The ambiguous hippopotamus

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I am thinking pleasantly back to the sweet time of childhood when in addition to a favorite color (red) and a favorite television star (Fess Parker) I also had a favorite animal (the hippopotamus).  Yes the “river horse” was my favorite, and nothing delighted me more than seeing him at the Central Park Zoo dine upon copious quantities of cabbage.

Maturity has led to a more studied respect for the hippo and an appreciation of his ambiguity as a gentle giant.  Yes, there were the dancing hippos in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” – pure fantasy.  And there was the National Geographic Magazine showing photographs of a hippopotamus rescuing a disemboweled antelope from the jaws of an alligator and pushing the mortally wounded beast up unto the shore – I suppose to be devoured by jackals. 8<( And my favorite was an episode of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” where they attempted to photograph hippos with their young underwater.  Finally, they resorted to using a very expensive remote camera.  All goes well until momma hippo is alarmed by the sounds of the camera’s mechanism.  She leaps out of the water and crashes down on the very expensive camera, flattening it like a pancake – Momma Hippo meets Paparazzi.”

All of these cobweb memories ran through my head yesterday as I was looking at Pictures of the Week on BBC News and came upon this lovely image by Mel Evans for the AP showing a little girl named Audrey Bruben at The Camden, New Jersey Adventure Aquarium posing with Genny a 4000 lb hippopotamus – all grins – or so it seems.  Wonderful, cute little girl and equally cute, albeit of ambiguous cuddliness, animal.

“Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.”

Ogden Nash, “The Hippopotamus”

The dreaminess of pinhole photography

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We have discussed the technical aspects of pinhole photography in the past as a means of introduction to how the camera works.  But we have not discussed the aesthetics of pinhole photography.  Pinhole cameras create: somewhat distorted images, in many cases soft out-of-focus images, and vignetting – that is a fading of light intensity as you move away from the center of the field.  Overcoming all of these distortions is why camera lenses cost so much.  But in the case of the pinhole image, all of this contributes to a sense of dreaminess and a sense of the antique.  If you want to create a picture that looks like it was taken in the mid-nineteenth century, this is certainly one way to go.

With all of this in mind, I was struck with a recent readers’ series on BBC News, a collection of pinhole camera images.  And to my mind’s eye the most strikingly dreamy of all was a wonderful image of a swan on a lake sent in by Daniel Ramsey.  Because this beautiful color image required a 30 second exposure the swan’s head and neck are blurred out as if captured in several positions, but in none really.  The distortion is four dimensional, encompassing all the dimensions of space and time.  It is truly a vision from a dream.

Pansies

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Figure 1 - Pansies or Food for Thought, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Pansies or Food for Thought, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Sometimes it is the simple things, and the photograph is no further away than your own doorstep.  I love the simple beauty of spring pansies with their little pensive lion faces looking back at you and floating in a gentle breeze.  There is ever the sense of the coolness associated with not quite summer.

The English name pansy comes from the French word pensée “thought.”  It was imported into Late Middle English as a name of for certain violets in the mid-15th century.  Shakespeare has Ophelia remind us that these flowers are to be, along with rosemary, regarded as symbols of remembrance.   I can never look at them without remembering  walking with a friend (and reader) in San Jose some years ago and discussing Ophelia’s words:

“Look at my flowers. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembering. Please remember, love. And there are pansies, they’re for thoughts.”

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow

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Figure 1 - English Sparrow, Passer domesticus, Concord, MA 5/25/2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – English Sparrow, Passer domesticus, Concord, MA 5/25/2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

After all this time carrying my big lens around in hopes of getting good bird pictures, I was delighted this past Sunday when a English Sparrow (Passer domesticus) landed on a branch in front of me and in a sweet voice demanded to have his portrait taken.  I only had my EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens*, but was really delighted by the bifurcated lichen covered branch and at 200 mm at the soft bokeh of the background.

Yes, it is a common house or English Sparrow.  Still he has his own high highfaluting Latin name and as Shakespeare eternally reminds us:

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.”

*EF70-200mm f/4L USM Lens at 200 mm Aperture priority mode AE, ISO 800, 1/800th second at f/5.6.

Ancient sentinels

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Figure 1 - The Hermaphroditic Sentinel, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – The Hermaphroditic Sentinel, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

I found myself once more at the Old North Bridge, National Historic Site, in Concord, MA again.  It is one of my favorite places, and I gravitate there spontaneously seeking the photographic opportunity of any given day and time’s uniqueness of light.

It is always rewarding to wander off the main path, to try wherever you can to reach the river, even if you have to slog through a bit of mud to get there.  There is one particular spot where you emerge to find an old cement landing.  It is lost to time, but undoubtedly speaks to a different layout of the site.  You can shut your eyes and imagine the laughter of swimmers fifty, maybe a hundred years ago – men in straw hats and ladies in white. There are two huge trees there, and these have suffered the ravages of termites.  The have tremendous girth – and certainly date back to the nineteenth century.  But they are partially hollowed out and you have to wonder just how long they will last.  Perhaps they will sprout “suckers” and truly live forever.  These are silent witness, sentinels on the river and they have witnessed a lot – but are silent and mum about just what they have seen.

