Soma-Sema.com » Nature

One Winter’s Dawn

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:12:52 +0000

In the frozen calm of a mid-winter dawn, after mounting my camera on the tripod and getting all my gear ready, I walk briskly across my driveway and into the southwest corner of the yard. I set up, compose the shot with the available space provided by my 28mm Nikon lens, and calculate my exposure. I have to be right; this is the last shot on the role and I do not have another on me. Thus, I wait until I feel myself in the current of the “flow”, until I know I am in that space I am always in when I make a material photographic image of the ethereal imagination I have in my mind; and then, cable release in hand, I take the shot with the breath held fast in my lungs.

Autopator’s Secret II

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:11:42 +0000

This is a companion shot to Autopator’s Secret; to see a full interpretation, visit the description of this photograph.

For more information on Autopator, pick up Gustav Davidson’s A Dictionary of Angels.

The Flames of Autumn

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:09:44 +0000

This tree began blossoming into fall colours much sooner than the rest on my property. It was buried within the hedge of thorn trees and vines that segregates one of my neighbour’s yards from mine, and shoots of colour would peep out from beneath the green. Soon, autumn would spark on another tree, and another, and the fires would set root and consume the yard, to the outlying forest.

Fall is southern Ontario’s most wonderful time of year. The spring, for the most part, is soggy and dank, with a dull, rotting aroma misting out of the ground (all the garbage that ignorant people throw out their windows during the winter, which most think is magically taken away by the snow fairy whenever it snows and covers the ground white anew, is revealed in its horrid multitude along the ditches and riverbanks); the summer, though lush and vibrant, is sweltering and the mosquitoes can drive one mad (though this is also a great time of year to visit Ontario, as the canoe and portage trails are a great escape from the vanities and stresses of civilized life); but, the fall is cooler, the bugs are dying, and the clawing cold has not yet strangled the green life from view. The fiery colours light up the landscapes just before all colour but white and blue are stolen, and in these few and fleeting months we’ll flock to the forests like the members of some new kind of Eleusinian Mystery, congregating in the groves and on the hilltop, a slow-stepping procession to give thanks for the summer and to proffer our gratitude in hopes of an easier winter. I love this land.

For more information about the processes churning within leaves as they change colour, please visit http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/misc/leaves/leaves.htm

Oak Leaves in the Fall

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:08:34 +0000

I took this shot using my Nikon FM2 loaded with Fujifilm 400 ISO, a blue filter on my cokin mount, my 50mm 1.8 Nikkor lens, and a shaded patch of rain soaked grass as a background. The Fuji, hungry for the blue, combined with the water, the overcast sky, and the shade all account for the surreal and strange blue colouration of the photograph. Its partner, Oak Leaves in Fall II, was taken using the same set-up. Typically, fall shots are a flaring of colour, or whole forest fires of red and orange and yellow, with perhaps just a slight dabbling of green to remind us what was, and most often with a splash of blue water or sky to heighten the sense of colour of the leaves and fill out the range. This photograph differs from the typical autumn shot by adding a sense of quiet melancholy to the inherent beauty of an oak’s fall bloom, that soon there would be no leaves and a dangerous cold would paralyze the tree and all others like it.

For more information about the processes churning within leaves as they change colour, please visit http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/misc/leaves/leaves.htm

Oak Leaves in the Fall II

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:06:47 +0000

This is the companion shot of Oak Leaves in the Fall I. A detailed description of technique and set-up can be viewed in the description of this companion shot.

Autopator’s Secret

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:05:10 +0000

This is a shot of a small section of the famous fall foliage of Gatineau Provincial Park (http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/bins/ncc_web_content_page.asp?cid=16297-16299-10170&lang=1&bhcp=1). I took it using my Sigma 70-300mm zoom lens at 90mm focal length, 1/60 shutter speed, and f/8 aperture.

