First images with my Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM Lens

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Ancient Tree, Concord, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Ancient Tree, Concord, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Back in the cold of winter I bought myself a Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens.  This is one of the gems of the Canon lens line, when considered on the basis of dollars per modulation transfer function.  It was cold and it was winter, so I did a quick test to make sure that all was well and put the lens away in my camera bag.  Ideally, this is your nature photography lens.  With the 1.6 multiplier it offers up a whopping 640 mm focal length.  Well there it lay all winter, in my camera bag.  And then this past Sunday was the most glorious day imaginable, and I thought that there were no longer any excuses to not taking it out and slogging through the mud along the Concord River by the Old North Bridge and seeing what images I could take.

Well, I learned quite a few points.  First, this is a lot of glass and not so easy to trek around with.  I took to wearing my camera over my neck with the front of the lens tucked into my shoulder bag for extra support.  But I like the convenience of a monopod and then you wind up carrying the whole rig in your hand.  Unless, of course, you get one of those quick release mounts.  Hmm, note to self … Second, and here’s the most important point, you’ve got to learn how to make this lens work, how to work with it, particularly if your goal is bird pictures.  And third, it’s going to be worth the effort.  While not as sharp as my 100 to 200 mm L lens this lens makes nice sharp and beautiful images.

As I learn more about it, I’m going to share images over the next few weeks.  Hopefully, there will be some nice bird and animal pictures.  But for starters, just to show what the lens can do, I’d like to share Figure 1- an image of a venerable old tree.  I love the soft waves of the roots piercing the ground.

Oh, I suppose that you want the  “blah de blah.”  Ok, this is the very first real photograph that I took with this lens.  It is at minimum focal length 100 mm. ISO is 400.  Exposure is Aperture=priority AE 1/400 s at f/8.0.  Hope that clears things up!

Happy Mothers’ Day

Posted on by
Figure 1- Mothers Day from the Wikimedia Commons by April 29, 2012 by Alfonsopazphoto at the Badoca Safari Park and place in the public domain under creative commons attribution license.

Figure 1- Mothers Day from the Wikimedia Commons by April 29, 2012 by Alfonsopazphoto at the Badoca Safari Park and place in the public domain under creative commons attribution license.

I found myself this morning scouring the web for an appropriate Mothers’ Day image.  Those of us whose mothers are no longer with them miss them dearly.  Those who still have them should hold them dearly.  The image of mother and child is so iconic as to be cliche. I am offering up as a Mothers Day card for my readers the image of Figure 1 which was taken on Mothers Day April 29, 2012 by Alfonsopazphoto at the Badoca Safari Park.  The unifying theme is someone to look up to, someoneone to care for, and a bond of love.  For me the ultimate Mother and Child image is that of Raphael’s “Madonna of the Chair.”  And really with this simple zebra image an identical theme plays out, and yes it is a cute cuddly animal picture.  My very point is the anthropomorphism.   Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

Holding the future in your hand

Posted on by

Those of us who were brought up watching the “Six Million Dollar Bionic Man” and the “Bionic Woman,” have been waiting patiently for the future, undeterred by Lindsay Wagner being reduced (?) to selling The Sleep Number Bed on television.  Actually, in truth not so patiently.  I am getting pretty imapatient about the promised man Mars landing! Still the future is all around us as we rocket headlong into it, towards what Ray Kurtzweil has called “The Singularity.”

As a result I was delighted, but not really surprised this morning, to read about FDA approval of Dean Kamen’s, the remarkable inventor who brought us the “Segway,” latest invention the DEKA Arm system, which is shown in this stunning photograph by HANDOUT/Reuters.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provided more than $40 million for the development of this device.  According to DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez: “It was designed to produce near-natural upper extremity control to injured people who have suffered amputations. This arm system has the same size, weight, shape and grip strength as an adult’s arm would be able to produce.”  The arm can perform complex actions simultaneously and is truly a quantum leap for amputees.

The arm is named for Star Wars character “Luke Skywalker” and is indeed so reminiscent of the prosthetic device that he is fitted with after his arm is cut off with Darth Vader’s light sword.  The photograph is excellent, conveying a beautiful bright translucence.  It is a translucence that enables us to make out the arms inner workings, albeit with a murkiness of vision that belies the cloudiness of the sight with which we must always see the future.

 

.

Out of the Big Bang

Posted on by

“In the beginning there was only chaos. Then out of the void appeared Erebus, the unknowable place where death dwells, and Night. All else was empty, silent, endless, darkness. Then somehow Love was born bringing a start of order.”

These words describe the essence of the ancient Greek view of the creation.  They are, of course, much more than faint echos of creation myths from all over the world.  I have always liked the ancient Greek description because it anticipates and antedates our modern scientific concept of the beginning of the universe, the essential evolution of both physical and the biological order out of chaos.  Note too the role played by darkness and its evolution into light.

Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using some of the fastest computers in the world,  have developed a computer program, the Illustris Simulation, that models.  The model inputs the fundamental laws of physics and outputs a simulated image of what the universe looked like at each stage of the thirteen billion years of cosmic evolution.   Be sure to watch some of the videos on the Illustris site. We watch the emergence of both light and matter out of bands of dark matter. What is quite remarkable is the success of Illustris in predicting, for instance, the forms of galaxies and a direct side-by-side comparison of what the universe should now look like and Hubble images of what it does look like. In this image the left hand side is from Hubble, the right hand side from Illustris.  You have to look hard to see the split. Such is the fidelity of the prediction.

