Figure 1 – Leon’s Mens and Boys’ Wear, Charleston, SC, (c) DE Wolf 2014

I’m in need of a mood boaster today; so I am going to post my favorite photograph from my recent vacation.  I worked a little outside my usual workflow on this trip.  Usually I take my pictures and then, at night, I work them up.  So I tend to stay current. I took my tablet with me and was planning on processing my images with LightRoom instead of PhotoShop; but I wound up without a way of transferring the images from my camera onto my computer.  This had two consequences.  First, I had to keep the images in my head – constantly mulling them over unil I got home.  And second, when I got home I had this large stockpile to go through.  It kind of puts everything in a different perspective or light.

On this particular day, it was raining, and I had left my camera in the car, while we had lunch.  Heading back to the car in a drizzle I was struck by this faded painted sign on the wall of a building and thought yes, this is a picture.  One point about cloudy days is that you can think pastels; you can think Kodachrome.  So I went back to the car; hesitated for a moment as to which lens to use, went out, and took the picture of Figure 1.  Don’t know about you, but I love it.  And I knew that I would love the results as soon as I looked at the LCD screen on the back of my camera as I was meticulously removing water drops.

I’ve been fairly strict with myself about processing – pretty much doing it in the order that the images were taken and as a result this was an image that I had to wait to process. For me it was worth the wait.  Oh and as for all the blah blah blah that you don’t care about.  Taken with my EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens, IS on, ISO 800, no compensation, at 41 mm, 1320th sec. f/9.0.

Figure 1 – Simple Gifts, Antique cooking utensils, Charleston, SC, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

The phrase “simple gifts” refers to the Shaker song by that name and to the theme derived from it in Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring.”  At a deeper level it refers to the pure beauty that may be found in simple, often utilitarian, things.  And photographically this theme has been wonderfully dealt with in Linda Butler’s portfolio book “Inner Light: The Shaker Legacy.”

While in Charleston, we went on a tour of the exquisite  Heyward-Washington House.  This Georgian double house structure was built in 1772 by Thomas Heyward Jr a patriot leader in the Revolutionary War and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In May of 1791 George Washington rented the home – hence the name.

When we entered the house, I asked the tour guide about the photography policy and was pleased to learn that non-flash photography was allowed. Later the guide asked why I had not taken any pictures.  Perhaps she did not notice the gloominess of the day and the fact that we had been touring the home like troglodytes albeit with sunny dispositions.

But then I went into the kitchen.  The kitchens were detached to prevent the danger of fire.  In the kitchen I found some antique cooking utensils hanging on the wall and the Shaker theme came immediately to mind.  The result is Figure 1.

“Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.”

Joseph Elder of the Shaker Community of Alfred, ME

Figure 1 – Palmetto Carriage Horse, Charleston, SC, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I actually learned an important lesson about photographing horses while I was in Charleston last week.  I have tried to take pictures of horses over the years and the results have never been very successful in my view – something was lacking.

Charleston has these horse drawn carriages and wagons that ferry people on historic tours of the city.  I apologize to all you romantics out there.  But this does not look like a happy situation to me – that is from an equine perspective.  And I gather that these carriages are just as controversial as the Central Park carriages in New York City.  The bottom line appears to be that either a 2000 pound Palmetto horse or a pair of mules pulls something like thirteen people through town.

I found nothing photogenic about any of this.  We have a carriage pulled by a team of Clydesdales in the Fourth of July parade in our home town, and the horses really appear to be happy and proud of what they are doing.  I’ve snapped away at this; but never got anything that I liked.

Then I came across the very self assured, beautiful, fellow resting in front of the stables shown in Figure 1.  He almost appeared to have a smile on his face, and I took several photographs of him.  As I came around on his side, I realized that he was intently looking at me, following my every move.  He was engaged and for once I liked the end result.  I can contrast what I consider to be a successful image with one I took more head on.  Eye contact and engagement were lost.  The horse loses his persona and becomes an object.

The point is obvious.  Animals are people too, and just as you have to engage with a person to do their portrait justice; so too with horses, and dogs, and cats.  I have a friend Karla Cook, who is wonderful artist and one of her specialties is pet portraits.  I just love these pictures.  I’m guessing that she could have told me this.

Figure 1 – Tone-on-tone 3 – Bunched Indigo, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Last April I posted an IPhone image of folds or bunching in a wedding gown that I found during one of my mall walks.  Every spring our local mall features dress and fashion designs by local students that attend regional fashion programs.  It’s done as a contest where the public judges the “best in show.” This morning I was delighted to find that this year’s show had begun.  It is a sure sign of spring, and the colors are truly like spring flowers.

What caught my eye this morning was a puffy indigo skirt by a very talented young lady named Eboni Bell from Mount Ida College.  I just loved the folds and took a close-up of them.  Folding and bunching so as to create drama and a sense of spontaneity is no small feat – and requires an excellent eye.

