Figure 1 – Cthulu, Glacken Field, Fresh Pond Reservation, Cambridge, MA.

There is a region of the Fresh Pond Reservation that is referred to as the Glacken Field, where it is almost invariably shady, and you have enter a little forest. You go “into the woods” and you know what that means! My mind invariably begins to wander from its most scientific task of searching out and identifying bird species to one more mythic and primordial. It was here that I found Merlin’s tree and the Lady of the Lake. It is such a magical place with mysterious steps leading up the hill into the woods, as if to “a secret garden.”

In several places the well-worn tree roots breach the path.  These invariably turn my memory to the not so encouraging, yet existential, quote from William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis:”

“Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again;

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix forever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon.

The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.”

But also I begin to look for patterns, for faces. The troll of Figure 1 is such a pareidolia.

The news has been so terrible lately that the world seems destined to desolation and decay that I saw Cthulu in this face. Cthulu derives and evolves from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. The mythos focuses on ancient imagined deities often referred to as  “Great Old Ones.” The most powerful of these is Cthulu himself. These are terrible gods that once ruled the world. But they are now dormant, imprisoned beneath the sea or Earth. They are dormant, but watchful, and will rise again when mankind itself degrades to such a point that the cosmos frees them.

This is what I was thinking about when I took the image of Figure 1. Perhaps it would be best to get back to the birds. We have become so good at ignoring the terrible, of keeping our eyes in the trees and not looking down at an inhumane world.

““Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.”

H.P Lovecraft “The Dunwich* Horror”

* Dunwich is a “mythical” town in Massachusetts

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 75 mm, ISO 1600,Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/500th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation,

Figure 1 – Cedar waxwing, Black’s Nook, Fresh Pond Reservation, Cambridge, MA.

I’ve got to agree with several birding sources that state how delightful an experience it is to come upon a group of Cedar waxwings – Bombycilla cedrorum. And the size of these groups can be imoressive. In my particular case I was walking around Fresh Pond and ended with a stop at Black’s Nook. There they were an intensely active group of birds hovering over the pond lilies and grasses like so many VTOLs or helicopters in search of insects. They were a bit too far off to get a good image with the lens that I had, but I quietly waited until one landed on a tree limb in front of me.

Actually, I did not know what I was looking at, but the Cornell Birdfinder app came quickly to the rescue. They are stunning birds as I hope Figure 1 captures – “a silky, shiny collection of brown, gray, and lemon-yellow, accented with a subdued crest, rakish black mask, and brilliant-red wax droplets on the wing feathers.” The mask is very confusing at first. At a distance you can’t quite figure out where the eyes and the beak are. This is truly the kind of experience which makes bird photography so much fund. And, of course, I am not quite satisfied with the photograph; so back I go to try to get a better one.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/1000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Detail of antique fire engine, Clark County Heritage Center, Springfield, Ohio. (c) DE Wolf 2015

Right now we are living in the great digital, wireless, internet age. And people of my generation have seen it all progress: the age of vacuum tube electronics. of transistors, of analog circuits. Remember broadcast television with its three channels of pabulum. Now we have two hundred channels of pabulum.

But what I wanted to point out here is that all of this was preceded by a mechanical age. And the complexity of machinery is truly marvelous. It was water, then steam, the gasoline. As I discussed a few days ago, last weekend I was in Springfield, Ohio. in 1838 Springfield was the western terminus of the National Road, which was the first major road construction project carried out by the United States federal government, and done, I might add, by manual labor. Springfield’s history is irrevocably tied to the Industrial Revolution.  As more and more people moved from the farms to the cities, it became essential that production of crop per acre and acres per farmer increase, and Springfield played an essential role in this industrialization of agriculture – almost seems a contradiction of terms.

