Sausage and ‘rooms

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Figure 1 - Sausage at Formaggio Kitchen, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Sausage at Formaggio Kitchen, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

When I fail to get a photograph right, I take it as a failure of technique and a learning lesson.  But it sticks with me, sticks in my craw, if you wish. Last October I posted about a trip to the Brooklyn Farmers’ Market in the Grand Army Plaza, where I photographed hydrangeas. What I did not discuss at the time was my absolute failure to successfully photograph some delicious looking mushrooms at the market – dull, boring, fuzzy image.  My son cooked them up that evening for our dinner, and they were truly delicious.  It was a failure noted and to be rectified.

I mentioned my Saturday trip to Formaggio Kitchen in Huron Village.  Food is an art form at Formaggio.  If you can get by the very tempting fare served outside in the summer you enter the cheese and sausage room. I was attracted to the sausages that were hanging out to dry on the wall.  Unfortunately, for the most part my sausage eating days are over. Next to them were some pretty good looking prosciutto.  Memories of the Prosciutto Room at the North Beach Restaurant in San Francisco came flooding back.  Now that was an experience!  But I digress.  While ordering cheese a took a few pictures of the sausage (Figure 1), attracted by the spot lights that illuminated them.  It required a bit more sharpening than I like and wasn’t quite successful in that respect. But the room was dark, and I was hand holding.

You leave the cheese room and enter the vegetable and fruits room, where as my wife shopped, I photographed.  You do not get strange looks.  They know that there food is beautiful!  I found the mushrooms of Figure 2, loved the earth tones, the variety of shapes, and the well, yes, the scrumptious appearance. Food photography, both amateur and profession, I believe, has one of two purposes: either to offer abstract geometry or to make you hungry.  So I count this photograph a success because it makes me hungry.

You finally, enter the flower section, which is a whole different photographic paradise.  Right now, I am dreaming once more of mushrooms sautéed in butter with just a bit of salt and pepper.  I truly hope that someone enjoyed that last night.

Figure 2 - Mushrooms at Formaggio Kitchen, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 2 – Mushrooms at Formaggio Kitchen, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Canon EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM Lens at 50 mm, IS, ISO 800, 1/15th sec. AE Aperture Priority Mode f/7.1, Exposure compensation 0.

Figure 2 – Canon EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM Lens at 52 mm, IS, ISO 800, 1/60th sec. AE Aperture Priority Mode f/7.1, Exposure compensation -1.

A little bit of California in Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Huron Village, Cambridge, MA, Summer 2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Huron Village, Cambridge, MA, Summer 2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

We have been basking in the glory of a beautiful New England summer and privately acknowledging that we deserve it after the cold and severe winter of 2013/2014.  Well, bad news people!  I heard on the news this morning that this mild summer with only four 90 + days, so far, is really only a continuation of last winter’s cold trend.  Thank you, Mr Weatherman.  Thank you for raining on my parade.

Still it has been spectacular, and so on a particularly mild, sunny, and gorgeous day my wife and I set out to explore a little bit of Belmont and Cambridge.  As if by magnetic attraction we ultimately found ourselves drawn to what is known as “Huron Village in Cambridge,” one of the “neat and desirable neighborhoods” and home to one of the best cheese shops in the state, “Formaggio Kitchen.” I know what I’m having for breakfast tomorrow morning.

As I wandered around with my camera enjoying the soft sunshine, I came across the facade of the Magic Beans Toy Store, Figure 1 In these dog days of summer it did not seem so incongruous.  Neither did the beans hanging in the window boxes.  They could, indeed, be magic beans. But when snow is about, these vivid, even blinding, California (or are they Miami?), colors will seem transported in space from an alien world.

Stalking the green heron

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Figure 1 - Green Heron at Black's Nook, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Green Heron at Black’s Nook, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

For the last couple of weeks, I have had my eyes on a group of green herons (Butorides virescens) that are summering at a place called Black’s Nook in Cambridge, MA’s Fresh Pond Reserve.  While smaller than the great blue heron (Ardea herodias ), the green heron is beautiful for its iridescent green and blue coloration.

