A clockwork orange

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The Balzer Family Clockwork at LL Bean, Freeport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

The Balzer Family Clockwork at LL Bean, Freeport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

This is a photograph that I took at LL Bean’s in Freeport, ME.  It is a clockwork and, yes, it is orange. 8<)  The Balzers are a family of tower clock restorers, and this commissioned work for LL Bean was manufactured in 1994.  It was dedicated Freeport-born Aaron L. Dennison (1812-1895), who was born, who is is recognized as the father of the watchmaking industry in the United States.   This is the first mechanical “tower” clock manufactured in the United States since 1963.  The clock mechanism drives a huge drum which has pegs that strike out the musical notes by engaging microswitches that activate the corresponding chime tube hammer and thus playing the note.  The tune can be changed by altering the pin locations. The tome of these chimes is magnificent. They raise the hairs on the back of your neck when they are played.

This is a striking and beautiful clock work.  Photographically the trick is two-fold.  First, you have to catch the glitter of the brass.  And second, you have to avoid the reflections in the glass that protects the mechanism from adoring but probing hands.  This glass problem is common and I have run into it often in malls and museums.  It makes catching the metal with flash difficult and often impossible. And, in  my experience using a polarizing filter helps but doesn’t solve the problem. I am pretty happy in the end with this picture.  There is a bit of annoying glass glare in the lower right that I could not totally eliminate.

Canon EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priorit-AE with -1 compensation, 1/100th sec at f/5.6.

 

Running with camels

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Figure 1 - The British Camel Corps in action in British Somaliland in 1913. From the Flicker Commons and in the public domain, originally uploaded by Dzlinker.

Figure 1 – The British Camel Corps in action in British Somaliland in 1913. From the Flicker Commons and in the public domain, originally uploaded by Dzlinker.

In searching “The Week In Pictures” feature on BBC News, I was struck by this beautiful violet shaded image by Bernardo Montoya for Reuters of a circus performer in Mexico City “Running with Camels,” or at least a camel.  There is this controversy in Mexico City because the local government has banned the use of circus animal;s, which threatens the livelihood of the performers.

The image is not perfect in many ways.  It is too out of focus for my taste, despite the fact that the photographer has banned with the animal.  It would work as an indication of motion but is not quite successfull here. at least to my taste.  I do hower love the color and I love the glow of the spotlight.  But what I really love is that it triggers in my mind, reference to Eadweard Muybridge‘s ground breaking work on motion in man and animals, which answered once and for all the critical(?) question whether all of a horse’s feet leave the ground at once.  Well, as it turns out horse and camels run differently.  I guess that you could call it the “dromedary dash.”  But the critical point, to me, is the allusion to Muybridge’s work and, of course, to the Kevin Costner film “Dances with Wolves.”

Just to confuse the focus of this post, I could not resist posting as Figure 1 and image of the British Somali Camels Corp in 1913, between Berbera and Odweyne in, what was then, the British Somaliland.  Hut, hut!

Stairs to where

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Figure 1 - Stairs, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Stairs, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

As every photographer knows, it’s all about the light, and in this particular photograph – again weathered wood in Kennebunkport’s Dock Square – I was beckoned by the light.  The high dynamic range was challenging as were the weird angles Of course, the weird angles merely represent a puzzle to be solved – a puzzle that required very careful framing and attention to all of the details.  In the end I particularly like the slightly out of focus vertical in the lower right.  When I concentrate on the specifics, I am kind of amused by the little stems poking out of the flower box and where dirt and soil have collected on the bottom edge of the box. This is when you know that your lens is delivering!

One of the nice elements of such a photograph is that when I return to this place in the future, when the light will be different, I will remember this photograph.  I suppose that the same must be true for people who paint.  When you have spent so much time studying and capturing a particular moment in time and place, it is always there in your memory.

A little boy came out of a shop just as I was taking this picture, and he laughed at the silly man with the long monopod and camera.  My monopod was extended maximally, and it was propped on a step at the bottom of the stairs and tilted at a large angle.  What a funny man!

Canon EF70-200mm f/4L USM at 70 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority, 1/1250 th sec at f/8.0 no compensation.

 

Optimus Prime

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For all of you Transformers lovers or parents of Transformers lovers, this week marked the gala opening in Hong Kong of the new transformer movie.  My son was never really into these toys,  But who can resist their very clever metamorphosis. And this was complete with a full size, or at least huge, replica of Optimus Prime.  In this wonderful photograph by Felipe Lopez for the AFP he is shown majestically set against the Hong Kong skyline, with the intended and successful effect of making him look even bigger than he actually is.  Pretty marvelous in my view,  And I love the light and the vaporous atmosphere that mixes with the skyline to create a futuristic other worldliness.  It all is metallic silver on metallic silver.  It is a world where transformers might actually exist.

A photograph every day for a year

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Our discussion yesterday about how every day the light is different reminded me of how when my son was small I took him every morning to day care and would have to drive by a lake,  Every morning the atmosphere and view were different than the day before.  The light was different, and I used to think that it would be interesting to stop each morning and take a picture from exactly the same spot with exactly the same camera angle.  Needless-to-say, I never did it.

