I know you’ve been sitting there wondering if I’m actually going to do a weekly topic this year, and I’ve been wondering that myself. I was thinking of featuring something from the film archives again, but with the system change I haven’t gotten the scanner working yet, so we’re skipping that idea for the time being. And I could always just keep going with the ‘On This Date’ posts, even in the face of being banned, because hey, I created the topic and kept it up all last year without missing one deadline, so I’ll do it as often as I like.
Instead, I realized that I haven’t been giving enough recognition to the models, those species posing for my various photos herein, and it’s time to change that. Thus begins our ‘Profiles of Nature,’ and we’ll start off with the guy who’s presently adorning my computer desktop. Let’s meet Deauchamp:
Deauchamp had tried tacos for the first time not long before our session, and was preoccupied with exactly how bad an idea this might prove to be; coupled with his inherent shyness, this did not make for the most outgoing portrait. Nonetheless, Deauchamp wanted us to know that he’s an avid collector of first issue Hardy Boys books and admits to being pretty mean with a wok – it might be best not to ask if this means “cooking with” or “wielding.” After working on the play Les liaisons dangereuses in grade school, he was bitten by the bug and now aspires one day to be an assistant dolly handler. In the meantime, you can usually find him near overpass construction sites examining the little ridges on rebar – “They’re remarkably diverse, like snowflakes,” he enthuses, “just a lot harder and, you know, boring.” His favorite class of algae is Paeophyta.
I promise to post a bit sooner in the day next week, and who knows? Maybe we’ll see the occasional other topic (I mean, aside from, ‘On composition,’ ‘Too cool,’ ‘Just because,’ ‘On the negative side,’ ‘But how?,’ ‘Because it’s a blog,’ podcasts, and the month-end abstracts,) peek in here and there. Anything could happen!
I mentioned earlier that I might do this, and you’d hoped that I wouldn’t, I know, but here it is anyway because I’m sadistic. In sorting video clips, I realized I had a handful (well, 25) that I’d been pleased to get – they just weren’t enough to justify editing and uploading, and while I’d waited to see if I’d get some more to make a complete narrative out of any of them, a nice little story or something, it hasn’t happened yet. So I strung them together in a little pastiche (or maybe a glop) and uploaded them anyway as another end-of-year marker. “But it’s not the end of the year, Al, you gobwit,” you say, rather obnoxiously, but I riposte (it’s international language day today,) Yes it is, Heinkel – I just didn’t say which end. Really.
I didn’t issue the warning in the video early enough, so I’ll tell you here, even though your obnoxious ass doesn’t deserve it: these are not cute and fluffy subjects. I purposefully chose the video thumbnail to be misleading.
I don’t think I’d gone out intending to shoot video for any of these, so they’re all handheld without any kind of stabilizing, and without an external mic or video light – at least the microscope ones are steady. Any of these may appear again when I finally do get more clips to go along with them, so you’re not out of the woods yet.
The players:
Chinese mantis, Tenodera sinensis
Meadow katydid, tribe Conocephalini
Lotsa unidentified aquatic microorganisms
Tardigrade, maybe?
Unidentified speedy seeds or something Vorticella
Northern water snake, Nerodia sipedon sipedon
Six-spotted fishing spider, Dolomedes triton
Unidentified fiddler crabs, family Ocypodidae
Unidentified hoverfly, family Syrphidae
Green treefrog, Hyla cinerea (vocals only)
Copes grey treefrog, Hyla chrysoscelis (vocals only)
Neighbor’s dog, Canis lupus familiaris (vocals only)
IC electrostatic discharge (vocals only)
I keep forgetting how long it takes to edit video, even in this half-ass manner; I was especially hampered by the editing program (OpenShot) engaging in audio-blips and stalling in the preview mode, so the voiceover had to be recorded separately while watching each individual clip, then edited in to fit. Still working out the best software and routines for all this.
Yes indeed, it’s time for the annual tag roundup, where we examine a collection of solitary and lonely tags to… uh… find out just how lame my humor is. I know you’ve been looking forward to it.
