Categories
Abstract

Blue Maple Sap Tubing

Blue Tubing for Maple Sap, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

So ends the month of March which began with a series of posts on maple syrup production and wound down with photographs from Williams Farm, the property featured in my maple syrup posts. My final image shows large coils of sap tubing waiting to be strung out in the sugar bush. Although the tubing is clearly identifiable as such, I like the way it assumes an abstract quality, especially the blurred stacks of tubing in the background.

When I make abstract looking images in camera (i.e. images that haven’t been manipulated using post-processing software like Lightroom or Photoshop or Nik Effects), one of the challenges lies in giving the images meaningful labels. Every photograph is a photograph of something; the easiest approach is to label a photograph by naming the thing that it is a photograph of. So, for example, this is a photograph of blue maple sap tubing. Only it isn’t. Not really.

When I stumbled upon these coils of tubing stacked in the barn, I didn’t say to myself: “I’d like to document coils of blue maple sap tubing.” I was emphatically not moved to make this image because I wanted to produce a photographic record of one inch plastic tubing. Instead, I was struck by the colour; I was struck by the way the morning light passed through cracks in the barn boards and settled on the tubing; I was struck by the curved lines moving from top to bottom; I was struck by the way the horizontal lines receded into darkness. All of this coalesced in a way that made me feel something.

If I had wanted to say what I felt, I might have written a poem. But there was something about this arrangement that was irreducible to words, and so I made an image instead. That makes a label problematic. Since the image is irreducible to words, a label is necessarily inadequate. It may even be a distraction. The best I can do is offer a few provisional words with the understanding that they have nothing to do with the image except to distinguish it from other images. It is what it is.

Categories
Country Life

Photograph? Video Game Screen Capture? Shared Hallucination?

Roller, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

During the first pandemic lockdown, our son helped us pass the time by setting up his VR hardware in the living room and letting us take turns wearing his headgear. For a few hours each day, I defended a medieval castle, I smashed lights on a futuristic conveyor belt, and I bludgeoned 3D zombie hordes before they could eat my brains. But then, when I realized I could make screen captures of my environments, I decided to wander through these virtual environments the same way I wander through real environments when I go on photo walks. I would observe my virtual world and respond by documenting it with “photos.”

For the time being, the resolution of screen captures in virtual environments doesn’t come anywhere close to the resolution of the images I make with my digital cameras, but it’s only a matter of time before these images are indistinguishable. When we cross that threshold, we will have to confront an important philosophical question about the nature of reality. It’s important (to a photographer) because it has practical consequences for discussions about the legitimacy and authenticity of contemporary photographic practice.

Given today’s post-processing tools—AI sky replacement, facial expression alterations, easy elimination of objects—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to verify that a photographic image corresponds to anything in the real world. This is especially problematic for documentary photographers and photo journalists. Post-processing tools are shifting to in-camera processing tools so that many of these alterations happen the instant the shutter is released. Who’s to say, then, that the image above represents a scene I stumbled upon while I was actually walking through a field. Maybe I added the sunrise colours using plug-ins I’ve installed in Adobe Lightroom. Or maybe this is a screen cap from a VR game.

There is a convincing argument that we already inhabit a video game. It’s called the Simulation Hypothesis. The idea hinges on the likelihood that a civilization could become sufficiently advanced to produce simulations of such granularity that they are effectively indistinguishable from the real world. Presumably photographs made within such a simulation would likewise be indistinguishable from photographs made in the real world.

If this hypothesis seems too far-out for your taste, consider the growing consensus among neurologists that what we call reality is, in fact, a shared hallucination. I commend Anil Seth’s 2021 book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. At the risk of oversimplifying, he suggests that the neurological mechanisms we use to perceive our world function in the same way as when we hallucinate. What distinguishes our experiences of perceiving reality and hallucinating is that there is a social dimension to perceiving reality. Most of us have the same experience when we perceive things and that sameness reinforces the “realness” of the things we perceive. But the experience of sameness doesn’t arise because we all perceive the same real things, but because we all have the same neurological toolkit.

