Infinity and the sea

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Figure 1 – Looking out at Marblehead Harbor at Sunset, Marblehead, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Last evening I was up at Marblehead on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. It was a perfect night with an insistent but warm wind. I took the image of Figure 1 of the mounting sunset with my cell phone camera. It seems there is nothing more visually and auditorily relaxing than to watch the ever changing light in the sky and water and listen to the relentless sounds of wave, wind, surf, and gull.

I believe that the sea represents, and has always represented to humans, the sense of the infinite, both spatial and temporal. There is the horizon and the magic of what lies beyond. In Tennyson’s words from his poem “Ulysses:”

“Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
 
There appear to be an infinity of waves, equally infinite in their variety. The waves come relentlessly, beating against the rocks and sand. Like the changing sky and seasons, they fill us with the sense of the eternal. As a result the sea mesmerizes and soothes. It is a balm to the hurt and stressed-out mind.
 
So all of this emotion I project into the image in my mind. The colors remind me of the paintrings of Francesco Guardi (1712-1793). Images that take me back to youthful visits to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. And a sadness grows within me. The sea appears to be infinite, immune to pain and change. But we are, by changing our planet, destroying it and threatening the great ocean currents that maintain the ocean’s very soul. We foolishly invoke Poseidon’s rage.

Woman in blue contemplating the sea

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Figure 1 – Woman in blue contemplating the sea. Gloucester, MA, May 18, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Yesterday was truly spectacular and what better place to enjoy it but Massachusetts’ North Shore. It was a day to contemplate the rejuvenating serenity of the sea. And I found this woman doing just that on a great boulder overlooking the ocean in Gloucester, MA. Its solemnity and majestic blues evoke the sense of the nearby Fisherman’s Memorial Monument.

On freeing yourself in photography

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Figure 1 -Sunset through the trees, stylized iPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Technology in photography, as it does in many fields, represents freedom. The calotype and then the wet collodion plate freed the photographer from the unique one only aspect of the daguerreotype. The dry plate freed the photographer from the wet plate’s requirement of using the newly created plate before it dried. Film was liberating from glass plates. And now we have digital photography.

A few weeks ago, a friend told me that I take pictures like a film photographer, meaning that I am a photographic hoarder, only shooting when conditions are just right. In film photography, you recognize that time and film are precious. You only take the best compositions because unless you’re a darkroom fanatic, you’re only going to work up the best images, and for me anyway a single image’s darkroom processing could literally take hours. In film photography, you save excess for exposure bracketing – the hope and prayer that you might get the image that you want.

Digital photography frees you from this. You get the instant gratification of knowing what works and also you are free, knowingly or unknowingly, to use Ansel Adams’ Zone System on each and every image. Now it may be cloudy, moments later sunny, now you may want to photograph in color, on the next image it might be black and white. Not only that, but modern cameras, including those incorporated in our cellphones, are essentially little thinking machines. You are freed to create.

Lumbering along like a film photography Luddite is not the most productive approach. The more photographs you take, the better you become at taking photographs – the more you are ready for Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment.” Whenever, I go out, I set my camera ISO 1600, f/7.1, center spot focusing. I am ever ready for wildlife and still I can miss it.

But there is more to “the chains we forged, link by link” throughout our photographic lives. We have a concept of what a photograph must be! I’m forever thinking sharpness and tonal range. Ansel is ever in my head. And if it’s color, I want brilliant color, carefully saturated.

Here is where you enslave yourself. My friend has taught me to shoot photographs with abandon. In this regard my iPhone 10XSmax is a chain cutter – a true liberator. It frees me to see and to take photographic chances. Photography is seeing first, and second it is learning how to translate seeing to photograph.

This raises a whole other point. What is the final medium? Is it paper? Is it cloth? Is it aluminum? Or is it that vague but brilliant substance-less finality of the computer monitor? Here now to be gone a moment later.

My friend has taught me something else. She has freed me from my obsession with sharpness and tonal range. I have learned that a well-constructed photograph need not be the end-product. It can instead be the beginning for experimentation with stylization programs, that use artificial intelligence to transform a photograph of this world to a painterly other world. In this vein, I wanted to share two Images so transformed. I took Figure 1 of the setting sun filtered through the forest and wasn’t quite happy with what standard photographic manipulation offered. So I transformed into a “painting” using PRISMA, and found myself quite satisfied with the result. Similarly, I photographed an ornamental pot of mosses, actually artificial mosses (Figure 2). I liked some aspects of the image, but really it elicited a big “eh” from me until I again processed it in PRISMA and turned it into a painting, which, as a science fiction fan, seems happily otherworldly.

