Figure 1 – Granite debris field, Singing Beach, Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

Figure 1 is another photograph that I took of the granites at Singing Beach at Manchester-by-the-Sea on this past Saturday. I am not enough of a geologist to say whether these are part of an ancient debris field, a glacial moraine, or man placed. Perhaps a reader can inform me. But I love the scene.

While my usual inclination is to do this kind of image in black and white, here I just loved the colors so much: the greens, the subtle blues, and the burnt oranges, that I just had to do the image in color. Just a little saturation and color balance correction and voila. It is a rock garden laid out randomly to convey a sense of order in the universe.That is one of the great and splendid songs of nature.

Canon T2i with EF 70-200 f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/250 th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – The View up Palfrey Ct. Salem, MA.” (c) DE Wolf 2020.

I was wandering down Salem’s Historic seaport district the other day and found the quaint view up “Palfrey Court” of Figure 1. A lot of time it is worth pausing and taking a look up a narrow street, framed by houses now close to the street, and this view did not disappoint. I took the image with my iPhone XS and was actually pleased with the result except for an overly enthusiastic blue tint to the white paint from a cold February light. As I expected, the image yielded wonderfully to a little working in the stylized AI App PRISMA. I am slowly accumulating a set of historic Salem scenes, where PRISMA magically turns them into paintings. 

The operational word here is magically, because when I begin this blog I emphasized the magic of photography from the very moment of its inception with Fox Talbott’s “Pencil of Nature.” You’ve got to think about all the people oohing and thing at the Crystal Exhibition of 1851. Anything that adds to this magic, in the modern era, is simply part of the process. 

And please let me rail on a bit. I am getting mighty frustrated by STRICTLY Black and White user groups. Fine, nobody loves black and white more than I. But is toning allowed? How about duotone or tritone. Some of the best black and white photographs use these, and toning is certainly part of the great master Ansel Adams’ formulary. And then we have the wonderful Facebook Cloud Appreciation users group, no enhancement allowed. Yeah right! “More practiced in the breach than the observance.” And finally, we have iPhone Photo contests that insist that you use a phone-based editing app. Can’t call them programs any more! GET REAL PEOPLE! Sometimes I think that these people are more interested in rules than art.

Figure 1 – Avalonian granites, Singing Beach, Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

Saturday was absolutely the herald day of spring. So we went to Singing Beach in Manchester-by-theSea and there I found the most glorious Avalonian granites depicted in Figure 1. Superlatives do not approach doing it all just. Giant boulders, massive plutonic flows, and threatening fissures. 

Avalonia speaks of a long lost time in the Paleozoic when a great volcanic arc formed off the coast of the continent of Gondwana. It rifted off to form the Avalonian microcontinent. Today the crustal fragments of Avalonia form the base of south-west Great Britain, southern Ireland, and the east coast of the United States. It takes its name from the the Avalon peninsula in Newfoundland. 

But really there is something more. It speaks of a long lost time and place in collective consciousness. The word Avalon speaks of a mythic place, sacred to the Arthurian legends of English speaking peoples. It is a place of great magic, a place to be sought, but only attained if you are worthy and ready.

“Avalon will always be there for all men to find if they can seek the way thither, throughout all the ages past the ages. If they cannot find the way to Avalon, it is a sign, perhaps, that they are not ready.” – Kevin”

― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

Figure 1 – Gravity defying hat. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

It has been a while, almost a year infact, since I last did a “reassuring moments in physics post.” It may in fact be the case that Figure 1 ain’t so reassuring. It is not a great photograph! But I was truly struck by the question, how is it that my hat is defying gravity and standing on its end at the precipice of the bed. And of course, it is not defying gravity but merely creating the illusion of that. Gravity physically and figurative literally binds us to the Earth. We may be quite reassured of that! The magic of being able to fly, so prominent a theme in Peter Pan, still eludes us, unless we go into space and in doing so use up a whole lot of energy to do so.

“That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.“

Charlie Chaplin

Figure 1 – Walker Hancock Figure from the Triton Fountain, Gloucester, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

I love photographing sculpture! The kind of sculpture of Figure 1 lends itself to warm subtle sepia tone and you can play for hours gently coaxing specific area to perfect highlight. . So I was delighted to find this one-third-scale version of one of the triton figures figures by Walker Hancock (1901-1998) from the now destroyed Triton Fountain at the 1939 New York World’s Fair at Elizabeth Gordon Smith Park, along the waterfront at Gloucester, Massachusetts. The original was plaster of Paris and I am wondering with this one is really bronze. This was taken on a gloomy day; so the light was very even and filling. I liked this because the whole figure was well defined and I could work out the highlights carefully. And then there was the final reward of duo toning a rich chocolate color.

