The glory of partially diffuse light

Figure 1 - Morning light diffused through sheer curtains, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Morning light diffused through sheer curtains, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Yesterday, I was doing what photographers do, namely experimenting with semidiffuse light.  Let’s start with a few definitions.  Suppose that you are out on a bright cloudless day.  The sun acts as a point source of light, just like a flashlamp.  As a result, you get sharp shadows, which generally translates to high contrast in your photographs.  This is nondiffuse light.  Such light sources tend to create specular reflections off  mirror like or shiny surfaces.  On the other hand, if the sun is shining through clouds the light is bounced around until it is coming at you from all directions.  There’s another way to create a diffuse light and that is by bouncing the light off a rough surface. Both of these reduce the contrast in the image.

Figure 2 - Carpet shadows, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 2 – Carpet shadows, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

So, what I’ve said is that there are two ways to diffuse or soften the light.  First, you can pass it through a scattering medium like a cloud.  Second, you can bounce it off a rough scattering surface.

Things can get really interesting when you start to work with semidiffuse light.  Yesterday, I took the photograph in Figure 1, of highly intense directional light being diffused as it passed through sheer curtains.  Notice how you can just make out some of the details behind the curtains, but that they are just a bit cloudy.  The intensity of the light and its diffusion creates a very dreamy illumination that, to me anyway, screams out “morning.”

Figure 2, on the other hand, uses light that has filtered through a forest of leaves, thus losing some of its directionality.  The shadows of the leaves and the window frame are fuzzed out.  The light is then further diffused by the texture of the carpet.  All in all it creates a very abstract sense.

Figure 3 - Morning fog at Brigham Farm, Concord, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 3 – Morning fog at Brigham Farm, Concord, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 3 combines both types of light.  It is an early morning scene, taken a couple of weeks ago on my commute to work.  The light is early morning light and very direct.  Notice the sharply illuminated dew on the plants.  But then notice how the morning fog diffuses the light creating dramatic sunbeams.

I am hoping that I have demonstrated the point that semidiffuse light can create very dramatic effects.  And when you are really successful these effects can be quite magical.

The International Herald Tribune

For a generation of American’s traveling in Europe, news was provided by reading the International Herald Tribune.  Today it is, perhaps, less so.  When I am in Europe these days I tune in to CNN or the BBC.  Nevertheless today marks a historic day.  Today the International Herald Tribune, after 126 years in print, starting as the Paris Herald  merges with the Global Edition of the New York Times to become the International New York Times.  This is, however, only the latest incarnation of what remains an important force in the news world but ultimately has an uncertain future.

My interest was piqued yesterday by a story by Serge Schemann in the New York Times about this transition.  What caught my eye was not so much the story as an embedded slide show of historic photographs featuring the Herald.  These are: Attilio Codognato’s photograph of Andy Warhol reading the Tribune in a Venetian Café in 1977, Raymond Cauchetier’s image of Jean Seberg in Jean Luc Godard’s film “Breatless,” Romanian Soldiers reading the December 25, 1989 edition of the Tribune announcing the fall of the Ceausescu government, and Martin Luther King reading the Tribune during a break at the 1964 Nobel Prize awards in Oslo.

Mr. Schemann sums up the transformation of the International Tribune with “The DNA of a great paper is defined by evolution of the complex and intimate interplay of reader and editor, owner and technology.”  This seems to me to be true of the story of modern photography as well.

 

Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza

Figure 1 - Columbia and the victories atop the triumphal arch at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Columbia and the victories atop the triumphal arch at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

When I was in college, Brooklyn, NY was seriously on the wane.  It was the Brooklyn of Thomas Wolfe’s short story, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” a place obscure, whose time seemed past, yet was full of a kind of vibrancy that was reflected best in its ethnicity.  I remember thinking however, about all the past glory that was so evident in its parks, public edifices, and brownstones.  And I would palpably wish that somehow time could be reversed and Brooklyn restored to its former glory.  Well, today in a sense time has been reversed.  It’s wonderful to find this somewhere other than in physics. Brooklyn has undergone and is continuing to undergo a wonderful metamorphosis.  The fact raises, even in the most cynical, one’s recognition of the important point that cities are meant to be lived in, and that it is not, a priori, a fact that they should be unmanageable.  The Brooklyn of today is an exciting amalgam, which is really what it was meant to be.

