Wonder and the sphere, Freeport, Maine. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

To begin with the simple facts, I took the photograph of Figure 1 at the L. L. Bean Riverbed Aquarium in Freeport, Maine. They have a plastic sphere, where you can stick your head into the tank, and the photograph shows a young boy doing just that. But here the magic begins because you can see both his delight and wonder. I took several images of the orb, but this was my favorite because of the expression on the boy’s face and the way that he points at the fish.

Part of the appeal to me of the subject is the subliminal meaning of such a sphere. There is the magic to the sphere, a collective mythic connotation. I return to Anne Brigman’s “The Bubble, 1909.” The bubble is the egg from which we all emerge into the river of life on which we must all journey. We are also reminded of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), where the Christ holds in his hand a crystal orb, representative of the cosmos or the universe. No matter how profoundly you want to take it, a sphere is magical and symbolic of wonder.

Here the light explodes outward outward from the sphere. The light reflecting and refracting off multiple surfaces creates a myriad of planes in the photograph. This is similar to my image from Saturday “Double selfie in a store window.” The fish is only dimly lit, but the sphere is gloriously illuminated. Light is seen to emanate from it. And if you look very closely and try to sort it out, you see spheres within spheres, just like the celestial spheres of the ancients.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 3200, Aperture Priority AE mode 1/640th sec at f/4.5 with -1 exposure compensation.