I will, of course, not hesitate to mention the way art gives us permission to welcome the mythic Greek and Roman figures back into our imagine reality. It is as if they never left us and we are immediately swept up into their pageantry of inner meaning.

Figure 1 – Rotten apples, Salem, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

Apologies to my readers for falling silent for a bit. I have been taking lots of photographs, but work has kept me too busy to work them up and post. I was walking the other day on the Salem waterfront and found these rotten apples in front of one of Salem’s witch shops by Pickering Wharf. They had clearly been left out intentionally and neatly arranged. The effects of freeze and thaw and oxidation are obvious and I think quite beautiful This, I suppose, raises the point that there can be beauty in decay, perhaps because it is part of the natural cycle of rebirth and restoration.

I have not been completely happy with toning in Adobe Photoshop; so I decided to experiment here with my old standby, duotone. Duotone is, perhaps a relic. The idea is that you fill your printer’s ink canisters with two or three different inks, In this case it would be one black and one sepia. You then independently adjust the lookup table for each. It is the secret of all those wonderfully rich black and white images in high quality reproduction. Kudos here to the best of the best “Lenswork” Magazine, which I recommend to all black and white enthusiasts.  And while I’m on the subject, a big thank you to Facebook for making it ever more difficult to post my blog!

Figure 1 – crepuscular rays, Derby Wharf, Salem MA. January 7, 2020. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

I recently joined the “Cloud Appreciation” users’ group on Facebook – that vast wasteland!  It is interesting because you immediately recognize that people are emphasizing a bit and often tending towards photographic hyperbole. I am no exception. You could argue, as I do, that it is art and more significantly that the goal of art photography is to represent what you see with “your mind’s eye.”

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet it may be recalled that Horatio is alarmed when Hamlet says that he sees his father. ”Where, my lord?” Hamlet replies: “In my mind’s eye, Horatio.” (1.2. 180-185).

I have not seen a ghost, an extracorporeal being. But I have seen crepuscular rays. These are the rays of light emanating from the sun, or so they appear, through a break in the clouds. They are in fact parallel lines meeting in infinity! Figure 1 is an example of this and was taken from Derby Wharf this past Tuesday afternoon in a waning light. And they occur during the crepuscular times of day, just after dawn and before dusk. When the rays appear to reach the ground they are referred to as a “Jacob’s Ladder.”

What’s this with Jacob and his ladder, you ask. Jacob’s Ladder (סולם יעקב Sulam Yaakov) refers to the ladder that led to heaven in a dream that the biblical patriarch Jacob had during his flight from his brother Esau in the Book of Genesis.

I am tempted to say, all this from a simple cloud and sun photograph. However, truly there is awe in the presentation of the light!

Figure 1 – By the wharf in winter at low tide, Salem, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

I was going to explore further the processing options for yesterday’s “Walking along the wharf in the rain,” but then I was back at the wharf today in the late afternoon when the light was blue and took the image of Figure 1. This I have entitled “By the wharf in winter at low tide.” The major features today, as I watched the gulls expertly smash clams against the rocks, was the cold blue light and the shallowness of the tide, which created beach all along the wharf on either side and revealed offshore rocks. A friend who complained about the intense aquamarine in yesterday’s image is going to really hate this one. Again it is stylized in a very similar way to yesterday’s. Again it is driven toward the pastel, but here a cold rather than a warm palette.

Figure 1 – Walking along the wharf in the rain, Salem, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

This past Saturday morning I was walking along Salem’s historic Derby Wharf and I came upon this woman, smarter than I, with an umbrella also walking along the wharf. I was struck immediately by the scene, reminiscent perhaps, of a gloomy wet winter day in Holland. The point with Derby Wharf, with Hawthorne’s Custom’s House, with Derby Light, and with the resident Friendship Sloop is that the place is bathed in history and seems, even in the brightest light, to be haunted by ghosts. The filI of the wharf is loaded with shards of broken antique bottles and historic porcelain. I think these were dredged up from the harbor and I imagine someone unloading a ship from “the orient,” losing their balance, dropping and shattering a jug or jar – the momentary curse still echos.

I  realized that there were so many ways to view this photograph. Perhaps keep the colors muted but shifted just a bit to a pastel template. For the interpretation of Figure 1, I resorted to stylizing with the PRISMA, turning the image into something painterly. I stuck to a pastel palette but chose more saturated colors. I think that I will experiment with other approaches and interpretations, but for now I am very fond of this one.