Old and new

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Figure 1 - Barn Door at the James Whittemore House, Lexington, MA, Minueman National Historical Park, (c) DE Wolf, 2013.

Figure 1 – Barn Door at the James Whittemore House, Lexington, MA, Minueman National Historical Park, (c) DE Wolf, 2013.

This past Saturday (August 24) I went up to the Minuteman National Historical Park in Lexington, Massachusetts in search of photographs.  The weather was just spectacular and the light strong with nice beams filtering through the forest.  In my book all was perfect.  So I wanted to share an image that I took of the barn at the Jacob Whittemore house.  I used for this my EF70-200 F/4 L USM lens set at aperture priority at f 7.1  with an exposure of 1/1600 and and ISO of 400.  I hand-held it at 81 mm.  Weathered wood seems to be a speciality of New England and I have to say that I love the tonal depth that it gives the image and the fine detail.  Despite my adjusting the black level into the histogram there is still subtle tones retained in the upper black region of the image.

On a totally different note, I was struck earlier in the day while waiting for my wife at lunch of an advertisement for Sobe Water on a tile floor.  The designed was created to give a deep sense of 3D perspective, and I was intrigued as to whether my IPhone could deal with the extreme angle of shooting and keep everything in sharp focul.  The answer is an unequivocal yes.  Marvelous little cameras, those IPhones are!

Figure 2 - Sobe Water advertisement on tile. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 2 – Sobe Water advertisement on tile. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

 

Pink katydid on Martha’s Vineyard

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Well it’s the official end to vacationer’s summer.  So I thought that in honor of labor day weekend, and reminiscint of the image that I previously posted of a lavender praying mantis, that I would share with you a photograph from the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette showing a rare pink katydid. This was brought to my attention by friend and reader Robin via her Facebook page.

The story goes that a care-taking crew in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard was pruning trees.  One of the workers went to dust debris off his sneakers when his eye caught what he thought was a pink grasshopper.  The crew’s foreman knew better.  The rose colored bug was actually a one in 500 pink katydid.  Although I have to say that I prefer to think that it was pink from embarrassment because katy-did. Sorry!

Andrea Stone – Reflections

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Figure 1 - Claude Monet, "The Magpie," from the Wikimedia Commons. Original in the MUsee D'Orsay and in the public domain in the United States.

Figure 1 – Claude Monet, “The Magpie,” from the Wikimedia Commons. Original in the MUsee D’Orsay and in the public domain in the United States.

As I said yesterday, time is flying and I am behind on everything.  I have indicated before that my favorite photography magazine is LensWork.  Nothing, in my opinion, beats it at present.  With most photomags you find that the photographer’s website offers better reproductions than the magazine.  In the case of LensWork it can go the other way, and I think that this is a real compliment to the effort and, frankly dedication to image, that they put into it.  I find that I am now an issue behind with LensWork, just like View Camera.  But I digress!

A few weeks ago I found in LensWork the truly glorious and amazing work of photographer Andrea Stone.  I was happy to find that these images could also be seen on “The Stone Photography” website, which Andrea shares with her husband Rob Stone.  As a result I can share them with you.

Ms. Stone relates her transformative moment as being drawn to Claude Monet’s work “The Magpie,” and with that to the realization of what an image can be.  She has made a study of city scapes reflected in distorted patterns in window glasses. But such a description is really way to mechanical, because what she has created is in itself transformation. It bridges photography with impressionist art, creating magical pictures that could just as easily be paintings.  When the building doing the reflecting is by architect Frank Gehry, the end result is simply amazing!  Looking at her work is one of those great wow moments, when you just fall in love with photography all over again.

Ms. Stone loves cities like Portland, OR, where there is a delicate mixture of the antique and classic with the new and modern.  She relates the challenges of photographing buildings in a post 9/11 world, where the photographer is challenged for her interest in a particular building.  And then there is the challenge of light that all photographers face.  The fact that you can return on a second day to the same observing spot, at the same time of day, and under identical weather conditions and the reflection will be altogether different.  It is like a reminder that we move in both space and time and can never truly return to the same spot.

 

Craig Alan Huber – the California Mission Project

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It is nearing the start of school once more, and I am reminded that I have let the summer fly by without taking vacation.  Last weekend I went over to our local Barnes and Nobles and picked up the latest edition of View Camera.  For some reason this is always an issue behind; so May-June, which was reassuring in a way.  Perhaps summer has not passed me by – really no such luck.  I should really purchase a subscription.

