Figure 1 -First attempt at photo-pictorialism. Heard Farm, Wayland, Massachusetts, December 17, 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Readers of this blog will recognize my interest in pictorialist photography, and I have been wanting to try the process. The other day I watched a YouTube video on how to make a bromoil print. It was an epiphany – amazing how you can read about a process but not truly understand it until you see it done. Still it was going to require a silver gelatin print as a starting point; so there’s the old mess of darkroom chemicals. I want to do some research as to whether you can do a digital print and then bleach out the pigments totally as a starting point.

At that point, I started looking into how you could mimic these analogue techniques digitally – say with Adobe Photoshop – YouTube to the rescue you again. I was not happy with what I was seeing and I realized that this was going to be a personal journey. I was going to have to experiment and find my own workflow.

Figure 2 – Alfred Steiglitz “Spring Showers, 1902.” From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain because of its age.

But first, I was going to need to find a suitable image. So often historically the beginning point is a dreary rainy day. Take Alfred Steiglitz’ “Spring Showers, 1902.” (Figure 2) as a prime example. This morning was appropriately grey, drab, dreary, and wet. I went for a walk with my son at Heard Farm in Wayland, Massachusetts and there I found my subject – rolled hay set against a foggy sky with silhouetted trees.

I decided to stay in color. What was surprising was that my usual workflow, my standard bag of Photoshop “tricks,” just didn’t give me what I wanted. Using “levels” and then “curves” to histogram equalize the photograph and to set the gamma, totally destroyed the effect that I was after. The fog is in the “DC values.” I also found myself vignetting the image, that is darkening the periphery to mimic the edges of an antique lens. Most amazingly, in the end, I found myself adding noise to the picture. The goal was to create a moody impressionist painting out of the photograph. Success or failure of my first experiment in digital pictorialism is shown in Figure 1. More to follow…

Figure 1 – House at Heard Farm, Wayland, MA, December 12, 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Pastels are usually made by diluting vivid colors with creamy white. Yesterday as we were emerging from the trail at Heard Farm in Wayland, Massachusetts, i was struck at the contrast between the tans f the dried grasses and the delicate magenta pink pastel of a house. The result is Figure 1. Notice also the pastel blue of the sky reflected in the window. But note most particularly the old wooden gate. This path through the brambles is clearly not well traveled. As such, it has a charm of mystery about it. Is this the way to some secret garden.

This is what I love about the character of the New England landscape, and I will take pastels over deep vivid hues any day.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 73 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/400 th sec at f/13.0 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Grace, Crumpet, and Keith at Heard’s Farm, December 12, 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

It was a most unwinterly 60 deg. F (15 deg C) in Sudbury this morning and my canine neighbor, Crumpet, was kind enough to invite me on an adventure at the Heard’s Farm Conservation land in Wayland, MA. If you are to understand her sacrifice, you must recognize that I was forever talking to her father (Keith), when he should have been throwing sticks for her, and also we were not quite keeping up the pace. Still my poking around with my camera in the scrub gave her plenty of opportunity to try for an un-noticed swim in the Sudbury River. But her mom (Grace) always managed to thwart her efforts. In the end the three paused long enough for a group picture (Figure 1), and Crumpet obliged me by climbing up on a log in a most undoglike manner. Still she was happy to be with people as she always is. In fact, my sense with dogs has always been the more the merrier!

Heard’s Farm is on Pelham Island and historically was owned by the Nipmucks of the Algonquin tribe. As I have indicated in a previous blog, Sudbury and Wayland featured prominently in King Phillip’s War. Pelham Island was, in fact, part of a separate land grant from the original Sudbury land grant that founded the two towns and was given to Herbert Pelham, who was the first treasurer of Harvard College. Herbert willed the Island to his son Edward in 1672. Today Heard’s Farm is part of gorgeous conservation land in the Sudbury watershed that also includes the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge that abuts it.

It is late fall and this is defined by stark leafless landscapes and reddish orange decaying leaves. We were circumnavigating the field, when I noticed the wispy cirrus clouds of Figure 2 crowning the naked trees along the horizon.  The whole sense of the  pictured: the colors, the textures, and silhouettes define the New England season to me. And the whole point is that whatever season you are in, in Massachusetts, there is always life in the landscape: life in the tree buds, life in the decaying leaves, and life in the wild birds. The phrase “a lifeless landscape” is indeed an oxymoron here.

Thank you, Crumpet, for taking me along!

Figure 2 – Heard’s Farm, Wayland, Massachusetts, December 12, 2015. (c) DE Wolf2015.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/200 th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.