Figure 1 – Moccasin flower, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA. May 20, 2016. IPhone macrophotograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I should probably have saved this posting until Fathers’ Day. But it is May and the orchids are in bloom in Massachusetts, demanding a timely posting. The thing is that my dad was a naturalist, and he would have delighted to walk with me in the woods. He would have been delighted by the great blue herons, by the Canada goslings, by the toad whose picture I posted yesterday, and by the adamant water snake that I crossed paths with last week. But I have been waiting and watching, waiting for the orchids to bloom, because I knew that this would have delighted him the most.

Figure 1 is a photograph of a so-called moccasin flower. It is a lady-slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule. They are very special and they grow on the ground of the New England pine-barrens. Indeed, they defy culture because no one has yet to figure out the essential ingredients provided by the pine needles and oak leaves that nurture them. The photograph was again taken with my IPhone serving as macrocamera. Here I would have preferred a little more sharpness. But I was not carrying the macrolens for my Canon with me. And like yesterday’s toad image, I had to get down on the ground close to the flower. There is something pretty magical about orchids, which we think of as tropical flowers growing in the Northern woods.

I say that my father would have delighted in walking with me. But, in fact, he still does. He was an extraordinary and encyclopedic naturalist. And in his day biology was still about naming things, just as geology was about mysterious land bridges where dinosaurs paid a toll and crossed between continents. So whenever, I walk in the woods today I remember all the names of plants and animals and minerals that he taught me, and it is as if he were still with me.

And there is something else. I grew up in New York City, which you would think was about as far from nature that you could get. But that was not really the case. There were wonderful parks: Central Park, Fort Tryon Park, Prospect Park, and Van Cortland Park where nature was waiting for you still, and if you tried hard enough these places would transform in your imagination to an antebellum time before nature’s war with mankind.

Figure 1 – American toad. Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, May 20, 2016, Sudbury, MA. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

As the weather has warmed up, I have noticed more and more reptiles and amphibians on my daily walks. First, it was the turtles soaking up the rays of sunlight on an otherwise chilly day. Then came the frogs, and the other afternoon I came across a little Northern water snake on the path. Despite his diminutive size this snake held his ground.

Yesterday I was delighted to come upon the American toad – Anaxyrus americanus – of my youth. Unbeknownst to my youthful self, they were classified as Bufo americanus in those days. We loved to find them. We would hold them, and they would excrete a “urine” in response, and after a period of boyhood tormenting we would release them, because even then we had been taught that natural things have the right to their own life and domain.

I didn’t touch the toad I found yesterday, and he just froze in the path confident in his camouflage. You think immediately of princes under the spell of witches waiting to be kissed by a kind-hearted maiden. That is, of course, the Ovidian stuff of  metamorphic myth, where things judged ugly may be transformed. Who is the ugly one? Remember though, that there is change in nature. Egg clusters become tadpoles, and tadpoles become frogs. Fuzzy goslings soon become geese. And verdant leaves take on the hues of autumn. It is far from a static world and these changes are as dramatic as princes changed to toads.

I conceived of the image of Figure 1 and I took it with my IPhone, which does a wonderful job of macrophotography. Indeed, I should say an amazing job of it. I was troubled by the top views that I kept getting, which really didn’t show the eyes. So I got down on the ground with the toad and held my camera sidewards on the earth within inches of him. The result is Figure 1, and I am pretty pleased with the effect.

Figure 1 – Picasso in the Forest, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Sometimes you’re just walking in the woods, surrounded by natural visions and you are suddenly drawn back into the human world. The other morning I was walking along the path and saw the tree of Figure 1 in my peripheral vision. Like I said, i was drawn back – but in a pleasing way. It was reminiscent of Picasso’s 1942 sculpture now in the MOMA in New York City – The Bull’s Head.

It is not uncommon for trees to remind us of other things – of people or animals. Indeed, early on in my digital photography days, I started a project which I called The Quest for the Ents. The Ents are, of course, the tree people of Tolkein’s Middle Earth. They symbolize a mythic animation of the forest. And they symbolize its terrible loss as well. There are no young Ents, becuase the Ent Wives have long disappeared.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 100 mm, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/500th sec at f/9.0, with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Red-winged blackbird, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, May 17, 2016. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

The red-winged black bird – Agelaius phoeniceus – is one of our more common birds, yet still they have a subtle understated beauty. Of course, their beauty is the only understated thing about them. They are loud demanding squawkers. When I see them in New England, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden comes to mind – he mentions the red-wings many times.

They also carry that great conundrum of the English language – to hyphenate or not. Why is it red-winged but  blackbird? We live today in the tyranny of spell-checker, where everything is hyphenated, correct or not. It is as if our entire lives were a parenthetical thought.

Anyway, I came across this loud fellow the other day, demanding attention and I liked the sleekness of the bird, and the contrast between red, black, and green. He also raised in my ever wandering mind the question of baking blackbirds in a pie. – from the nursery rhyme “Song of Six Pence.” Based on a reference in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night there is evidence that this poem dates back at least to 1602.

“Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocket full of rye.

Four and twenty blackbirds,

Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,

The birds began to sing;

Wasn’t that a dainty dish,

To set before the king?”