So finally, on Friday I schlepped my big lens and monopod to Black’s Nook and sought out my avian friends.  While they are not totally fond of visitors, they tolerate them, and I was not disappointed.  I learned once more that I have a lot to learn about shooting at 400 mm (really 640 mm with the sensor factor).  Even with the monopod it is hard to hold the camera still enough to get the spot autofocus right.  I set the ISO at 1600 so that I could use a 1/200th sec exposure, that to hopefully stabilize things.  Indeed, if you compare Figure 1 shoot at 1/2000th sec and Figure 2 shot at 1/500th sec, you’ll see that the sharpness award goes to the shorter exposure despite the image stabilization.  And then the trick is shoot, shoot, shoot – just keeping shooting.  I am starting to think that the tripod without image stabilization is the better way to go.  That’s how I got my “Supre Moon” picture. I recently bought myself a set of Manfrotto quick releases, enough to cover all my lenses, my monopod, and my tripod.

When I got home I sorted through the images for sharpest and best pose.  I am pretty happy with Figure 1, which I hope shows Butorides virescens to best advantage and in all its glory. Sharpness is always a big deal for me, but also, of course, the composition and lighting are important.

The proverbial “they” always tell you that you should photograph a bird doing something interesting, something that speaks of its behavior.  So I also include Figure 2. When this fellow landed on this particular log, he found it was already occupied by a turtle sunning itself.  The heron approached the turtle and the two contemplated each other for a moment.  The turtle quickly retreated into its shell.  Finally, the emboldened heron charged the turtle chasing him off of the log.  It is this moment of avian assault and reptilian retreat that Figure 2 captures.

Figure 1 – Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens using IS 1 at 400 mm. ISO 1600 with 1/2000th sec with Aperture Priority AE f/7.0 and spot AF.

Figure 2 – Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens using IS 1 at 800 mm. ISO 400 with 1/500th sec with Aperture Priority AE f/8.0 and spot AF.

Figure 2 - Green heron charging turtle, Black's Nook, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 2 – Green heron charging turtle, Black’s Nook, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Sharpness isn’t everything

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I was doing some bird photography yesterday and obsessing, I do a lot of that, over image sharpness.  I need to remind myself that sharpness isn’t everything, witness the image of the chamber maid by Emile Joachim Constant Puyo, Montmartre, ca. 1906, which we have previously discussed. And in looking through the usual candidates for great pictures of the week, I came across this amazing shot by Fully Handoko for EPA showing Indonesian villagers atop the crater of Mount Bromo in Probolinggo, Indonesia on August 12th.  These Tengger Hindus were celebrating the Kasodo ceremony, an expression of gratitude to the gods for a good harvest.

Fogginess, absolute fogginess! The people are reduced to mere silhouettes in the darkness.  For some reason, I am particularly drawn to the man on the horse.  You could crop him out and make a wonderful picture of that alone. The image seems to speak of the confusion of life on Earth and the clarity of heaven, as the pictures moves our eyes from dark murkiness to brilliant clarity, bottom to top.  Here the lack of sharpness seems to bespeak a mystic sacredness.  Remarkably, despite the fogginess and its flatness, we get an wonderful sense of the enormity of the scene. And, we seem to be in an impressionist world, where the vision isn’t quite clear until there is an explosion of light..

Usually in contemplating such a religious scene, we would comment on its timelessness – the fact that it could have been taken at any point in, perhaps, the last five hundred years.  But alas, that is not the case.  Two of the participants are taking pictures with their cell phones.

 

Picturing misery

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For the last few weeks I mentioned several times how terrible the news and its images have been – photographs of maimed and killed children, no parent should live to see that; photographs of killed parents, no child should live to see that. We talk about being hardened to such sights, which isn’t quite right. It is not that we become hardened by these images. It is that they disconnect us. Our brains reach an elastic limit and literally “turn off” an image, if it just disturbs us too much, if it takes us beyond what we can mentally deal with, beyond our humanity.

Sometimes it takes something more subtle to wrench us back into humanity. Today I came across such an image, a simple, and oh so powerful, photograph by Bulent Kilic for – Getty Images. It shows a Ukranian refugee, crying in in a field with all of her remaining belongings on the ground beside her. This is the defining moment of terror and desperation. For a moment because of the image we become that woman. Look at her luggage. She could be any of us off to the gym or the beach.

And for me, it brought back the most vivid imagery. When I was in elementary school, we went on a class trip to visit the local newspaper, called if I remember correctly “Town and Village.” There were huge press photographs on the walls and the one that disturbed us the most was of a car crash, a man and a woman lying bloodied and dead and a wailing child. The guide assured us that the child was now living with his grandparents. He really didn’t know, and I believed that as much as I now believe that the woman in Kilic’s photograph is now on vacation on the French Riviera. But what we did learn was just how powerful a photograph can be when it appeals to what is fundamentally human within us.

