On photographing sculpture

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

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

One of the things that I find that I love most to photograph is sculpture.  There is a certain serenity to it.  I used to think that it was a bit of a cheat.  You let the sculptor do the creative part, to find and put the emotional part into the piece.  But, of course, that is very far from the facts.  Yes, it represents a derivative art form.  However, that is merely a superficial element of the creative process. It is just a beginning. That is the very point.  It is the beginning of an enhanced experience of the piece, of a propagation, if you will, of creativity.

There are two favorite materials: bronze and stone, preferably marble. And each of these has its own special qualities.  It is the unique way that each of these interacts with light that is photographically appealing. Surprisingly, I find that a flat light is often the best, as bright light tends to create an excessive contrast. The raw materials can be a bit overwhelming, and the real appeal comes with age and patina, subtle forms of oxidation, less subtle forms of urban pollution, and, yes, even molds and lichens. These all create a defining signature to the material.

The hand of a sculptor defines a significant genesis, and the photographer augments this creation by interpreting how the piece interacts with light.  Sculpture takes a chaotic material, essentially void of form, and puts order in it.  This is the extraction of order out of random chaos and is symbolic of, indeed mirrors, both the physical and biological evolution of our own world and universe.

I am posting today two photographs that I took at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI.  This is a wonderful place, created and maintained by an army of talented, creative people.  Figure 1 is a bronze leaf that children like to crawl under.  Shortly after I took this image we watched a mother crawl under it to extract a gleeful toddler.  I chose to photograph close.  The leaf gestalt is lost, but what reams is waves of bronze.  As always with such subjects I carefully worked on the highlights with a fine brush dodging tool.  The magic of bronze lies in these highlights.

Figure 2 is a stone relief that sits, as if randomly, among the flowers of the Thai garden.  The edges of the stone are cut as if to say that this is sound ruin or relic.  There is a dark patina, which I suspect is intentionally added, again to indicate or mimic antiquity.  I love this dancing figure.

In both cases the light was diffuse and dull.  It illuminates evenly and doesn’t create hard shadows.  It requires a bit of local brightening, but in the end the three-dimensional affect is there but not over whelming.

Leaf – Canon T2i with  EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 1600, Auto AE-Priority Mode, 1/250th sec at f/8.0 with no exposure compensation.

Dancer – Canon T2i with  EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 87 mm, ISO 1600, Auto AE-Priority Mode, 1/400th sec at f/11.0 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 2 - Dancer, Thai Pavilion, Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 2 – Dancer, Thai Pavilion, Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

 

Google camel cam

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The news media were all abuzz this morning with images and videos about the latest adventures of the Google Trekker Camera.  This is the 360 degree view camera that Google sends around the world to create the street view images for Google Earth.  You might see this strange looking camera in your neighborhood.  And of course, legends of the strange things photographed by the Trekker Camera abound.  But now it seems that Google has gone one step further and strapped its camera to the hump of a camel named Raffia to drag the camera around through the shifting sands of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis, and these are beautiful images.

According to Google spokeswoman Monica Baz the camel was an apt way of documenting the desert. “With every environment and every location, we try to customize the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment…In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way.” Ironically for the camel the only thing that it does not photograph is itself. As a result, and if you exclude shadows, there are no selfies in Camelot.

Shades of Lawrence of Arabia, shades of the Three Wisemen, shades of Marco Polo’s expedition to the orient.  I am reminded of a limerick taught to me by a reader and friend forty years ago. AB knows who he is. But that is too risque to repeat here. So we will have to settle for Ogden Nash here:

“The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary , two;
Or else the other way around.
I’m never sure. Are you?”

 

 

Ruffed Grouse, Bonasa umbellus

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Figure 1 - Ruffed Grouse, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Ruffed Grouse, Madison, WI. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I have not yet figured out all of the unofficial legitimacy rules concerning bird photography. But hey, a photograph’s a photograph in the end. I took Figure 1 of a Ruffed Grouse, Bonasa umbellus, with my EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 200 mm and handheld (1/40th sec f/6.3) ISO 1600 at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI. The bird was free to wander off, but seduced by a bowl of bird seed, and the conditions were really quite dark and challenging. Also my lens kept fogging over. Despite its relatively short maximum focal length and lack of IS capabilities. I am finding this lens really convenient for stalking birds. I was very pleased with how it came out. The eye is in good sharpness and I like the catch-light. The image captures the grouse in a very natural and well camouflaged surrounding.

Badgermania

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The blogger at the Madison Farmers Market on a cold, rain Saturday. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

The blogger at the Madison Farmers Market on a cold, rain Saturday. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I spent this past weekend in Madison, WI. Madison is a cool place. The operative words there are “On Wisconsin.” The operative symbol is the badger. And the operative color is red. Everyone is wear red badgerphrenalia. I once made the mistake of going to a Badgers Football game in my black leather jacket. There were 80,321 people in Camp Randall Stadium that morning. 80,319 were dressed in red. But in true “Fighting Bob LaFollette” progressive fashion my wife and I were not shunned.

I took a lot of photographs in Wisconsin and I’ll be posting some of them over the next week or so. But for beginners I’d like to start with this image of me this past Saturday at the Madison Farmer’s Market. It was very cold and rainy so my red layer is beneath my rain jacket, although it is still clearly visible. So Figure 1 is your intrepid blogger and photographer camera in hand and looking very serious.

Badger, badger, badger! You might wonder where all this badgerosity comes from. Turns out that the nickname refers to the lead miners, of the 1830s. These miners worked at the Galena lead mines, which is actually in Illinois. Go Figure! The Wisconsin miners lived, not in houses, but in temporary caves that they cut into the hillsides. Not altogether the most healthful of places. These caves were described as badger dens and, the miners who lived in them, as badgers.

Oh, and in 1957 the Badger became Wisconsin’s state animal. I have never figured out why every state has to have its own animal, bird, flower, and mineral. But at least it is something for school children to remember and learn. Bucky Badger is everywhere in Madison, and he definitely has determination and attitude. In the meanwhile, I was totally delighted as I explored the galleries of Wisconsin’s State House to discover the wonderful carved badger of Figure 2 glaring down at the workings of the state. Also as it turns out the gilded statue atop the Capitol of Wisconsin by Daniel Chester French, like so many of the Badger afficianados of today sports a badger cap. Actually, in her case it is a helmet. Her arm reaches forward, in homage to the state motto, which after all is just another way of saying, “On Wisconsin!”

Figure 2 - Badger lording over the Wisconsin State House. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 2 – Badger lording over the Wisconsin State House. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Canon T2i EF70-200mm f/4L USM at 70mm. ISO 3200, 1/60th sec at F/4.0 AE Aperture-priority mode no exposure compensation.  Handheld! Woot, woot!

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.