To the extent that photography is simply a record of our perceiving, there is no necessary reason why a photograph should correspond to anything in the real world. The most that can be said of a photograph is that it is a photograph.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Introverted Landscape

Sometimes a landscape presents to me as extraverted. At other times a landscape will approach me with a cautious reserve.

My encounters with landscape remind me a lot of my encounters with people. I think of all those times I’ve sat in a meeting and there’s that one person who goes on and on, and in the midst of it their bluster seems persuasive, but afterwards, when I’m reviewing the minutes, I realize that, despite the torrent of words, the person has said nothing of substance. Meanwhile, there is that one person who sits quietly in the corner, unable to get a word in edgewise, who later sends an email or phones me, and I discover that their head is brimming with helpful ideas and creative solutions.

Landscapes can be like that. Some landscapes smack me full in the face with an immediate impact and I say: Wow! A lot of sunset shots affect me in that way. Then I look more closely and realize there isn’t a whole lot going on in the image; it’s the photographic equivalent of a vapid blond Fox news anchor. Or, to borrow a phrase from MacBeth, it is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Meanwhile, lurking in the corner of my lightbox is an understated image that doesn’t seize my immediate attention but nevertheless lingers in my memory.

Try an experiment sometime. Take an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of white paper and mark it with a single black dot, then show it to friends and ask them what they see on the page. Almost invariably, they will point to the dot while ignoring the overwhelming whiteness of the page. When we look passively, we are keyed to see certain things, like bright colours and stark contrasts. Only when we look actively do we begin to notice subtlety and nuance.

Categories
Abstract

Meta-Photography

This could be a skirt. This could be a pony tail. In fact it’s a massive sheet of plastic pulled together and knotted around two stakes in the ground. To my way of seeing, this is a meta-photograph. We tend to think of meta-photography as photographs of people making photographs. But in this instance I’ve made a photograph of something doing what photographs do (metaphorically speaking).

This is a photograph of something drawing our attention to a focal point. The lines of the plastic remind us of the way light functions when it passes through a lens. All the lines settle on the stake in the same way that light passes through a camera lens and settles on the image sensor, or through the lens of an eye and settles on the retina.

When I was a kid, I was severely near-sighted. Apparently I have long eyeballs which means that light focuses in front of my retina and makes distant objects appear blurry. When I was in my early thirties, I had laser eye surgery to reshape my lenses. The result was stunning. However, the ophthalmologist cautioned that in time I would become far-sighted as part of the natural aging process. True enough, whenever I use an LCD screen to frame a photograph now, I have to stop everything and fish around in my pockets for my reading glasses.

Despite the analogy to eyesight, photography is nothing like natural eyesight. The focal point of a photograph is positioned front to back and the distance in front of and behind that point which remains in focus is called depth of field. But from side to side, and up and down, everything on the same plane as the focal point remains pretty much in focus.

Eyes don’t work that way. Our eyes focus light in a narrow range. The rest of our visual field, from side to side, and up and down (our peripheral vision), blurs and becomes increasingly blurred to the edges. Each eye also has a blind spot. But our brain compensates for this so that we are rarely aware either of the blind spot or of the fact that most of our visual field is blurred. Most of the time, we have no way to tell how much of our visual perception is presented to us courtesy of our eyes and how much courtesy of our brains. However, it’s fair to say that without brains to compensate for the limitations of our eyes, we would see far less than we do.

Because contemporary photographic technologies remove many of the limitations of seeing, it’s tempting to let our cameras do all the work. But when we do this, we forget that the real work of photography isn’t seeing, but looking. And the camera that can do our looking for us hasn’t been invented yet.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Photographing in the Divide Between Order and Chaos

I was walking down the street when a youngish man approached and offered a piece of paper. You never know what you’re going to get when a stranger offers you a piece of paper. It could be a notice about a closing sale. It could be a rant about how Covid is a psyop mind control experiment. Or, as in this case, it could be a pamphlet promising eternal life with an old geezer in the sky above if only I surrender myself to the path laid down by a bronze age rabbi.

There are any number of reasons why I might find contemporary proselytism offensive. Chief among them is that Christian proselytism is intimately tied to a long history of Western colonialism and has been used to rationalize the exploitation of both people and resources. In my estimation, it hasn’t even begun to atone for its many sins, and will never begin that process until it allows a measure of humility to enter into its teachings. I receive the strident certainty of its tone as confirmation that it is deluded.