To explain for those who have, amazingly, never encountered this blog before: Tags are those little descriptors at the bottom of each post that help people find related topics, unless you’re here, and then they may also be snarky commentary. They’re just one of the many ways that I enhance your Walkabout experience, like little ant-infested mints on the pillow. Actually, do hotels still do that? Or did they ever? I’ve never seen it personally, but then again, I won’t pay a week’s salary or better for the use of a bed and shower, cheapskate that I am.
Enough stalling! Read onward…
vanilla rain – I can’t believe I haven’t featured this ancient one before.
couldn’t get away – Also, ‘eighties hair,’ ‘where are they now?’ ‘a squabble of seagulls’ (which is the proper term,) and ‘you’ve got that song going through your head now haven’t you?’ Getting to know me?
it was planned I tells ya! – Also, ‘yeah once,’ which is a direct connection to the title, but that might be a little too obscure, so I provide this helpful sound file, revealing as I do so that I misquoted it anyway. Damn.
“Fascinating” said both Spocks in unison – As well as, ‘barbecue goose with soya sauce ginger and spring onions,’ ‘laughing your ass off,’ and, perhaps appropriately, ‘you had to be there.’
not a plane or superman – So what’s that leave? And the lack of capitalization implies there’s more than one I think…
I did you a favor, there’s no reason to snap at me – With, ‘a cross between Harry and Voldemort.’ Since commas are separators among tags, you can’t have one within a tag, so that first one is actually two – the planning that has to go into this is exacting.
I set two blog records this year, with the number of posts (233) and the number of images uploaded (1,037.) Not too shabby, especially when you consider that the only trip we took was a brief weekender, and it’s the trips that usually contribute the most to the images. I doubt I’ll be breaking that barrier anytime soon (well, it couldn’t be before next January anyway, but you know what I mean.) The word count was not among the records, rolling in on the high side of 173,000 within the year – there appears to be some slop in the plugin I’m using to calculate this, but close enough. That brings the lifetime total (within the blog) up to the 1.73 million word mark, which isn’t competing with, like, Why Evolution Is True, but I’m still cool with it. A graphical view:
There appears to be little correlation between image and word count, though at the monthly level there is enough of one, easily explained by the fact that I usually expound upon the images, rather than them replacing text content. The past couple of years at least, there have been fewer long-winded philosophical posts, I suspect mostly because I’ve been reading fewer posts on other blogs, the kind that often spark such treatments. Whether this is good or bad is up to you.
This year was also pretty sparse (again) on podcasts, which I’m attempting to correct, but there will almost certainly be more videos coming along, since those are goals of mine. I’m hampered a little by the requirements, which is an additional bank of accoutrements, and there’s only so much that I want to carry at any given time, but not carrying it means that I don’t have the equipment along to do such subjects justice, should I stumble onto them. Still working this out.
By the way, if you have the interest, here’s a list of the ten longest posts since the inception. None of them are from this year; in fact, none of them are less than four years old. I was doing more long-form stuff then, it seems.
All out of ifs, May 2015; 6,965 words – The most recent and media-hyped claims about where Amelia Earhart ended up are, to be blunt, horseshit, and this goes into why. Despite the length, it seems to flow along.
Seneca Falls, we have a problem, August 2012; 5,592 words – I am strongly in favor of equal rights; I am not a fan of feminism. While it remains a poorly-defined term, this covers the differences to some degree.
Book and theory review: Chaos, January 2016; 4,380 words – Chaos theory yet remains not at all impressive to me, and the named book even less so.
But how? Part four: Religious belief, July 2011; 4,275 words – My own examination into why so many people in the world are religious. I may have refined these thoughts a little over the years, but they still hold strong to me.
But how? Part 14: Atheology, April 2014; 4,240 words – While I am not very motivated to convert anyone, these are some of the logical arguments in support of atheism.
Nuclear whoas, April 2011; 4,185 words – Nuclear power isn’t going to solve any of our energy issues, and it’s already created too many.
Personal god, March 2012; 4,169 words – About using religion for self-indulgence and believing this counts as guidance.
Too smart to be intelligent, August 2012; 4,056 words – Wholly deserving of the ‘worthless philosophy’ tag, but it also deserves a ‘pompous nitwit’ one too.