We have spoken before about how computers can generate images that never really existed – of imagined worlds.  Placed in this scientific construction the split between reality and the imagined blurs.  What is real becomes imagined.  What is imagined becomes real.

Mint green

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Mint green Satin, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Mint green Satin, (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Today I’ve got an addition to my IPhone monotone images of folded fabric.  The color of the day is mint green colored satin; so it is meant to be on the more subtle end of the spectrum compared to scarlet and indigo.  Mint green speaks to spring and coolness, appropriate for the Northern hemisphere where we are very anxiously awaiting the coming of summer.  the days are growing ever longer and we are now in the enjoying spectacular and perfect days.

Now just remember this – a kiss is just a kiss

Posted on by

I guess that hands down the image of week was taken on on April 30, 2014 and shows Hong Yaoming, who is  deputy headmaster of Xianning Experimental Primary School, fulfilling a promise to his students by kissing a pig. The previous week at the school’s weekly flag-raising ceremony Hong promised that he would smooch the porcine provided students stopped littering on campus. Hong said the inspiration came from the story of an American teacher who promised to kiss a pig if more than 80 percent of his pupils passed their math exam.

So the next question where did the piggy come from. The 40 kg porker was provided by one of Hong’s friends.  There are undoubtedly lots of jokes about a whole variety of movies, starting with Charlottes Web.  The pig could not be reached for comment as to whether Hong was a good kisser – which is just fine since she’s not a swine to kiss and tell.

The mummy photograph fad

Posted on by

Well, it all gets even more bizarre – ain’t that always the case.  In researching my two posts on mummies, I found two an interesting blog about the mummy photograph fad of the late nineteenth early twentieth century.  The fad involved having yourself photographed in a mummy case and appears to have been started by American society lady Mrs. James P. Kernochan of New York on her return from a trip abroad that included Cairo.

A Cairo photographer obtained a mummy case and cut out the face.  The subject (victim) would climb in and pose with their face sticking out of the hole.  We still see this kind of gimmick at amusement parks.  As the fad grew, intrepid photographers, especially those with access, to mummy cases took a photograph of a mummy case cut out the face and placed this over a portrait of the subject.  What a darling present for one’s beau.  Don’t you think!

Francis Frith on the Nile

Posted on by
220px-FrancisFrith

Francis Frith self portrait in Middle Eastern garb, 1857. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of agae. Oroginal photograph is in the Philadelphia Museum..

Our discussion on Friday of antique photographs of the unveriling of ancient Egyptian mummies got me thinking of Francis Frith (1822-1898).  Frith was the first great photographer of ancient Egyptian monuments and the Nile Valley.

Francis Frith  was an English photographer of the Middle East and many towns in the United Kingdom.  Frith recognized that images of Egypt were in great demand by “armchair travelers.”  From 1856 to 1860 he traveled in the Middle East with a huge (16″ x 20″) with a collodion process camera.  This was a great accomplishment given the dust and heat of the desert. We have said this repeatidly of many of Frith’s contemporaries – yet in remains indisputable.  Photographing in those days required extreme dedication to purpose, art, and technique.

In 1859, he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co., which was the world’s first specialist photographic publisher, selling his beautiful images of Egypt and the Middle East.  He then embarked on a colossal project, typical of the grand vision Victorian mindset – to photograph every town in the United Kingdom.  These he sold as travel postcards. Eventually hiring a team of photographers, his studio became one of the largest in the world, with over a thousand shops selling his postcards.

Remarkably, his family continued the firm well into the twentieth century.  It was sold in 1968 and closed in 1970 only to be  was restored in a 1976 as The Francis Frith Collection, when this important archive was purchased by  the tobacco company Rothmans.  

In 1977, John Buck bought the archive from Rothmans and has continued to run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. As a result even today, over 150 years since it founding you can still find and purchase both nostalgic and historic images.

765px-Hypaethral_Temple_Philae

Figure 2 – The Hypaethral Temple, Philae, by Francis Frith, 1857; from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland (on Flickr), from the Wikimedia commons and in the public domain because of age.

 

Ist kaputski with moose and squirrel

Posted on by

Hmm, a couple of weeks back we had the snowmobilers chasing a moose in Maine and this week we have a man taking a selfie while just about cheek to cheek with a squirrel.  Well guess what? Neither episode ended so well.  What’s wrong with these people?  Are they candidates for this years Darwin Awards?

And it got me thinking, always a dangerous thing!  When people post photographs or video that go “viral” was that (going viral) their intent all along?  Or is it just caprice?  I would not strictly rule out purposeful intent.  I suppose that you could focus your raison d’etre to “viral” – all for a brief shining moment of fleeting fame and then a return to anonymous oblivion.  There are clearly folks who follow this Kafkaesque path – to join the ignominious pantheon of those gone viral before them, whom no one remembers now.  But for the most part, I believe that people just post because people just post.  We don’t feel complete unless our friends, superficial and real, witness our antics, and no antic or event is too trivial to record.

It all kind of goes with photographs of dinner.  About fifteen years ago my wife, son, and I were appalled by a couple who video recorded what they were having for dinner on vacation in Santa Fe.  What a moronic thing to do, or so we thought.  Now people do it all the time.

I suppose that as long as there are people who care, or fain to care, such pursuits are legitimate.  A hundred years from now logs of Facebook activity will offer up valuable historic records of everyday life and everyday concerns.  In that regard they are automatically placed in an annotated context.  And these images will speak to us, perhaps a bit more clearly, than the glimpses of nineteen century life that everyday photographs from that period do.