As for the tone-on-tone of my photograph, taken again with my IPhone 4S, I love the challenge that monochromicity poses.  It is so too easy to over do the dynamic range, to plunge to total blackness, and soar to pure white.  It is a mistake that kills the whole effect of the tone-on-tone.

Figure 1 – Charleston Cock, Charleston, SC, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I was delighted to learn today that the expression, “it don’t make no never mind to me,” is South Carolinian in origin. That makes it a perfect complement to the cock of Figure1.  In encountered this fellow and an avian friend by Charleston Old Market, where the horse-drawn carriages depart.  I am not sure why he was there, although I suspect that it had something to do with what the horses leave behind.  And I hasten to add that the City of Charleston has these sanitary trucks that follow the horse paths, clean up, and disinfect.  Perhaps the chickens are municipal employees.

So now the litany.  This picture was taken with my Canon T2i camera using    EF70-200mm f/4L USM, exposure compensation +1, at a focal length of 131 mm, 1/100th of a second at F/9.0. WHO CARES! And frankly your f-numbers don’t make no never mind to me either, or perhaps neither. 8<)

It’s kind of like a scientific notebook.  Scientists are religious about taking notes, recording all the facts and details, and usually it turns out in retrospect that they wish that they had recorded some salient point.  Still too much is too much!  When I was a postdoctoral fellow in Michael Edidin’s laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University, several of the graduate students would spend hours producing multicolored, neatly written, masterpiece, notes.  They would then proudly sit down with Michael and become infuriated, when Michael would scribble all over their notebooks with his fountain pen.  (Allow me to assist those of you who are strictly of a digital age.  A fountain pen is a writing implement that leaves little annoying pools of ink on paper, fingertips, and shirt pockets).  Michael was teaching an important lessen, that the purpose of a scientific notebook was to be a free flowing, on the spot record of an experiment, and not an impediment to getting work done.  Indeed, I have learned over the years that in science the amount of good work accomplished is inversely proportional to the beauty of a lab notebook!

Returning to exposure details, the point is that rarely is all of this information of any value to anyone but you.  Ansel Adam has it right, when his picture taking began with absolute and relative measurement of the light and its dynamic range.  The important point is that he was developing a critical system of photography, “the zone system.” It was a system that starting with the key element “light measurement” and systematically provided a modus operandi for producing “the best” print using the exquisitely annoying nonlinear media of film and photographic paper. .  Note that “best image” is in quotes because that too had to be defined within the zone system.  It was brilliantly designed to overcome uncontrollable variables, like how exhausted your developer was, and produce the same high quality print again and again from a given negative.

And arguable you could develop such a system for your digital images.  But the starting point would need to be a measurement of the intensity and dynamic range of the light and a scrupulously consistent workflow with standardized (your own) curves or look-up tables.  That being the digital equivalent of film type.  Without that it all starts to unravel and become pretty meaningless.

I do not argue that in surveying your own work that the exposure data is useless.  It teaches you how your camera and lenses perform under certain circumstances, albeit qualitative circumstances.  Is a given lens sharp enough at a given f-number and focal length?  How does lens type affect depth of field?  How far with your camera can you push the ISO?

What about other people’s exposure data.  While I would never say that it is useless, I do have to say that without a lot more information it’s of little value.  There are just too many unknowns to make meaningful assessments.  So I have to return to the statement that “your f-numbers make no never mind to me.”

You have to love the expression.  It is a quadruple negative, easily driven driven to quintupleness with the addition of the word neither at the end- “your f-numbers don’t make no never mind to me neither.”  And can even be made a sextuple negative in the subjunctive- “your f-numbers wouldn’t make no never mind to me neither.”  It all flies in the face of those bratty English teachers, who insisted that it was improper to use a double negative (despite the fact that most other romance languages do), to blatantly split an infinitive.  The concept of ending a sentence with a preposition I shall not bring up.

Picasso’s Minotaur, Charleston, SC, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

So the usual – get up at three thirty in the morning, drive to the airport bus, take the bus to Logan Airport, fly two hours to Charleston, hassle at the car rental (the old bait and switch), drive to hotel (kinda bait and switch again).  But I am not a bitter person.  OK, well maybe just a little.  I have been accused of having a glass empty view of the world.  So finally around two in the afternoon we arrive at the King Street Mellow Mushroom for well a pretty good lunch.

I am itching to get out and take some pictures, when the chandeliers above the two front tables catch my eye – my favorite abstractions white tone on tones.  So now there’s this weird guy at the front of the restaurant taking pictures of the lighting.  People are tolerant in the American South! Taken with my Canon T2i with my EF70-200mm f/4L USM using IS 1/60th second at f/13.0 ISO=800.This was not my expected first photograph in Charleston.  But, the result is Figure 1, which I entitle Picasso’s Minotaur – hopefully for obvious reasons.