Category Archives: Personal Photographic Wanderings

American Gothic

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Figure 1 -Discarded antique belt wheels at the historic Damon Mill in Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

This past week, I made two photographic transitions.

First, I upgraded my failing IPhone 6 to an IPhone  XSMax. The 6 represented a major advance in cell phone camera technology, and the 7 even more so.  With the XSMax comes the best camera until, I suppose the XI. There are three cameras on the iPhone XS Max, two in the back and one in the front for selfies and facial recognition. Significantly for those of us who do a lot of post-processing, the dual rear cameras are at 12 megapixels, which some will recall was the transition point when digital started to be equivalent to film in resolution. The lenses are f/1.8 for the wide-angle camera and f/2.4 for the 2x “telephoto.” Let’s put the word telephoto in quotes, for photography buffs this is more of a “normal” lens. But I hasten to mention the fantastic capabilities of these cameras in terms of close-up and wide-angle ability. For me, there is no reason to carry any other cameras but my phone’s and my DSLR.

Of course, a lot of the value lies in the Artificial Intelligence. the AI, in the algorithms. Yes that again, friends!  This is not your father’s camera, or at least not my father’s. This is “computational photography” and has a new feature called ‘Smart HDR’ where the phone begins capturing images as soon as you open the app not just when you push the shutter. Each image is a stream of images, one being chosen as “best.” But, I hasten to add you can change that later as you use the camera’s post-processing algorithms. By combining images the camera optimizes lighting and in the process avoids overexposure and shutter lag. While the images produced are only 8 bit per color plane, in my experience so far, the histograms are spot on, filling the dynamic range perfectly. Well enough said for now, I am having fun, and getting fabulous shots.

And as an example of image quality, I am including as Figure 1 a sepia toned black and white image of discarded antique belt wheels at the historic Damon Mill in Concord, MA taken with my IPhone XSMax and very minimally modified in Adobe Photoshop. I think the subject matter fitting. In its day, in the mid to late nineteenth century, these waterworks that, electricity free, powered the clothing industry of the Industrial Revolution were the height of technology, just as these new cellphone cameras are today.They are now discarded ornaments, which truly makes one wonder what is next!

Second, at the urging of a wise friend, I have started playing with the app PRISMA. This stylizes your images in various painterly fashions. According to Venture Beat, “PRISMA’s filter algorithms use a combination of convolutional neural networks and artificial intelligence, and it doesn’t simply apply a filter but actually scans the data in order to apply a style to a photo in a way that both works and impresses.” If you’re like me this tells you NOTHING. But the point is that these are not simple filters but AI neural networks applied to image modification. They are a lot of fun to use, and when you have a photo, which lacks a certain umph, you can often “jazz” it up with the PRISMA app. It is important, I believe, that the goal here is to achieve a beautiful and artistically pleasing image. Artistic photography is intrinsically nonlinear. Strict intensity and even spatial relationships are fundamentally lost in the processing.So there is nothing wrong with using modern image processing techniques to enhance the effects.

More importantly both the iPhone camera transition and the PRISMAand related apps transition truly represent a new world for the photograph, one where, along with the photographers brain, the camera itself has a brain that works in tandem with you. Of course, the beginnings of all of this rest historically with the development of autofocus and autoexposure back in the seventies. But really, it is a new world energized by neural networks and artificial intelligence. You may have wondered how I can write a blog about photography and futurism in the smae breath. Now you know!

As an illustration of this, Figure 2 shows The Old Salem District Courthouse in the Federal Street District of Salem, Massachusetts reflected in the window of a condominium. The scene struck me as ever so Gothic. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the original image. However, I was able to accentuate this feeling of medieval  Gothis as well as to brighten up the tonality with the PRISMA Gothic filter.

Figure 2 – American Gothic, reflections of the Salem District Courthouse in a condominium window, modified using the PRISMA Gothic filter, Salem, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Courting swans

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Figure 1 – Courting swans on the pond at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA, April 21, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

I am finally making it back, with some regularity, to the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge and wanted to share this photograph of two mute swans (Cygnus olor), necks intertwined, in their courting dance. So beautiful, and such a privilege to see. Definitely there are shades of Anna Pavlova and Saint-Saens Le Cygne! It is, in fact, a privilege to be able to see that old footage as well. The world stops and you are mesmerized by the love dance of these graceful creatures, made all the more poignant by the simple fact that they have danced in this way for millennia. We are truly blessed by the swans and by the wild places.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 275 mm, ISO 1600,  Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/2500th sec at f/6.3 with -1 exposure compensation.

Drinking life to the lees

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Figure 1 – the lees at the bottom of my morning cup of coffee, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees…”
 
And so begins Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s truly wonderful poem Ulysses. There are a lot of life lessons to be learned from that poem, about perseverance, endurance, and living. “Lees” are, of course, the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of wine. And the phrase “drinking life to the lees” means “to the very last drop.”  I first read that in High School and this phrase, and others from that poem,  are never far from the conscious surface of my mind.
 
