Figure 1 -“E pluribus unum, Salem, MA.” (c) DE Wolf 2014.

It is, friends, the official end of summer – whatever that means.  New England photographers prepare first for the gorgeous light of September and then for the glory season of autumn.  I will admit to being just a bit psyched.  That’s psyched not psycho!  So it seemed pretty fitting to seek out the sea today.  To touch the Atlantic one more time at least before the winter. We went up to Salem Massachusetts to the National Maritime Historic Site and to the Peabody Essex Museum to see, before it closes the exhibit “J. M. W. Turner and the Sea.”

It was an amazing day, fist weather-wise.  But then I found myself having lunch in the tap room of the Hawthorne Hotel and I realized that almost fifty years ago to the day, August 1964, I had dinner there with my parents.  It is funny how the time machine of life goes.  And I am always amused to read the wall exhibits at the Inn about the shooting of an episode of the television series “Bewitched” there in 1970.  For how much longer will the fading collective mind of a generation remember that television series?

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864) was born in Salem, MA, then a teeming seaport and the capital of the “China Trade.”  The “House of Seven Gables” is preserved as is the “The Customs House,” were Hawthorne actually worked.  There is a magnificent gilded American Eagle atop the Customs House a three-dimensional variant of The Seal of the United States, “E pluribus unum” – “Out of the many, one.”   I took a few photographs of the eagle, but the distance is trying.  I found a smaller replica at the National Parks Service’s Vistor’s Center, got down on the floor to get the angle that I wanted, and used my 70 to 200 mm lens at 91 mm from a few feet away to achieve the in the eagle’s face off center look that I wanted.  Since the light was low, I shot with an ISO of 3200.  I don’t find that too grainy in the digital world, and it enabled me to use 1/80th sec (approximately 1/focal length) necessary because the lens is not image stabilized. Note the catch-light in the eagle’s eye.  It is not added and gives a real-life sense to the bird.  I got home and was delighted to find that I could achieve exactly the tone and mood that I wanted.

Canon T2i with  EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens hand-held at 91 mm, ISO 3200, Aperture-Priority AE, 1/80th sec at f/5.6 with no exposure compensation.