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.

Alluding to the Ebola epidemic

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The Ebola epidemic is tragic, terrible, and ultimately pretty terrifying.  We have all been trying to understand exactly what it means, and trying to remain cool, no panic, and analytical about it.  And it is the kind of thing where photographs can be just two vivid to deal with.  Still we are being bombarded with images constantly, most of which, quite frankly, fail to really tell the story of what is going on in West Africa. Yesterday, I came across a new form of Ebola image from AFP-Getty images which really gave me pause.  It shows a Chinese seamstress in a factory, churning out hundreds of protective suits for healthcare providers. Suddenly one is confronted with the magnitude of the reality of the epidemic. And what makes it doubly poignant, is that my first thought on looking at this photograph was how much it reminded me turn of the twentieth century images of workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.  That tragedy we have discussed before. The point is that human tragedy is universal.  It spans place and it spans time. What I think is most significant here is that when actual events are so horrific, it often proves to be the case that images that essentially allude to reality can be just as, or even more, effective in portraying it than raw and visceral reality.  This alluding image is ever so successful.

Rock doves (Columba livia) in flight

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Figure 1 - Pigeons in flight, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Pigeons in flight, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Rock dove is a fancy name for our common pigeon.  The ones in Figure 1 were photographed in Concord, MA; so they are suburban birdsand probably drive BMWs.  As a result, they need a fancy Latin name, hence “Columba livia.”  I was watching these birds, their identity was obvious from the way they flocked and their flight pattern, as I walked along a muddy path this past Saturday at a farm in Concord.  They were obviously drawn by the remnants of September’s harvests but were quite a bit off.  But in the end my patience was rewarded when they flew frenzied past me against the background of the late fall foliage.

Birds are hard enough to photograph, but birds in flight represent a true challenge and it is more than a bit of a challenge to achieve the eyes in focus goal.  I didn’t quite accomplish it here.  But the feathers on the wings are well defined, and the seemingly random asynchronous beating delightful.  Birds always seem to be in a frenzy come October – all hurrying somewhere.  My father used to tell me that they were debating whether to go south for the winter and that birds like these pigeons debate too long.

I know that these guys will be huddling together come January, and it is a tribute to the resilience of nature that anything can survive outside in those elements.  We have ultimately to consider the pigeon quite noble.  They figure prominently in Darwin’s thought process that led to his “Origin of Species,” and for that we owe them a great gratitude.

Radishes and sunflowers

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Figure 1 - Radishes and sunflowers, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Radishes and sunflowers, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

The image of Figure 1 was meant to be an experiment.  The goal was to let color dominate but then to break a few compositional rules, or at least to be quirky.  It was a cold wet morning at the Madison, WI farmers’ market when I saw this woman buying sunflowers. The brilliant yellow sunflowers were beckoning and they stood out against a pile of gorgeous radishes.  I had thought to exclude the woman’s face, but it seemed more interesting to let her nose and bangs enter into the image.  The vendor counting change and looking rather cold is relegated to the background.

I got exactly what I was after. With a little knife and a shaker filled with salt I could feast on those radishes! Whether it is a success, I have to ask you.

Wars and conflicts past

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I was struck yesterday by some photographs on the BBC.   These images deal essentially with old wars and conflicts and they, perhaps, suggest that with time even the most terrible and seemingly unresolvable conflicts can in end reach some level of closure – unfortunately only to be replaced by other vicious conflicts.

The first of these is an image by Peter MacDiarmid of Getty images showing the reinterrment northern France of fifteen British soldiers who were killed a century ago in battle near the village of Beaucamps-Ligny.  The remains were found in 2009 during drainage work.   This is one of those breath stopping moments.  You wonder about what was and what might have been.

The second is a set of images, a set of photographs of Londonderry taken by French photojournalist Gilles Caron in 1969.These recently donated images will be on display at the Void and City Factory Galleries in Derry from 28 October until 20 December. This was the first battle in what became euphemistically referred to as “The Troubles.”

Back in 1969, most press photographs were in black and white.  Here you realize that they must be in black and white.  Color would be superfluous.  There is such an intense and stark, gritty reality to the use of monochrome.  These images are masterpieces, fantastic in there ability to say all that needs to be said without the encumbrance of words.  Consider the look on the face of the young, stylish woman in heels, clutching her handbag as she stands on a street corner turned battlefield.  She is out of place in her own home. And then there is the man in a gas mask against a wall on which the universal expression is written, “We Want Peace.” Three words and a single photograph that in the end say everything about wars and conflicts past and present.

 

Sometimes green is best

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Figure 1 - Leaf in the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Leaf in the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

In photography two things often surprise me.  The first, is that many times, when I open the RAW format of an image that I have destined to be black and white, how the color can already be almost monotone.  This is probably the unassuming quality of RAW format.  It assumes very little about what you are trying to do.  The second, is diametrically opposed to the first.  It is the moment when I start to convert the image to grey scale and suddenly it is as if someone has put on the brakes.  The image demands, or at least is highly enhanced by, color.

Such is the case of the leaf image of Figure 1.  I took it inside the green house of the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI earlier this month.  I had conceived a black and white photograph focusing on texture and form.  But the greens of the leaf itself and the contrasting blue tones of the bokeh behind it were just too appealing to be dismissed out of hand.  And the other point about this image is that it was taken in a very flat overcast light.  The greenhouse was actually quite dark and demanded a high ISO.  But the illumination is beautifully even and still manages to accentuate the veins in the leaf. I have learned to low this kind of light and do not fear an overcast day.

I begin to question Kermit the Frog’s song “It’s not easy being green.”  Green is so easy on the eyes and speaks volumes about the essense of life.  It is so easy to be seduced by green; so perhaps the better song to sing is “Greensleaves.”

As i revisit the lyrics I am captured by the phrase: “Your vows you’ve broken, like my heart, Oh, why did you so enrapture me? Now I remain in a world apart,But my heart remains in captivity.” Green houses are in a sense meant to deny death or to deny, at least the season. Here we have a green and vibrant tropical leaf, stolen in a sense from its real world,  held captive in a place that isolates it from a cold Midwestern winter, a place where it is always spring.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM at 98 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture-priority AE mode 1/160th sec at f/6.3 no exposure compensation.