Category Archives: Personal Photographic Wanderings

Alien Lovers

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Figure 1 – Alien Lovers. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

There is this gift shop in the local mall that frankly sells schlock. At the outset, I predicted its demise. But it was in their window that I photographed “cube man,” a while back. And this week, days before it closed for good, I took the image of Figure 1, which I entitle Alien Lovers.

It is a time to consider what it means to call someone “alien.” It is to render them faceless and make them “other,” that is to despise them. These two faceless figures are reminiscent of the mannequin army that I have spoken of before. And we know from The Twilight Zone “After Hours” episode that these, in contradiction of their being inanimate and non human, come to life at night when the store closes. By making them faceless, we can be inhumane to them.

But here the affection gestures of the lovers defies their alien name. They reclaim their humanity. Any similarity between this blog and current events is purely intentional.

Summer Days

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Figure 1 – White Hydrangea tone-on-tone, Sudbury, MA, July 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

We have reached the hottest time of year. Invariably, July brings with it a heat wave, and this gets worse and worse each year. It is the same global warming that is stirring up tornadoes in the Midwest and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. But it has been a marvelous year in the  North East for hydrangeas, and the white ones have given me the opportunity to explore once more the lacy, delicate quality of white tone-on-tone.

Figure 1 was taken in my garden today, so far the hottest day of summer. I used my iPhone Xmax my close-up camera of choice. I stopped being lazzy and did the processing, pure black and white (not toned) in Adobe Photoshop.

Macrophotography with the iPhone

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Figure 1 – Blue Dasher Dragonfly, Pachydiplax longipennis, Heard Farm Conservation Area, Wayland, MA (c) DE Wolf 2019.

More and more, my iPhone XS has become my camera of choice for macrophotography. The ease by which you can come really close, remain in focus, and fill the field with your subject can me astounding! This is especially so when you think how small the photo-sensor is. So, I tend now to use by Canon T2i for birds and landscapes and my iPhone for close-ups.

Figure1 is a macrophotograph taken with my iPhone XS of a blue dasher dragonfly, Pachydiplax longipennis. As experiment all post-processing aspects including editing and sharpening were done with Apple Apps. Dragonflies can be really tricky to capture sharply. The problem is that they fly away when approached and on this particular day, the blades of grass were constantly swinging in the breeze. But with patience …

Infinity and the sea

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Figure 1 – Looking out at Marblehead Harbor at Sunset, Marblehead, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Last evening I was up at Marblehead on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. It was a perfect night with an insistent but warm wind. I took the image of Figure 1 of the mounting sunset with my cell phone camera. It seems there is nothing more visually and auditorily relaxing than to watch the ever changing light in the sky and water and listen to the relentless sounds of wave, wind, surf, and gull.

I believe that the sea represents, and has always represented to humans, the sense of the infinite, both spatial and temporal. There is the horizon and the magic of what lies beyond. In Tennyson’s words from his poem “Ulysses:”

“Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
 
There appear to be an infinity of waves, equally infinite in their variety. The waves come relentlessly, beating against the rocks and sand. Like the changing sky and seasons, they fill us with the sense of the eternal. As a result the sea mesmerizes and soothes. It is a balm to the hurt and stressed-out mind.
 
So all of this emotion I project into the image in my mind. The colors remind me of the paintrings of Francesco Guardi (1712-1793). Images that take me back to youthful visits to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. And a sadness grows within me. The sea appears to be infinite, immune to pain and change. But we are, by changing our planet, destroying it and threatening the great ocean currents that maintain the ocean’s very soul. We foolishly invoke Poseidon’s rage.

Woman in blue contemplating the sea

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Figure 1 – Woman in blue contemplating the sea. Gloucester, MA, May 18, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Yesterday was truly spectacular and what better place to enjoy it but Massachusetts’ North Shore. It was a day to contemplate the rejuvenating serenity of the sea. And I found this woman doing just that on a great boulder overlooking the ocean in Gloucester, MA. Its solemnity and majestic blues evoke the sense of the nearby Fisherman’s Memorial Monument.

On freeing yourself in photography

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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.

Great Blue Heron

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Figure 1 – Great blue heron at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, April 21, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

With my recent post of the courting mute swans I mentioned that I have made it back with some regularity to the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. The image of the swans was taken last Sunday and during the same trip I took the image of Figure 1. I had spotted this great blue heron (Ardea herodias) about fifty meters away and I had a bead on him, spot metering his eyes. Then he took off and I started shotting maddly and was rewarded by Figure 1. As pointed out by a reader the red spot on the wings is particularly prominent on this guy. I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that this is mating season, when plumage is most dramatic. I never can look at a great blue heron or a wild turkey for that matter without thinking, “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 330mm , ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/400th sec at f/6.3 with no exposure compensation.