There is a great intricate beauty in these machines. In the composite they show what can be achieved by complex integration of mechanical parts. If instead you focus on the individual components, often hand-machined, you come to marvel at what precision the human hand and mind can achieve when working in synchrony. This is the point of Figure 1, which is a close-up of the working mechanism of an antique fire engine. Photographically there is something so seductive in the specular reflections of polished steel and something almost alive in the interaction of parts. Recognize that the creation of the machine requires much more that the tooling of the part or the assembly of a hundred parts. It bespeaks a deep understanding of the physics of the engine and a knowledge of the science of the materials chosen.  The people who made this fire truck are long departed, but their essence is still there and still speaks to us.

Canon T2i with EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens at 51 mm, ISO 6400, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/160th sec at f/8.0 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Abstract #2 – Earth, sky, and water, Fresh Pond Reservation, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

After my weekend in Ohio, it was good to get back to Cambridge and the Fresh Pond Reservation. I took this image at Black’s Nook. It is an Abstract derived not of man-made items but from natural ones. What struck me was the beauty of the clouds and the powder-blue sky reflected in the water of the pond. If you look closely you will see some delicate reds in the clouds.

The branches provide a minimalist division of the space and my eye struggles to find details like the peeling bark on the branches.
Water and sky are mirrors of one another and at first glance you might ask whether we are looking at branches silhouetted against the sky or against the sky reflected in the water. But if you look very closely you will see the phantom shadows of fish beneath the water and multiple bubbles causing little bright specters of the sun on the surface. So the little mystery is solved.
Can T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 145 mm, ISO 1600 Aperture Priority AE mode 1/1250th sec at f/8.0 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Windmill blades, Springfield, OH. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Last weekend I was in Springfield and Columbus, Ohio.  I took the image of Figure 1 at the at the Clark County Heritage Center in Springfield. As an abstract it begs the question: What is it? The features of the photograph to make it abstract are straight forward: high grain, tight close up, a slightly awkward and puzzling perspective, and a concentration on the shadows. It is an object that was once familiar in the fields of the American Midwest – indeed one which still can be found.

I like to take abstracts. The reason is that they evoke an innate sense of the geometric – something coded deeply in our psyche. Perhaps this appeals to a sense of the spiritual and the objects seem to become almost animated. In a way abstract art is contradictory.  It contradicts the fundamental definition of the word “abstract” as something existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.

It might seem to be a work by Picasso or the like.  But it is in fact a pair of windmill blades mounted on a wall.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 6400, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/30 th sec at f/6.3 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – IPhone photograph, “The espresso cup,” (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Bill Clinton used to end his jogs at MacDonald’s. It was a nightmare for the Secret Service and the basis of one of the best SNL skits of all time.  I’m not that bad. On weekends I tend to trade my long walks around Fresh Pond for a short walk around the mall that ends with espresso at the Nordstrom’s Ebar.  And boy is it good.

Espresso, by definition,  is, of course,  coffee brewed by forcing a small amount of nearly boiling water under pressure through finely ground coffee beans. Espresso is generally thicker than coffee brewed by other methods and has a higher concentration of suspended and dissolved solids. Yum! The notable part, other than its incredible rich taste and ability to blast you into a caffeine frenzy is the foamy “crema“on top.  These also result in the characteristic residue on the classic porcelain espresso cup, which I have made the subject of Figure 1. In a fantasy world we might imagine reading the future in the espresso lees as is done with tea leaves. Curious how pattern and message is associated with randomness.  In the real world all that we can do is enjoy the flavor and the intense contemplation that it affords us.

The history of espresso is capsulized in the Wikipedia article about it.  The precurser to espresso appears to lie in Angelo Moriondo’s 1884 Italian patent for a steam-driven “instantaneous” coffee beverage making device.  This however was designed to produce coffee in bulk not on an individual-by-individual basis.  In 1901, Milanese Luigi Bezzera came up with a number of improvements to the espresso machine. A patent was granted in 1902 entitled “Innovations in the machinery to prepare and immediately serve coffee beverage.”

As I said, espresso is classically served in a little porcelain cup with saucer and miniature spoon. In the photograph I have tried to capture the patterns of the residue on such a cup. And I’ll give a little derivative nod, since I certainly had it in mind when I took this IPhone image, to André Kertész‘s “The Fork, 1928.”