I think that’s long enough; you don’t want to know how long this takes to put together. In closing, and to recognize one of the two species that contributed so many poses to the past year, I’ll close with one of the unused images still sitting in my blog folder, a juvenile green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) recently emerged from the water and tadpole form, hanging out on the edge of the nearby pond – I like the translucence of the skin, like that Slime kid’s toy from some years back. More stuff on the way…
So yeah, my first post of the new year is gonna be a trivial one, and I’ll let you read into that whatever you like, because I know it’s mostly due to a lack of available time. I have a few things planned or in process, but they’ll be a little while in coming.
Right now, I’ll tell you that the Quadrantids meteor shower is peaking tonight – I should have been along with that earlier, especially since the reminders have been coming up in my calendar for the past week, but see above, plus the fact that the weather here has been completely non-conducive to such things (“Is that a meteor?!” “No, that’s water too,”) so I’ve been largely ignoring the topic, even though perhaps not everyone who has access to these posts is having the same weather. Fuck it – call it laziness.
The other little bit that I’ll throw down for you is a video from Voyageurs Wolf Project, clips taken across a beaver dam over the course of a year. The dam, a big one, sits south of Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, which itself is within spitting distance of Ontario, Canada, while the video shows the variety of wildlife species that traverse the area. I don’t think it was by accident that they have nighttime clips of otters galumphing across the dam, immediately followed by daytime clips of foxes sniffing around the exact same area, likely picking up the evidence of the otters.
One of the potential posts that I have planned is putting together some of my own video clips from the past year into a little compilation; these were mostly segments that I got with the idea that I’d get more, complementary clips and edit together a nice little informative video about each particular topic. That didn’t happen this past year, so they’ll be brief and touching on a lot of subjects, but those bigger goals haven’t been dismissed yet. You know I’ll be back.
I know, I’m cheating, and trying to shamelessly increase the photo count for the year, but we all know about me and shame by now (“we all” meaning, of course, me, because who the hell else is reading this?) But I promise, this is the last ‘On This Date’ post of the year – no sneaking in a ’54-A’ or anything like that. Other posts with photos, I make no guarantees…
And this one largely came about from a minor curiosity, because I noticed when reviewing my handy-dandy date spreadsheet (that made all of these posts possible) that we had entries in the ‘Mammals & Carnivores’ sorting category on different years, back-to-back. This category is woefully underpopulated in my stock, oddly enough, mostly because the mammals available around here are largely nocturnal, unless you count grey squirrels, and in December, that’s what I was expecting to find when I checked the photos listed. But no, I found the exact same thing for both.
I mentioned in the previous post that we would hear more about Fearrington Village, and here we are. One of the village’s claims to fame (or at least its signature aspect) is being home to a bunch of Belted Galloway cattle, sometimes know as “Oreo cows” because they’re a blatant ripoff of Hydrox. No, it appears, as I do a bare modicum of research, that it’s instead because Belted Galloways are black cows with a thick white band in the middle, something that my photo here from 2005 shows very poorly, though if you ever wanted to gaze deep within the nostrils of a curious cow, I’m your man. (I mean, I’ll provide the pics, not the nostrils.) Overcast days are actually good times to tackle animals that are black and white (preferably without including quite so much of the sky,) because the lessened contrast makes the opposing colors more visible and controlled in the images, as opposed to sunny, high-contrast days when either the black portions or the white (sometimes both) will fall outside of the range that the camera can capture. Which I demonstrated six years later in 2011, when I visited again on this date.
Not so much with this photo, I mean, because I purposefully shot these cows lying in the shade to control it, but another frame that I have from the day is in regular use with my students to show what happens when you tackle high-contrast subjects in high-contrast lighting.
[As a silly note, I cropped and sized these photos a day ahead of starting this post, and just now as I was proofing a draft, I stared at the above image and wondered how it uploaded corruptly, before remembering that I’d left a portion of the fence in the bottom of the frame – those aren’t neutral-grey and white rendering errors, but a white fence.]
Now, I have visited Fearrington Village perhaps a total of seven or eight times during my entire tenure in North Carolina (presently about 27 years,) and somehow two of those visits were on the same date. That’s crazy, right? Well, okay, it’s a trivial coincidence, falling at roughly a 2% chance, but one that serves as a partial post topic anyway. Continuing the trivia now as I’m typing about it, I’ve spent a decade more time living in NC than I have in NY, but I still kind of self-identify more as a (central, “upstate”) New Yorker than as a Carolinian – and yet, I was born in Jersey. That’s crazy.
