I can’t believe that it’s August

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Figure 1 - Johann Heinrich Füssli, "Odysseus vor Scilla und Charybdis, 1794-6," From the Wikimedia Commons, the Yorck Project and in the public domain under GNU license.

Figure 1 – Johann Heinrich Füssli, “Odysseus vor Scilla und Charybdis, 1794-6,” From the Wikimedia Commons, distributed by the Yorck Project and in the public domain under GNU license.

Well it’s August, folks, and frankly I can’t believe.  Summer is flown, and the doldrums of its indolent end will soon be upon us.  I have been doing my weekly ritual reading of the various Photos of the day, week, and month and found a couple of gems in MSN’s “Must See August 2013.”  Hmm, August!

The first of these takes me back to our discussion of a chance encounter with Mammatus clouds.  Strange fluffy cloud forms are one thing, imagine yourself in Roberto Giudici’s bare feet as you sail carefree off the Greek island of Orthoni in the Ionian Sea.  Then on July 23, this is what you see, or more accurately what he photographed – shades of Scylla and Carbydis for sure! Yes, Yes – the hero’s journey. Sorry!

Then there is this beautiful colored image of a deserted German diamond mine in the ghost town Namibian village of  Kolmanskop. Diamonds were discovered there in 1908.  There were stately homes, a hospital, a ballroom, a power station, a school, and even an ice factory.  All this pushed back the desert.  Now, the desert has reclaimed it all.

 

 

Jim Markland’s Ballerinas in the wild

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BBC news is featuring a portfolio of dance photographs of English Photographer Jim Markland entitled “Ballerinas in the wild.”  The term “in the wild” is meant to connote  outside of  their natural habitat and features ballerinas dancing and leaping in strange exotic places like on the tarmack of airports and in old pump houses.  My personal favorite is an image of ballerina Szilvia Zsigmond  on a Cheltenham Street: stretching, reading a book, and waiting for a bus.

You can also visit Markland’s website Rowbotham Dance Photography.  Dance photographs are his specialty, and you can see an extensive slide show of his work on Flickr.   Check out his tango images such as this one from the Pittsville Pump Room.  It captures all the intricacy of the tango perfectly: intense focus, prefect form, and a profound dose of the sensuous.

We have recently spoken about the great appeal of dance photography in connection with the work of E. E. McCollum.  There is, of course, an artistic tradition that goes back to Degas.  The diversity form and beauty certainly appeals to both Degas, as a painter, and to photographers.  But, I think, that there is a special appeal for photographers because of the way that the medium is capable of catching that brief instant in time, when gravity seems overcome, and the figures fly, seeming effortlessly, through the air.

For those of you fortunate enough to be visiting the English countryside this summer, there is a show of his work at the Gloucestershire Guild Hall for the month of August 2013 called “Jumpin.'”  The rest of us must be satisfied with these slideshows.

 

 

Denuded Tree

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Figure 1 - Denuded Tree, Wellesley, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Denuded Tree, Wellesley, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

At the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s Elm Bank Reservation in Wellesley, Massachusetts there is this wonderful dead tree that is totally devoid of bark that they have labelled and use as a “bird habitat.”  It is wonderfully polished, covered with a labyrinth of termite tunnels, like little streets, and presents this marvelously shiny ivory color.

The sky was completely overcast, presenting a very low contrast light.  But I was struck by the textures, the termite tracks and the spots that glistened subtly above the rest of the surface.  These would not have been there in bright high-contrast sunlight.  The scene presented the kind of tone-on-tone challenge that I just love to photograph.  Since I was shooting with IS, but no tripod, I chose an ISO of 800.  I find that with the Canon T2i you can really go much higher than this without getting into grain trouble.  I experimented with manual but found that AF gave me what I wanted.  I do this by zooming in on the fine detail after taking a test shot.  Here the detail was the termite tracks.  The image in Figure 1 was taken with my EFS 18-55 mm (1:3.5-5.6) IS STM zoom at 37 mm in aperture priority at 1/400.

The result was, I think, my best image of the day.

Summer Gardens in New England

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[slideshow_deploy id=’3404’]

We have reached the beginning of August in New England, and the gardens are all marvelously ablaze with color.  Last weekend my dear friend and reader, Eleanor invited my wife and I to see her garden at the height of its glory.  Eleanor’s garden is filled with the most beautiful lilies imaginable, some of them with a breathtaking lavender hue, that I just love.  Dragon flies and hummingbirds are everywhere (my cat was not invited).  And what made it all very special was the fine mist of water droplets that covered everything with a fresh sense of expectant vitality.