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Figure 2 – Ornamental mosses, stylized iPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Great Blue Heron

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Figure 1 – Great blue heron at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, April 21, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

With my recent post of the courting mute swans I mentioned that I have made it back with some regularity to the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. The image of the swans was taken last Sunday and during the same trip I took the image of Figure 1. I had spotted this great blue heron (Ardea herodias) about fifty meters away and I had a bead on him, spot metering his eyes. Then he took off and I started shotting maddly and was rewarded by Figure 1. As pointed out by a reader the red spot on the wings is particularly prominent on this guy. I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that this is mating season, when plumage is most dramatic. I never can look at a great blue heron or a wild turkey for that matter without thinking, “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 330mm , ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/400th sec at f/6.3 with no exposure compensation.

American Gothic

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Figure 1 -Discarded antique belt wheels at the historic Damon Mill in Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

This past week, I made two photographic transitions.

First, I upgraded my failing IPhone 6 to an IPhone  XSMax. The 6 represented a major advance in cell phone camera technology, and the 7 even more so.  With the XSMax comes the best camera until, I suppose the XI. There are three cameras on the iPhone XS Max, two in the back and one in the front for selfies and facial recognition. Significantly for those of us who do a lot of post-processing, the dual rear cameras are at 12 megapixels, which some will recall was the transition point when digital started to be equivalent to film in resolution. The lenses are f/1.8 for the wide-angle camera and f/2.4 for the 2x “telephoto.” Let’s put the word telephoto in quotes, for photography buffs this is more of a “normal” lens. But I hasten to mention the fantastic capabilities of these cameras in terms of close-up and wide-angle ability. For me, there is no reason to carry any other cameras but my phone’s and my DSLR.

Of course, a lot of the value lies in the Artificial Intelligence. the AI, in the algorithms. Yes that again, friends!  This is not your father’s camera, or at least not my father’s. This is “computational photography” and has a new feature called ‘Smart HDR’ where the phone begins capturing images as soon as you open the app not just when you push the shutter. Each image is a stream of images, one being chosen as “best.” But, I hasten to add you can change that later as you use the camera’s post-processing algorithms. By combining images the camera optimizes lighting and in the process avoids overexposure and shutter lag. While the images produced are only 8 bit per color plane, in my experience so far, the histograms are spot on, filling the dynamic range perfectly. Well enough said for now, I am having fun, and getting fabulous shots.

And as an example of image quality, I am including as Figure 1 a sepia toned black and white image of discarded antique belt wheels at the historic Damon Mill in Concord, MA taken with my IPhone XSMax and very minimally modified in Adobe Photoshop. I think the subject matter fitting. In its day, in the mid to late nineteenth century, these waterworks that, electricity free, powered the clothing industry of the Industrial Revolution were the height of technology, just as these new cellphone cameras are today.They are now discarded ornaments, which truly makes one wonder what is next!

Second, at the urging of a wise friend, I have started playing with the app PRISMA. This stylizes your images in various painterly fashions. According to Venture Beat, “PRISMA’s filter algorithms use a combination of convolutional neural networks and artificial intelligence, and it doesn’t simply apply a filter but actually scans the data in order to apply a style to a photo in a way that both works and impresses.” If you’re like me this tells you NOTHING. But the point is that these are not simple filters but AI neural networks applied to image modification. They are a lot of fun to use, and when you have a photo, which lacks a certain umph, you can often “jazz” it up with the PRISMA app. It is important, I believe, that the goal here is to achieve a beautiful and artistically pleasing image. Artistic photography is intrinsically nonlinear. Strict intensity and even spatial relationships are fundamentally lost in the processing.So there is nothing wrong with using modern image processing techniques to enhance the effects.

More importantly both the iPhone camera transition and the PRISMAand related apps transition truly represent a new world for the photograph, one where, along with the photographers brain, the camera itself has a brain that works in tandem with you. Of course, the beginnings of all of this rest historically with the development of autofocus and autoexposure back in the seventies. But really, it is a new world energized by neural networks and artificial intelligence. You may have wondered how I can write a blog about photography and futurism in the smae breath. Now you know!

As an illustration of this, Figure 2 shows The Old Salem District Courthouse in the Federal Street District of Salem, Massachusetts reflected in the window of a condominium. The scene struck me as ever so Gothic. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the original image. However, I was able to accentuate this feeling of medieval  Gothis as well as to brighten up the tonality with the PRISMA Gothic filter.