In this issue there was a lovely portfolio by Craig Alan Huber entitled “The Spirit within – Las Imágenes de las Misiones de Alta California.”  I have been to a few of the California missions over the years, starting with being taken to Mission San Francisco de Asis by my friends Marilyn and Marshall in 1973.   There is an inner sense of peace when you enter these churches.  There is a silence perhaps broken by the eternal sound of a fountain.  The light is subdued so that you can see more clearly.  These churches elevate you to a mythic and spiritual plane in a very subtle fashion – not gaudy and huge like the great cathedrals, but just as spiritually uplifting.  If you truly focus, you can find your center.  And as is the nature with holy places, it is then time to return to the mundane world, hopefully a bit more at peace with the world and a bit more enlightened.

There are twenty-three  Spanish Missions in California.  They were established as religious and military outposts by the Franciscans between 1769 and 1833, under the leadership of Fray Junípero Serra, and run up the California coast.  Many of these are still functioning churches two centuries later.

Huber photographs with a 5″ x 7″ view camera often with a vintage 1860 Darlot Opticien Petzval lens.  You will often hear large format enthusiasts comment about the dreamy image quality that these Petzval lenses create: sharp centers that fade away at the edges just ever so slightly.  Huber prints in platinum palladium and the effect is wonderful.  It truly captures on paper all of the sensations of inner peace and timelessness that you have when you have the honor of standing in one of these places.  And it has been argued that platinum palladium prints will last a thousand years; so perhaps they like the missions themselves are enduring.

I have many favorites among Huber’s images and, as always recommend a quiet hour or so be spent visiting his website.  I will recommend “Saint Francis de Asis Church, Rancho de Taos” as a closing example.  Craig Alan Huber’s goal is to photograph and document all of the California Missions.  Large format is truly a labor of love – love of place, love of vision, and love of image. His website also contains images from other spiritual places around the world.  Inner peace is the sublime theme that unites his work.

The fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963

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Figure 1 - Martin Luther King speaking at the March on Washington, August 28, 2013. Image property of the United States government and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Martin Luther King speaking at the March on Washington, August 28, 2013. Image from the Wikimedia Commons, property of the United States government and in the public domain.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.  The event was defining for a generation of Americans, and all its associated imagery, like Figure 1, proves iconic.  In a very real sense the event ushered in the beginning of the sixties, a tumultuous and often disturbing decade that was a moment of profound change.  Let the image speak for itself.

Erik Johansson’s imagined worlds

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I read an essay once about writing fantasy fiction.  The key to it was to define a set of rules and then after that to stay true to those rules.  Pigs may fly as long as they always fly.  The worlds that Swedish photographer Erik Johansson’s creates are marvelous fantasies. When you first see them they look quite normal.  Then as your minds eye zooms out to take the whole image in, your sense of the normal becomes challenged, and you start to realize that something is amiss.  Your bed sheet is not made of snow.  Water does not pour from the frames of seascapes.  You can see a collection of his clever images on the msn site or, and perhaps better still, at Johansson’s own website.

I have several favorites, starting with “Stryktalig,” which means “tough” and shows aman ironing his pants and himself.  It is odd because I find myself more troubled by whether the man is burning himself than I am with his gradual transition from being two to three dimensional.  What are we to make of “Wet Dreams on Open Water,” the woman rowing her bed on a lake with floating pillows and an ominous sky?  This is very dark and threatening.  We have been given entrance to someone’s, presumably the woman’s,  private nightmare. “Common Sense Crossing,“the right side up and downside up street is so so reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s famous lithograph “Relativity.”  It raises the same questions about the meaning and reality of topography.

Finally consider another inside out world, that of “Arms break, vases don’t,” Here some one has dropped a vase on the floor.  the vase remains intact, but the person’s arms have shattered, and you worry not so much about the incongruity but rather about the possibility of his cutting his bare feet on the broken shards.  Just when you thought that you understand the world, Erik Johansson has magically altered reality.  Just when you thought that you know the limits of photographic creativity, Johansson has thought outside the box and shattered those very limits!

Kodak to emerge from bankruptcy – it’s not photographic news

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Figure 1 - George Eastman with Kodak #2 Camera on the S.S. Gallia in 1890 by Frederick Church, image from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – George Eastman with Kodak #2 Camera on the S.S. Gallia in 1890 by Frederick Church (1864-1925), image from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

We learned on August 20 that the Eastman Kodak Co, which pioneered the popularization of photography, has earned court approval to emerge from bankruptcy as a  much smaller digital-imaging company specializing in commercial and packaging print.    Big snore!  It’s not photography news.

The name of the Rochester, NY company was for a century synonymous with photography.  They manufactured film, paper, and cameras.  They had development and printing laboratories worldwide.  They made photography accessible to the masses – and parenthetically were responsible for its mediocritization.  Kodak, based in Rochester, New York, was for years synonymous with household cameras and family snapshots.

