Figure 1 – Maple buds, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA. (s) DE Wolf 2018.

Last Thursday, I drove to work in a wet and persistent snow. Winter has hung on, and some are referring to the date as the 96th of January. But I have noted that, in some gardens, the forsythia is beginning to make a bold statement, and on some days the temperature had tickled the sixties.

Today, in fact, was glorious, and I ventured into the marshland in the early afternoon. This is a quiet time with few birds. Still I heard the stomping of a woodpecker, saw mallards and Canadian geese as well as a lone king bird. What was most striking was, as shown in Figure 1, the fact that the swamp maples were taking advantage of the warmth and sunlight and starting to bud. The image of the figure was taken, not ideally, with my biding lens. It did however offer some lovely bokeh.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 200 mm , ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/2500th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Abstract in asphalt. (c) DE Wolf 2018.

Along the theme of yesterday’s post “What is it,” today I’d like to share the IPhone photograph taken during my daily walk yesterday. It shows a section of asphalt which has been “repaired” by a dizzy street worker with tar. That’s worker not walker! The cracks create the random pattern and the street worker has dribbled tar, much like Jackson Pollack would paint. There is also a proper way to repair this kind of thing.Also my colleague rightly asked me, why was I photographing the pavement.

For me the appeal is the tone-on-tone, not white-on-white but black-on-black. One might be tempted to see in this image some poetic irony concerning “the first photograph” taken by Niépce in asphalt in 1826 and  a photograph of asphalt. But really it is meant to be a photograph of asphalt, nothing more than its own abstraction.

There remains the troubling question of yesterday of the “what is it?” mystery. It is the shadow, umbral and penumbral, of a microwave cover, which has holes in it to vent air.

Figure 1 – What is it? (c) DE Wolf 2018

I like to photograph objects and optical effects that seem puzzles and abstractions. So here we have a collection of hexagons and bright spots, of shadows and illuminations, of rings and connecting lines. It reminds me of a video that I once saw, an electron micrograph of single Uranium atoms diffusing about randomly. And you might think that it is something that I took in the laboratory, but is it? And most significantly what is it?

The End of the Storm, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2018.

Here we are with definite signs of spring, and I have not posted this photo that I took two weeks ago of the end of that day’s nor’easter.  I noticed that the trees on the South side of my house were heavily laden with snow. I emphasize South because consistent with the snow coming out of the nor’east that was where it was both the most prevalent and the most protected. Now I will also emphasize that this is what you do not want to see as it can presage falling limbs and broken power lines. But it also offered the kind of tone-on-tone that I love so much photographically. Tone-on-tone always starts off as hazy whiteness and then it morphs. The into what is the big question. If you spread the contrast or equalize the histogram, you wind up with way too much contrast – meaning that the original sense of the image is not preserved. So there is a very subtle need to balance out the histogram and the contrast.

The other problem that I have found is that my usual sepia toning just doesn’t cut it with snow. It makes it just unnatural and muddy. Snow demands blueness. And this is the natural state, because snow, like the sky, preferentially scatters blue light – a phenomenon referred to as Rayleigh Scattering. So I have here taken a purely black and white image, both in reality and as created, and cold-toned or blue toned it. I very rarely do this. To the modern practitioner of digital photography this is merely a variation, a shift of the toning spectrum. But to those born of an earlier era there are remembrances of chemical toning. In those days, the means were chemical and the method was to replace the silver in the image with iron using ferric ferrocyanide, more commonly known as Prussian blue.

The problem with the digital print is that the odors of yore are lost. I sometimes miss the noxious smells of the darkroom, as I do the smell of rosin in the violin shop. Well, maybe not so much. But smell creates an additional dimension to the image.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 200, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/60th sec at f/9.0 with no exposure compensation.

Late winter storm in the woods, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2018.

Today is third nor’easter in two weeks, and this is the biggest. We are expecting something like 18″ of the white fluff. The quality of snow lies in its ability to obscure all blemish and to coat everything in a virgin white, enrobing the bride of the forest. In that regard, it is an obscuring of sight. Less appreciated is the way that, in the absence of wind, it obscures sound. The other night there was the sound of pelting rain. This was followed by the peels of the thunder snow. And then there was silence, utter and complete silence. When I looked out the window, all was white, reborn in pure crystalline form.

The image of Figure 1, I captured by sticking only my head and camera out into the maelstrom. Or as W.C. Fields said in the 1933 movie  “The Fatal Glass of Beer.”

“It ain’t a fit place out for man or beast.”

