A Change in the Whether

Happy New Year! In recognition of the standard images of New Year’s celebrations, here are some bubbles. I’ve always liked watching bubbles, sometimes to the embarrassment of those friends still fearless enough to take lunch with someone bent on close visual examination of the utterly ordinary.

These bubbles, happily, are much easier to work with than the violent effervescence of champagne or a carbonated beverage; these are in a viscous liquid hand-soap that holds bubbles in a sort of stasis until the pumping of the soap disturbs them. They are a fun subject to shoot at about life-size, play with different lighting effects, sort through the possible viewpoints for an interesting abstract composition or an interesting pattern of specular highlights, or the reflections of the other bubbles. I use a small krypton bulb flashlight to see approximately what will happen when the flash(es) lighting the scene fire(s).

I had started experimenting with these a few days before I started another photographic course. As it turned out, part of the coursework was to take a couple of the pictures during your work for the first week and take the same subject again during the last week to apply what you’d absorbed during the lessons; I think of it as seeing how “whether” affects your new image. Whether you would use a different point of view, whether you would use a different depth of field or optically extract a different center of interest by restricting the zone of clear focus…a whole bunch of the standard ‘whether’ questions that crop up in photographic problem-solving.

At roughly the same time that class got underway, both of our cats started behaving “differently”. As the days progressed it became clear that our nearly 24-year old elder cat was in sudden, accelerated decline. Although she had been nearly blind with cataracts for some time, she’d not stopped going outside daily with people to enjoy some fresh-grown mild cat mint (sometimes climbing up into the pot to sit on the plant so that the younger cat wouldn’t get silly ideas about her sharing) and a good stretching roll on the sidewalk. This changed into her becoming frail in her walk and focused on finding an inaccessible, small place to hole up, frequently trying to leave the yard, causing whichever of us had chaperoned her walk to hustle before she managed to get into some cranny where we could not find her or from which we could not retrieve her.

We didn’t know what to make of the 12-yr old. For as long as he had lived with us, he’d followed people. Originally, he was mostly a gardening supervisor, scouting out where you should work next, coming over to inform you and then settling in an advantageous spot from which to carefully scrutinize your work, as if to be certain you weren’t pulling anything that Ought Not Be Pulled. Then I got this digital camera and he became Photographer Sidekick, Esq. Whenever I pulled out the tripod or put the camera strap over my neck and stepped into my Muck boots, Tyrone would appear and sit patiently while I collected gear. He’d precede me to the door and out we’d go. For the first few minutes he’d check the yard for interlopers while I set up a shot. I’d sit on a low brick retaining wall to take pictures of the flowers and grasses and work for a bit, take the camera from my face and there would be Tyrone sitting either upright or Sphinx-like, crowding my right elbow, happy as a clam. If I set up for bee practice, he’d be sitting slightly in front of the tripod legs watching the bees, looking at the lens and back to the bees. He did not, however, approve of me taking *his* picture and, until he was too ill to thwart me, the only decent shot I got of him was when he came out under the redwoods in the backyard with me, settled into the deep shade of the lower redwood branches and debris at the trunk and I sneaked a shot when he looked up to see what I was doing (seen above).

We got both cats into the vet, knowing how poorly Carla was doing and thinking that maybe Tyrone’s teeth were bothering him again, despite brushing, or that his insulin doses needed fine-tuning. We discovered that Carla’s kidneys were about what one would expect in a 23-year old cat, which we had anticipated, and that Tyrone had a shadow on his x-ray, about the size of a golf ball, which at only 12 years of age, we were not prepared for at all. Soon, biopsy and CT scan would show this to be an extremely intrusive and fast-growing lung cancer, which quickly metastasized to several other locations.

Numbly, we gave both of our beloved friends palliative care for as long as they seemed to take comfort. Carla got the right of way, anywhere, and whatever she felt she could eat. Supervised trips outside soon fell away and she dozed where she could hear someone working at a desk. Tyrone, with all that black fur and the sun bakingly hot in the afternoons, spent hours supervised outside, where he started to take on the behavior Carla had been exhibiting, finding a small shaded hidey-hole at the base of dense plants or in long millet stems in under a rose bush to curl up in. Turn your back and he’d have vanished from sight. I would take a lunchbox, a book, a director’s chair, water and my silver reflectent umbrella and sit, keeping both myself and any exposed Tyrone bits from overheating in the direct sun.

In mid-September, Carla left us, sometime in the very early hours of the morning, apparently passing in her sleep. Tyrone seemed as lost by this as we were and started sleeping most of the day away, in under the parlor organ with his head propped on the top note of the bass foot-pedals. Within three weeks it was obvious that palliative care was no longer effective enough and it was time to help him out of pain; we took him “visiting” to the vet’s one final time.

During this melancholy period, the photographic course rolled on. I’d not really considered how hard it would be to take up the tripod or the camera, look up and not see a very large black fuzzball waddling authoritatively in my direction or a petite, superbly-camouflaged elderly tortoiseshell heading for the door. As I went about the final assignments alone, this added a new “whether” to the choices made in re-shooting the subject from the first week for the last assignment of the course: whether to try to inject my mood into the image or shoot it straight. Looking around in the soap bottle for a new composition, I found a domed bubble that was reflecting the bubbles above it and decided to go with that. The teal-blue and silvery bubbles of the original seemed too cheerful to me, mindful of the gaping hole in this room, where my photography companion would normally be, and the empty office chair in the other room where our elder cat used to take comfort in hearing someone working nearby. Opening a desk drawer, I dug out a filter holder, mounting it on the end of the lens. I went to the back room equipment drawers, selected an old Kodak 80A Wratten Gel filter and placed it in the holder. I adjusted my exposure to account for the loss of light due to the deep blue filter and took a few exposures, adjusting depth of field and lighting along the way.

The result captured much of what I wanted, but I would like to have shot this at about 2.5X magnification to pick up the bubble reflections in the domed bubble; they only really show up at the original image size. I also imagine two small moons would look nice in there but that’s a job for image manipulation, and I don’t think I could do it the way I imagine it.

I think of most pattern shots and abstract shots as a form of music, each with its tempo, tone, and rhythm…this is a Nocturne for Carla and Tyrone.

May your New Year be blessed,

pete