Figure 2 - Detail of Francis Savage's Neptune, the Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 2 – Detail of Eugene Francis Savage’s Neptune, the Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

My only regret, and I suspect that this is a minority opinion is that the Barclay’s Center never achieved the grand schemes that Frank Gehry originally envisioned for it.  I find that a major disappointment.  If in search of grandeur one has to return to the old magnificent Brooklyn.  Happily it is still there, with new life breathed into it.

Figure 3 - Detail from Eugene Francis Savage's Bailey Fountain, Felicity and Wisdon, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 3 – Detail from Eugene Francis Savage’s Bailey Fountain, Felicity and Wisdon, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

And as always, the epicenter of all of this has to be  The Grand Army Plaza.  For photographers it has to be a Mecca.  The term Grand Army can mean only one thing and this is emblazened on the top of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ triumphal arch beneath Frederick MacMonnies Quadriga: “Defenders of the Union 1861-1865.”  The Quadriga depicts the lady Columbia, an allegorical representation of the United States, riding in a chariot drawn by two horses, while two winged Victory figures, each leading a horse, trumpets Columbia’s arrival.  Just marvelous!

The Grand Army Plaza is the dramatic main entrance to Olmstead and Vaux’s  Prospect Park.  The Plaza consists very dramatically, albeit somewhat at the pedestrian’s peril (particularly one whose mind strays away from traffic to the perfect photograph), of concentric oval rings arranged as streets.  The outer ring is Plaza Street. The inner ring was originally meant intended to be a circle is in fact Brooklyn’s major thoroughfare Flatbush Avenue.  It connects radially eight roads: Vanderbilt Avenue; Butler Place; Saint John’s Place (twice); Lincoln Place; Eastern Parkway; Prospect Park West; Union Street; and Berkeley Place.

Figure 4 - Snake planters at the entrance to Prospect Par, Brooklyn, NY, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 4 – Snake planters at the entrance to Prospect Par, Brooklyn, NY, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

In addition to the Plaza and the Park are three of Brooklyn’s most impressive landmarks: The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, The main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, and Brooklyn Museum.  I think quite literally that I could spend many months photographing within a half mile of the Plaza.  Needless-to-say one’s photographic wanderings are personal and a bit quirky.  For me the goal is not to document the architecture but to photograph what the light strikes on a given day and therefore grabs your fancy.

For me the first focus is always philanthropist  Frank Bailey’s  (1865-1953) fabulous Neptune Fountain.  It was built in 1932, a collaboration between by architect Edgerton Swarthout and sculptor Eugene Savage.   The fountain, a dramatic sculptural waterwork includes  central bronze sculptures of male and female figures atop the prow of a ship.  These represent Wisdom and Felicity and are surrounded by Neptune himself, his attendant Triton, and a boy holding a cornucopia.   To me personally the only material that compares to bronze in being photogenic is marble.  And here you have the magic of bronze combined with water.  What I really need to do is visit this fountain at different times of day to get different illuminations.  Figure 2, an image of Neptune I have posted before and is one of my favorites.  Figure 3 I took last weekend of Wisdom, Felicity, and the boy with the cornucopia.    My only problem is that I would have preferred to get a face on image, but the lighting wasn’t right.

Figure 5 - Facade of the Brooklyn Public Library, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 5 – Facade of the Brooklyn Public Library, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Poking further around the Plaza, I was very much taken by the snake garden planters that adorn the entrance of the park.  One of them is shown in Figure 4. From there I climbed the library steps and photographed the art deco main entrance of the library (desisigned by sculptors Thomas Hudson Jones and Carl P. Jennewein. Take note: The bronze screen above the entrance features beloved characters from American literature..  Figure 5 catches a bit of the famous door with its golden literary figures.  The ones shown in my picture top to bottoms are: Meg (from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott), White Fang (from the novel by Jack London),  Natty Bumppo (from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales), The Raven (from the poem by Edgar Allan Poe), and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (author and narrator of Two Years Before the Mast).

The Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, and the surrounding neighborhoods are fertile grounds for photographic discovery.  And what you discover, I believe is an important connect or link between three Brooklyns: the Brooklyn of the gilded age, the Brooklyn of the art deco period, and the vibrant hipster-ethnic Brooklyn of today.  Maybe Thomas Wolfe put it best, and maybe he had us photographers in mind when he said:

Dere’s no guy livin’ dat knows Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo, because it’d take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun’ duh goddam town.”

Baby elephant in utero

Well, I’m not sure whether this violates my no cute cuddly baby animal rule or not, but I was struck today by an image from the Oklahoma City Zoo showing a baby elephant in utero.  This is, of course, an ultrasound image taken of an eighteen year old female elephant Asha at the Zoo.  Zoo officials announced on Tuesday, October 8 that Asha is with calf.  She is seven months pregnant which means, given the elephant’s gestational period of pachyderms, that she isn’t due until December of 2014.

There are a number of important points to be made here.  First, is that sound waves can be used to produce images just like light waves, and the laws of physics regarding resolution etc. are pretty much the same.  You may ask whether this is really a photograph.  I would argue that it is.  The wonder of all of the amazing medical imaging modalities (CT, PET, MRI, ultrasound etc.) is that they enable us to see the previously unseen and like a good photograph they make us wonder, to think about, and to see in new ways.  Right now I am marveling that I never thought that I would see a photograph of an unborn baby elephant, whose trunk is clearly visible.

 

Rogan Brown – paper sculptures

A while back I discussed the magical worlds in toilet paper rolls of French artists Anastassia Elias.  I find paper sculpture art very appealing.  There is tremendous delicacy about it.  It also opens up an infinity of possibilities for tone-on-tone photography, particularly white tones on white tones.

Tone-on-tone is, to me, a very intriguing form of photography.  You’ve got to very carefully choose the tonal range.  It is way too easy to “equalize the histogram,” setting the darkest tone to black and the lightest tone to white.  When you do that you can lose the very essence of the tone-on-tone.

With all these reasons in mind, I was delighted last night to discover the wonderful laser cut paper sculptures of British/Irish artist Rogan Brown.  Brown finds inspiration in nature and inspiration, in part, from the great tradition of scientific drawing and model making, from such artist-scientists as Ernst Haeckel.  The natural inspiration spans from the microcosm of biology to the macrocosm of geology: a zygote, a seed pod, the ocean, or a mountain range.

I love the sculptures.  Many of the tone-on-tone photographs, to my taste, could use a bit of work.  They seem to follow, for the most part, a simple side lighting approach, and I think that there is room to explore greater drama with more complex light set ups.

Art is inevitably a matter of vision, and Brown’s vision is superb.  It is far from merely copying nature like a draughtsman. It is the difference being merely seeing and truly seeing.  Brown quotes William Blake, and I think the point apropos of all that we discuss here, and of all the photographs taken for arts sake.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of a man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.”

William Blake, Letter to Revd. Dr. Trusler (1799)

On a wing and a prayer

If you have ever tried to photograph a bee on a flower in crystal clarity and sharpness, you will definitely appreciate this wonderful macrophotograph by showing a lady bug hitching a ride and sailing through the air on a dandelion seed.  It truly brings to life the phrase “on a wing and a prayer.” This image is really quite amazing and was taken by nineteen year old polish photographer Jagoda Cholacinska.  She spotted it in  a poppy field near her home.  Jagoda said, that “I was walking in a poppy field when I noticed a ladybird imitating a witch on the pollen of a dandelion.”

I am going to think about this picture every time I take a tricky macroshot only to come home and conclude that it is out of focus or not entirely in focus.  Maybe it is truly magic!

Hydrangeas

Figure 1 - Hydrangeas # 1 (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 1 – Hydrangeas # 1 (c) DE Wolf 2013

I know that this is going to shock the more ardent gardeners among my readers but there are two wonderful aspects to autumn.  The first is the magical colors and light for photography, and the second is that it is time to let one’s garden go to seed.  After a season of feeding my “Endless Summer” hydrangeas aluminum sulfate to keep them blue, I am delighting in the way that the early and warm October light is catching the subtle pink and green tones of hydrangea gardens.

