Figure 1- Abandoned World War II Ammunition Bunker, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

March 12, 2016 and I am off into the woods at the Assabet River Wildlife Refugee. This is a spectacular wetland with a very strange history. In 1942 the Federal Government seized the of land, which spans the towns of Maynard, Sudbury, Hudson and Stow, Massachusetts, by eminent domain. Residents were given about ten days to pack up and leave, and claimed that they were given only ten cents on the dollar for their homes. This explains why as you walk the paths you come upon remnants of habitat, a fire hydrant or an old gas line. The purpose of all of this was to create a military for ammunition storage that was convenient to railroad lines that enabled shipping to the Boston Navy Yard.

The ammunition was stored in bunkers called “igloos”that had inside dimensions of 81x26x12 feet with a curved roofs. The sides and roofs were mounded with dirt to provide further protection and to disquiet the igloos from aerial view. The location was chosen so as to be out of the range of bombardment by enemy battle ships in Boston harbor.

Now the forest has grown back out of these bunkers and they offer a very dark and Gothic aspect that shatters the tranquil beauty of the woods.I have captured the great iron door to one of these bunkers in Figure 1. I find the place foreboding and mysterious. You almost expect to see the words “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.” The words that Dante tells us adorn the gates of hell, “Abandon all hope ye that enter here.”

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 73 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/50th sec at f/7.6 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Floor-tile study #2, Natick, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I just wanted to share Figure 1 today, which is my second floor-tile study. It was even more difficult than the one that I posted yesterday, in terms of the narrow contrast of the original; so again a challenging tone-on-tone. I processed it in a very similar fashion and again ended with a fairly deep sepia tone. Here the original was tan and tanner. I do not see anything specific in this tile only the intricate and magic of polished stone and in the image’s interpretive adherence to the “golden rule of thirds.”

Figure 1 – Floor-tile study #1 – the elephant and the unicorn, Natick, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Following on the theme of abstraction, I took the photograph of Figure 1 of the pattern in a floor tile this past Sunday. It is a kind of photographic Rorschach blot, and the pattern that I see is that of a sitting elephant and a rather whimsical unicorn. This may confirm your suspicions about me.

The image was taken with my IPhone 6 and what attracted me was, as ever, the tone on tone nature of the tile. It was brown and browner with very little dynamic range. I took it to black and white, worked it up with all the usual tricks, and then sepia toned it deeply.

A tribute to M.C. Escher, Natick, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I think that most people both know of M. (Maurits) C. ( Cornelis) Escher and delight in his work. His drawings feature mathematical objects and operations and delightfully many of these can be termed “impossible objects,” like staircase that go up only to come back down. It is very much like a Twilight Zone of Mathematics and Escher is highly regarded among scientists and mathematicians . He featured prominently in Douglas Hofstadter‘s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Escher did not consider himself to be a mathematician yet he interacted with many of the contemporary mathematicians of his day, notably including:  George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Harold Coxeter.

A point in all of this is that infinity, symmetry, chaos, and fractals are everywhere. They surround us and will grace the receptive eye. Such is what immediately came to mind Sunday, when I was confronted by this store window decalled with this “infinite” mathematical pattern. It is the kind of pattern that wonderfully seems to blink between being flat and two dimensional alternative with appearing three dimensional.

Photographically, I spent a lot of time trying to hold the IPhone just right so as not to distort the image and to frame it just so. There was also a bit of a problem with window glare. But this I managed to eliminate: first by switching to black and white and second by burning or cloning out all of the glare. In the end I decided that the slightly tilted perspective greatly enhanced the sense of the infinite. Parallel lines are said to meet in infinity.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Figure 1 – Goose tracks in the spring mud. Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

In 1802 a twelve-year old farm boy, named Pliny Moody, was plowing a field in what was known as Moody Corner in South Hadley, Massachusetts, when he discovered a slab of rock which contained the first recorded dinosaur tracks ever discovered. These tracks were subsequently acquired by Dr. Elihu Dwight. They were dubbed “the tracks of Noah’s raven” after the biblical raven that Noah released to find dry land.  Dr. Dwight retained possession of the tracks until around 1839, when they were acquired by  Professor Edward Hitchcock for Amherst College. They can still be found there as number 16/2 in the Amherst College natural history collection.

Now, two centuries later, there are many fine examples of dinosaur tracks or footprints from all over the world. In some regards we may think of them as being akin to photographs – capturing an instant in time and holding that instant for millions of years. Indeed, in a sense, photographs pale by comparison. Dinosaur footprints or tracks are unique among fossils in that they capture a moment of life rather than a moment of death and decay. Always in these tracks is the tell-tale reptilian triple toe. And you probably are familiar with the evolutionary origin of modern birds as dinosaur if not from textbooks then from movies.

All of this came to my mind this afternoon, when I went for a first outdoor spring walk. Boy is it good to be out. Spring in New England has the alias as “Mud Season.” Indeed, all self-respecting New England houses have what is referred to as a “mud-room,” where you take off and put on your mud-caked boots. I was walking along the side of a farm field in Concord, mindful of the mud. It was the same field where I had gotten in trouble trying to photograph wild turkeys last fall- sinking ever so deeply in the grime and slush. In any event, I came upon the scene of Figure 1. These are the tracks of Canadian Geese, Branta canadensis. And you may note the delicate curvature of the between toe webbing. “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

Figure 1 – Alligator bread. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

“She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the NIle,” is one of the famous malapropisms from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s (1751-1816) wonderful play “The Rivals, 1775.” He [on the other hand] is “the very pineapple of politeness.” Dear, Mrs. Malaprop, where is she now when we poor souls need her so very much?

Anyway, whenever I hear the word “alligator,”  “allegory” springs to mind in its steed (neigh stead).

And so that is what I thought about this morning after “Super Tuesday” when I spotted the little French-bred [sic] alligator or allegory of Figure 1 at the local bakery. Clearly it was sculpted lovingly with children in mind. But we are all children at heart. Or as Mrs. Malaprop herself said: Oh! it gives me the hydrostatics to such a degree.”

Figure1 – Tree at dusk on Christmas Eve 2015, Wayland, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

One of the fun aspects of digital photography is that every time you open your memory card you get to revisit photographs that you took earlier in the year. This is especially true on a cold winter’s day when you get to see the pictures that you took during summer vacation. Ah the warm and photographic joys of a leisurely summer’s day! I was doing this the other night and I decided to see whether there was anything that I had failed to “work-up.” That typically means that I am looking for difficult to process images. And I found the raw image of Figure 1 that I had taken at dusk, when it was already pretty dark, on this past, and very warm, Christmas eve.

I had been attracted by the ghostly contrasts at the time, as well as the clinging atmosphere.  While all of these aspects were in the image, it was  pretty flat, dark, and kinda boring. It was going to require a lot of manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. A lot of manipulation smacks of photopictorialism; so I though that I would take that tact with the image. The idea of photopictorialism is to work the image hard; so as to create a sense that it is a painting not a photograph.

Usually this painterly quality requires addition of noise, but I found that that did not work here. I did however, use my second favorite trick that of darkening so as to vignette the edges and create the sense of an antique lens and there was also the slight over saturation of the color. There was fuzziness enough from the slow shutter speed. The final result is the image of Figure 1 – failure or success? I am seeing shades of the story “Sleepy Hollow” in this and expect at any moment to see the Headless Horseman come bolting on his steed out of the woods.

“On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!–but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!”
– Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 78 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/25th sect at f/8.0 with -1 exposure compensation.