpools or vortices to form (center in Figure 1).

I took a couple of pictures and we went on to discuss the Coriolis force and whether water truly goes clockwise down a bathtub drain in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere.  Life is good!

Figure 1 Henry Fox Talbot “The Open Door” from his “Pencil of Nature, 1844. From the Wikicommons and in the public domain because of expired copyright.

I was thinking about photographic technology and got to musing about alternative possibilities to modern digital photography.  We’ve gotten so used to taking our images on digital cameras, altering them with an image processing software package, and then printing them using a digital inkjet printer. What if none of this existed?  Are there alternative technologies that we could invent?  I guess that I’ve come to so love the fine detail of dodging and burn that can be achieved with digital photography that the thought of returning to the dodge and burn with masks and fingers of the “good old days” terrifies me.

So then I got to thinking that if you allowed me to replace my old enlarger condenser with a finely focused laser beam (three laser beams if I wanted to do color) then this beam could be my pencil. (Remember Fox Talbot and “The Pencil of Nature“) and I could have as fine and as precise control as ever I wanted.  Photography would be a bit like water-coloring in that you would always be building up density (Burning in) never removing it (dodging), but you could certainly get used to that-just as goauche artists get used to the opposite.

Well no good idea goes uninvented for long, and I learned of Cymbolic Sciences, Inc.’s “LightJet” technology.  That technology was a drum printer that used three lasers (red, gree, blue) to write directly onto color film (silver halide).  It was capable of amazing dynamic range and really represents a hybrid between modern digital printing and its predecessor analogue photography.  These systems are no longer commercially available.  However, they remain the darlings of some photographers particularly large format photographers.

Technology does not necessarily follow a preordained path.  To borrow a phrase from science, there are an infinity of possible world lines.  And unless we are incredible prognosticators, it’s never quite what we think it’s going to be.  Consider all those science fiction movies of the 1950’s and 1960’s where computers “of the future” had blinking lights and reel to reel tapes.  It didn’t quite work out that way.

In science and possibly mathematics, it’s not that way.  We have this unproven sense that science is based on an inherent reality and as a result that theory ultimately has to reflect that reality.  We might express it differently but the reality dominates.

Technology is an evolving system.  Like biological evolution it is driven by a small set of rules, but is ultimately random in the way that complexity grows.  It’s a wonderfully accurate analogy especially as it relates to transitional technologies and their similarity to transitional species.  Fill a niche today and tomorrow you are relegated to quaintness.  Watching this process makes it truly worth getting up in the morning.

Figure 1 – New York City during the Great Blizzard of 1888, showing the tangle of electrical wires taking the strain of the snow. After the disaster of the storm New York City began the task of placing electrical utilities below ground. From the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

The weather in New York City in early March of 1888 was unseasonably mild.  On March 12 heavy rain developed and then turned to snow.   The snow became heavy just after midnight and continued with fury for a day and a half.  There was a total of about 40 inches in New York and New Jersey, while Connecticut and Massachusetts received as much as 50 inches.  In New York City at the height of the storm winds gusted to forty miles per hour and snow drifts averaged 30 to 40 feet in New York and New England.

The Great Blizzard of 1888 was  the perfect formula for disaster as the City was a tangle of electrical, telegraph, and telephone wires.  The wires rapidly became covered in snow and were brought down by shear weight and ferocious winds.  People were electrocuted by falling wires and their bodies not found for weeks until the snow melted.

Figure 2 – My grim discovery (c) DE Wolf 2013

I remember a diorama of the storm at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and my father recounting the story as if he had lived it.  Such were my memories and thoughts on Monday afternoon, as I walked along the Charles River Reserve beneath the Watertown, MA bridge.  Our own blizzard was reduced to memory now with almost all the snow melted and remnants of colossal drifts now yielded their own detritus.

12:45 PM EST was when I found him.  It was near the children’s playground on the north bank of the river about a mile east of the bridge.  I was glad that there were no children present to witness my grim discovery.  I saw him first lying face down in the flotsam of now wasted snowdrifts.  His fur was grimy but unmistakably red.  One eye was turned back in his head.  I turned him over to confirm his identity.  We await DNA verification, but it all seems sadly certain.  Rest in peace, little red friend.