But what of baking blackbirds into a pie? It never struck me as a situation where the blackbirds – hyphenated or not – would fare very well. Interestingly, it was a sixteenth century amusement to place live birds in a pie. Indeed, an Italian cookbook from 1549 (translated into English in 1598) contained such a recipe: “to make pies so that birds may be alive in them and flie out when it is cut up. Whether, the hapless birds left any surprises of their own is not recorded by history.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 400 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/1250th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Eastern Kingbird, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA, May 18, 2016. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Apologies to regular readers.  I have been very busy and as a result remiss in posting. I have however been making almost daily trips to the Assabet River Wildlife Refuge for hiking and photographing. I’ve got multiple pictures that I would like to post. So let me begin today with an image that I took this morning of an Eastern Kingbird – Tyrannus tyrannus. I am always so impressed when I look a bird up. Tyrannus tyrannus summers and breeds over much of the United States and Canada. But it winters in the forests of South America where it eats fruit.  Just incredible how such a little bird migrates such amazing distances.

I continue to experiment with my big lens for bird photography. It’s always just short of sharpness compared to my 70 to 200 mm.  But really is the perfect zoom for birds. Today I started experimenting with cutting back on the ISO – to 800. We will see how well that works out.

Canon T2i with Lens EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 235 mm, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/1000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – On the verge of the singularity, IPhone photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Readers of this blog will know that I am a great believer in the singularity. It’s one of those fun concepts to think about and comes with the fundamental paradox that science triumphs over all, but perhaps we should be careful what we wish for. Of course, it is a bit like Alexander Pope’s “Man never is but always to be blessed.” Part of the charm of the singularity is that it is ever near but not quite here. We may consult Ray Kuzweil himself on the matter of when the singularity will actually arrive, or more accurately be achieved. “”I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045.”  Still comfortably distant – right?

I have followed the macabre metamorphosis of manikins with interest. The have become more alien and more machine-like. They have ever been so anthropomorphic – like veiled denizens of a world not quite real. Yesterday I was struck with the dark thought that perhaps they are shells of robots waiting for the day that men become machines and machines become men. The great silver manikin or womanikin of Figure 1 struck me in this way. What is she really?

But there is another point that has been on my mind lately. Technology plummets us forward. All things accelerate. While afraid of it, we are also impatient with the singularity. Shouldn’t it have come already? And part of what we have evolved – or perhaps degenerated – to is an impatience with how long things take.

A common event in my life is to resolve to study some subject. I think it through carefully. What is the best way to acquire, or reacquire, some body of knowledge? Is it to read a book, to read it online, or to watch videos? But no sooner do I decide on my path then I calculate how long it will take? There are x chapters in this book; so if I read a chapter a day it will take x days. Can I accelerate the process of assimilation? I read three times faster online then on carbon. But which modality brings the most delight to the mind? What is the hurry? It took Michelangelo four years to execute the Sistine Chapel. Medieval cathedrals took centuries to complete. Building a cathedral is an act like that of planting a tree. We do not do it for ourselves.

The danger of the singularity does not lie in the dissolving distinction between man and machine, but rather in a failure to recognize that the whole point of these transformations is to exceed and magnify what we can accomplish. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the singularity signals the end of mortality. Again be careful of what you wish for. But if it be so then perhaps we will finally have a response to Andrew Marvell’s marvelous poem “To his Coy Mistress:”

“Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.”

And all of this from a chance encounter and photograph of a futuristic womanikin in a store  window display.

Figure 1 – Common yellow throat warbler, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA, May 12, 2016. (C) DE Wolf 2016.

One of the really fun photographic adventures of a New England spring is chasing the warblers. They are very fast and very small making it difficult to get a “bed” on them. But they are subtly beautiful making success very satisfying. Figure 1 is an image that I took this week at the Assabet River Wildlife Refuge of a male Common yellow throat warbler. True to what the field guides say, these birds love low vegetation, making it very difficult to get a clear shot of them. Here I’ve decided that the intervening grass is illustrative of their habitat, and I love the colors both of the grass and of the warbler.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens,at 250 mm ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/250 th. sec at f/9.0 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Wild turkey, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA. May 10, 2016. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Back when I was in graduate school (Yes this was after the invention of the computer!) wild turkeys – Meleagris gallopavo- were a rarity and elusive creatures. You were lucky to run into one. Today you are lucky if they don’t take over your yard and their private stomping ground. Still they remain wary of people and can be difficult to photograph. the last time that I tried they kept retreating and luring me further and further into the mud. As a result I got no photographs – only very muddy sneakers.

Well yesterday as I emerged from the woods at the Assabet River Wildlife refuge I encountered the fellow of Figure 1 behind the Ranger’s Station. I proceeded to chase after him as he bid a hasty retreat first into the sunshine and second into the forest. And this time my photo-endeavors were successful. Surprisingly when I got home and looked at the images. I found that the flat light of the shaded images were preferable to the harsh contrast of the pictures that I took in the sunshine. Watch these fellows lumber about for a few moments and there can be little doubt of their Jurassic origins. This is what happened to the dinosaurs.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 275 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/400th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – The Kiss. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I have spoken in earlier blogs about photominimalism – which in essence is the concept that less is more. I’d like to pick up on that theme today. Figure 1 is an image that I took this past Saturday of a Tiffany’s store window display. It might as well be a line drawing – white on black. But the kissing figures are in fact made out of white wire. It is only that I have eliminated all other detail from the image, leaving only the white outline. And, of course the theme itself is a simple one. Shades of Rodin’s famous marble sculpture “The Kiss,” only it is much more minimally stated here – first in white wire and then in photographic interpretation. You may argue that a line drawing is a line drawing no matter what its origin, and I will argue in reverse that if the image is made using photographic media, it is by default a photograph.