Last weekend we visited the farmer’s market at the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, NY.  The weather and the late morning light were, well picture perfect and I had a great time photographing vegetables, plants, and of course statues.  One stall was selling dried hydrangeas, hung upside down and glistening in the sun.  It was a very fitting end to summer and raised the point that, while autumn is color, not all of it has to be brash and dramatic.  Here the all magic is in the subtle pastels.

Figure 2 - Hydrangeas #2 (c) DE Wolf 2013

Figure 2 – Hydrangeas #2 (c) DE Wolf 2013

Perfect Polly and the Turk

Figure 1 - A replica of the "The Turk," a fraudulent eighteenth century chess playing machine.  From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploladed by Carafe and in the public domain under creative commons license.

Figure 1 – A replica of the “The Turk,” a fraudulent eighteenth century chess playing machine. From the Wikimedia Commons originally uploladed by Carafe and in the public domain under creative commons license.

I have to apologize because I feel the need today to deviate a bit off topic – never one hundred percent.  I am incensed.  Yesterday in the groggy hours of morning, you know when that is.  It is when there is no choice on television except  between reruns of “Frasier” and “I Love Lucy,” and when you are sitting in a stupor, sipping your coffee, I was confronted with a television commercial for “Perfect Polly.”  Perfect Polly is a mechanical parakeet that has a motion detector in her chest that causes her to move her head from side to side and to chirp incessantly.  I am pretty sure that my cat would be wholly unconvinced.  She knows full well that her “Squeeky Mouse” is a fraud.  Still she happily disembowels him of his squeaker and drops his lifeless carcass, like so much carrion, in her water bowl.

We have  spoken at length in this blog about the human machine interface, about the intelligent camera, and about the coming of The Singularity and a new bionic age.  I was encouraged by a recent news clip showing a truly bionic leg prosthesis in operation.  The Singularity is near, people.  But a mechanical parakeet?  Come on! It is an insult to parakeets everywhere, including my friend Wendy’s little bird MJ.  I never tire of Wendy’s photos of MJ sharing her Cheerios.  That is cross-species bonding.  But a mechanical parakeet.  This is not what we have been talking about, and it joins robot dogs (remember those?) in the dredge heap of useless things.  Perfect Polly is of the genre of mechanical people and animals in ancient clockworks.

And Perfect Polly is reminiscint of “The Turk.”  The Turk at least has an interesting story and is closely related to the Turing Test of whether a machine is a machine or a human and how would you test it to know. The Turk was  a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. Between 1770 and 1854, when it was destroyed by fire, it was repeatedly exhibited as an automatron, even after it was exposed in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, The Turk appeared to play a mean game of chess chess against a human opponent.

The Turk was, in fact, a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the mechanism. Over the course of 84 years, The Turk won most of the games it played during its demonstrations and defeated many challengers including: Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Probably the most famous analysis of The Turk and whether it was a fraud or an actual automatron was by Edgar Alan Poe and entitled “Maelzel’s Chess Player.”  Many of Poe’s arguements are incorrect.  Yet, in a sense, the essay is significant in that it anticipates “The Turing Test.”

So a big hurrumph for Perfect Polly.  As for The Turk, I should point out that on May 11, 1997, a chess playing machine developed by IBM defeated then world champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match.  The age of “thinking” machines is upon us as witnessed by Deep Blue and our modern digital cameras.  It just has nothing to do with Perfect Polly!

 

Cute cuddly baby animal photographs

Rescued baby sloth to be returned to the wild - but not so fast. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Ken Mayer creative commons license.

Rescued baby sloth to be returned to the wild – but not so fast. From the Wikimedia Commons, original image uploaded by Ken Mayer creative commons license.

Hurumph!  An old friend has accused me of being rather maudlin on this blog.  I suppose that what she wants is cute cuddly baby animal pictures.  Even I have been known to do it, but not so much!  OK, so let’s get it out of our systems.  Please visit this collection of such warm and fuzzy images. And I have one especially for friend and reader Reebs.  If you still need more visit Facebook.  People are endlessly posting such images there and elsewhere on the web.  It is certainly an escape from the cruel heartless reality of our world.  But as I told my friend, A. E. Housman pretty much summed it up in  “The Shropshire Lad (verse LXII) 1919:

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.”