Balloon Plant – Gomphocarpus physocarpus

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Figure 1 - Balloon Plant or Bishop's Balls, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Balloon Plant or Bishop’s Balls, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 is a photograph of the Balloon plant a form of milk weed that I photographed last month at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin.  It has the formal name – Gomphocarpus physocarpus but has many common names.  My favorite is “Bishop’s Balls.”

The photographic appeal is obvious.  It is a study in shape, composition, and texture.  The needles add a complexity of texture.  But what appeals to me the most is the subtle contrast between the greens and the magentas.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 118mm, ISO 1600, Aperture-priority AE Mode 1/250th sec at f/18.0 with no exposure compensation.

Legacy lost

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I am always amazed at how many times I am moved by a photographic essay.  It is the essence of photography that it enhances and enriches a story and, when well-done, can intensify a personal story beyond the possibility of the written word alone. Today I found a photoessay by AP photographer Tsering Topgyal. When he was 8 years old and living in Tibet, his parents hired a smuggler to take him over the Himalayas. His weeks’ long trek brought him to India.  His story is the story of tens of thousands of Tibetans, who have left Tibet for India since the Dalai Lama fled Chinese rule in 1959. Topgyal has not seen his family for eighteen years and his search has been to understand just why he was sent.

His search has led him to explore with powerful images the stories of other Tibetan exiles, who had to leave their families behind.  One of the people that he interviewed is Tsering Choephel, 26, who left his home in Tibet for Dharamsala, India 23 years ago. His comment is so poignant, and I think represents the tragedy of all refugees from all conflicts. “The great tragedy of my life is not being separated from my family, but being separated from the sensibility of missing them, after living without them for decades.”

Topgyal photographs Pema Lhamo, now eight, demonstrating how she stuffed herself into a box in order to escape, when she was three years old. And he photographs Kalsang, who is now nineteen, posing in the library of her Tibetan college library near Dharamsala.  She escaped Tibet in 2004 and is studying Buddhism.  The volumes behind her offer counterpoint.  Can you really learn your culture from books?

Raisin day

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I’ve noticed a trend.  When it comes to fun photographs we, maybe it’s really I, am drawn to all those events involving throwing colored pigments on everybody, wife carry races, and the highland games.  No one was hurt, not even the poor wives, in the production of these photographs! So I was struck this week by a wonderful picture of Raisin Day at Saint Andrews College in the UK.

Here, all the students have taken part in a great foam fight.  They are doused with foam and having a great time! It’s the usual story where the first year students are the “victims.” Academic parents are dressed up in embarrassing costumes but are rewarded with a gift that used to be a pound of raisins, Hence the name, but now more likely to be of the fermented variety of grape. Indeed, fermented grapes figure prominently in the weekend’s events. The origin of the tradition of Raisin Day is obscure in this University, Scotland’s oldest, founded in 1413.

Double crested cormorant – Phalacrocorax auritus

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Figure 1 - Double crested cormorants on Fresh Pond, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Double crested cormorants on Fresh Pond, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

By this point if there is one thing that I have learned about photographing birds is that there is always an issue.  Nothing is ever perfect.  Today was cold, blustery, and there was a spectacular sunlight that reflected off the water. I spotted three double crested cormorants, Phalacrocorax auritus, sitting on a branch that was just above waterline about an 1/8th of a mile ahead of me.  I was convinced that they would fly away before I got there.  But to my surprise the birds stayed put.  Not only that, it was one of the few places on Fresh Pond where the fence is low.  In fact I could rest the camera on top of the fence for extra support.  But then I found the problem.

Try as I would, there was no way to totally avoid intervening branches.  In the end I decided that I would take it as indicative of the surrounding brush, my need to stalk the birds, and their need to hide themselves.  the other problem was that the grouping of three just didn’t work compositionally.  No matter what I did, the photograph seemed out of balance.  So in the end I chose to show only two of these magnificent birds, who to my eye really make a handsome pair.  These are truly gorgeous giants!

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 172 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture-Priority AE mode 1/4000th sec at f/8.0 with no exposure compensation.

 

Pitcher plant

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Figure 1 - Pitcher flower, Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf.

Figure 1 – Pitcher flower, Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf.

The gloomy weather here continues: cold, rainy, and windy.  We have even had our first snow, albeit of the nonsticking variety.  So I continue to “work up” photographs.  So today I am offering up an image of a pitcher plant again taken at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI, and again under really poor light.  But it was ever so vivid that I remember the moment including the damp warm smell of the Earth and the sound of running water.  These are always intriguing plants, and here I was attracted by the lovely, yet savage, shape captured between two blade like and out-of-focus leaves,

Pitcher plants are an adaptation of four families of carnivorous plants. Insects, such as flies, are attracted to the cavity formed by the pitcher shaped leaf. Often this involves an alluring smell or visual appearance.  The insect becomes trapped inside and ultimately drowns in the pitcher’s nectar.  The body of the insect is gradually dissolved.  The mechanism of this digestion can be quite complex.  It can involve symbiotic bacteria or lytic enzymes.  But also it can involve digestion by insect larvae within the liquid, in which case the insect excretes nutrients into the fluid. All these mechanisms create a nutritive brew of amino acid and other metabolites for the plant to feast upon.  It is a tribute to Darwinian evolution.

