Yearly Archives: 2014

The great pumpkin caper

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I spent yesterday in transit, as they say; so I need something pretty simple and amusing photographically today.  So I thought that I would pick up on the “October is pumpkins” theme and record the fact that the world’s largest pumpkin record as been smashed (sic).  Swiss Gardner, Beni Meier, went to great lengths to transport the behemoth to Germany.  The big orange puppy weighed in at 2,096.6 lbs. This breaks the previous record held by Tim and Susan Mathison from California.

The pumpkin will remain on display in Klaistow, Germany, according to spokeswoman, Maika Ziehl when it will be “slaughtered” (Gulp!) made into soup and its seeds auctioned off by those with dreams of giant pumpkins.  Well, Oktoberfest is over; so time to move on to something else… 

Shirley Baker

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Lovers of the work of Vivian Maier will morn the loss last week of English Street photographer Shirley Baker. Happily Ms. Baker saw to the preservation of her own work. It didn’t need to be discovered in a trunk at auction.  Rather Ms. Baker, one of the leading British photographers of the past century donated her work to the Mary Evans Picture Library.

A significant.body of this work is a collection documenting Salford and Manchester. These images mostly from 1960 to 1973 a time of economic and social metamorphosis for the working class people of Manchester and Salford. And as such the work becomes an important historic documentation.

Ms. Baker had a keen sense of the lyrical in her images, juxtaposing, for instance, an elderly woman staring wistfully immutable on one side of a bench with two children in motion rough-housing on the other side. This simple image becomes a Shakespearian allegory of the “seven ages of life.” Then there is a wonderful image of a woman sitting oblivious to the huge great dane seated beside her.  And then a dog sitting in a train station stall with its legs crossed next to a woman with her legs crossed.

It is such a pleasure to study these wonderful images and to let them transport us back in time and place. It is one of those cases when even if you do not recognize the photographer, you recognize the photograph. And you recognize the love and respect for subject that you find in them. Study is the operational word here, because there is so much to learn about seeing and photographic composition in Shirley Baker’s life’s work.

Sir John Benjamin Stone

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Figure 1 - portrait by "Spy" of Sir John Benjamin Stone. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – portrait by  Leslie Ward “Spy” of Sir John Benjamin Stone. From the Wikimediacommons and in the  US public domain.

We have often discussed in this blog the way in which nineteenth century photographs offer us a rare yet highly personal glimpse of life in that century.  Currently on exhibit at the Brazilian Embassy in London is a collection of photographs taken by Sir John Benjamin Stone (1838-1914) during the famous Solar Eclipse Expedition of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1893.

Stone was official photographer for that expedition.  But what is the most remarkable element of Stone’s work is his extensive portrayal of peoples. The expedition brings to life the Portuguese immigrants and Brazilian people working to build an independent nation. There is something oh so appealing, for instance, in the way that Stone takes us back to a shipboard card game of over a hundred years ago. We relate completely with these young immigrants.

Stone was prolific in both his travels and this very intimate genre of work.  I thought that I would share two images. The first (Figure 1) is a classic “Spy” portrait of Stone from the Vanity Fair series “Great Men of the Nineteenth Century.” While this is not itself a photograph, I think it gives a real sense of the cumbersome gear of the photographer of that time. And besides, I so love this series! It too is a time capsule gift to us. The second is a portrait by Stone of two English revelers at a country fare. You share their pleasure and amusement and wish that you could share a pint with the. “And drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things.”

Figure 2 - Sippers and Toppers by Sir John Benjamin Stone c. 1900. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Sippers and Toppers by Sir John Benjamin Stone c. 1900. From the Wikimediacommons uploaded by user smalljim  and in the US public domain.

 

The time has come the walrus said…

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Figure 1 - The 2014 "haul out" of 45,000 walruses along the Northern Alaskan coast. Image from NOAA.

Figure 1 – The 2014 “haul out” of 45,000 walruses along the Northern Alaskan coast. Image from NOAA.

I am thinking that the picture of the day is the one of Figure 1.  It was released by NOAA on September 27 as part of their annual aerial survey of marine mammals and shows a “haul out” of walruses in Northern Alaska.  Estimates now are that there are about 45,000 individuals in the mammalian cluster.

These events occur when melting ice robs the walrus of his/her favorite lounging spot and they have to resort to hauling out onto the beach.  One local news woman commented this morning that there definitely “a shortage of towel space.” Unfortunately, this is likely an effect of melting arctic seas.  The picture is amazing and poignant!

“The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!””

Lewis Carrol, (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

George Shuba

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George Shuba died at 89 this past Monday.  Back in the 1950’s he played in three world series for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  But today what Shuba is best remember for is a minor league game. Shuba reached out his hand as a welcoming gesture to Jackie Robinson on the day that  Robinson broke the color barrier and integrated baseball.  The moment was captured by an AP photographer in a famous photograph?

