It is nearing the start of school once more, and I am reminded that I have let the summer fly by without taking vacation.  Last weekend I went over to our local Barnes and Nobles and picked up the latest edition of View Camera.  For some reason this is always an issue behind; so May-June, which was reassuring in a way.  Perhaps summer has not passed me by – really no such luck.  I should really purchase a subscription.

In this issue there was a lovely portfolio by Craig Alan Huber entitled “The Spirit within – Las Imágenes de las Misiones de Alta California.”  I have been to a few of the California missions over the years, starting with being taken to Mission San Francisco de Asis by my friends Marilyn and Marshall in 1973.   There is an inner sense of peace when you enter these churches.  There is a silence perhaps broken by the eternal sound of a fountain.  The light is subdued so that you can see more clearly.  These churches elevate you to a mythic and spiritual plane in a very subtle fashion – not gaudy and huge like the great cathedrals, but just as spiritually uplifting.  If you truly focus, you can find your center.  And as is the nature with holy places, it is then time to return to the mundane world, hopefully a bit more at peace with the world and a bit more enlightened.

There are twenty-three  Spanish Missions in California.  They were established as religious and military outposts by the Franciscans between 1769 and 1833, under the leadership of Fray Junípero Serra, and run up the California coast.  Many of these are still functioning churches two centuries later.

Huber photographs with a 5″ x 7″ view camera often with a vintage 1860 Darlot Opticien Petzval lens.  You will often hear large format enthusiasts comment about the dreamy image quality that these Petzval lenses create: sharp centers that fade away at the edges just ever so slightly.  Huber prints in platinum palladium and the effect is wonderful.  It truly captures on paper all of the sensations of inner peace and timelessness that you have when you have the honor of standing in one of these places.  And it has been argued that platinum palladium prints will last a thousand years; so perhaps they like the missions themselves are enduring.

I have many favorites among Huber’s images and, as always recommend a quiet hour or so be spent visiting his website.  I will recommend “Saint Francis de Asis Church, Rancho de Taos” as a closing example.  Craig Alan Huber’s goal is to photograph and document all of the California Missions.  Large format is truly a labor of love – love of place, love of vision, and love of image. His website also contains images from other spiritual places around the world.  Inner peace is the sublime theme that unites his work.

I read an essay once about writing fantasy fiction.  The key to it was to define a set of rules and then after that to stay true to those rules.  Pigs may fly as long as they always fly.  The worlds that Swedish photographer Erik Johansson’s creates are marvelous fantasies. When you first see them they look quite normal.  Then as your minds eye zooms out to take the whole image in, your sense of the normal becomes challenged, and you start to realize that something is amiss.  Your bed sheet is not made of snow.  Water does not pour from the frames of seascapes.  You can see a collection of his clever images on the msn site or, and perhaps better still, at Johansson’s own website.

I have several favorites, starting with “Stryktalig,” which means “tough” and shows aman ironing his pants and himself.  It is odd because I find myself more troubled by whether the man is burning himself than I am with his gradual transition from being two to three dimensional.  What are we to make of “Wet Dreams on Open Water,” the woman rowing her bed on a lake with floating pillows and an ominous sky?  This is very dark and threatening.  We have been given entrance to someone’s, presumably the woman’s,  private nightmare. “Common Sense Crossing,“the right side up and downside up street is so so reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s famous lithograph “Relativity.”  It raises the same questions about the meaning and reality of topography.

Finally consider another inside out world, that of “Arms break, vases don’t,” Here some one has dropped a vase on the floor.  the vase remains intact, but the person’s arms have shattered, and you worry not so much about the incongruity but rather about the possibility of his cutting his bare feet on the broken shards.  Just when you thought that you understand the world, Erik Johansson has magically altered reality.  Just when you thought that you know the limits of photographic creativity, Johansson has thought outside the box and shattered those very limits!

I try very hard not to post about cute, cuddly animal pictures.  There’s enough of that on social media.  However, today I could not resist passing on this wonderful picture by photographer David Gray of Reuters show a leopard seal entranced by the sounds of a saxaphone. The photograph was taken on August 19, 2013at the Taronga Zoo in Sidney, Australia.  IT shows Steve Westnedge, the zoo’s elephant keeper  playing his sax for a Casey, the leopard seal.

It was done as part of a study on the animal’s reactions to sounds. A reader recent commented about cross-species interactions, and I agree that this is really one of the wonderful points about life on planet Earth – that we can interact in a meaningful and mutually conscious manner with other species. In this case the seal occasionally responds with his own sounds.