Figure 2 – American Gothic, reflections of the Salem District Courthouse in a condominium window, modified using the PRISMA Gothic filter, Salem, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Courting swans

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Figure 1 – Courting swans on the pond at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA, April 21, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

I am finally making it back, with some regularity, to the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge and wanted to share this photograph of two mute swans (Cygnus olor), necks intertwined, in their courting dance. So beautiful, and such a privilege to see. Definitely there are shades of Anna Pavlova and Saint-Saens Le Cygne! It is, in fact, a privilege to be able to see that old footage as well. The world stops and you are mesmerized by the love dance of these graceful creatures, made all the more poignant by the simple fact that they have danced in this way for millennia. We are truly blessed by the swans and by the wild places.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 275 mm, ISO 1600,  Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/2500th sec at f/6.3 with -1 exposure compensation.

Drinking life to the lees

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Figure 1 – the lees at the bottom of my morning cup of coffee, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees…”
 
And so begins Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s truly wonderful poem Ulysses. There are a lot of life lessons to be learned from that poem, about perseverance, endurance, and living. “Lees” are, of course, the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of wine. And the phrase “drinking life to the lees” means “to the very last drop.”  I first read that in High School and this phrase, and others from that poem,  are never far from the conscious surface of my mind.
 
And so this morning, as I was drinking my morning coffee and staring into the nearly finished cup, the physicist within me marveled at the pattern of the residual grounds, the lees, and Tennyson came to my mind and it is all captured in Figure 1.
 
But there is more, the physicist within me once stirred is not easily quieted, and I find took great joy in the little fractal rivers that carve the “Mississippi Delta” out of the caffeine laden mud. They are fractal yes, random little twists and turns of unpredictability. But they are not fractal in the sense that there is a physics driven size scale to the pattern that we see – driven by surface tension, ground size, and imperfections in the surface of the cup.  Famously. in the movie Jurassic Park Ian Malcolm explains to Ellie Satler how subtle variations cause chaos in the descent of a drop of water down her hand. It is a great seduction scene and presents the essence of chaos theory right there in the bottom of the coffee cup.
 
When I was in graduate school there was the proud tradition of coffee and donuts before seminars. And there was a great black indolent dog, named KT, whom everybody loved and who only came alive for donut time. You would bring your little styrofoam cup into the seminar with you and then quietly massage it into a work of art – the best being to turn it inside out patiently until it resembled a sombrero. Then too there is the tradition of studying the physics of the coffee cup. Upon looking carefully you truly may find the universe in a cup of coffee. It so wonderfully mimics the physics of mega-scale phenomena like stellar dynamics and the thermal engines that drive the currents of the terrestial atmosphere and oceans.
 
Tomorrow morning, as you drink your cup of morning Joe, pause a moment and reflect on the meaning of life and the physics of the cosmos. It is all so near and yet so far away.

Bluebirds on a spring morning

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Figure 1 – Eastern Bluebird, Sudbury, MA, April 11, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

This was a morning of pure delight! The weather is finally turning warm. Yet the eastern bluebirds, Sialia sialis,  have persisted at my feeders, and they dazzle in the warm morning light. I so love the bluebirds best of all. It is both because they are difficult to attract and because of their splendid color. So today, I celebrate spring, and warmth, and bluebirds, with the photograph (Figure 1) of a male near my feeder. We are in Thoreau country here. He celebrated the bluebirds, the ancestors of these very birds. It was he who said that “the bluebird carries the sky on his back.” My bluebirds wintered here. Maybe it was colder in Thoreau’s time, because he wrote:

“The bluebird had come from the distant South
To his box in the poplar tree,
And he opened wide his slender mouth,
On purpose to sing to me.”

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 185 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/500 sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Who’s all the fuss about

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Figure 1 – Piping Plover, Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, Plum Island, Newburyport, MA. March 30, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

There is quite a fuss made each year on April 1 at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island. They actually shut down the miles of beach and the reason is the little fellow shown in Figure 1. He is a piping plover, Charadrius melodus. The piping plover is listed as a near threatened species, and he is given the whole beach to himself in early April to breed and brood in privacy and peace.  Its population, as a result, of such conservation activities is actually on the rise.

Unlike the sanderlings of yesterday’s post, which pipe for crustaeans just at the water’s edge, the piping plover hunts for small insects and worms further up the beach away from the surf. He tends to hunt alone or in smaller groups, as I found this solitary fellow. Anthropomorphically, I love the way his little feet sink into the wet sand. The food specialization reflects itself, true to Darwin and his finches, in the precise shape of its bill. Here short and stout in stark contrast to the sanderling’s long pipe.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 235mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/4000th sec at f/7/1 with -1 exposure compensation.