And so this morning, as I was drinking my morning coffee and staring into the nearly finished cup, the physicist within me marveled at the pattern of the residual grounds, the lees, and Tennyson came to my mind and it is all captured in Figure 1.
 
But there is more, the physicist within me once stirred is not easily quieted, and I find took great joy in the little fractal rivers that carve the “Mississippi Delta” out of the caffeine laden mud. They are fractal yes, random little twists and turns of unpredictability. But they are not fractal in the sense that there is a physics driven size scale to the pattern that we see – driven by surface tension, ground size, and imperfections in the surface of the cup.  Famously. in the movie Jurassic Park Ian Malcolm explains to Ellie Satler how subtle variations cause chaos in the descent of a drop of water down her hand. It is a great seduction scene and presents the essence of chaos theory right there in the bottom of the coffee cup.
 
When I was in graduate school there was the proud tradition of coffee and donuts before seminars. And there was a great black indolent dog, named KT, whom everybody loved and who only came alive for donut time. You would bring your little styrofoam cup into the seminar with you and then quietly massage it into a work of art – the best being to turn it inside out patiently until it resembled a sombrero. Then too there is the tradition of studying the physics of the coffee cup. Upon looking carefully you truly may find the universe in a cup of coffee. It so wonderfully mimics the physics of mega-scale phenomena like stellar dynamics and the thermal engines that drive the currents of the terrestial atmosphere and oceans.
 
Tomorrow morning, as you drink your cup of morning Joe, pause a moment and reflect on the meaning of life and the physics of the cosmos. It is all so near and yet so far away.

Bluebirds on a spring morning

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Figure 1 – Eastern Bluebird, Sudbury, MA, April 11, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

This was a morning of pure delight! The weather is finally turning warm. Yet the eastern bluebirds, Sialia sialis,  have persisted at my feeders, and they dazzle in the warm morning light. I so love the bluebirds best of all. It is both because they are difficult to attract and because of their splendid color. So today, I celebrate spring, and warmth, and bluebirds, with the photograph (Figure 1) of a male near my feeder. We are in Thoreau country here. He celebrated the bluebirds, the ancestors of these very birds. It was he who said that “the bluebird carries the sky on his back.” My bluebirds wintered here. Maybe it was colder in Thoreau’s time, because he wrote:

“The bluebird had come from the distant South
To his box in the poplar tree,
And he opened wide his slender mouth,
On purpose to sing to me.”

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 185 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/500 sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Who’s all the fuss about

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Figure 1 – Piping Plover, Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, Plum Island, Newburyport, MA. March 30, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

There is quite a fuss made each year on April 1 at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island. They actually shut down the miles of beach and the reason is the little fellow shown in Figure 1. He is a piping plover, Charadrius melodus. The piping plover is listed as a near threatened species, and he is given the whole beach to himself in early April to breed and brood in privacy and peace.  Its population, as a result, of such conservation activities is actually on the rise.

Unlike the sanderlings of yesterday’s post, which pipe for crustaeans just at the water’s edge, the piping plover hunts for small insects and worms further up the beach away from the surf. He tends to hunt alone or in smaller groups, as I found this solitary fellow. Anthropomorphically, I love the way his little feet sink into the wet sand. The food specialization reflects itself, true to Darwin and his finches, in the precise shape of its bill. Here short and stout in stark contrast to the sanderling’s long pipe.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 235mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/4000th sec at f/7/1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Sanderlings

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Figure 1 – Sanderlings on Plum Island, Newburyport, MA, March 30, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Figure 1 shows a pair of sanderlings, Calidris alba, that I took on Saturday during my trip to Plum Island in Newburyport, MA. These are the common sandpipers of the eastern coast of North America. In fact, the Sanderling is one of the world’s most widespread shorebirds. While they nest only in the High Arctic, in fall and winter you can find them on nearly all temperate and tropical sandy beaches throughout the world. Despite this, the sanderling population has decreased by as much as eighty percent since the early 1970’s. They are assaulted by climate change both in their feeding and breeding grounds and by human encroachment.

To watch these little sandpipers pipe in the sand at the water’s edge is truly a gift. The beach is never silent, but it is so easy to become mesmerized by sand and surf and to watch these little birds endlessly, or until something spooks them and the whole flock disappears in an instance. Beaches truly are magical places, where you don’t even have to shut your eyes to be transported back in time to the age of the pterodactyls, the great soaring dinosaurs. Here truly are their descendants.

I spoke yesterday of the magic of Avalon. One of my friends said to me, “Too bad it isn’t true. That the magic isn’t real.” To that the response must be that Avalon is not a physical place, but it is real, it is in your heart. The sandpiper, the beach, and the mist all bring the magic to your heart.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 235 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/4000th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

The Mists of Avalon

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Figure 1 – The Mists of Avalon, Plum Island, Newburyport, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019

Yesterday, I finally made it up for an early spring visit to Plum Island. The trip had the instant vacation, the instant spiritual cleansing, effect of all trips to the sea. This did not disappoint. Massachusetts’s North Shore is a magnificent and magical place, especially this time of year when great expanses of the shoreline are devoid of people, when the sea is cold and green, when you can immerse yourself in the insistent claim to existence of the surf and the wind.

