Figure 1 – Landham Brook behind Old Mill Village, Sudbury, MA, the day after Thanksgiving 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

After I posted my black and white image of Landham Brook in Sudbury, Massachusetts yesterday, I worked up the image of Figure 1. This testifies to the conflict between color and black and white. Sometimes, maybe even more often than not, a little color however muted adds to the quality of an image. In this case the question for me was which medium best captured the mood of the day. I think in the end that I will settle on this one.

New England weather is defined by a multiplicity of seasons, which is why those who live here love it so much. We have the glorious color of early fall and that gives way to a desolate and moody late November that anticipates the first snow. There is a special bleakness to a leafless world accentuated by the muted orange browns of fallen leaves. I think that this image speaks to the temperament of the day after Thanksgiving 2015 and I believe that it captures the brook in a light which could easily have been taken on any late November day over the course of a hundred years or more. The name of the brook is barely remebered today. But its face is almost timeless. In a number of places, if you hold your head or camera just right, you can still feel the wilderness of the centuries ago. I spoke yesterday about the history of the place. In New England, old only by New World standards, history is everywhere.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 94 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/125th sec at f/9.0 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Landham Brook, Sudbury, MA, the day after Thanksgiving 2015. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

The day after Thanksgiving this year was unseasonably warm in Massachusetts. There were cloudy skies, but not without blue patches, and temperature were in the low to mid sixties Fahrenheit (~ 21 deg C). I took advantage of the warmth to explore some of the local waterways and took the photograph of Figure 1 along Landham Brook behind Old Mill Village. I have been intrigued by the spot since a few years back when I saw a pair of river otters playing in the snow and ice, just like young school children. There was no snow nor ice today, only water rushing and light dancing in the current.

A short way downstream Landham Brook joins up with the Sudbury River in the Town of Wayland. This region of the state is scrubby wetland, at least today, and strangely the nature of the land has a raw and wild appeal. This is where the local native Americans (the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Podunk, Narragansett, and Nashaway) staged their first major battle, known as King Phillip’s War, to stop the invasion of their lands. From 1675-1678 Metacomet, who had adopted the English name “King Philip” in honor of the previously-friendly relations between his father and Plymouth pilgrims, waged war against the colonists. On April 21, 1676 ironically 99 years almost to the day before the Battles of Lexington and Concord and a century before the Declaration of American Independence the Battle of Sudbury took place.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 87 mm, ISO 400, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/50th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Family memories for Thanksgiving. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of the readers of Hati and Skoll!

Thanksgiving is a great family holiday in the United States; egalitarian in that it is non-sectarian. Thanksgiving brings to mind people lost yet remembered. So I wanted to share a photograph that I took with my IPhone this past Monday afternoon. It was late Monday afternoon, in fact, and the light was streaming in almost horizontal and illuminating a nearly ninety year old photograph of my mother-in-law, Ginny, as a young girl. She hated when I called her Virginia and would say that “only my mother calls me Virginia.”

She was a very sweet and wonderful woman, and it has been many Thanksgivings, since she was with us. But in the warm glow of late autumn light streaming in through a little blue window an old colorized black and white portrait is brought back to life. The reflection of the little window is an enigma. The plane is not quite certain. The features are not quite sharp. It is kind of a fuzzy memory and the reflection of the window in the glass serves to remind us that the eyes are the windows to our souls.

Figure 1 – Bubble in my coffee cup, Natick, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

There is a long standing tradition among physicists to search for the cosmos in a coffee cup.  I don’t know if this tradition arises from the quiet contemplation that coffee produces or from generations of boring physics seminars where you have nothing else to do but look for galaxies in a swirl of cream. I had a colleague years ago, who would finish his coffee and then slowly knead the cup inside out until it looked like a sombrero. But even that speaks to the mathematics of topology that so dominate the theory of General Relativity, and it is that which ultimately governs the universe. And, of course, there is the appealing science fiction possibility that our universe is merely a vortex in the coffee cup of some titan race.

Anyway, this past Sunday I departed from my usual espresso and chose instead a more standard cafe’ Americano and as a result I spotted this little bubble on the surface of my brew and marveled at the reflections that it created. These include two images of the IPhone that I used to capture it. The double image almost certainly results from reflections off two surfaces – the convex top and concave bottom of the bubble.

Bodyless beauties, Natick, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Manikins or mannequins are our alter egos. They stand mute in our temples of commerce, utter slaves of fashion. Only in a classic and poignant episode of the Twilight Zone do they shed tears or try to love. Still I have been troubled by their dismemberment in recent years. They appear now in various states of dehumanization, faceless, headless, armless, or even as mere torsos like some grotesque lab specimen kept alive to further reproduction in Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive. Perhaps it is all an allegory for the helplessness and despair of our times.

I found the two bodyless beauties of Figure 1 during my Sunday walk at the mall and was struck by their ambiquity. Photographed in this way, you are not quite certain at first whether these are real people. Maybe the lips of the lady on the left are a give-away.  They otherwise seem like two young women caught up in lace and costume jewellery.

Figure 1 – Shadow band, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. IPhone photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2015.

I was sitting with my wife at a favorite coffee spot in the late afternoon yesterday, when I realized that there was this dramatic silhouette of myself cast on the wall. Self portrait from the Outer Limits? The result was the photograph of Figure 1. Late afternoon and late fall light are the keys.

I was very intrigued by the intensity, yet delicate nature, of lines caused by dirt on the window and by the broken pattern of shadows cast by the Venetian blinds. But must of all was the appeal of the enigmatic band – originally green – that breaks the image in two.

Once again the IPhone served as the no-fuss, no-muss camera. After eliminating the color it needed very little Photoshop adjustment – just a bit of dodging here and burning there.