Inspired we went this weekend to a fair that was being held at Elm Bank Reservation in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which is owned by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  There I photographed: bees on pink cone flowers, hibiscus, and flowering grasses.  I decided to experiment in this post with a little slide show of my flower work. Note, that if you place your mouse over the picture the title comes up.

Flower photography seems trivial because of power of color to delight our senses.  It is in fact a tricky task.  Finding just the right focus (best done in manual mode) and depth of field is an art.  It is really best done with a tripod and a macrolens.  But while not perfectly successful, I amused myself and got some acceptable if not brilliant images.  I believe that if you’re concentrating on the task at hand and deliberate in your work, you can learn a lot.

So again the end of August and the dog days are near.  I begin to get a bit wistful.  The school traffic will be back soon, and my commute will lengthen.  But the really nice point about New England is that the scene is always changing and the view is ever beautiful.

Evoking a sense of smell

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Figure 1 - Astronaut Karen Nyberg on the International savoring the gift of a grapefruit from Earth. From NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Astronaut Karen Nyberg on the International Space Station savoring the gift of a grapefruit from Earth. From NASA and in the public domain.

It has always struck me as pretty wonderful how many of our memories instantly evoke a sense of smell.  My grandmother had this aluminum serving dish shaped like a flower.  When you pushed down on it the petals opened to reveal these wonderful after dinner mints.  To this day I cannot see a picture of my grandmother without the sense of a peppermint. And I can still smell Sunday dinners at my mother’s home.

Despite the fact that the olfactory is not our dominant sense by any means, it is striking to me how strong these image-smell associations can be.  So I offer today this absolutely wonderful picture from July 28 of NASA Astronaut Karen Nyberg aboard the International Space Station smelling a grapefruit sent up from the Blue Marble.

Back in colonial times, oranges were considered a rare delicacy, suitable for gift giving at Christmas time.  So among its many meanings the image of Figure 1 is a reminder of the precious things that we give up when we leave the bonds of Earth to meet our destiny in space.

Nitrocellulose-based flim

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Figure 1 - a badly deteriorated piece of nitrocellulose photographic film, from the Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada via the Wikipedia and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – a badly deteriorated piece of nitrocellulose photographic film, from the Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada via the Wikipedia and in the public domain.

So, as promised, what about this nitrocellulose?  We really need to project ourselves back to the late nineteenth century and imagine that we want to create a light weight portable film that doesn’t require loading a single glass plate at a time.  Our goal, really George Eastman’s goal, was to create a flexible roll film. Nobody wanted to carry glass plates around.  So you need a tough, clear,sheet material, and its being the late nineteenth century there aren’t too many choices.

The story really begins in 1832 with Henri Braconnot, who used nitric acid combined with starch or wood fibers to produce a lightweight combustible explosive material to which he gave the name xyloïdine.  1832?, you exclaim, that’s just before photography was invented.  Then in 1838 Théophile-Jules Pelouze treated paper and cardboard in a similar manner to create nitramidine. Both of these were pretty unstable and not practical explosives. In 1846 Christian Friedrich Schönbein, finally found a practical solution.  He mixed nitric acid with cotton, dried the material, and then there was a flash.  Oh did I mention that he dried it on the oven door?   I am reminded of a childhood limerick:

“Johny was a chemist.

A chemist he is no more.

For what he thought was H20 was H2SO4.

And it rained little Johny for a week!”

Schönbein and several other chemists worked on controlling the process, which eventually led to the creation of a material called “gun cotton.”  Gun cotton was a usable explosive and was employed for all the good and bad uses you can imagine.

It was subsequently discovered that a suitable “plastic” (meaning flexible) sheet of Nitrocellulose could be made using camphor as a plasticizer.  Starting in 1889, Eastman Kodak, starting in August 1889 used as the first flexible film base.It was used until 1933 for X-ray films and for motion picture film until 1951.

Though driven by the technical requirements of a clear and flexible film base, using a material also used for magicians’ flash paper and explosives, was not ideal – especially when used in conjunction with very bright and very hot movie projectors.  Even worse, nitrocellulose, once burning, produces its own oxygen and as a result will continue to burn even when fully submerged in water. Projection rooms had to be lined with asbestos, and it was illegal to transport nitrocellulose movie films on the London underground.

