Figure 1 is a photograph that I took of Messier 81, Bode’s Nebula two nights ago using iTelescope T24, a 0.61-m f/6.5 reflector, in Auberry, California. It is another example of encounters with robotic eyes. Bodes’s Nebula is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Messier 81 was first discovered by Johann Elert Bode on 31 December 1774; Bode being famous for Titus-Bode’s Law of planetary distances.

At first, I was a bit put off by the lack of sharpness in this image. Artistically it look like a little fuzzy pancake. But then I realized that I had looked at M81 myself with my own telescope the previous night, and that is exactly what it looks like. The appeal lies in the subtle color, in the incredible dynamic range between the galactic core and the outer band; it floats; it is gorgeously ethereal. M81’s core contains a black hole with the mass of 70 million Suns and 15 times the mass of the black hole at the center of our own Milk Way galaxy. Breath taking!

But moving from the sublime to the more mundane, what I really want to talk about today is my Roomba by iRobot. It cleans my house by command either using an app on my cellphone or using Alexa by voice command. My house has never been so clean! Every day I send it to a different room. It is constantly updating its map of my house. Yes, true learning! So, I think a true robotic encounter.

You are encouraged to name your Roomba. Mine is Rumpole. And everyday as I watch him systematically lumber to his task. I think of Leo McKern, who played this character on television.

But really, I tend to be reminded of the nineteen-sixties futuristic TV series “The Jetsons“ and in particular Rosie the Robot, the Jetson family’s XB-500 series robotic maid. Rosie came complete with a little frilly French maids outfit. Like Rumpole, she was forever cleaning.

Futuristic fiction always bears the flavor of modern times. The Jetsons takes place in a temporarily displaced 1960’s. It carries forward all the prejudices and quirks of the 60’s. Worse, of course, is Star Trek. Did we truly hope that the future would be just as sexist as the then present? Rosie is a human-like machine that pushes a vacuum around. Makes no sense from an engineering perspective. Rumpole takes a deep dive under the couch, in the search of alien dust bunnies. Indeed, on his first mission in my bedroom, he had an encounter with a paper towel under my bed. Rumpole growled a bit and spit it out. The paper towel did not fare as well.

To people of my generation, the concept of robots began first with Robby the Robot Toy of the 1950’s and more so with the stories of Isaac Asimov, and of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, science fiction at its height. We dreamed of a world of robots and androids and pondered weighty issues such as whether they would be programmed with a prime directive “to bring no harm to humans” and whether we would be so kind in return.

Well, fiction becomes truth! For decades robots built our automobiles, farmed our farms, baked and packaged cookies for us. But they were huge ungainly contraptions, and there was no sense that theycould be interacted with directly. Well, wake up Rip van Winkle! I find that I have come to consciousness in 2023 and encounter robots everywhere. They have crept up on us, and they now surround us, not necessarily in a threatening way but as our helpers. And, indeed, the word “consciousness” rings true. We have come to grapple with the question of their sentience and awareness, even if we like to tuck it away somewhere safe.

When I was a teenager I was very “into” amateur astronomy. Back then if you wanted to see something with your telescope, a star, planet, or galaxy say, you pulled out your Norton’s Star Atlas and carefully “star hopped” from some bright star following the map field by field until if you were lucky found the desired object. Recently, telescopes have evolved with various complex auto-alignment systems. Well, I will have to admit that with age crawling around in various awkward positions to look under and over my telescope to get it aligned, more often than not defeated me. It was all very frustrating! Recently I added the Celestron StarSense Autoalignment System to my telescope. It is a little robot that you tell to align my scope and it does. Then you tell it what you want to look at and it goes there and tracks the object. Purists may argue that this is very algorithmic and not true artificial intelligence. But it is truly marvelous, arguably the best thing ever, and it is robotics at its very best, since it takes a difficult task for humans adn makes it easy and trivial. That in the end is what robotics is all about. Farming the Earth and building automobiles is one thing, aligning my telescope quite another! I call my telescope Celeste. My telescope now is smart enough to have a name if not a soul.