I am reminded of the famous first line of William Congreve’s “The Mourning Bride,” “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.” Before I take heat for accusing this soft, warm-blooded, and cuddly leopard seal of having a savage breast, I’d like those of you who haven’t seen or don’t remember the movie “March of the Penguins,”to consider this image by Ben Cranke of Solent News showing a panicked penguin narrowly escaping the gaping jaws of a hungry leopard seal.  The point is well made in the movie “Jurassic Park.”  Animals are not intrinsically good or evil.  They do what they do because they are programmed by nature to do it.  Still as Gray’s picture so poignantly shows they possess the origins of our souls.

Every year at this time we are greeted (bombarded?) by images of the “running of the bulls.”  One cannot help but feel sorry for the bulls, who seriously would rather be anywhere else.  This fails to mention the point that these primitive mythic games, shades of the Minoan Minotaur and Pablo Picasso, invariably do not work out well for the bovine participants.  Also one cannot help but exclaim something to the effect of “what morons!”

Still, I was struck today by this particularly bizarre photograph by Jesus Diges of EPA/Landov from Aug. 15, 2013, showing the traditional El Pilon bull run at Falces, Spain honoring  of the Virgin of Nieva*. The El Pilon bull run, as can be seen, is held on a very treacherous hill.  Runners have to avoid the bulls on an 800-meter long narrow slope with the mountain on one side and a rather steep cliff on the other.

I pondered a bit, as to what makes this image work against a myriad of other “running of the bulls” pictures.  I think that the first two points that catch your eye are the blood-red shirts and the lone bull, careening down the hill. The red is important because like someone thrilled by an aerialist performing without a net, there is an aspect of perverted voyeurism in all of this!   The broken diagonal of the path creates a dramatic interest.  Indeed, the composition of the photograph is very well done.  The dust tossed up by the bulls and the panicking runners creates a wonderful sense of motion.  The precarious foothold of the observers presents a sense of real danger.  Note in particular the photographer leaning dangerously over the edge to photograph the scene. Also, I find appealing the way the foreground is sharply in focus, while the lone bull and the background fades just slightly to out of focus.  The one aspect that throws the image off is the fellow in the red shirt, who prods the bulls with a rather large stick.  You realize with that, that absent this sadistic, mischievous fellow, the bulls might just stop and graze peacefully on the surrounding grass.  Still, when I first saw this gore-geous image, an immediate caption came to mind. “Uh, oh!”

*Tradition has it that in 1392 the Virgin Mary appeared to a young shepherd, Peter Amador Vázquez, at this spot in Falces.

You probably heard about, or seen, images were the sense of motion is captured by letting the moving object blur out against a stationary background.  I came across a really wonderful example of this today.  It is an image by David Munoz of Reuters that shows a runner stopping to photograph himself while everyone runs past him in exquisite blurs. This picture was taken on August 11 at the “City2surf” footrace in Sidney Australia.  There were 80,000 participants.

A number of associations come to mind: the comic book “The Flash” and a Star Trek episode called “Wink of an Eye,” where there is a parallel universe where everyone moves at incredible speed relative to “normal” life on the Enterprise.

The picture is brilliantly executed.  I love the way the image axis lies along the diagonal.  The pastels are marvelous.  And a really nice element is the way that the photographer has captured the runners’ shoes.  The contrast between the still runner and everyone else adds a perfect sense of contrast.  This is beautifully executed!

Yes, you read that right.  I want to speak today about toilet paper roll dioramas.  A diorama is a small scene created in a small place, like a ship in a bottle.  Small is actually not a requirement of the genre.  When I was a little boy – sorry more tales from the cretaceous – I loved to go the the American Museum of Natural History and when I got home I would use little wooden cheese boxes and plastic animal figures to create my own natural history scenes, or I would invert small plastic strawberry or blueberry containers from our local Pioneer Market to create little zoos.  A more complex contrivance was to take a cereal box, cut a square hole at one end, and an eye hole at the opposite end, and to string a comic strip between two pencils that would stretch across the square hole.  Hold it up to the light and you slowly wind the comic strip in succession and create a kind of miniature movie.

Carrying all these memories, I was delighted this week to come across the simply magical worlds of French Artist Anastassia Elias.  These are magnificent and complex dioramas each contained within the telescopic universe of a toilet paper roll.  Click on one of the images and then click on the right arrow to see a slide show.  I’ve decided that the photos are just as wonderful as the dioramas themselves, which makes it all fair game for Hati and Skoll.  Enjoy these little marvels that ultimately take us back to childhood, when anything was possible and all possibilities were magical.