There was an explanation for the second visit featured here though, and that was because a friend of ours (also from NY) was visiting, and she’s got this serious obsession with cows – don’t ask me, I’m not making this up. So of course we had to take her to see the Belted Galloways nearby – partially because it was her birthday, too. Still is, or at least the anniversary of such, so we’re slipping in another aspect of this post. That’s her down below (the one on the left,) so if you recognize her, wish her a happy birthday and tell her to find some new obsession that makes a little more sense. I mean, cows…
Well, specifically, it’s the end of the month, and the end of the year, but really, these are just arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. Still, they’re lines I’ve chosen to recognize with things like the end of the month abstract, and here’s the dealio: when I opted to alter my schedule slightly to have two ‘On This Date’ posts for this week, I found a couple of abstract images taken on the 31st, so the pics here are doing double duty, while there is still an ‘On This Date’ post coming today. Confused? I know I am…
Anyway, this is what we have, both from this date fifteen years ago.
I don’t actually remember it being this way, but EXIF info doesn’t lie – unless I had the camera date set wrong and corrected it between two sets of images from different days. But these two images come from two different locations that day (maybe,) and I do remember that both of these trips were taken with Jim Kramer. The one above was to a spot nearby called Fearrington Village, which we’ll hear more about later on, but it’s a picturesque housing development/farm/touristy shop place, the kind intended to be described as “quaint” though personally I’m not sure it quite personifies this. Within, however, is a park and meadow area with a pond and stream, and that’s where I found this unidentified tree completely laden with berries. I was using the Canon Pro 90 IS, which greatly limited my options and approaches, and even at the minimum aperture of f8 the depth wasn’t quite what I was aiming for, but the overall effect is still acceptable.
The other was taken some 55 kilometers away, less than two hours previous;I remember this excursion as well, to a curious island on the Haw River. Winter conditions weren’t ideal of course, but I found a little tableau that I liked in the rocks on the river itself, and did a few minor variations of it.
I liked the split between what you can see through the water and the reflection you can see in it (or technically not in it I guess, bouncing off without entering,) the leaf having escaped the trees’ grasping branches or somesuch – read into it what you will. And I’m not sure if clearer skies would have improved or reduced the effect, to be honest, though at least it would have made the colors richer.
Despite reasons to celebrate, desires to forget, welcoming the new year, flipping off the old, or anything else, don’t party too hard tonight (or try it without alcohol, at least.) If you choose this line in the sand to make changes, fine, cool, run with it, but if you’re expecting such things to happen automatically because there’s something different about tomorrow versus today, seriously, don’t make me lecture you.
I was trying to put together an illustrating image for an upcoming post today, first pondering what I really wanted to portray, then hoping I would get the conditions needed for the shot once I settled on the composition, but this was not to be. I would have known that, had I checked my calendar, because today is National Fail To Produce a Necessary Illustration Day, a holiday that has victimized much bigger people than I, among them Annie Leibovitz and Theodor Geisel. I could have spent the time working on a podcast or finalizing next year’s weekly topic instead, but now that time’s all wasted. So let that be a lesson to you: always check the calendar before engaging in some creative activity, because there’s only so much inspiration that you might have, and when it’s gone it’s gone. It was such a cool idea too.
As further evidence of my poor planning about this time a year ago, the normal weekly entry for the ‘On This Date’ posts would be tomorrow, but as I look at my spreadsheet for December 30th I find that (as far as my annotated, digital images go anyway,) I’ve shot nothing. Not a sausage. Hell of a finalé, eh? Ah, well – see you next year.
Nah, I can’t let it go at that. I did have some photos for both the 29th and 31st, so we’re going to double-down here at the end of the year and have two ‘On This Date’ posts this week. Call it your christmas bonus for a productive year, or something. Call it whatever you like – who’s gonna stop you?
So, going back to 2006, we have – well, only one that I’ll post, because I shot three all told, and two of them are detail photos of the underside of barnacles. I don’t think you can handle that much excitement, so we’ll use the other.