Still there is the problem that I would like to have Celeste high on a mountain top and I would like her to have a larger aperture so that I could take marvelous astrophotographs. Enter the age of robotic eyes, telescopes that you can control remotely, all located in distant sites perfect for astrophotography – places like Nerpio, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. I took Figure 1 of Messier 51, the Great Whirlpool Nebula using a 12 inch robotic telescope (T18) on the iTelescope network. I have also used robotic telescopes on the Skygems Remote Observatories network. The proposition is a simple one. You control the telescope, either in real time or on a schedule, and the telescope takes the image. Then you download and image process it on your home computer. These encounters with robotic eyes are truly wonderful and enriching.

Purists will argue that this is not the same as taking the image yourself on your own telescope. I feel about this the same way that I feel about the argument that film-based analogue photograph is purer and better than digital photography. In fact, our cameras have become robots and through the combination of automatic analysis of the scene and high dynamic range digital imaging sensors have freed us of cumbersome analysis of the image, freed us to be artists. So often I hear “show me the camera’s raw image,” as if that were somehow truer and purer. I personally always shoot in raw, but I process, true to the point made by Ansel Adams that “You do’nt take a photograph. You make it.”

So three robots enriching my life anyway: the Celestron StarSense Autoalign, robotic telescopes, and my digital camera. I am truly Rip van Winkle, awakening in a Brave New World. To paraphrase Miranda in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,”

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous [machinekind] is! O brave new world
That has such [robots] in’t!

Another point that I learned from Ansel Adams is that a photograph of a single tree, especially in context, could be as beautiful and dramatic as a wide vista of mountains. It is a form of intimate landscape. Figure 1 is my attempt at such an image. And this time – no toning! Sometimes just black and white tells the whole story. Here the story is meant to be the a combination of the texture and the shape. You can see the failing of the small camera format in the not quite there sharpness. But I loved the scene and I loved the subject. Loving a tree? Somewhere in all of this is the recurrent meme of the sixties and seventies, Tolkein’s legend of the Ents.

And this points to another technological marvel. The photograph was not taken with my Canon T2i but with my iPhone.

I was standing near sunset this past Saturday at Halibut Point State Park in Gloucester, MA photographing the pounding surf against the beach, and the scene struck me as a kind of “mission accomplished moment.” When I was in high school and college we seemed to worship at Ansel Adams’ feet, wishing that we too could take glorious photographs using the his “zone system.” We didn’t take many family and friends photographs back then. Our goal was chocolatey black and whites, with a nice topping of toxic selenium tone. Today I regret the lack of family and friends images from back then, despite having drawerfuls of photographs, which my wife took with automatic camera taken photographs often of my family growing-up. These out-of-focus muddy colored images were usually ordered in triplicate. But the mediocritization of popular photography was a a separate issue back then. For me the goal was always laser-sharp negatives with my glorious Leica M3 followed by a trip into my chilly and somewhat damp basement darkroom to attempt, but ever to fail, to achieve the master’s talent. I even bought a book on The Zone System for 35 mm Photographers.

There were a lot of technical issues back then – and of course the issue of vision and talent. The beauty of today is that the combination of technology and AI have enabled us to achieve it, at least technically. I emphasize the importance of 14 to 16 bit dynamic range that enables us to tweak the near perfect exposure achieved with modern AI algorithms. I set aside here the question whether true AI can be algorithmic. They are antonymic terms. But, as Ansel taught us, the goal in a photograph is the 7 to 8 bits per color plane of the final photographic print. We can pluck the needed dynamic range out of the dizzying 14 to 16 bits modern cameras afford us. We have total control over the dynamic range, transfer function curves, and toning (in black and white) of the final image.

Despite the self-serving arguments that we make about needed resolution, we are still limited in sharpness. Go stand in front of a giant Ansel Adams print and you’ll see what I mean. Going to an exhibition of Ansel Adams is still a transitional moment! And it changes every time that you do it. Sometimes you are amazed by the tonal range. Sometimes you are amazed by the sharpness. But, and here’s the point, always you are amazed by his talent and vision.