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 75 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/4000th sec at f/9.0 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Nor’easter March 8, 2018. (c) DE Wolf 2018

Well, it is March and we have had our second nor’easter along the East Coast. My office is closed. The Town has asked me to stay off the road. I went downstairs to get coffee and snapped this photograph of my birdfeeder. March storms tend to come with this dangerous coating of the tree limbs.

Why do we call it a nor’easter, instead of a northeaster? Is it a reversion of some kind to a seafaring past, genes that most of us don’t have? It is a strange point of being a New Englander that this kind of wild weather soaks our brains and we are driven to affect a nautical tongue. “At matie! dars a mightie rough wind outa the nord. Lower ye missan mast! Batten down the hatches. Ay!” 

This weekend will come the time change.

“We loiter in winter while it is already spring.”

Henry David Thoreau

Figure1 – Convection, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf, 2018.

The other day I was microwaving asparagus. It was a modest act, to be sure. But physics dwells within the seemingly mundane. The asparagus was placed in a bit of water and covered with pats of butter. Water! Butter! You may anticipate where all this is going. Because, later when I went to clean the ceramic dish, I found that the water had all evaporated and the  swells of molten butter congealed, freezing in time and space the convective thermal forces at work.

Now the miscibility of oils and water have been well exploited in, for instance, the decorative marbling of old book papers. But convection, that’s a beautiful phenomenon, so often neglected. We see convective cells in our morning coffee, but barely pause before we drink it up. We take convection for granted.  A young women anxious to attract a certain classmate wears a special perfume. If she were dependent on diffusion in air, well.. Let me just say we or she would still be waiting. It is through convection, thermally driven airflows that she works her magic.  The whole perfume industry is based on this simple fact. And most importantly, beneath our feet, deeper than the solid lithosphere, seethes the molten magma, heated (are you ready for this?) by the power of radioactive decay. The lithosphere floats on this molten sea, and convective flows move the continents. This is the famous continental drift of tectonic theory. There are granites on Cape Ann in Massachusetts that can be matched to other stones in Africa.

So I guess that the morale the story is that next time you see the swirls in your coffee cup, you should marvel at what a powerful force convection is.

And yes, of course, I have a quote for you

Figure 1 – Water, air, and ice on the pond, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA, February 24, 2018. (c) DE Wolf 2018.

There seems to be an infinite variety of form for snow and ice. This derives principally from the complex “phase behavior” of water. That is a long story, but basically the point is that if you apply pressure to ice, it does not stay solid, rather it becomes a liquid and if you’re not careful you slip and fall. Dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide, does not do this. It stays solid and you cannot ice-skate on dry ice. The second factor is the one of history. The natural world has a tendency to change and not remain static. Hence, the ice you see and photograph is like a recording of all that it has been, a serial reflecting the vagaries and changes of weather.

In the context I came upon this ice, mixed with air and water, on a shallow part of the pond on Saturday afternoon. In nature structure arises out of chaos and reflects and copies the funadament structure of the building block molecules.

“Ice contains no future , just the past, sealed away. As if they’re alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That’s the essence of ice, the role it plays.”

Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 75 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/400th sec at f/11 with +1/3 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Winter pastels on the pond, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA, February 24, 2018. (c) DE Wolf 2018

It has been an unusually warm February here in the Northeast. We say that knowing full-well that it is no longer a random February thaw, but rather the effect of global warming. And this sends a chill through our hearts.

Just the same, I felt on this fifty-six F degree February day that it was high time to renew myself as Ayesha in the Pillar of Fire. So I heeded John Muir’s words and headed off into woods once more.

There was no snow and barely any ice, just mud. The skies were very overcast; so in essence, I surrendered myself to the glorious gloom and photographically to a very flat light.

Water, air, and Earth, they are the three essential elements of the woods. And in winter the color is there. It is just subdued and beautifully pastel. I found that when I went to photograph the perfect symmetry of denuded branches piercing the pond, the curves of the shrubs perfectly mirrored by their reflections in the water. I was surprised by the color in the frame and looked back at the original to see if it was real. It was. Winter had just tricked me into believing that the world was monochrome. It never is.

As I walked further along, I was saddened to find a crushed turtle. I was depressed to think that this was the work of some sadistic person, who didn’t possess respect for nature. But then I realized that in all likelihood the turtle had when captured by some raptor bird and dropped to the Earth below to crack it open. This seemed, perhaps, a more acceptable scenario. For animals the woods are ultimately unforgiving.

“There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.”
  H. Rider Haggard, She

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 200mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/160th sec, at f/9.0 with -2/3 exposure compensation.