But in this instance, I didn’t even make it to that primary concern. I was too distracted by two grammatical errors. To my way of thinking, the function of grammar is a lot like the function of religion: it brings order to chaos; it makes our world more meaningful. A religious tract with grammatical errors is like a book of laws for criminals. It embraces a contradiction that not even faith can overcome.

I confess that I tend to take the same approach to the world when I have a camera in hand. I choose subjects and frame photographs and gravitate towards narratives that reinforce a world view in which order triumphs over chaos. In the distance, the world may swallow itself in fog. But here, right here, I see the world with clarity and that reassures me. Like the proselyte on the street corner, I want to share my view of the world with others. My photos may not have the same heft as a passage of scripture, but my aims are the same. More troubling is the fact that when I insist you look at the world exactly as I have looked at the world, I am replicating the colonizing tendencies of my proselytizing brothers and sisters.

Maybe my photographs would benefit from more chaos.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Fog and Intimacy

Lone Tree in Fog, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

There is something about fog that produces a sense of intimacy. Our view of what lies in the distance fades almost to nothing. All that remains is whatever stands in the foreground. I made this photograph on New Years Day. I make a habit of rising to greet the sun on the first morning of the new year, but when I got up on January 1st, 2022, I found the world shrouded in fog. After nearly 2 years of a global pandemic, attended by a growing cloud of disinformation, fog may be an apt way to start a new year.

I stood alone in a field with a solitary tree and the two of us communed for a time. To be honest, I can’t think of a better way to begin a new year. To be honest, I can’t think of many people I’d care to engage this way. I wish more of the people in my life would treat me the way this tree treated me. It didn’t challenge my thoughts and hint that maybe I’m a fool. It didn’t tell me I’m wasting my life on trivial pursuits. It didn’t tell me I’ve let myself go during the pandemic. The tree was a good listener and leaned in when I let my voice fall low.

I take it as a given that we can enter into relationships with trees. When I was young, my best friend and I built a tree house in a big maple. While we were still in the planning stages, we decided we couldn’t nail boards in place as that might hurt the tree, so we lashed everything with rope and twine. We discovered early on that we weren’t the only creatures to shelter in that tree. There were squirrels, robins, frogs, ants, beetles, lichen, and moss. That tree presided over our childhoods like a benevolent elder.

I have difficulty standing by when people cut down a live tree. It feels to me like an act of violence. I can understand why some people become tree-huggers, and I can understand, too, why industrialists adopt derisive tones when they use the term. A tree-hugger challenges everything an industrialist stands for. Despite the industrialist’s bluster, I’d rather be a tree than a chain saw.

Categories
Nature

Nomenclature

Ice-covered seed pod, possibly chestnut

At the beginning of a semester in high school chemistry, the teacher rhymed off all the general topics we’d be covering. That was the last science course I ever took, and I don’t remember any of the topics our teacher mentioned … except one. She said we’d be learning about nomenclature. One of my classmates put up her hand and asked, in all seriousness: “Who’s Norman Clature?” She thought maybe he was a famous chemist.

In certain circles, people think Norman Clature is a big deal. In other circles, not so much. In photography, people’s views divide down the middle. A lot hangs on what a given photographer thinks their photograph is for. If, for example, a photograph of a bug is going to end up in a textbook on entomology, then Norman Clature will likely insist on correctly identifying the bug. On the other hand, if a photograph of a bug is going to end up in an artsy forum where viewers are more concerned about line and colour and composition, then Norman Clature may not be so fussy.

For me, the challenge is that sometimes I have no idea (nor control over) how a given photograph will be used. Take today’s image, for example. Focus takes our eyes to a spiky seed pod covered in a thin layer of melting ice. I have no idea what species of seed pod this is. Maybe a chestnut? When I set up my tripod and framed this shot, I wasn’t thinking: “Oh, there’s a fine example of [insert Latin phrase here].” I was thinking: “Isn’t it interesting how those spikes are sticking up through the ice.”