Famous photograph?  I am amazed at how many images are stored up in my brain and instantly recognized for the story that they tell.  We tend to catalogue them as well.  Black and white images, especially fuzzy grainy ones, are safely categorized as “of the distant path.”  That is until we examine them closely and recognize that while we have come so far, we still have so far to go. So many images introspectively reveal this sort of ambiguity.  Images of war, human brutality, civil rights, and women’s rights are all obvious examples.

I think a significant point.  Because such images are not merely relics.  They tell us where we’ve been, and when we are honest, they continue from there to tell us both where we are and we we need to be.  As such, they are so much more than simply history.  Such photographs are living, breathing, and organic.

Mirror India on Mars?

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Near full disk image from the ISR Mars Orbiter. Reposted from the ISR Facebook page.

Near full disk image from the ISR Mars Orbiter. Reposted from the ISR Facebook page.

I’m giving huge kudos to the Indian Space Research Organization for their successful insertion of their Mars Orbiter into Martian Orbit at 46,000 miles or 74,500 kilometers.  This is no mean feat, and a lot of credit also has to go to the heroic French mathematicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, who made all of this possible.

Now less than a week after the insertion the spacecraft has captured a beautiful gibbous portrait of the Red Planet, capturing a massive dust storm and in true egalitarian form posted it to the ISR’s Facebook Page. I’ve reposted it here as Figure 1. Wait a minute and look just left of center in the image.  Saurabh Gupta wrote in a comment to the posting, “OMG, India map on Mars!”

Well, deja vu! We have another wonderful pareidolia. It’s all a testament to the way that the human mind seeks to see familiar and recognizable paterns. This in turn essentially creates a whole genre of photographs.

October the First

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Figure 1 - Autumn comes to Dean Park, Shrewsbury, MA a few years back, (c) DE Wolf.

Figure 1 – Autumn comes to Dean Park, Shrewsbury, MA a few years back, (c) DE Wolf.

So today is the First of October. Time for a full transition into fall!. I’m going to celebrate first with Figure 1, which shows the lake a Dean Park in Shrewsbury, MA.  This is one of the very first digital photographs that I ever took about ten years ago.  I shot it with a significant sized Sony camera, which was max 2 Mp, and processed it with a now antique version of Adobe Photoshop.  I remember that I was experimenting with digital photography and that the fall foliage afforded me lots of dramatic photo ops.  It was exhilarating at the time to be able to process in color – something I had always read about but afraid of the cost, complexity, and necessary temperature control.  Also, I was using the Xerox Solid Wax printing process at the time, which was superior to the dye sublimation printer that I had access to, but was brittle.  I still have an image that I took with a Leica M3 as a negative, digitized the negative with a slide scanner, and then printed with the solid wax, hanging in a dark place on my wall.  The colors are rather sensitive to excessive light.

My second celebratory act is that I am reposting the Halloween Gallery that I composed in 2013 of hanging Halloween Decorations.  As a child Halloween was my favorite holiday.  The reasons are quite simple.  I grew up in a religiously diverse neighborhood.  Halloween was the one holiday every kid could celebrate and of course there was the candy.  Where I lived there were 80 buildings with 105 apartments each.  The world was my Oyster! And maybe we could take a lesson from our childhoods and all celebrate Halloween.

The last day of September

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Starburst, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Starburst, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Hmm! Today is the last day of September.  I am realizing that the last week or so had a certain ambiguity.  It was a cross between the wild flowers of late summer and the emerging autumn colors in New England.  While the flowers are still clinging to life, prodded on by temperatures on Sunday in the eighties Fahrenheit,  there is a certain evolving dryness to plant life.  What is left behind by summers flowers are delicate skeletons with lacy patterns that bear the spirit if not the color.  I came upon the starburst of Figure 1 in Concord, MA this past Saturday.

The more robust of these patterns will linger into winter and will delight us as they pop up defiantly through the snow pack to endure frigid winds.  But those will lack the delicate remnant of spider webs.   We have to agree that summer is over, even if nature tries to fool us with what is here referred to as “Indian Summer.”  We hold our collective breath and await the glory season.

The lost doll

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Figure 1 - Lost doll, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Lost doll, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

On Saturday I went. during the golden photography hours of the afternoon. up to the Old North Bridge, National Historic Site in Concord, MA. The park was invaded by tour buses filled with “leaf-peepers.” I tried to photograph a dozen Eastern Bluebirds chirping frantically in a crab apple tree behind the Old Manse, but every time I approach the,  they flocked away to a farther tree.

But I did spot this little doll leaning up against a tree, and I think that the photograph tells its own story.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 84 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture-priority AE mode, 1/320th sec at f/5.6 exposure compensation -1.