They are splendidly complex objects for photography. And I have photographed them before. The depth of possibilities is brilliantly explored by photographer Beth Moon in her “Savage Garden” series.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 98 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture-Priority AE mode, 1/100th sec at f/6.3, with no exposure compensation.

Bowling Ball Heads

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Figure 1 - Bowl Ball Garden decorated for Halloween. (c) ABW 2014.

Figure 1 – Bowl Ball Garden decorated for Halloween. (c) ABW 2014.

Halloween is pretty much my favorite holiday.  What could be better: costumes, candy, and really no religious baggage – Día de Muertos.  So it is pretty much with remorse each year when November rolls around.  Sometime in the seventies Halloween started to become a big deal commercially: costumes for adults, home decorating, and the like.  I am a great fan of giant blowup pumpkins, spiders, and ghosts!

But yesterday a reader posted on his Facebook page a picture from Wisconsin of his neighbors bowling ball garden, decorated for Halloween.  Every bowling ball had a ghoulish mask.  So I asked this reader to send me a higher resolution shot from his IPhone, which he was kind enough to do.  So as I take down the “Halloween Gallery” for another year, I thought that I would share this snapshot with you.  Also, I am hoping that it inspires people all over the world to decorate their bowling ball gardens for appropriate holidays: Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, Diwali.  The possibilities are endless.

Scoria

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Figure 1 - Scoria at the Thai Garden in the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014

Figure 1 – Scoria at the Thai Garden in the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014

I am sitting in my dining room at my computer and listening to a cold rain falling on the roof.  It is a washout for the first Saturday in November, although I did venture out with my camera for a short walk through the woods.  Nothing grabbed me photographically, but I was content to watch the raindrops and the leaves fall into Sudbury’s Cricket Pond.  There is something really special about leaf covered paths on a rainy day  There is an inner peace to the dampness and the muted colors..

But now I am back home, warm, and happy to have some unfinished photographs to “work up.”  I am reasonably pleased by the image of Figure 1 of some scoria in the Thai Garden at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI. Scoria is a volcanic rock, filled with cavities from gaseous bubbles.  There is something wonderful about it – something that binds us to an ancient, growling Earth. Although our Hawaiian friends staring in the face of home-threatening lava fields may not agree.

Tonight is the time change and last night I thought nostalgically about the fading light.  I will not drive home from work in the light again until the first week of February.  The light of September that I spoke so fondly about is now long past, and I found myself wondering about night photography.  That is much more accessible and doable than it was in the days of film. On the other side of cycles, I may again enjoy the light of dawn illuminating fog enshrouded cows on my drives in. I guess that it is time to take down Hati and Skoll’s Halloween Gallery.

Saints and the Tempest

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Well here is something off the wires that I think is absolutely magnificent and beautiful crafted.  It is an image from AFP/Getty Images showing a statue is St. Peter’s Square silhouetted agasinst the sun.  The image was taken just before Pope Francis’ general audience.  Of course, this is filled with classical allusions.  The disk of the sun is like a saints halo in a renaissance painting and the foreboding clouds are reminiscent of a painting by Michaelangelo, or perhaps of Giorgione’s “The Tempest.” The one incongruity in the scene, which only makes the photograph ever more wonderful is the scaffolding and ropes on the statue.  Here is the sacred and there is the profane.

Frozen in time

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You will often hear the cliché’ that a photograph freezes a moment in time.  Hmm!  Yesterday I came across a news photo that appears to put this phrase in new light.  On Tuesday what is probably the best preserved mammoth extracted from the Russian tundra went on display in Moscow.  With or without a photograph, here is something truly frozen in time – from 38,000 years ago.

Needless-to-say this mammoth has raised hopes of resurrection of the wooly beast by cloning – shades of Jurassic Park.  I remember quite vividly as a child visiting the skeletons of these prehistoric animals at the American Museum of Natural History and wondering … Is the validity of recalling these victims of extinction simply a matter of wonder, is it science, or is just a collective guilt – probably a little bit of all three. We can debate the ethics and consequences of cloning.

And speaking about ethics… This also raises the important (?) question of whether the Russian Czars actually ate mammoth or the related mastodon meat.  I have it on good authority (The Internet) that these stories are false and apocryphal.  Too bad, I guess.  Most discovered mammoth flesh extracted from the tundra permafrost is kinda putrid and pretty foul smelling.  So for now I’m going to need to be content with a colleague’s father, who discovered thirty year old hamburger at the bottom of a freezer that he had in his barn.  He ate it with great satisfaction.