American Gothic

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Figure 1 -Discarded antique belt wheels at the historic Damon Mill in Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

This past week, I made two photographic transitions.

First, I upgraded my failing IPhone 6 to an IPhone  XSMax. The 6 represented a major advance in cell phone camera technology, and the 7 even more so.  With the XSMax comes the best camera until, I suppose the XI. There are three cameras on the iPhone XS Max, two in the back and one in the front for selfies and facial recognition. Significantly for those of us who do a lot of post-processing, the dual rear cameras are at 12 megapixels, which some will recall was the transition point when digital started to be equivalent to film in resolution. The lenses are f/1.8 for the wide-angle camera and f/2.4 for the 2x “telephoto.” Let’s put the word telephoto in quotes, for photography buffs this is more of a “normal” lens. But I hasten to mention the fantastic capabilities of these cameras in terms of close-up and wide-angle ability. For me, there is no reason to carry any other cameras but my phone’s and my DSLR.

Of course, a lot of the value lies in the Artificial Intelligence. the AI, in the algorithms. Yes that again, friends!  This is not your father’s camera, or at least not my father’s. This is “computational photography” and has a new feature called ‘Smart HDR’ where the phone begins capturing images as soon as you open the app not just when you push the shutter. Each image is a stream of images, one being chosen as “best.” But, I hasten to add you can change that later as you use the camera’s post-processing algorithms. By combining images the camera optimizes lighting and in the process avoids overexposure and shutter lag. While the images produced are only 8 bit per color plane, in my experience so far, the histograms are spot on, filling the dynamic range perfectly. Well enough said for now, I am having fun, and getting fabulous shots.

And as an example of image quality, I am including as Figure 1 a sepia toned black and white image of discarded antique belt wheels at the historic Damon Mill in Concord, MA taken with my IPhone XSMax and very minimally modified in Adobe Photoshop. I think the subject matter fitting. In its day, in the mid to late nineteenth century, these waterworks that, electricity free, powered the clothing industry of the Industrial Revolution were the height of technology, just as these new cellphone cameras are today.They are now discarded ornaments, which truly makes one wonder what is next!

Second, at the urging of a wise friend, I have started playing with the app PRISMA. This stylizes your images in various painterly fashions. According to Venture Beat, “PRISMA’s filter algorithms use a combination of convolutional neural networks and artificial intelligence, and it doesn’t simply apply a filter but actually scans the data in order to apply a style to a photo in a way that both works and impresses.” If you’re like me this tells you NOTHING. But the point is that these are not simple filters but AI neural networks applied to image modification. They are a lot of fun to use, and when you have a photo, which lacks a certain umph, you can often “jazz” it up with the PRISMA app. It is important, I believe, that the goal here is to achieve a beautiful and artistically pleasing image. Artistic photography is intrinsically nonlinear. Strict intensity and even spatial relationships are fundamentally lost in the processing.So there is nothing wrong with using modern image processing techniques to enhance the effects.

More importantly both the iPhone camera transition and the PRISMAand related apps transition truly represent a new world for the photograph, one where, along with the photographers brain, the camera itself has a brain that works in tandem with you. Of course, the beginnings of all of this rest historically with the development of autofocus and autoexposure back in the seventies. But really, it is a new world energized by neural networks and artificial intelligence. You may have wondered how I can write a blog about photography and futurism in the smae breath. Now you know!

As an illustration of this, Figure 2 shows The Old Salem District Courthouse in the Federal Street District of Salem, Massachusetts reflected in the window of a condominium. The scene struck me as ever so Gothic. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the original image. However, I was able to accentuate this feeling of medieval  Gothis as well as to brighten up the tonality with the PRISMA Gothic filter.

Figure 2 – American Gothic, reflections of the Salem District Courthouse in a condominium window, modified using the PRISMA Gothic filter, Salem, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

Courting swans

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Figure 1 – Courting swans on the pond at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA, April 21, 2019. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

I am finally making it back, with some regularity, to the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge and wanted to share this photograph of two mute swans (Cygnus olor), necks intertwined, in their courting dance. So beautiful, and such a privilege to see. Definitely there are shades of Anna Pavlova and Saint-Saens Le Cygne! It is, in fact, a privilege to be able to see that old footage as well. The world stops and you are mesmerized by the love dance of these graceful creatures, made all the more poignant by the simple fact that they have danced in this way for millennia. We are truly blessed by the swans and by the wild places.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 275 mm, ISO 1600,  Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/2500th sec at f/6.3 with -1 exposure compensation.