Curious to see how well digital handled long night exposures, I set up a borrowed Canon 10D in my adjoining woods and fired off a 15 minute exposure, aimed north – I knew I couldn’t locate Polaris through the trees but aimed in the general direction with a wide angle lens, and I believe I may have still snagged it anyway. The star arcs will describe a circle around Polaris (or would, if you could let the exposure go for 24 hours and, like, not have the sun come up,) so they’ll kind of indicate where it would be, and while it would be easy to believe that it’s that brightest spot buried in the tree to the left, that’s not quite in the right location. Plus that seems to be a little elongated itself from tracing its own partial circle. No, it looks like Polaris may be that very faint star directly to the right of the bright one, partially hidden within the branches (because it should be fairly bright in this exposure.) Regardless, the test told me a few things, including how digital sensors register light pollution (better than Provia film, by a wide margin,) and how distinctly they register star colors (worse than Provia.)
I recalled a post talking about doing a long exposure on the Mamiya medium format camera (thus film, and likely Provia at that,) and I do have a scan of such a photo – but then I remembered that I hadn’t even started the blog by this date, so that post and the subsequent MF exposure is referring to a different date – this one, actually. I suppose I could have posted it for the ‘On This Date’ post back in January, but no, that fell on the 29th too.
Oh, hell – it’s already scanned, so here it is. Just don’t count it as on this date, y’hear?
I’d have to go back and see if all the dust was on the slide itself (thus within the camera lens) or an artifact of scanning, which I consider more likely because this was done with a flatbed scanner with medium format capability. This is Fuji Provia F, better than the digital but still not ideal, though that may be due to the conditions and light pollution more than anything else; that orange glow on the tree is due to the neighbor’s porch light. My goals to do some of these long exposures while at the Outer Banks (the darkest spot within about 300 kilometers) still haven’t come to fruition, thought I did try.
So for our next negative from the mists of time, we have this authentic B&W image from Florida, back when I was experimenting with random films and developing them in the bathroom. It’s grainy partially from being old film, partially from being a time exposure in the dark, and partially from developing at a less-than-ideal temperature; film does best when the chemicals are 20°C, but even the cold water came out of the tap in Florida during the summer at better than 25° – subsequent efforts involved moderating the temperature of the chemicals with an ice bath. Anyway, what we’re seeing here is a train bridge at night, a long exposure as the train passed through, thus the streaks of light atop the bridge. [As a side note, I always find it disconcerting that train bridges have no guardrails, but then they don’t really need them, and if the train starts to leave the tracks, ain’t no railing gonna do a damn thing about it. Yet I still expect to see them.] This image has an anomaly, however, and it takes a little to grasp it.
The anomaly comes from the glow in the water, seen in the lower half of the frame. The lights of the train were reflecting in the water as they passed, and this is normal and expected. What’s not normal are the dark periodic arcs in those reflections, because they don’t make immediate sense. The exposure was for an unknown time, but at least thirty seconds, possibly much longer – doesn’t matter too much, because the key bit comes from the passage of the train lights, so call it ten seconds or so. It’d be easy to consider these shadows, but the moving lights wouldn’t throw a distinct shadow in one location – instead, they’d produce tracking shadows that would pan across the frame during the exposure and thus almost eradicate themselves in the reflections thrown from the same locations when they weren’t there. Not to mention that there wasn’t anything (like guardrails) to throw shadows in the first place.
So here’s what I think is going on, and engineer Jim Kramer agreed, years back when I first showed him the photo: it’s an artifact of ripple interference. Bear with me here.
Any water source will show ripples a great percentage of the time, mostly due to wind or breezes, sometimes due to flow, and these will generally be in one direction. And then, disturbances (splashing, vibrations) may throw out another set, usually expanding in concentric circles from the source; these won’t eradicate the existing linear ripples, but intersect with them, in places causing combined-height wave peaks, in others cancelling each other out and producing very localized smoothness. So as the train passed over the bridge, it produced vibrations that carried down the bridge supports and into the water, and these ripples interacted with the existing ones to create a double, overlapping pattern. And at key points in this pattern, the water simply faced the wrong way to send reflections of the train lights back to the camera. Because one set of ripples originated from fixed points, the bridge supports, the pattern presented a more-or-less immovable interference pattern.