In a sense, it is Mission Accomplished. In another sense we still have so much to learn.

Canon T2i with EF 100-400mm , F/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 100 mm, ISO 1600, 1/4000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

“Things are not always as they seem.” This has always been one of my favorite quotes from Hamlet. “Seems, madame? Nay it is. I know not seems.” It is a scream for rationalism in an irrational world, gone awry, turned topsy turvy, insane, existential.

First of all, I have been on vacation in Key Biscayne and Miami, Florida. Over the next several days I will bring many of the photographs that I took there: birds, reptiles, orchids, and luscious tropical greenery.

I’d like to begin with the image of Figure 1, which shows the rain forest at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden – now one of my favorite places on Earth, or so it seems. Look at it, so green and wonderful with the four requisite strata of tropical rain forests: emergent, canopy, understory, and forest floor.  Is something missing? Yes. There are no birds, no monkeys, and the photograph tells it all. As my traveling companion pointed out there is no sound. The forest is mute. Yet it has a story to tell.

It is kind of like Disney World an artificial man-made rain forest, only the plants are real. Even the mist is human created. Things are not always as they seem. Yet the day may come when only such man-made rain forests will exist. Indeed, even this one, so lovingly and laboriously created may eventually wither in the next century as climate in Florida changes from gloriously warm to withering hot.

Right now, you literally want to caress the plants and solemnly kiss the orchids, they are all so very wonderful. As I present this series of photographs to you, it is worth noting that many of the animals and plants photographed are transplanted invasive species.

“I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.””

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Figure 1 -Sunset through the trees, stylized iPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Technology in photography, as it does in many fields, represents freedom. The calotype and then the wet collodion plate freed the photographer from the unique one only aspect of the daguerreotype. The dry plate freed the photographer from the wet plate’s requirement of using the newly created plate before it dried. Film was liberating from glass plates. And now we have digital photography.

A few weeks ago, a friend told me that I take pictures like a film photographer, meaning that I am a photographic hoarder, only shooting when conditions are just right. In film photography, you recognize that time and film are precious. You only take the best compositions because unless you’re a darkroom fanatic, you’re only going to work up the best images, and for me anyway a single image’s darkroom processing could literally take hours. In film photography, you save excess for exposure bracketing – the hope and prayer that you might get the image that you want.

Digital photography frees you from this. You get the instant gratification of knowing what works and also you are free, knowingly or unknowingly, to use Ansel Adams’ Zone System on each and every image. Now it may be cloudy, moments later sunny, now you may want to photograph in color, on the next image it might be black and white. Not only that, but modern cameras, including those incorporated in our cellphones, are essentially little thinking machines. You are freed to create.

Lumbering along like a film photography Luddite is not the most productive approach. The more photographs you take, the better you become at taking photographs – the more you are ready for Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment.” Whenever, I go out, I set my camera ISO 1600, f/7.1, center spot focusing. I am ever ready for wildlife and still I can miss it.

But there is more to “the chains we forged, link by link” throughout our photographic lives. We have a concept of what a photograph must be! I’m forever thinking sharpness and tonal range. Ansel is ever in my head. And if it’s color, I want brilliant color, carefully saturated.

Here is where you enslave yourself. My friend has taught me to shoot photographs with abandon. In this regard my iPhone 10XSmax is a chain cutter – a true liberator. It frees me to see and to take photographic chances. Photography is seeing first, and second it is learning how to translate seeing to photograph.

This raises a whole other point. What is the final medium? Is it paper? Is it cloth? Is it aluminum? Or is it that vague but brilliant substance-less finality of the computer monitor? Here now to be gone a moment later.

My friend has taught me something else. She has freed me from my obsession with sharpness and tonal range. I have learned that a well-constructed photograph need not be the end-product. It can instead be the beginning for experimentation with stylization programs, that use artificial intelligence to transform a photograph of this world to a painterly other world. In this vein, I wanted to share two Images so transformed. I took Figure 1 of the setting sun filtered through the forest and wasn’t quite happy with what standard photographic manipulation offered. So I transformed into a “painting” using PRISMA, and found myself quite satisfied with the result. Similarly, I photographed an ornamental pot of mosses, actually artificial mosses (Figure 2). I liked some aspects of the image, but really it elicited a big “eh” from me until I again processed it in PRISMA and turned it into a painting, which, as a science fiction fan, seems happily otherworldly.