Yesterday was overcast, although there was a cloud-draped sun, and there was a glorious mist. This immediately evoked all the magic of the mists of Avalon and the fact that we, as English speaking people, are spiritually, if we open our minds to it, never too far from that seminal myth of Britain. Mist is hard to photograph, but I am pleased by the image of Figure 1. I took several images but this one, where the woman resembles Vivien, Mallory’s “Lady of  the Lake,” spoke most to. It seems as if the Lady of the Lake lifts up the fog from the sand and the sea.  The mist does not enshroud her, but rather she enshrouds herself with the mist. We have the words of Marion Zimmer Bradley that ultimately describe the critical point of all hero journeys.

“Avalon will always be there for all men to find if they can seek the way thither, throughout all the ages past the ages. If they cannot find the way to Avalon, it is a sign, perhaps, that they are not ready.”
 
As for the photograph, I made a critical error here and left my camera on Large JPEG rather that raw format. The dynamic range suffers as a result. Other than that, I used my big birding lens, as I was there to photograph the Piping Plovers. Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 180 mm,  ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/4000th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Axis Mundi 2

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Figure 1 – Axis Mundi 2, a thin, translucent slice of agate, Natick, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

In yesterday’s blog, I spoke of the axis mundi, which is the center of the world, or of the universe, and I’d like to offer another glimpse of that center today. It is shown in Figure 1. What you see is a picture of a giant translucent slice of agate in a window at Tiffany’s. I mention this because when I entered the store to photograph it, I was immediately surrounded by concerned clerks. “One Adam Twelve, One Adam Twelve! Crazy photographer on the loose!” I’ll leave to my generation to recognize that.

But I do want to point out the ambiguously bright center of the agate, which like a black hole contains infinite light, as well as how the shades of dark and light in the bands resemble the zeros and ones of binary data storage, because like the Tree Of Knowledge, an example of the world tree that is the axis mundi, is meant to contain all the knowledge in the universe.

Last night I was speaking to a friend about the meaning of the axis mundi and the world tree. As this photograph clearly illustrates, this central axis is everywhere – found here at the mall, but at the same time it is the life-long quest of the Hero with a Thousand Faces. That dichotomy seems a contradiction. 

Where is the center of the universe? Logically, the center is the point from which all things emanate – in an expanding universe. Well, suppose that you are on a balloon that is being inflated and there are other people on the balloon. Each person sees everyone else moving away from him/her. And the same is true of our-four dimensional space-time universe. So by that definition the central point is everywhere.

On a mythic level it may be everywhere, but it may not always be attainable or accessible. That is of course true, for instance, for the hero Percival who is first denied access to the grail only to attain it later*. The moral to the story is that the center is indeed everywhere, in the simplest of things you will catch glimpses of it by  virtue of the simplicity. It is a simple gift that may be found even in a thinly sliced, translucent layer of cryptocrystalline silica.

* In Chrétien’s Perceval, he encounters a crippled king but he fails to recognize the significance of the grail and therefore does not ask the right question, the question that would have healed the king. He is not ready. From then on he vows to find the true grail. And as in all these hero stories he must first become worthy.

 

“How to Make Good Pictures”

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Figure 1 – Don’t sit under the Apple Tree with any one else but me.”

Hmm! On Saturdays I take my trash to the town dump. It is meant to be no more than than a mundane event, a task to be freed from. However, whenever I finish dumping the trash I go into the “Book Swap,” where all the books bear my favorite price, $Nothing! But a few weeks back I got more than just a book. There on the shelf was a little book published in 1941 by the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, N.Y. Memories flooded in and I was in a time warp, as if I was a time traveler – transported again to my youth.

My father had owned a copy of this book. My father had taught me photography, and this was the very first book about photography that I had ever read. It contained advice about everything: about cameras for the amateur, about photographing children, about color and black and white films, and it contained a formulary for the dark room.It was not as profound as, for instance, Looten’s book on enlarging. But it was the first.

Greedy for memories of my dad, I immediately and reflexively opened to the book’s frontispiece – a color image of a young woman sitting beneath an apple tree, a bushel of apples by her side, and with a partially eaten apple in her hand (Figure 1). She is, oh, so beautiful and, oh, so forties. I fell in love with her again!. And truly, the image evokes the words and sentiment of that war generation song by the Andrews Sisters:

“Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me
Till I come marching home.”

So many did not come home! Many of the images in this book recall this longing for home – so defining both the war years and the quest for normalcy that followed the nightmares. At this juncture three quarters of a century later, it connects us with that generation – the generation of my parents. I find myself regretting the loss of my father’s copy, at some point casually and indifferently given away as obsolete – failing to comprehend its deeper meaning.

Ultimately, it was Billie Holiday who said it best:

“I’ll Be Seeing You”

I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day and through

In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children’s carousel
The chestnut trees, the wishing well

I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you

I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you