Autopator, as defined by Gustav Davidson in his A Dictionary of Angels, “one of the 3 powers established by the Virgin (Pistis Sophia?) of the lower world and entrusted with the hidden things reserved for the perfect” (Davidson 62). Please note, by titling this picture as I have, in no way do I mean it is perfect or that I am: it is referring to the hidden quality of the subject and subject matter.

The human mind only has a certain amount of conscious cognitive capacity. Due to this, we have what is called selective attention: we focus on, or take conscious notice of only certain elements of a scene, and using heuristics, mental shortcuts, we categorize and store such information (this is speaking in a very general way, and is not to be taken as rule for every situation). Because of our proneness to cognitive overload, we tend to miss much of what is around us. The taste of the coffee in our mouths hinders our ability to notice the baby deer suckling at its mother on the drive into work; the radio or CD keeps us from spotting the wood duck hiding in the ditchwater; the person on the other end of the cell phone keeps us from seeing all the cars on the road. Thus, instead of wide angle shot that would have incorporated the entirety of the section of forest of which this is a photograph, I took the portrait of one single tree, a unique survivor amongst the group, young and weakened but surviving, in its place amongst all the other yellowed trees. In the woods, our senses are clear: we hear, see, smell, and sense the world around us without distractions. Because of this clarity, I could distinguish an individual story among a myriad of them, each tree wearing the scars and battles of its life. This one suffered greatly, but continued to strive for the sky.

For more information on selective attention, visit http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/students/arousal.htm

Eclipse II

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:02:11 +0000

This photograph was taken during a lunar eclipse in the winter of ‘04-‘05. I took this using a long exposure, about 5 minutes, with a wide aperture. Unfortunately, to this day, I am unable to fully explain the results of this photograph, but it is as it is, despite my ignorance. It’s companion shot, Eclipse I, offers a slightly different composition.

For more information on solar and lunar eclipses, visit http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html

Eclipse I

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:01:20 +0000

For more information on solar and lunar eclipses, visit http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html

Pannanick Pond II

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:58:49 +0000

This is the partner shot of Pannanick Pond. For my personal thoughts and interpretations of these shots together, see the description of Pannanick Pond.

I took this shot using my 50mm Nikkor 1.8 lens with an 81b cooling filter mounted on my cokin filter system at handheld shutter speed with a small aperture. Whenever possible (using film bodies), try to avoid using the extremes of your camera’s abilities. That is, try to avoid either the widest or the smallest apertures of your lens. At these points, your lens, even new digital lenses, will function at their poorest. For best quality, keep you aperture in a mid-range, between f/16 and f/5.6 (depending on the range of your lenses aperture). Congruently, avoid using the fastest of slowest shutter speeds your camera body can achieve. At these points, your camera is most likely to produce reciprocity failure, which is discussed in the description of The Cycle Respun. If you find yourself caught in situations where the light is too strong not to use both smallest aperture and fastest shutter speed, then you know it has come to the point where you need to invest in special filters called Neutral Density filters. These filters contain a darkening grey that will have no effect on the colours within the photograph except to darken their exposure. This allows one to use slower shutter speeds and/or wider apertures in bright daylight. They come in varying degrees, from a third of a stop to 2 full stops.

For more information on Neutral Density filters, as well as sample images, visit http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/DigiCam/User-Guide/filter/filter-ND.html

Pannanick Pond I

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:57:22 +0000

This pond and the hills that span the background of this shot are the old proving and roving grounds of my cousin Chris Duguid’s youth in the lethargic town of Ballater, Scotland. Here, to escape the drowsy strangulation a young, rambunctious man perceives when passing the time in a place where cleanliness and order are pillars of the community’s collective esteem and pride, Chris would clap his heels on the ground with a mischievous smirk as he walked out of a huge mud puddle (metaphorically speaking, of course).

Scotland does not have trespassing laws (so I was informed). One is free to wander where one pleases, though there are certain rules of etiquette that most will follow in order to avoid some kind of physical showdown with the owner of a certain piece of land who might not want punks and brutes passing through his piece of the world. However, I have always loved the idea of this. The land is its own, and we may wander it freely as we may wander our own conscious and unconscious alike.