The part that doesn’t seem to support this hypothesis is the number of bridge supports versus the number of interference arcs, plus the fact that they don’t appear to line up. And I can’t explain why there’s only one arc on the right side but dual arcs for the rest. So without experiments or video that seems to show how these patterns work, I’m not 100% convinced that this is right. Yet I also don’t have any other explanations.
Notice how, over on the right side of the frame, the reflection from the bright light in the distance cuts right through the dark arc, but this is expected because that light was shining on the water well before and after the train had passed, so the interference pattern would not have existed at those times. I don’t recall for certain which way the train was traveling, but I was favoring right to left, and the reflections kind of support this too, in that they’re extending further out/down from the bridge on the right side, where the ripples could travel farther while still catching the train’s lights.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting artifact, and I remember noticing and pondering about it after scanning in the negative, way back when. And since there’s little to shoot and no time to shoot it anyway, this is what I got right now ;-)
Today is the twelfth anniversary of my first blog post, and that means it now has to pay adult prices at the movie theaters – even when it can’t see adult movies, be tried as an adult, or any other functions claimed by that exalted/overrated classification. Kind of a rip-off, really. Just for the perspective, this is itself the 1,934th post, but only the 1,877th that contains nothing but trivial, uninteresting content.
I looked to see if I’d shot any photos on that date, but nope; the first appears in 2010, but hey, close enough – one of those will appear at the bottom.
Anyway, a brief update. It’s been, I think I’ve said, a frustrating season, or maybe period – it’s lasted much longer than a month, has overlapped the ‘season’ change from fall to winter, and so on. As you likely already know, the US Postal Service has gone totally bonzo-fogus – both The Girlfriend and I have been tracking packages that are apparently taking sightseeing tours of the entire US, and so christmas carols this year included repeated choruses of, “This isn’t everything – more will arrive eventually,” which isn’t that catchy and hopefully won’t survive to next christmas. My work schedule has been almost as unpredictable and much more annoying.
And then there’s the computer, and while I can go into gruesome detail regarding that, I’ll just say that the end may, perhaps, be in sight. Long story short: the computer/motherboard that I’m now using, while sufficient in performance and abilities for my needs, has a BIOS lacking in one particular thing, and that’s support for harddrives larger than 2 terabytes. I discovered this, naturally, when I installed a pair of 3TB drives within, because the files are growing routinely and I need the extra storage space. Numerous workarounds were attempted, none of them working, until I finally decided to install a Solid-State Drive for the operating systems – this made the BIOS happy, and once past that and into the operating systems, the larger harddrives were not an issue. But this meant installing both Linux and Windows on said SSD, and I upgraded one (Linux Mint 20) and downgraded the other (Windows 7, because Windows 10 bites ass.) This led to numerous reformatting issues, including default file locations and rebuilding stuff like the MIDI music structure (more on that someday,) and I just discovered this morning that Windows 7 is now having issues. So, it’s ongoing, but at least the prime functionality has been restored. If you’re having trouble sleeping, send me your phone number and I’ll call you with the entire list of actions and results.
With all this, I really haven’t felt like working on posts, not at all helped by there being (as seen above) nothing interesting to post about. I know these are all first-world problems and a lot of people have it worse, much worse, and I should really stop whining, but I also feel obligated to have regular content here and feel guilty when I don’t, obligated to explain it, and I can’t explain it without delving into grumbling. Ah, well. I’ve got a couple of light posts that’ll be along eventually, and I’m still considering what I’ll be doing for the year’s end, or beginning, or whatever, but there’s nothing promising on the horizon. Is this screed giving an accurate reflection of my mood and attitude lately? I’ll see what I can do about digging up some humor…
In the interim, have a set of sparkly icicles, taken on this date in 2010, aftermath of a winter storm a few days earlier. I’d had a version of this sitting in the blog folders for a long time, never having made it into any posts, then purged it along with many others when weaning that folder down – and now reinstated it (but cropped tighter and bigger now.) That’s what I consider progress.
There appears to be little correlation between image and word count, though at the monthly level there is enough of one, easily explained by the fact that I usually expound upon the images, rather than them replacing text content. The past couple of years at least, there have been fewer long-winded philosophical posts, I suspect mostly because I’ve been reading fewer posts on other blogs, the kind that often spark such treatments. Whether this is good or bad is up to you.