I have spoken three times now of human and humanity.  What this and kindred images remind us is just how shallow these terms can be.  We are a broken species, when our politics, and worse, our religions condone the misery of this woman, a grieving mother, or an orphaned child as “collateral damage.”  What a disgusting phrase!  There is ultimately more defining humanity in Kilic’s photograph than in all our holy books.

 

Kodak Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates

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Mark Twain gave sage advice about the proper way to behave in the afterlife.

“Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It’s not your place to begin.
Don’t try to Kodak him. Hell is full of people who have made that mistake.
Don’t ask him what time the 4:30 train goes; there aren’t any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less information you get about them the better for you.
Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.“

Mr. Clemens was always one to embrace technology.  He would certainly love the vain and narcissistic pursuit of the selfie – the glorification of you.  And there is a subtle point in this reasonably famous quote, and that is the use of the word Kodak, otherwise a brand name, as a verb.  There may be a modernization of this, now that we store our images on “The Cloud.” It was the latter day equivalent of the word Xerox, that being only one brand of copy machine.  And now of course, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, who would rather we “Bing it,” we still “Google it,” even if as yahoos we are actually “Binging it.”  Life does get confusing.

In Twain’s case I believe that his usage belies the incredible rise of Kodak and the popularization of photography.  Of course, with popularization came its sister mediocritization, as we discussed in my recent blog about the pictorialists, who hated this sort of thing.

Fugure 1 -n Koday Picture Spot from Disney's MGM Hollywood Studios, from the Wikimedia Commons and uploaded by Tregowith under creative commons license.

Figure 1 -Kodak Picture Spot from Disney’s MGM Hollywood Studios, from the Wikimedia Commons and uploaded by Tregowith under creative commons license.

Kodak’s dominance of photography through popularization got to the point where you couldn’t go to a scenic spot in the United States without encountering a sign referred to as a Kodak Picture Spot.  “This location recommended by top photographers to help you tell the story of your visit in pictures.” Stand here and you will get a beautiful picture, which by the way you could take to the nearby Kodak store and have it processed.  Oh, and please buy some film while you’re at it.  You wouldn’t want to run out. Figure 1 is an example from Disney’s MGM Hollywood Studios. Kodak ended this sponsorship relationship at Disneyland in 2012.  Which is pretty much when Kodak, the inventor of digital photography cried “uncle” and gave up the consumer photography market.

Of course, anyone who loves photography for the sake of art and beauty abhors this concept, which caters to the view that photographs are essentially trophies.  That’s the least of it.  The more paranoid among us might suggest a certain level of mind manipulation, an attempt to cookie cut as into the perfect customer – to Xerox us into similitude!.

A moment of technological extinction

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Figure 1 -= Jack Baily host of "Queen for a Day" 1945-1964 in a promotional shot. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because it was not copywritten.

Figure 1 -= Jack Bailey host of “Queen for a Day” 1945-1964 in a promotional shot. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because it was not copywritten.

We have spoken before about the relentless demise of broadcast television.  There are so many factors at play. But I believe the most significant demographic is the rapidly declining rate of television ownership by the up and coming generation, my son’s generation.  They download what they want to watch and seek both their image and information content on the internet. And this is a well-educated generation.  Broadcast television is just not sustainable – witness how much time is devoted even on major channels to infomercials and low budget reality shows extinction is near. TV is going the way of the dinosaurs.  Television like those who cling to it are techno-dinos.

Still the rate of the transition is astounding – this because of “the singularity phenomenon.” And it is amazing to watch, because the change is essentially palpable and real time.

This weekend my wife pointed out to me a curious aspect of this metamorphosis. Network news has long given up on news. Breaking news, news flash, news flash. I remember when your heart would stop. At the very least someone had been assassinated. Let me fill you in, the events of reality shows are not news.  A network cannot both create and report the news, it’s kinda like media … Well, anyway it’s not good, it’s not real, and really, really it’s not news.

But what my wife pointed out to me was how much of the television news consists of YouTube clips. I mean how many clips of ducklings being rescued from storm drains can we watch?  I am suspicious that its all the same mama duck – a not too bright mama duck! This morning we had the bear cooling off in the kiddie pool. Yesterday was the bear with hurt from paws walking upright on two legs. At least he’s evolving in the right direction. And then there was the kid with the butterfly landing on his nose. In what way is this “Attack of the Lepidoptera” news?