It seems a paradox that high tech companies like Kodak and the Digital Equipment Corporation were borne of innovation, but then floundered by failing to embrace the next wave.  In Kodak’s case the error was acute, as digital photography was invented by a Kodak engineer.  When Steve Sasson in the applied research laboratory at Eastman Kodak built the first digital camera using a Fairchild CCD, he was told how clever it was, but to keep it all quiet.  The rest as they say is history. The ultimate losers in all of this, needless-to-say, are the Kodak workers, many of whom have lost not only their jobs but their pensions.

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast

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I try very hard not to post about cute, cuddly animal pictures.  There’s enough of that on social media.  However, today I could not resist passing on this wonderful picture by photographer David Gray of Reuters show a leopard seal entranced by the sounds of a saxaphone. The photograph was taken on August 19, 2013at the Taronga Zoo in Sidney, Australia.  IT shows Steve Westnedge, the zoo’s elephant keeper  playing his sax for a Casey, the leopard seal.

It was done as part of a study on the animal’s reactions to sounds. A reader recent commented about cross-species interactions, and I agree that this is really one of the wonderful points about life on planet Earth – that we can interact in a meaningful and mutually conscious manner with other species. In this case the seal occasionally responds with his own sounds.

I am reminded of the famous first line of William Congreve’s “The Mourning Bride,” “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.” Before I take heat for accusing this soft, warm-blooded, and cuddly leopard seal of having a savage breast, I’d like those of you who haven’t seen or don’t remember the movie “March of the Penguins,”to consider this image by Ben Cranke of Solent News showing a panicked penguin narrowly escaping the gaping jaws of a hungry leopard seal.  The point is well made in the movie “Jurassic Park.”  Animals are not intrinsically good or evil.  They do what they do because they are programmed by nature to do it.  Still as Gray’s picture so poignantly shows they possess the origins of our souls.

 

 

Trilobite eyes – vision in prehistoric seas

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Figure 1 - A schizochroal schizochroal eye of the trilobite Phacops rana, eye dimensions 8mm across by 5.5mm high, found near Sylvania, Ohio, USA, from the Devonian, from the Wikimedia Commons image by Dwergenpaartje and in the public domain under creative commons license.

Figure 1 – A compound schizochroal eye of the trilobite Phacops rana, eye dimensions 8mm across by 5.5mm high, found near Sylvania, Ohio, USA, from the Devonian, from the Wikimedia Commons image by Dwergenpaartje and in the public domain under creative commons license.

On Wednesday we discussed how to correct a lens for spherical aberration: you can use an aspheric shape, you can add a second compensating lens, ideally of a different index of refraction, and you can use a single lens where you grade the index of refraction.  The last of these solutions is the very high tech GRIN lens.  The concept of the GRIN lens is illustrated in Figure 2.  The shape of the lens is a simple cylinder.  However, because the index of refraction changes radially with the kind of parabolic distribution shown on the left, the lens focuses light and corrects for spherical aberration just as if it had a curved surface.

Figure 1 - Schematic of a GRIN lens. Left - the radial distribution of the index of refraction, Right - the cylindrical GRIN lens. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain under creative commons license.

Figure 1 – Schematic of a GRIN lens. Left – the radial distribution of the index of refraction, Right – the cylindrical GRIN lens. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain under creative commons license.

A GRIN lens is not the kind of thing that you expect to see in a prehistoric compound eye.  However, both all three approaches, used today by optical engineers to correct for spherical aberration were employed by nature hundreds of millions of years ago in the construction of trilobite eyes.

Trilobites are a well-known fossil group of extinct marine arthropods that had three part bodies.  They first appeared in the early Cambrian  (521 million years ago), and roamed the seas for the next 270 million years, becoming extinct 250 million years ago.  Those numbers are kind of mind boggling.

Unlike the eyes of modern arthropods which use protein-based lenses, the lens material trilobites utilized was the mineral calcite.  As a result, they are remarkably preserved after hundreds of millions of years and ready for study.  Species such as Crozonaspis used an aspheric lens design that is remarkably similar to that developed by Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century.  Crozonaspis further corrected its lens by addition of an an intralensar body, essentially a second lens element made of a material with a different index of refraction. Most remarkable are the lenses of Phacops rana, see Figure 1 which are actually GRIN lenses, where the calcite, or calcium carbonate, is doped with magnesium carbonate.

It is a remarkable story – complex lens designs created by nature 250 plus million years before Descartes.  The two significant limitations of trilobite eyes, indeed of all compound eyes, is the lack of a means to change focus and the lack of resolution.  This ability to change the eye’s focus is referred to as “adaptation” for human eyes and was first explain by the great British polymath Thomas Young(1773-1829).  In humans this change of focus is accomplished by bending of the lens.  It is, of course, what we do with a camera lens by changing the distance between lens elements or more simply by changing the lens’ distance from the photosensor.  Resolution, as we have seen is largely matter of f-number.