I find that birders are the worst. A guy with a pair of binoculars will see my long lens and ask: “Did you see that fine example of a double-breasted hairy hoober goober?” And I’ll shrug and say: “I’m just here to shoot pretty birds.” I understand why it’s important for birders to bring Norman Clature into the field with them, but not all of us care for his company. Sometimes the visual effect of a photograph doesn’t depend on whether you can name the thing represented in the photograph. There it is! Look at it!

Categories
Bugs

Grasshopper

Grasshopper on Grass

I wonder what it would be like to be a grasshopper. Imagine being able to jump 100 times your own height. That would mean I could jump onto the roof of a tall skyscraper. And if I missed, or if I crashed into the side of a neighbouring building, it wouldn’t hurt because my exoskeletal shell would protect me.

If I wanted, I could cling all day to a stalk of grass. And while I can’t say that my life would be carefree (given that I’d have to be wary of birds and frogs and other natural predators), still there would be moments of supreme pleasure as I swayed back and forth on the midday breeze. I think I’d be one of those grasshoppers given to stridulating all day long. I’d probably join an important community chorus, maybe the Mormon Tabernacle Stridulators.

And imagine looking at the world through multifaceted eyes. What a brain it must take to see a hundred different images of the same thing and compile them into a single coherent visual field. It’s like the James Webb telescope with its 18 separate mirrors. I might not be able to see to the edge of the universe, but I’d be able to see to the edge of my universe.

The only drawback of life as a grasshopper is that sex wouldn’t be terribly interesting. That’s the downside of an exoskeletal shell. While it protects you from injury, it makes you less sensitive to touch. I don’t know. Depending on your point of view, that might be an upside. If Donald Trump was a grasshopper, the women grasshoppers who worked for him wouldn’t have to worry so much: “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful grasshoppers—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the shell. You can do anything.”

Categories
Country Life

Shoveling the Pond

Shovelling the Pond, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

A 13 second exposure on the evening of a full moon while the clouds scud overhead. My brother-in-law is shoveling the pond so the kids can go skating. He wears an LED head lamp and, when I ask him to hold still, miraculously manages to keep the head lamp still for the full 13 seconds. When he’s done shoveling, he’ll augur a hole in the ice and pump water from underneath to create a smooth glassy surface. This is how you do it when you don’t have a zamboni.

It strikes me that this is an entirely northern scene. I have cousins who grew up in Florida. I remember one of them telling me how she had never seen snow until she was in grade 5 or 6 and there was a cold snap and freak snowfall. Her school let the kids out so they could play in the snow. I don’t imagine there was any accumulation, but at least the kids could run in it and catch flakes on their tongues.

I’m amazed at how easy it is to take for granted my own view of things. That’s one of the reasons I like to follow other photographers on social media. They shake me out of my complacency and remind me that mine is not the only way to see the world.

Shoveling the pond at night
Shovelling the Pond, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON
Categories
Country Life

Frost on Old Maple Leaf

Frost on Maple Leaf Stem, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

During the past couple months, culminating with the “Freedom” Convoy and successive marches that use the pandemic as cover to promote extremist ideologies, I’ve witnessed regular displays of the Canadian flag co-opted in the service of hateful speech. The red and white, the maple leaf. People wrap themselves bodily in the flag and call themselves patriots, all the while turning the flag into yet another dog whistle for white supremacist tropes. I find it personally insulting that anyone should try to pass off this hate-mongering as patriotism.

To my way of thinking, patriotism grounds itself in gratitude. Like my dog whistling friends, I enjoy certain rights and freedoms, and for those I am grateful. But I’m more grateful for the fact that I am surrounded by people who, through their sense of duty, service, and social responsibility, safeguard my rights and freedoms. I express my gratitude by doing my part in turn to safeguard the rights and freedoms of those around me, including and perhaps most especially those who annoy me by wrapping themselves in the flag and saying things I contest.

The curious thing about the maple leaf that appears on the Canadian flag is that, of all the species of maple we could have chosen, we opted for the sugar maple. The leaf on the flag is a stylized representation of the sugar maple leaf. It calls to mind a practice—boiling sap to make syrup—that started on this land thousands of years ago. It reminds us of a gift—the gift of a specific knowledge—that Indigenous peoples freely shared with white settlers. And it points to something we have here in abundance, this sweetness that invariably brings us joy. Like our freedoms, it comes to us as a gift and needs to be acknowledged with gratitude.

