Figure 1 – A classic example of a roll cloud. Photgraph from the US NOAA and in the public domain.

I posted recently about cloud photography, and the night that I wrote the post I saw a clip on the NBC Nightly News showing a so-called “roll cloud” spotted and filmed over Texas.  The Texas roll cloud is, I think, best viewed as a video.  But I have included as Figure 1 a from NOAA.  There is also a really impressive image from the United States National Weather Service showing a roll cloud forming in Sterling, VA, Figure 2.

Roll clouds are really rare.  They are a form of arcus cloud.  These are low forming horizontal clouds.  The other major form of Arcus Cloud is the shelf cloud.   While they appear to be horizontal tornados, they are, in fact, not related to tornadoes at all. They are caused by convective down draft at the leading edge of frontal systems.

So now I want to see and photograph my own.  And I am still waiting to see mammatus clouds as well.

Figure 2 – Roll cloud forming over Sterling, VA. From the US National Weather Service and in the public domain.

Over the last few months in the United States, we have been rather appalled, and most of us embarrassed, by the shoddy performance of our congress in dealing with real issues, and yes, in their failure to do their jobs.  I had the opportunity over these months to take three trips.  The first was to Washington, DC – the helpless Capital of us all – the true belly of the beast as it were.  The second, was to New York City – Capital of the Blue Zone – and the third to Houston, Texas –  Capital of the Red Zone.  In both cases, I was struck and really moved in the end by the hardworking immigrants to America, who are trying to build a future for their children here.  You just need to speak with them.  I had a long conversation with a New York City taxi driver, originally from Cuba, who told me about his children, who were going after advanced degrees in college, and about how he was working to build their futures.  I came away from all of this pretty optimistic.  We will be OK in the end, because, as it always has been, the future of the United States lies with its immigrants.

On a typical day at my job, I work with Indians, Iranians, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Chinese and Iranians.  We are the United Nations!  I am, in fact, a little concerned that I might insult some valued colleague by omitting them from this list. This kind of diversity is one of the great benefits of being a scientist.

But there is a very special class of immigrants – the refugees, the people who came here fleeing persecution, indeed often fleeing imminent death.  So imagine this – imagine that you are a refugee and you have just crossed over, just arrived in America.  You stand at the limina, the threshold of passage from an old to a new world.  What do you feel?  Is it terror, relief, elation, ambiguity?  Every one of these refuges has been at that point and felt those feelings.  I remember a friend in college who told me about her family’s escape from Ceausescu’s Romania.  Her father had been imprisoned and tortured.  Their escape was via Italy to the United States.  I have never forgotten her story.  I can still hear her soft quiet voice as I write about her. And there were other friends as well: one who told the harrowing story of her narrow escape from Idi Amin’s Uganda, fearing rape and murder; and another from a friend whose mother carried him on her back across a river to freedom.  These are the refugees and their stories are unique and personal.

So I’d like to draw your attention to Kerri MacDonald’s blog in the New York Times on November 12, 2013 entitled “Checking In to a New Life in America.”  This blog and a new exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center  features photographs from Gabriele Stabile’s book “Refugee Hotel.”  There is also a book “Refugee Hotel, Voice of Witness,” by Juliet Linderman and Stabile.  Mr. Stabile gained access through the International Organization for Migration and documented over several years the “first night” that many refugees to America spent in the United States.

There are many touching stories  here.  One is a 2009 photograph of Somali refugees who spent the night in the hotel hallway for fear they would be left behind on their trip to resettlement.  Then there is the image of Karen refugees being introduced to modern hotel plumbing.  You don’t see their faces, but true to great photography you can read their expressions, feel their wonderment. Another great example is Stabile photograph of a refugee brother and sister asleep and locked in an embrace – holding on to beloved familiarity, to the very bonds of place and sanity for dear life.  I usually only give at most three examples.  But I am totally haunted by the face of a little Bhutanese girl in Los Angeles from 2008 that tells the entire story.  This image says everything.

There is a dark graininess to Stabile’s images that creates a certain grittiness. Like the subjects, your eyes are strained by the darkness, trying to adjust, and looking for brightness. The mood is totally captured.  And I think most clearly the total exhaustion of these people on their first night is vividly portrayed.  It is as if, indeed it has to be, all of their strength has been required to bring themselves to the limina, to the threshold of a new world.

Whenever I fly, I always have my IPhone ready to catch an interesting cloud pattern and I have posted a couple of these here: storm clouds over the Chesapeake and the optical phenomenon called the glory.  On a recent trip into Houston, I was half expecting, somewhere, as we crossed from Massachusetts and the Northeast into the South, to see a sharp line with blue color on one side and red on the other.  It wasn’t that way at all – just everywhere majestic and beautiful.