Needless-to-say there were multiple fires caused by nitrocellulose movie film.  In 1926 a cinema fire at Dromcolliher in County Limerick claimed the lives of forty-eight people. Sixty-nine children where killed in a theatre in Paisley, Scotland in 1929.

And then you have the coup de grace.  The intrinsic instability of nitrocellulose, the very thing that makes it useful as an explosive, makes it a disaster from an archival point of view.  It deteriorates very badly (see Figure 1).  As a result old films, indeed the very films that represent the incunabula of cinema, are decaying.  They are dangerous to store, dangerous to work with, and crumbling to explosive nothingness!

Restoration of “Les Enfants du Paradis”

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Figure 1 - Scene from Les Infants du Paradis, from the French Wikipedia and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Scene from Les Infants du Paradis, from the French Wikipedia and in the public domain.

I was reading the BBC news “Pictures of the Day” yesterday and came upon an intriguing photograph of a technician restoring the 1945 French film “Les Enfants du Paradis,” (“Children of Paradise“) at the laboratory of Eclair outside Paris.  The film shot on nitrocellulose was seriously compromised and constantly in danger of exploding or bursting into flames – never a good thing!  The film was directed by Marcel Carné during the German occupation of France during World War II. The plot is prototypic.  Set in the Parisian theatre scene of the 1820s and 30s, it tells of a needless-to-say beautiful courtesan named Garance, and the four men who love her: a mime artist, an actor, a criminal, and an aristocrat.

The accolades for this film are astounding.  In the original American trailer it was described as the French answer to “Gone With the Wind” .  None other than the great French film director François Truffaut  said: “‘I would give up all my films to have directed Children of Paradise’”  TAnd here’s the clincher, in 1995, it was voted “Best Film Ever” in a poll of 600 French critics and film professionals.

So, the restoration is an important landmark in the history of film conservation.  Now we get to see it as it was meant to be seen. It is also a tribute to the incredible painstaking work associated with such a frame by frame.  It is truly a work of love, and to someone, like myself, who was involved in some of the early image processing, our ability to accomplish such Herculean tasks is, frankly, awe inspiring!

But it all begs the questions: what is this thing called nitrocellulose and why would anyone use an explosive as a film base?  I’d like to explore these mysteries in tomorrow’s blog.

E. E. McCollum and the “Cocoon Series”

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Phew!  It had been a very busy and stressful week.  So this past Saturday morning, in the peaceful early hours, I found myself looking for something soul-soothing and I found it on the pages of LensWork online in E. E. McCollum’s “Cocoon Series.”  Of course, I immediately visited McCollum’s own site and found many more wonderful images.

The cocoon series began when McCollum’s friend and model Kaitlin went into the dressing room of his studio, donned a nylon body cocoon, and began posing in it.  The effect is arresting.  The cocoon creates: first a sense of mystery, second its own marvelous forms, and third some of the most gorgeous ripple textures imaginable.  I just love these wave patterns.  To me, as a scientist, they are suggestive of what are called space time warps.  In physics, these gravity patterns represent being.  Every object or person creates a warp in space time that affects all other object or persons.

Of course, the cocoon represents transformation – the fundamental transformation between caterpillar and butterfly.  It is death and then it is resurrection to something much more beautiful.  It has that fundamental ambiguity of meaning about it and therein lies the great mystery.

I keep trying to figure out which image in “The Cocoon Series” is my favorite, and that is very hard.  Maybe it is #41, which I love for its photographic and compositional qualities.  But then there is #34 which is so beautiful because of its simplicity and its sense of beauty emergent.

I also think that McCollum’s “Dance” series holds many gems.  I am struck by the figures in motion leaping through the air.  It is curious, when there is a single figure captured in motion its kind of “OK that is cool!”  But when there are two figures, such as “Greenfield #2,” it all becomes just magical and balance.  It defies gravity,

This is a website that I plan on returning to.  And it offered up a wonderful start to a weekend.

 

So ugly only a mother could love

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I think that we need a break from memes and myths and themes.  So I thought that it would be a good day for confessions.  Like everyone else, I cannot resist a cute and touching animal picture.  This one is for reader Wendy S.  It’s from the AP and was taken on July 24 and shows an Indian parrot hatchling being fed by hand.  It had been caught in a forest in the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland by a local hunter and offered for sale . It shows a mythic bond and relationship between species…  Sorry, maybe I should just say: “Aww!”