One of the things that troubles me about these conversations is the way that patriotism gets passed off as a marker of personal identity. I am a white, cisgendered male who happens also to be … Canadian. However, history teaches us that what it means to be Canadian is tightly bound to the exercise of colonial power. It is contingent and rooted in stories of oppression. What’s more, as millions of refugees flee Ukraine, the rest of the world looks on and sees how nationality as a marker of personal identity can be snatched away in the blink of an eye.

The Ukraine people can console themselves with the certain knowledge that all powers fall and finally crumble to dust. Here in Canada, we deceive ourselves when we intimate that we are somehow exceptional. Like the maple leaf consumed by the morning frost, our cherished symbols lose their potency and their meanings fade. It may well be that of all possible markers of personal identity, national affiliation is the least stable.

There is an antidote to the feelings of instability that arise when we lose our grip on a shallow patriotism. The antidote is to acknowledge that, all along, we were asking the wrong question. We don’t invoke patriotism to answer the question: who am I? We invoke patriotism to answer the question: whose am I?

Frost forms on blades of grass.
Frost on Grass, Williams Farm, Wybridge, ON
Categories
Country Life

Cranes Across the Sun

Cranes Across the Sun, Wyebridge, Ontario

I made this image by shooting straight into the sun. I had the camera set to Aperture Priority so it compensated for the bright light by upping the shutter speed. The result is a strangely dark shot that reminds me a bit of images of Jupiter but with the sun in place of the red spot.

This is a mating pair of sandhill cranes flying overhead in Wyebridge, Ontario. I’m more accustomed to shoot sandhill cranes during winter trips to Florida where they wake you in the morning with a cry that sounds like the raptors in the movie, Jurassic Park. Although it always surprises me to see them in Ontario, it shouldn’t. When you consider their wingspan and the speed of their flight, how can they not have a huge range? More telling is the fact that their formal name is Antigone canadensis because they do most of their nesting in northern Canada.

When I see a bird this size, I wonder what it tastes like. Probably chicken. Doesn’t all fowl taste like chicken? The only birds I don’t imagine as a feast on my table are turkey vultures. Turkey vultures feed on carrion and the thought of eating something that feeds on rotten flesh presents me with a gastronomic conundrum. What wine pairs best with a corpse devouring bird? A Riesling? Maybe a Grüner Veltliner? I should consult my sommelier. As for sandhill cranes, I recommend a Chenin Blanc.

Close-up of a sandhill crane
Categories
Country Life

Fab Four – Deer Hanging Out in a Field

I call these four John, Paul, George and Ringo. To be honest, I can’t tell anything about the gender of these deer. What’s more, they didn’t stick around long enough for me to ask their pronouns. For all I know, they could be Benny, Frida, Agnetha and Björn.

Whenever I see deer hanging out in a field, I play a game called: how close can I get before they notice me? The answer is: not very. In the case of these four, I knew they were on the far side of a rise, so I crept up a gentle slope to a position I thought would serve as a blind. The problem came when I tried to set my camera on the tripod. It snaps into place with a quiet click. Not quiet enough. John, Paul, and George heard me right away. Ringo let on he didn’t hear but, hey, that’s part of his charm.

On another occasion, I got caught in a sudden downpour so took shelter under the eaves of the drive shed. I peered around the corner and there stood a solitary deer. The sound of rain bouncing off the metal roof may have hidden my approach. I was already close to the deer as I raised my camera and steadied the long lens against the corner of the building. I got a few shots as it stared at me, then it turned and ambled off.

A deer caught unawares in rural Ontario
Categories
Country Life

Picking Photos from the Flowering Image Tree

Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

All the good images are there for the taking; you can pluck them by the handful from the flowering image tree. The problem is that the flowering image tree only comes into bloom when normal people are asleep, which means that if you want any of those good images for yourself, you have to wake up early or stay out late.