Clouds and cloud patterns hold a very special appeal.  What if we could soar like birds?  And in another sense they speak of the changing, the ephemeral, and of something beautiful and nebulous  that is only loosely held to the Earth.

The message here is that I am very drawn to dramatic cloud pictures and, of course, the most dramatic of cloud pictures are the storms.  In turn, the most dramatic of storms are the super cells that can become tornadoes. 2013 was a devastating year for such storms in the United States, the most terrible being an EF5 storm in Moore, OK on May 20th.

There are people, who chase these storms for science and people who chase these storms to photograph them.  One of the best storm photographers is Mitch Dobrowner.  He has a recently released a book of storm images with Gretel Ehrlich.   Dobrowner’s images are humbling and awe inspiring.  There is an intense and frightening magnificence to these images – a sense of the omnipotent and the fragility of what we are.  I am really hard-pressed to say which of Dobrowner’s wonderful images are my favorites.  But I will give you two.  First, there is “Rope Out, Regan, ND, 2011.”  The second is one of his beautiful landscapes entitled “Shiprock Storm, Navajo Nation,New Mexico 2008.”

In great black and white photography there are always three things: first the light, second the vision, and third the technical ability to create a print with rich black, dramatic whites, and all the tonal range in between.  Dobrowner is truly a master.  And I have to tell you that when I am trying to recover from an intense work week there is nothing that reestablishes balance and bliss than great black and white photography.

It is often the case that you can find a photographer’s raison d’être on their websites in terms of a quote that they have placed in some prominent place.  Dobrowner quotes enivronmentalist, anarchist, and eco-terrorist Edward Abbey (1927-1989).

“Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.”

This seems a wonderful vision and mantra for all photographers – something to strive for and something that answers the question: is this worth photographing?

We ask why photographers like Dobrowner chase the moments and the light, even to the point of great personal risk.  I believe this answers the question and our vision is so enriched by it.

Here is one for all of you who had to pass the dreaded swim test at summer camp, high school, or college.  On Wednesday, November 6, the two new Sumatran tiger cubs at Washington, DC’s National Zoo were subjected to a swim test of their own before they would be allowed to roam the tiger enclosure.  The cubs, Bandar and Sukacita were not totally pleased with the outing, which will not be a surprise to anyone with a pet cat.  It is totally humiliating!  But it is important that should the little(?) felines find themselves accidentally in the drink, as it were, that they be able to both swim and drag themselves out of the enclosure’s moat.  Hmm, Bandar was kinda unceremoniously tossed in and in can be seen showing his extreme displeasure, in this perfectly caught photograph by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP, as in “do that to me again and I’ll eat your face-off!”

This may shock you, but today I am going to post a cute, cuddly dog picture.  It’s just the mood that I’m in.  I am forever going through the various “Best of the Week” photo series and am forever depressed by all of the terrible events going on around us!  Today I just cannot deal with it anymore. So…

Last week there were severe and devasting storms in Europe.  We have been watching the news footage here in the United States in the context of the pretty recent memory of Hurricane Sandy in New York City and along the New Jersey coast.  So I was drawn to these images and delighted to find this wonderful picture by Jens Buettner / Deutsche Presse-Agentur via AP showing a very shaggy dog running during a heavy storm at the harbor of Timmendorf on the German island of Poel in the Baltic Sea on October 28.

What I like about this photograph is that it tells the whole story without words.  The dog shuts his eyes against the onslaught of the wind, which fiercely blows back his fur.  We wonder if he is in danger of being blown out to sea. Some technical points: love the rule of thirds, love the color similarity of dog and dock, love the out of focus bokeh of the sea. Great stop action.  Then there is a certain ambiguity about how the dog feels.  Is he upset about being windblown?  Would he prefer the warm of hearth and home?  Or does he find it all great fun, in the same way that school children enjoy a day off and fun in the snow the day after a blizzard when the rest of us have to clean up.

For the past four years a blogger known as “The Gentle Author” has been writing about the social history of East London.  For those of you who follow “Call the Midwife,” it is that East London.  In the process The Gentle Author has amassed a hundred years of London photographs with this easterly viewpoint and he has now published them.  Here is a wonderful video with some of these images.