But there are, of course, people who start their year with a New Year’s resolution to take a photograph every day, to create a photo-journal.  It seems to me that this is not narcisim.  As Socrates pointed out “the unexamined life is not worth living;” so there is value to this kind of nonverbal journal.  At the same time you can do it through a dedicated site like that of the 365 Project and, guess what, you are connecting with people all around the world.  Yes that’s through social media, but also you are connecting through pictures, participating in a greater community of photographers.  I feel the same about the various art photography groups on social media.  The whole point is getting involved, doing what you enjoy, and connecting.  Finally, the whole process of “forcing” yourself to find a photo-worthy subject every day and figure out how to express your thoughts is good for your artistic soul.  It is a challenge and by rising to this challenge you expand your photographic self.

Behind Dock Square – an infinity of image possibilities

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Figure 1 - Behind Dock Square, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Behind Dock Square, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

The central square in Kennebunkport, referred to as Dock Square is pretty, but also pretty innocuous. Many of the shops and restaurants have been around for a very long time: The Colonial Pharmacy, Compliments, and Alison’s. However, it all gets really interesting from a camera perspective if you go behind the buildings to look at the water.  There you are greeted by a photographer’s paradise of wood white-washed by harsh weather.  As you can see from Figure 1 there are all sorts of angles and parallel lines to be contemplated and framed into a photograph.

What intrigues me the most is that I am constantly called back year after year to photograph the dock and the tidal mud flats behind the bridge.  The light is always different, and you invariably bear the scars of the failed photographs of the past and the hope that this time you will be successful.  But even success is a fleeting chimera because the reality is that when you come back again, the light will be different, raising the very really possibility that you can still create a better photograph. There are an infinity of possibilities.

Seeing double

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Well, I guess that after all the fuss that I’ve made about tornado photographs, about tornado hunters, and Helen Hunt, I really don’t think that I can pass up on images taken of Monday’s double tornado in Nebraska.  While not unherad of, such phenomena are very rare, occurring once every ten to twenty years, and dare I say it double trouble – in this case destroying the town od Pilger, Nebraska..  This devastaing storm was photographed by Eric Andersen for the AP.  There is something at once beautiful yet terrifying about such images.  The light is other-worldly, reminiscent of quiet silence before devastation.

 

 

Minimalism Series

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Figure 1 - Minimalism #1, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Minimalism #1, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

One of the projects that I worked on in Kennebunkport, I refer to as the “Minimalism Series.”  It was inspired by the video documentary “Herb and Dorothy [Vogel].” The Vogels were prodigious collectors of minimalist art, which might be a piece of string arranged on a board or a few dots on a piece of paper.  Interestingly some of these can affect you profoundly. Two years ago, on a previous visit to Kennebunkport, I was struck by the simple yet intriguing patterns made by strands of seaweed on the sand.

My visit then was marred by the realization that the second party lens that I was using just wasn’t up to the task of sharpness.  It was an important issue learned. So I returned this year with my 18-55 mm IS Canon lens, and the results were significantly better. 
There is  lot of work to be done to work-up the thirty or so images from this year’s photo-shoot.  But for now I thought that I would post Figure 1, which is a prime example.  It reminds me very much of a petroglyph, perhaps a deer or bison hunted and killed with a spear to the head.  At least that is how the image speaks to me.
EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens at 51 mm, ISO 400, uto focus, Aperture Priority-AE mode, 1/500th sec at f/9.0, +1 compensation.

As real as a photograph

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I apologize but I need to digress.  Last Wednesday I posted a self portrait taken in the window of the 1912 Cafe.  When I was sitting and contemplating taking that photograph the light reminded me of a favorite painting; but my brain and Google failed me.  I have finally remembered that it is the amazing painting by American Realist Painter Scott Prior entitled “Nanny and Rose” (1983)  in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  Nanny is the beautiful woman, Rose the dog.  Prior says of his work: “Nanny and Rose and the subsequent paintings… are very personal. To me they are like large snapshot photos, and as a collection they have become a memory album of my life. It has been my belief that the painted intimacies of ordinary life must be recorded and celebrated.”  This is really the appeal simple, compelling beauty in everyday things and events. That was what I was thinking about when I took that selfie.

Whenever I marvel at Prior’s work my brain hurts.  I wonder about technique, how painstaking it must be to create a painting so like a photograph.  I have come to realize that I may have it backwards.  First, there were paintings not the other way around. Maybe the first were cave paintings.  And paintings ran, and still run, the gamut from pure abstraction to absolute realism.  In some sense photography emerged as an attempt to paint in an absolutely realistic way with light.  But oil and tempera were its predecessors.

Photography is a combination of chemistry and physics.  It emerged with the limits and virtues of its science.  It was Fox Talbot’s “Pencil of Nature.”  Early photographers sought to emulate painters.  They pushed the new medium to sharp realism.

You look at a painting like “Nanny and Rose” and you realize that nobody could have posed long enough for that to be painted in such stunning and precise detail.  In some sense it had to be posed and constructed, even perhaps aided by a camera.  But the same is true of the photograph.  Many are spontaneous and candid. Others extensively set up and posed.  But as in all art there is inevitably a significant component of artist construction.  For the photograph this occurs first at conception and then the image is born again in the dark or light room.