Some mornings, when I’ve set my alarm at a ludicrous time, I wake up and my wife says: “Oh God, are you going out to the flowering image tree again?” And I turn off the alarm and fall back to sleep. An hour later, I get up and realize what I’ve done. It feels good to get an adequate night’s sleep. But when another night has passed and still I’ve missed the flowering image tree, I start to engage in all kinds of negative self talk. I call myself a lazy bastard. You’ll never get any decent photos, I say to myself, because you’d rather sleep all the time. Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, you lazy bastard!

So it strikes me as a minor miracle that I manage to pluck much of anything at all off that flowering image tree. I picked this image on July 1st, 2016 at 5:35 am. Even today, when I look at the image, I can’t believe I really got up that early. What is wrong with me?

As an aside, I prefer shooting in the winter because sunrise arrives so much later. I can get a full night’s sleep, throw on my coat and boots, and still make it in time to catch the flowering image tree in bloom.

Categories
Country Life

Tapping Out

Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

As with the maple trees each year, I find myself tapped out. I had thought I could sustain a series on maple syrup for the entire month of March. And while I have a lot of good syrup-related photographs I could share, I’ve run out of words to accompany them.

So, to borrow a word that’s become overused during the pandemic, I’m going to pivot. For the balance of the month, I will feature photographs of Williams Farm, the property that appears in all my earlier maple syrup photos. But these photos will treat non-syrup concerns. After all, the sap runs for only a few weeks each year. Things don’t suddenly stop the instant the last sap is boiled.

The first of my pivot images is a variation on an old theme. Visual artists love to play with the way trees cast shadows across the snow. I’ve seen paintings, woodcut prints, and of course photographs that explore the almost abstract variation of light and dark that bare trees produce in the winter time. However, I’ve always felt there is something missing from these images. There are no sap lines running from tree to tree. The sap lines produce a gossamer web through the forest that catches the early morning light.

Categories
Country Life

Acknowledging the Land Where Maple Syrup Comes From

Steam from the evaporator, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

Overwhelmingly, maple syrup production occurs on Turtle Island, the name First Nation peoples, especially in the North East, give to the North American continent. Historically, settlers/colonists haven’t bothered to think too deeply about the origins of maple syrup, treating it as just another food commodity that happens to come from trees. However, as conversation around suppression of Indigenous life and culture becomes more widespread—as it has this past year with the location of unmarked graves on residential school properties—some people writing about maple syrup production are being more intentional about acknowledging its origins. For an excellent example of this, see Bhavani Munshi’s “Decolonizing Maple Syrup” on the Life And Thyme web site.

The spring tradition of boiling maple sap comes from the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Wabanaki peoples and may well stretch back 9,000 years. They shared their knowledge with early white settlers who likewise enjoyed the health benefits of this natural sweetener and, like their indigenous teachers, used it to flavour and preserve meats. What I find particularly interesting about the maple syrup story is that, because traditional cultures were matrilineal, responsibility for sugarbushes passed from mother to daughter, as did knowledge relating to maple syrup production. And so we have the ancient story that maple syrup was discovered when a woman mistook sap for water and, after boiling meat for a meal, enjoyed a sweet surprise.

Decolonizing projects find themselves at odds with late capitalism to the extent that late capitalism tends to turn everything it touches into a commodity. As a creature of settler colonialism, late capitalism’s superpower is the power to forget things. In this case, it forgets where this natural commodity comes from and it forgets who safeguarded the knowledge that first brought it into our lives. This is especially true of large-scale operations that distribute their product through huge retailers. Any sense of connection to the land vanishes in a mist of money.

Small producers, like Williams Farm, have a more intimate connection to the land and can be more mindful of the process from tree sap to bottled syrup. The farm stands on land that, for thousands of years, was the sacred gathering place of the Huron-Wendat, the Ojibway, and Métis and is governed by the Williams Treaty (no relation) and the tri-Chippewa Council of Beausoleil, Rama and Georgina Island First Nations.

One cause for celebration is that there is a growing number of First Nation maple syrup producers who are working to recover this traditional knowledge. See for example, Giizhigat Maple Products on St. Joseph Island just south of the Sault. Or Jacob Charles on Georgina Island.