On this particular day, in the crisp light of a bright but cloud-laden afternoon, skies threatening thunder showers, I was struck by how the light illuminated the mysterious cavern within this particular ancient one.  There is a certain, yet profound, hermaphroditic ambivalence.  And if you look closely into the carnivorous darkness there is a strange serpentine presence.  It reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft and beckons you to return to the well trodden road and the present.

Apocalypse now

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Unfortunately, The Week in Pictures is all too reminiscent of the movie “Apocalypse Now,” or worse the mythological concept – the Ragnarok  being a favorite theme of Hati and Skoll.  Among this weeks news pictures we’ve got wars (you almost lose track of all the wars), we’ve got fires, we’ve got desperate parents in Nigeria, and we’ve got natural disasters floods and earthquakes. I thought that representative all this misery is a stunningly and therefore, hauntingly beautiful, photograph by Stuart Palley for the EPA.   It is an  extended time exposure showing smoldering remains of overnight fires on the hillsides of San Marcos, California, early on May 16. Firefighters are deparately battling fast-moving wildfires in southern California. The light in this image is amazing.  The blue is an unworldly iridescent shade, perhaps contradictory in that this kind of blue more often depicts water and wetness, not fire, heat, and dryness.  The rocks in the foreground combine with the morning light to evoke the sense of an other worldly lunar landscape – the ultimate in lonely isolation.

Sorry people, I know that I could have chosen the sloth!

The first photograph of a tornado

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Figure 1 - Firs photograph of a tornado, taken by A.A. Adams in Anderson County, KS, from the Kansas Historical Society and in the public domain because it was taken and published before 1923.

Figure 1 – First photograph of a tornado, taken by A.A. Adams in Anderson County, KS, from the Kansas Historical Society and in the public domain because it was taken and published before 1923.

My brief discussion of the supercell video yesterday got me wondering about what the first ever photograph of a tornado or twister was.  The obvious place to turn for this sort of information is the Kansas Historical Society’s website, and it didn’t disappoint.

The first photograph of a tornado, Figure 1, was taken on April 26, 1884 by fruit farmer and amateur photographer A.A. Adams in Anderson County Kansas.  Adams was standing twelve miles from the storm. He subsequently published his photograph both as a cabinet image and as a stereographic image, where he focused in on the storm.  Unfortunately for him, his image was rapidly eclipsed by a second image taken in South Dakota on August 28, 1884, although that images appears to have been doctored.

All of this, is perhaps needless-to-say, the precursor that spawned generations of storm chasers and, of course, the 1996 Jan De Bont film “Twister.” Who can forget the flying cows?

New online archive from the Metropolitan Museum

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Figure 1 - Robert Howlett's portrait of : Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1857). From the Wikipedia and in the public domain because it is more than a 100 yrs. old and copyrights have expired. (This image is not from the MMA collection.)

Figure 1 – Robert Howlett’s portrait of : Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1857). From the Wikipedia and in the public domain because it is more than a 100 yrs. old and copyrights have expired. (This image is not from the MMA collection.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has released an amazing new  “Colossal” archive of 400,000 high resolution digital images from its collection. This archive is available for non-commercial purposes. Approximately 18,000 of these images are photographs spanning the nearly two centuries of photographic art.

I have been trying to understand how to best utilize the search feature of the Colossal archive.  However, so far no problem.  It’s just delightful fun to enjoy the images that randomly appear on the site.  There is always so much to learn. Just to get a sense of the depth and breadth of this collection you might start with Robert Howlett’s (1831-1858)’s well known image (Figure 1) of : Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing before the launching chains of the Great Eastern and then move on to Stephen Locke‘s timelapse video from My 10th of a Supercell forming over Climax Kansas.    It’s all about the image.

Bend in the road

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Figure 1 - Bend in the Road, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Bend in the Road, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Years ago, when I was a graduate student at Cornell, one of my favorite places on campus was a bench that crowned and overlooked “Libe Slope.”  The bench was placed there in 1892 by Andrew Dickson White and his wife, Helen Magill White.  It bore the profound inscription:

“To those who shall sit here rejoicing,

To those who shall sit here mourning,

Sympathy and greeting;

So have we done in our time.

1892 A.D.W.–H.M.W.”

There you have it once more – the sense that we may speak to our fellow humans across the otherwise impenetrable abyss of time.

I have carried that bench in my mind with me for over forty years now and truly I think of it often.  I thought of it again this past weekend when I took the photograph of Figure 1, which I entitle: “Bend in the Road.”