Figure 1 – Sunset on the winter solstice, 2016. (c) AB Wolf 2017.

Happy New Year to all my friends and readers of Hati and Skoll. Thank you all for your continued support and interest!

It has become a tradition here at Hati and Skoll to speak in the New Year about two things: the tabula rasa (the blank slate) and paths. Reminded again, about world events it is hard to think this year about blank slates. There is just way too much excess baggage, just too much moral turpitude on the planet. As for paths, we continue to have them, there are a multitude of options. We can follow Michele Obama and choose the high road, you know, just as our mothers taught us. But …

Anyway, I do not mean to be so glum. I am sharing today a photograph taken on the winter solstice not by me but by my son. It shows the slippery path to light. I am one who hates the darkness of winter and it is important to me that I do not have to wait until the solstice for the light to increase at night. Here in Boston the earliest sunsets occur on December 15. Thereafter, the minutes of light are taken off in the morning. It is a quirk or vagary of celestial mechanics.

So astronomically we are on the ascendance. Let’s make that metaphoric and follow the admonition of Mark Twain to “Dream other dreams, and better,” my friends. It is ultimately in our power.

Happy New Year to you all.

David

Figure 1 – Silver Christmas Balls. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I have gone in search of Christmas and I have brought my Iphone along to record the moment. It is an odd year in America and has been since the election. There is a glum resignation that has proven grinchlike and the malls and houses just don’t seem decorated in the usual optimistic way. I will except from that the hot air figures that people place on their lawns: the santas, the snowmen, the nativity scenes. I mean a blow-up baby Jesus is just the thing to ring in the season.

But I decided to wear a positive attitude and see where Christmas lay hidden this year. I smirked as I passed a store with a tee-shirt saying “I’m grumpy today and only speaking to my pets.” That was just as i felt and I thought of my cat who had greeted me this morning with a meow, a kiss on the nose, and a request for an ear rub. There was a little boy with his father, both all dressed up. They were headed to have breakfast with Santa. Many years ago my father and I encountered Santa at the Automat. All of this points to the obvious fact that “Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus,” I have seen him at the mall.

“and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us!  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!“

Yeah, Yeah! Hmm, I am not there yet! But I did find and delight in the little silver balls on a silver Christmas tree of Figure 1. I like the IPhone for its ability to get in really close, and it is an important point that you have to get in close in photography and in life to avoid the distraction of unrelated background. As with all things, I went to see if Christmas can be found, or at least, is explained somewhere on the internet. There I found this from humorist Dave Barry, which seems very much to leave Dickens to the side and gets very much to the point,

“In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!”

Figure 1 -Hand silhouette, IPhone photograph, (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I took the image of Figure 1 a few weeks back. It is an image in a store window that is trans-illuminated – essentially a shadowbox. The hand is meant to be a backdrop to a collection of clothing and hand bags. I have chosen it to be the subject of the photograph. I like the elegance of the pose and the purity of the black and white. It is quite literally a “black and white photograph.” It is striking that a hand alone can portray a dramatic sense of animation and beauty. The absence of color and, well, the rest of the body creates a hint of mystery about it. We wonder what exactly is the meaning of the pose. And at another level, we look down at our own hands to figure out exactly how the thumb had to be placed to be absent from the shadow. You will notice also that there is a certain ambiguity of the edges. You know that they are sharp, but somehow they seem not quite right, as if they are fuzzed out. This I suspect is a combination of optical illusion and digital aliasing. It seems like the hand of a ballerina or more precisely of classical Indian dance, of which I learn that there are eight traditional forms. The eyes are meant to be the “window to the soul,” but here the expressing hand takes over.

Figures 1 – Spuds. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 is of spuds, fingerling potatoes to be more precise. It is, needless-to-say taken with my IPhone during a boring moment buying vegetables at the local farm-stand. What is appealing about potatoes photographically is their surface textures: cracks, bumps, crevices, and eyes. Eyes indeed, because that is the other point. They seem to take on magical shapes. The large one in front I imagine to be a fish or better still a manatee. The double tusker at top is certainly a walrus. And the curly one in the middle is perhaps a ghost. And, of course, the most appealing point of all is that we get to see the magical in the most mundane.

Figure 1 – IPhone portrait of Steve. (c) DE Wolf 2016

Figure 1 is of Steve, a bull mastiff who visited our offices this morning. Despite my aversion to cute and cuddly animal pictures, his face was so wise, knowing, and wrinkled that it seemed to demand me to photograph him. The IPhone did an amazing job of capturing the texture on his nose and the hairs on his face. He was very interested in my pants legs which carried the smell of my cat, and I think that I offended his sense of politeness, the sacred canine-human pact forged so many millennia ago, when I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cellphone instead of a treat.

Figure 1 – Music of the spheres, IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I wanted to share another IPhone photograph. This is simply a pair of folded paper spheres. In actuality they are white Christmas ornaments. I think that I am getting better at framing with the IPhone, an acquired skill, and I cannot complain enough about all the images that people post on Facebook with tilted poorly composed perspectives. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not really that difficult. I also think that some image processing is critical, particularly to be able to crop, set levels, and apply a curved look-up-table to the image. Of course, I also like converting first to black and white and then sepia toning. And this takes me back to the opportunity of this image – one of my favorite themes to explore – the pure tone-on-tone, white-on-white. The IPhone offers the advantage of being always with you. It is also more innocuous. While I don’t see any posted restriction, places like the local shopping mall may frown on DSLR photograph.

Figure 1 – The pond in a November light, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Years ago, I would drive every morning past this little pond or lake. Of course, I was caught up in the rush hour desire to get to work. Still every morning the combination of sky and water struck me, and I imagined stopping at exactly the same spot every day and taking a photograph. I was certain that no two would be the same, and that many would be dramatic and striking.

Yesterday, I went back to the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge for the first time in about a month. It was, as I have said, dreary and dull. But it seems always the case that there is something interesting and dramatic to be seen on the pond. Figure 1 is the aspect from yesterday. Reeds coming out of a moody, surface, reflecting clouds and sky. I had imagined the scene in black and white. But as is often the case, I wanted capture the muted colors, the angry blue reflections and the ever so subtle redness of the reeds. I studied my results, afraid at first that I had over dramatized the scene, but in the end I found it true to the vision of the moment.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 109 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/3200th sec at f/7. with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – An apparition of summer, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I’d like to follow-up on yesterday’s blog with an image that I took yesterday along a similar vein. I am calling it an “An Apparition of Summer.” This is Figure 1, and I did it in black and white, because what struck me here was the dark trees of the pine barren and a few remaining deciduous leaves on a little sapling that seemed to my mind’s eye to be floating like little planets in a void. And the second point that struck me is that the tree trunk seems to have a face, or at least a mouth frozen in a kind of frown.

This really captures my sense of late November in woods. A dreary darkness prevails, but flashes of light illuminate. The image appears to me to have a three-dimensionality. The little bright leaves seem to float in front of a flat background.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/250 th sec at f/7. with -1 exposure compensation.