Figure 1 – Tasseled wobbegong shark, from the Wikimedia Commons, original image by Jon Hanson and reproduced under creative commons license.

Well, it’s early August.  The great white sharks are following the seals to Cape Cod, and a day barely goes by without a reported sighting.  The official Shark Week is a tradition started in 1987 by the Discovery Channel.  Other TV stations seem to follow suit with all the great viscerally terrifying movies like: “Jaws”, “Jaws 2,” “Jaws 3,” “Deep Blue Sea“ (my personal favorite shark movie), and “Open Water.”   Just stay out of the water people!

Anyway, and following up on yesterday’s blog about the Whale Shark, I’d like to deviate just a tad from the purely photographic and talk about the Wobbegong (Orectolobae) (see Figure 1).  I am inspired in this by a reader who posted Figure 1 on her Facebook page. Wobbegongs are bottom-dwelling sharks, mostly to be found in the pacific just cruising around and resting on the sea floor. Most wobbegongs have a maximum length of 1.25 metres (4.1 ft) or less.  However, the spotted wobbegong (see Figure 2), Orectolobus maculatus, can grow to lengths approaching ten feet.

The fellow shown in Figure 1 is a tassled wobbegong (Eucrossorhinus dasypogon).  It is a species of carpet shark and kind of does look like a carpet.  It can be found in shallow coral reefs off northern Australia, New Guinea, and adjacent islands and can grow to about six feet.  It’s fringed dermal flaps and coloration provide camouflage that enables it to trap and ensare small fishes that take it for a pile of seaweed.

While tasseled wobbegongs will bite the foot that steps on them, the fate of wobbegongs is similar that of many other shark species.  They are eaten by humans.  Their flesh is called flake and consumed by humans in Australia, and their skin is prized as a source of leather.

And you thought that this post was going to be about a fictional lake in Minnesota.

Figure 2 – The spotted wobbegong, image from the Wikimedia Commons, original image (c) 2005 Richard Ling and reproduced under creative commons license.

Figure 1 Male whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium, photo by Zac Wolf, from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain under creative commons license.

I was intrigued yesterday to come across this photoshoot project by Kristian Schmidt and Shawn Heinrichs showing fashion models swimming with whale sharks.  I am actually a bit ambiguous about these images.  So I thought that I would post it to see how readers feel.

So, first the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), it is the largest living non-mammalian vertebrate by a long shot.  Living about seventy years these a slow-moving filter feeders can reach lengths of ~13 meters or 42 feet and can weigh as much as 66,000 pounds. As filter feeders they dine mostly on plankton, but also will suck in schools of small fish.

The images in the photo-essay were shot off the village of Oslob, a remote corner of the Philippines. Fishermen there have developed a touching interspecies relationship with these giants by feeding them handfuls of shrimp.

Unfortunately, the whale shark is targeted by commercial fishermen in several locations, where they seasonally aggregate.  The species is considered to be vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, although their population size is unknown. In the Philippines, itself, harvesting whale sharks was banned in 1998.

Arguably, these images fall to the criticism that we have discussed before, in respect to Sports Illustrated’s use of indigenous peoples as props for a fashion shoot.  Here the whale sharks become props, in as sense.  What’s more significant to me is that it just doesn’t quite work!  The whale sharks are just so awesome and beautiful that they utterly eclipse the bathing beauties, sorry ladies.  Who’s the prop here?  Or as the sharks would probably put it: who are these people and what are they doing here?

When we discussed dancers caught in midair, I commented how they seemed to be defying gravity and floating in midair.  Well the sharks and the models do seem to be floating.  But in fact they really are floating.  The bottom line is that whale sharks are truly magnificent, but I don’t really need the models.  These images just aren’t speaking to me.

Well I came upon this image today on the Huffington Post by Ohio photographer Debbie DiCarlo that shows a mother coyote teaching her pubs to howl. Can it get any better than this?  This image is right on theme, coyotes being kissin’ cousins of wolves, and well, 100% Hati and Skoll approved.  As is so often the case, it is well worth going beyond the Huffington Post’s page and visiting DiCarlo’s website, where she has a pretty extensive portfolio of photographs.

Nature photography takes a lot of patience, skill, and luck.  It’s not just about big lenses.  It has to begin with a real sensitivity to the subject!  When this photograph was posted last week, it went viral on the web, and also was highly criticized by many skeptics for being “set up” in a museum diorama.  Well, nothing of the sort.  The image was taken at a workshop in Hinckley, Minnesota, and DiCarlo takes the “too perfect” criticism as a compliment.