Taking yesterday’s cue, we’re going to feature two images today for the ancient lore, both taken on the same day – one at close to 3 AM, and the other at 8:30 AM; I’m fairly certain I got a little sleep in between those, but can’t say for sure…
The folder is Science/Miscellaneous, which collects mostly things like weather phenomena and then everything that doesn’t fit into other categories. The first is… well, I shot it for some kind of poignancy, but soon realized that it doesn’t really carry that, and over the years I’ve looked at it and utterly failed to find a use for it – save for here, after which I may simply discard the frames.
That’s – the lower jaw of a pig, likely a wild pig, found in the shallows of my primary haunt in Florida. One season, someone discarded the carcasses of a couple of pigs right there, much to my annoyance, and later on I found this jawbone, studded with barnacles and blackened by who-knows-what. I perched it on the stump that sat on shore and has appeared several times on this site, but really, it just ain’t doing it.
I’ll take a moment to mention that the ‘wild’ pigs of Florida are actually domestic pork pigs that have escaped, or been released, and set themselves up a feral existence in the state, which somehow seems to encourage that kind of jazz. But no, these are not ‘boar’ or anything similar, and on occasion you can spot striped varieties. I’ve seen them a handful of times but never got any photos.
Now the next, which was actually the earlier of the two.
There’s nothing fascinating about this one either, but it was the first attempts to do some light trails across the causeway bridge – that red line is from the sole car that went through, so a time other than three AM is certainly better for traffic. And it has two little bits of trivia all its own.
The first is a story. One evening/morning, but I don’t think it was this morning, I was at the left side of the bridge shooting a long exposure out over the water, likely of a moored sailboat dimly visible in the ambient light, and decided to switch to the other side to see what could be found there. I crossed the horrendously busy lanes and reached the center barrier, which was about a meter high, swung my legs over it, and let myself down to the other side.
Except, the streetlight right over that immediate vicinity was out, which can actually be seen in the center of this pic if you look closely, and I was peering out across the water to scope out any potential. You may have already realized my mistake, but I’ll point it out if you haven’t: the lanes are, for reasons unknown, two different heights right at that point. Completely unaware of this, I swung my legs aver and expected a slight drop of a handful of centimeters, and actually fell more than a meter. There is the shortest experience of falling terror that occurs in such circumstances, before my straightened legs slammed into the road surface below and sent the shock right up my spine. I staggered but somehow managed to remain upright, then looked around to check if, by any remote chance, someone had seen me perform this graceless maneuver.
[You may be looking at this and thinking, What the hell, how could he have missed that? but I’ll remind you that this is a time-exposure, collecting a lot more light than was readily visible by eye, and even with this, you can see how dark it gets right there. But yeah, it would have been obvious had I looked down.]
Now for the second bit, discovered when doing some editing some time back; I even prepped and saved an illustrating image, but ended up not using it. Until now. The streetlamps are sodium pressure bulbs, putting out that curious orange glow, which looks reasonably accurate in digital but renders much worse in Fuji Provia slide film. However, this provided an overall orange cast to the image – accurate for the conditions, but not exactly white-balanced, you know? So I tried editing the image to bring it more in line with white light, and couldn’t even come close. Then when attempting something else, I looked at the separate color channels and found out why.
That’s each right there, and as can be easily seen now, sodium lamps put out virtually no blue wavelength, or at least none that can be captured by the digital camera I was using. To counter an orange cast, you’d want to increase the blue channel and reduce the red, but the blue channel had no effect whatsoever except for the glare from the bulbs themselves, and even then it was trivial. Just for giggles, I selected the blue channel and blew it out to almost maximum, what would normally be a radical overexposure, and got the faintest hint of reflected light only from shiny surfaces near the bulbs. It makes me wonder what the particulars are about that wavelength, since it reaches the camera directly, albeit weakly (that’s why the glare from the bulbs is still visible in the blue channel) but virtually everything that it shines on doesn’t carry away. It could just be extremely weak I guess.
That’s the kind of useless pondering I get up to sometimes…