This squabbling over pieces of dirt is ridiculous when you put it into perspective against what could be accomplished by a humanity that understands the advantages of solidarity. As John Lennon sung so perfectly in his tribute to the idea for which so many great men have already suffered and/or died, Imagine:

Imagine there’s no Heaven

It’s easy if you try

No Hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

No religion, too

Imagine all the people living life in peace

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope some day you will join us

And the world will live as one

Imagine no possessions,

I wonder if you can.

No need for greed of hunger

A brotherhood of man

The most depressing thought, to me, is what we could have already accomplished with a worldwide government funded space program. The U.S, China, Russia, England, just to name a few, spend countless millions on developments in their space programs. And, in a sense, it is a worldwide community, as the discoveries of one team will, in time, filter out to all the other teams. Further, one could also argue this is natural way of things, as the competition that is created between each group helps to drive the development of ideas within them, and the necessity to be strong weeds out the weaker components of each group. It’s evolution; it’s nature. However, such people are misusing Darwin’s theory of evolution, as such a theory was meant to EXPLAIN behaviours, not CONDONE them. The reality is problems are not just isolated within specific countries anymore; the world over has to grow up and look around, and I mean that literally: if one compares the cognitive capacities of our civilization as a whole compared to the development of a child’s mental abilities, we would probably be classified as still not grasping object permanence – since we still don’t understand that since we can’t see a problem, it still exists the same way a baby thinks a toy has disappeared completely when it’s been hidden – and we would most likely classify as autistic since we have trouble making direct eye contact with other people, and we have no theory of mind – that is, we cannot directly deal with our problems because politics are so befuddling, and we are basically incapable of thinking from another’s point of view and especially understanding that if we think something, it does not necessarily mean another will see the same situation with the same perspective, hence the tensions between religions and cultures. With these criteria in mind, then, Western Society as a collective consciousness could arguably be classified as still being in the first stage of infancy outlined by the greatly intellectual and pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget: the sensorimotor stage.

Returning to my point about the space program, although competitive evolution has helped us evolve thus far in the sense of our technologies, such growth-shaping forces will only facilitate our development until a certain point, which we are rapidly approaching wherein an outside pressure could accelerate the existing competitive tensions between groups to a point where such groups consume themselves. At this point, the tensions between groups will cause their destruction, not their evolution, and when this point is reached, the only way to get groups to work together is by showing them superordinate goals. These goals affect every group equally and are a threat to their survival as a group and as individuals. Now, all small groups become one larger group in order to solve this universal problem. I think most intelligent people in the world now will agree that the world over is facing some very serious threats. Working together, from now on, is the only way out. Thus, we must pool our resources, as a humanity, and as a species of animal on this Earth, to stop the horrific cycles we have begotten in our time, learn of our errs before they are too late (though many, many, many already are: think of the millions upon millions of species already extinct that will never return to this Earth again). Just think of how much we could afford to produce if all governments pitched in on a worldwide space program. Could terra-forming have already begun on Mars? Do we really think the Earth is going to last forever with the way we are treating it? (Most women say it is a chauvinistic idea to think mankind can destroy the world, but the truth is that if man truly put itself to the task, it could accomplish it). Humanity may need an entirely new home world in the near future, and who can afford to send us there? Who can afford to even find one, on their own? The world as a whole could. And if these possibilities seem far-fetched, then ask yourself this, which one country on its own can afford to clean the whole world of its pollution? Not a single one on its own.

For more information on Scotland’s history, visit http://www.north-scotland.co.uk/

For information on the great John Lennon, http://www.johnlennon.com/

For more information on Piaget, please read this special from Time Magazine at http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/piaget.html

For more information about the principle of superordinate goals, please visit http://www.angelfire.com/ab6/polepino/Chapter11/Principleofthesuper.html