TC and I attempted to escape the perils of winter in the Northeast this year by spending January in Southern California. We should have stayed longer as we are now being hit with winter storm after winter storm. But the trip was a great success photographically. I have been working on the images all through February and now am ready for the great reveal.

I have also concluded that we are Sunday Explorers – a nice walk along the water’s edge, lots of wildlife to photograph, and, of course, a nice lunch! What can I say? We are spoiled.

A totally remarkable place on this trip was La Jolla cove. I think that we went there four or five times. The why is obvious from the image of Figure 1. There you come face-to-face with enormity – the enormity of the Pacific, the enormity the Earth, and the enormity of life on Earth. Here nature meets man often to sad effect, I came upon a Brandt’s Cormorant with what I thought at first was a white feather on its chest. In reality it was one of those plastic six-pack ties – so sad – and nothing to be done.

Still in the picture, I hope you can get a sense of the enormity of the place. Here three cormorants bravely battle the sea to defend their rock. The Pacific defies its name and pounds bird and rock with enormous force. For a moment you can ignore the presence of man and urban outcroppings to see the world as Darwin did on his “Voyage of the Beagle” almost two hundred years ago.

Darwin’s great champion, Sir Thomas H. Huxley said,

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.”

Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 200mm, 1/3200 sec at f/7.1, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE mode.

Halloween again and the colors are splendid! On that foggy day I came across the lichen covered bench of Figure 1 along the path Great Meadows. Always lonely benches on foggy days are reminiscent of lichen covered gravestones in some of our historic cemeteries. Here the nineteenth century is never too far behind us, and these woods intellectually and in spirit belong to Emerson and Thoreau.

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Today’s image I’m calling “Cobweb and Thistle,” and it is just in time for Halloween. It was taken at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge with my iPhone XS on that foggy day of October 24. Dried thistles abound this time of year. Here the flycatching cobweb has been thwarted by the rain. Or perhaps, you know my propensity for thoughts mythical, perhaps it is a glimpse into the revelries in the fairyland the night before (meadows being. prime spot for fairies after all) – a mixture of air, water vapor, and the not so tangible substance of cobwebs. There was chill enough in the air without bring the fairy people into this. As C. S. Lewis pointed out in “A Mighty Girl,”

“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

Yesterday I went for a walk at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Concord, MA. It was very damp and foggy and the ground was covered with wet fall leaves; so I had to tread very carefully. Finally, I came to a clearing along the river and took Figure 1 in an attempt to capture the fog. I have always had trouble photographing fog. Partially, I think this is because that while the idea in some cases is to capture an image of the fog as subject, more often, as here, it is to capture the effect of fog on the landscape.

Fog is not loss of light; it is loss of resolution and dynamic range. It is noise. It is a flattening. Most significantly in working up the photograph the goal is not to defeat the fog but to embrace it. There are Fourier Transform methods enough that can extract the scene from the fog, but that is not the point.

Here it took me quite a while to realize that the image needed brightening, not moody darkening. Curiously, I see in Figure 1 not a full depth of visual range, but four distinct planes as if they were cardboard sheets. The first is the foreground, clear and distinct, the leaves and the berries. Then, second plane, the orange trees on the left. Third are the grey silhouetted trees. And finally is the distant hills and the sky. Interesting! What might in a sharp photograph be a continuum of distance is flattened by the fog to these four distinct planes.

Before winter comes and while autumn is in all its glory, I thought that I should post at least one fall foliage scene. Figure 1 is from one of my favorite places the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. It is always glorious, especially in fall and winter. Here, the colors of the distant trees reflect once more in the pond, caught her in the waning light of late afternoon. I shutter a bit to think of the coming darkness – just a few weeks from the advent of the return to standard time. I thought we weren’t going to do that this year, but I was wrong.

I am always struck as summer transitions into fall how even the non-migratory birds are moved to a frenzy. Every wing is fluttering madly about – every bird stuffing itself with seeds and berries. I used to muse (probably heard it from my father) that the sparrows and starlings were arguing in great avian counsels whether or not to migrate. We hear a chirp or a litany of chirps and wonder “who dat?” More often than not the answer is that the sound is from a northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos – the multi-language mime).

The other morning at the Allyn Cox Reservation I took the photograph of Figure 1 of a mockingbird singing in defiance of a windy early autumn morning.

Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm F/4.5 to 5.6 L IS USM lens at 375 mm, ISO 100 Aperture Priority AE Aperture Priority Mode 1/4000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Early fall is such a wonderful time to explore and poke around. Two weekends ago we went to Newburyport, MA and walked along the Merrimack River. There is an antique barn there and I found the balustrade ornament or sculpture of Figure 1. It is such a marvelous classical and knowing face, and I find the blue color absolutely wonderful.

The seasons are changing rapidly now. Fall and then winter seem to be approaching ever so rapidly. We are now bathed in all the glory of New England autumn. To mark the occasion or more accurately the transition I wanted to share the image of Figure 1 – the last of the lotuses at Great Meadow. Despite the drought it has been a glorious summer comeback for the lotus flowers. In this photograph is just a hint of last summer’s glories. Water clings to the pad in giant droplets, the tones mute towards a quiet magenta, and truly summer’s decay has begun.