It’s pathetic. Television is trying to imitate the net. As television moves inexorably towards its demise, it appears to imitate its successor. And the progression or succession is definitely interesting.  First, there were books.  Books were intimate.  There was a one-on-one conversation between the reader and the author.  Then came movies.  The intimacy was lost but there was still the illusion of a close relationship because the images were so vivid and there was still a story being told by abstracted voices.  Then there was television.  Like publishing, television was in a sense elitist and inaccessible.  The key to the whole medium was scarcity.  Three networks controlling everything.It was a one way conversation.  Few people actually achieved an appearance on the TV – few became the “Queen for a Day,” but everyone could aspire too it.

The internet, especially with its social media, changes the playing field.  It is totally accessible.  Upload information, upload misinformation, upload images, upload doctored images.  Anyone can be the monarch of his/her own domain.   This is why talk show hosts and news anchors spend so much time trying to create a sense of being with you in your living room.  It is a chimera.  We are longing for connectedness and, no surprise, we are embracing it in the new medium.  And, of course, we are wondering what is next. That because we have become so used to the rapidity of technological innovation.

 

 

A remarkable social history

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I came upon a remarkable photoessay by Phil Coomes, photoeditor for the BBC that I thought I should share with you.   It is a story about Photographer Charles Fox a photographer, who is is based in Cambodia., and earlier this year he began to collect family pictures he had found in that country, publishing them to Tumblr and his twitter account.

In 2009, Fox met a Cambodian man named Yanny at a London celebration  celebration of the 2009 Khmer New Year.  “Yanny used to show me his old photographs of life in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, he would tell me how his family moved back into Phnom Penh, and how society started to rebuild itself, all of this whilst flicking through his worn family photo albums illustrating his point.”

On his return to Cambodia, Fox began collecting old family portraits to document this period.  He would copy the images, often bleached, chipped, or water-damages and with them he would collect a tidbit of family commentary – enough to get your imagination going, to recollect what you never knew, the story behind these pictures.

Coomes argues, and I agree, that the social history of the twentieth century is written in family portraits.  I think that we may argue the same for the “selfies” of today.  Somehow these too need to be preserved, and it seems the case as well that the little commentaries that we attach on Facebook and other social media are just enough to get our minds going.

Imagine yourself centuries from now at an exhibition about the twenty-first century.  The room is cool and dark, or perhaps the museum isn’t a room but a projected thought and every second or so an image appears a smiling face, or worse the anguished face of a victim of one of our countless wars and conflicts, from so long ago, now made just a bit more familiar, evoking a sense of almost tangible connection..

Remembering being tested

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Figure 1 - Figure 1 - Nixons departing the White House for the last time, August 9, 1974, from the wikimediacommons, taken by a US Government employee and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Figure 1 – Nixons departing the White House for the last time, August 9, 1974, from the Wikimediacommons, taken by a US Government employee and in the public domain.

Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of the resignation of Richard M. Nixon.  It was a moment of collective memory.  My wife worked at the time for Harrison M. Trice, who was a distinguished professor or organizational behavior at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.  Harry had been convinced that Nixon was going to declare martial law and stay president.  Sound paranoid?  The thing was that Harry had been a graduate student at The University of Wisconsin, when Nixon came with Senator Joseph McCarthy and declared: “We’re going to drive the communists out of this university with whips this thick.” Hmm!  “You’re president is not a crook!”  Except that he was a crook and had precipitated the greatest constitutional crisis in the United States since… Well, since McCarthy.

American’s were desolate.  I was watching a newsreel last night, an interview of a woman, my mother’s age at the time, and she said: “This country is going to celebrate it’s two hundredth birthday in a couple of years.  I want to be proud of America and right now I’m ashamed.”  It was pretty powerful stuff.  But political support for Nixon eroded to the point that Republicans in congress and the senate told him that they didn’t have the votes to stop the impeachment.  And so… The constitution held.  We were both appalled and proud.

There are many images of the day.  But the power of the constitution, of the union, was best represented by the Fords escorting the NIxons to the helicopter which started the Nixon’s journey home (Figure 1).  And then there was a last futile attempt at bravado as Nixon turned one last time, put out his arms, his fingers flashing V’s as symbols of false victory.

Figure 1 - Nixon poses one last time as he departs the White House, August 9, 1974, from the wikimediacommons, taken by a US Government employee and in the public domain.

Figure 2 – Nixon poses one last time as he departs the White House, August 9, 1974, from the Wikimediacommons, taken by a US Government employee and in the public domain.