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Figure 2 – Ornamental mosses, stylized iPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Figure 1 – Axis Mundi 2, a thin, translucent slice of agate, Natick, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

In yesterday’s blog, I spoke of the axis mundi, which is the center of the world, or of the universe, and I’d like to offer another glimpse of that center today. It is shown in Figure 1. What you see is a picture of a giant translucent slice of agate in a window at Tiffany’s. I mention this because when I entered the store to photograph it, I was immediately surrounded by concerned clerks. “One Adam Twelve, One Adam Twelve! Crazy photographer on the loose!” I’ll leave to my generation to recognize that.

But I do want to point out the ambiguously bright center of the agate, which like a black hole contains infinite light, as well as how the shades of dark and light in the bands resemble the zeros and ones of binary data storage, because like the Tree Of Knowledge, an example of the world tree that is the axis mundi, is meant to contain all the knowledge in the universe.

Last night I was speaking to a friend about the meaning of the axis mundi and the world tree. As this photograph clearly illustrates, this central axis is everywhere – found here at the mall, but at the same time it is the life-long quest of the Hero with a Thousand Faces. That dichotomy seems a contradiction. 

Where is the center of the universe? Logically, the center is the point from which all things emanate – in an expanding universe. Well, suppose that you are on a balloon that is being inflated and there are other people on the balloon. Each person sees everyone else moving away from him/her. And the same is true of our-four dimensional space-time universe. So by that definition the central point is everywhere.

On a mythic level it may be everywhere, but it may not always be attainable or accessible. That is of course true, for instance, for the hero Percival who is first denied access to the grail only to attain it later*. The moral to the story is that the center is indeed everywhere, in the simplest of things you will catch glimpses of it by  virtue of the simplicity. It is a simple gift that may be found even in a thinly sliced, translucent layer of cryptocrystalline silica.

* In Chrétien’s Perceval, he encounters a crippled king but he fails to recognize the significance of the grail and therefore does not ask the right question, the question that would have healed the king. He is not ready. From then on he vows to find the true grail. And as in all these hero stories he must first become worthy.

Figure 1 – Don’t sit under the Apple Tree with any one else but me.”

Hmm! On Saturdays I take my trash to the town dump. It is meant to be no more than than a mundane event, a task to be freed from. However, whenever I finish dumping the trash I go into the “Book Swap,” where all the books bear my favorite price, $Nothing! But a few weeks back I got more than just a book. There on the shelf was a little book published in 1941 by the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, N.Y. Memories flooded in and I was in a time warp, as if I was a time traveler – transported again to my youth.

My father had owned a copy of this book. My father had taught me photography, and this was the very first book about photography that I had ever read. It contained advice about everything: about cameras for the amateur, about photographing children, about color and black and white films, and it contained a formulary for the dark room.It was not as profound as, for instance, Looten’s book on enlarging. But it was the first.

Greedy for memories of my dad, I immediately and reflexively opened to the book’s frontispiece – a color image of a young woman sitting beneath an apple tree, a bushel of apples by her side, and with a partially eaten apple in her hand (Figure 1). She is, oh, so beautiful and, oh, so forties. I fell in love with her again!. And truly, the image evokes the words and sentiment of that war generation song by the Andrews Sisters:

“Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me
Till I come marching home.”

So many did not come home! Many of the images in this book recall this longing for home – so defining both the war years and the quest for normalcy that followed the nightmares. At this juncture three quarters of a century later, it connects us with that generation – the generation of my parents. I find myself regretting the loss of my father’s copy, at some point casually and indifferently given away as obsolete – failing to comprehend its deeper meaning.

Ultimately, it was Billie Holiday who said it best:

“I’ll Be Seeing You”

I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day and through

In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children’s carousel
The chestnut trees, the wishing well

I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you

I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you