Often, a drawer or box full of old photographs becomes a treasure trove and derives new meaning simply by sorting and cataloging.  It becomes a thematic collection, and history has a way of making the mundane and everyday now prized for the nostalgia it evokes.  People who collect historical photographs, antiques, or antiquarian books are always told to choose a topic and take it on with undaunted focus.  We have time and again seen collections of old pictures evolve into wonderful collections.  When I was growing up my father had a friend who went around NYC photographing things that were typical but on the way out – making that wonderful transition from commonplace to quaint.  Such collections they teach us where we have been, and by learning that we get a glimmer both of essential humanity and where we are going.

We’ve spoken quite a lot, and quite enough, about the Barbie image.  I’m not going to continuing beating that dead horse today.  However, I came across a very interesting little video that shows just how much a little image processing or “Photoshopping” can alter a models looks and appearance.  It’s really quite fascinating so I thought that I would share this time lapse video with you.

A little makeup and a few well-placed hair-extenders seem pretty harmless once you see the model’s occipital orbits widened to give her that oh so lovely Botox “deer in the headlights” look along with a quick little nose job. The digital tummy-tuck and breast enlargement are not unexpected.  But then they stretch first her thighs, then her legs, and finally her neck.  Yikes that must hurt and  OMG  it’s the Stepford Wives gone wild.

Today, at least, I’m not going to make any judgments about right and wrong, and technology gone wild, or even about unrealistic norms.  Today I’m just going to marvel at the technology.  However, I was going to remind you of what Hamlet said about reality, but then  I came upon this quote from Plato’s Phaedrus, and it is so much more to the point.  Plato was never one to trust his senses above his reason.

“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.”

The more I see, the more I like.  There is a contest each year entitled Wildlife Photographer of the year and jointly sponsored by the BBC Worldwide and The Natural History Museum.  This contest has received over 48,000 entries since its inception in 1965.  This years winners have just been announced and it’s one of those “Wow, amazing, %@$#*!!! Moments.

So the question is where to begin with personal favorites, and I’m going to confine myself to three.  I have to start with Paul Souders’ breathtaking photograph of a polar bear hunting just below the surface.  (Once the picture shows up, be sure to click on it to enlarge.)This photograph is winner of the “Animals in their Environment” category.  There is a subdued pastel quality to this image and, of course, that polar bear is certainly intent upon its dinner, which you feel certain could just as easily be you.  Hence there is a sense of fear create.  At the other end of the spectrum is remorse that these beautiful animals are quite likely to be extinct in the wild in another fifty years or so as their habitat melts away..

Next I’ll vote for Connor Stefanison’s photograph of an owl in British Columbia at night.  This is the winner of the “The Eric Hosking Portfolio Award.” This female barred owl had a territory near Stefanison’s home in Burnaby, British Columbia. He began the work by studying the owls flight path and behavior, doing that until he felt ready for the shot.,  He set up his camera near one of the owl’s favorite perches that was triggered and linked remotely three flashes: diffused and on low settings.  He used a dead mouse on a platform above and out of sight of the camera to induce swooping.  I just love the quality of the stop action and the sense of night, despite the vividness of the surrounding forest.

Finally, there is Joe McDonald photograph of two mating jaguars in Brazil. This image is winner of the “Behavior: Mammals” category.  There is a wonderful sense of intensity and raw visceral emotion as well as beautiful coloration caught in the picture .This is not what your online dating services would advertise. 

Be sure to check out all of the photographs.  There is a lot of wonderful work to be seen here.

Figure 1 – Edward Steichen, “Sailors Sleeping on the Deck of the USS Lexington,” 1943, from US NARA and in the public domain,

Today is Saint Crispin’s day and 598 years ago on October 25, 1415 there took place one of the great epic battles of the Middle Ages, the Battle of Agincourt.  This battle is highlighted in Shakespeare’s epic history “Henry V.”  I point this out because one of the great soliloquies of that drama is Henry bemoaning the fact that slaves may sleep while kings pace the night sleeplessly.

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium…

You may ask what is my point.  Well, reader Megan has shared with me a wonderful portfolio of images by Dutch photographer Paul Schneggenburger, which are night long exposures of couples sleeping.  They seem to be more like intricate dances – dances of sleep.   The couple sleeps in Schneggenburger’s studio apartment, obviously black sheets.  The room is lit with candles and the camera hangs over the bed and takes a six hour exposure.  There is something sweet and wonderful here, maybe an ounce of voyeurism, perhaps reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s five hour and twenty minute film entitled “Sleep,” showing his friend John Giorno sleeping.  But in the end, I think what strikes one the most is the sense of joyous peacefulness.  Henry V was right.  There are no kings here.