Branching out

bare branches against sunset sky over Jordan lake
Not gonna say a lot about these, because it’s a little hard to type right at the moment, but here are a couple of pics from Monday’s sunset and Tuesday’s successive sunrise – not too often that this happens for me, except at the beach sometimes. These are both local, however. The sunset above was from Jordan Lake, looking in much the same direction that the little sliver of moon was seen a few posts back, and sunrise below was from the pond nearby. The branches just seemed to work for both of them, so here we are. But I also liked the little added touch of the ‘smoke’ wafting from the ‘fingertips’ above; really just a jet contrail, which is why I prefer sunrises because the jets usually aren’t active then, but it kinda worked here, unintentionally.

bare branch against sunrise sky the next morning

Moon Face Monday

slightly gibbous first quarter moon
Hey hey it’s Old Man Al D here with a new topic, “Moon Face Monday!” Today we have a first quarter moon giving way to gibbous phase, taken just hours ago! “Gibbous” comes from the Latin word gibbus, meaning ‘humpbacked,’ which I suppose could be said to apply to such a phase, if you ignore the obvious aspect of bierbeibei, which is the Latin word for ‘potbellied.’ Wahoo!

Be sure to check back next week to see what else I have for Moon Face Monday!

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Okay, no, not really. I’m just messing with Buggato.

January ran so far away

distant huge flock of seagulls
I said that this pic would be coming in a few days, because it’s an obvious choice for the end of the month abstract. Well, that and the fact that I’ve shot almost nothing in January, so it’s this or some weird images through the microscope.

While out on Jordan Lake, a huge flock of birds was visible well out over the water, and the long lens (and a knowledge of flight behavior) revealed that they were likely seagulls. But what exactly they were doing at dusk wheeling around far out on the lake, I couldn’t tell you, probably because of the threatening electrodes attached to my genitals. No, seriously though, I don’t know. I don’t know! It wasn’t fishing, because nobody was diving or clustered on the water as they tend to do, and to the best of my knowledge there was no garbage scow out there.

Just a few minutes before I found the moon, however, I glanced out there again and saw that not only had the flock moved further off, it had grown remarkably, stretching across perhaps a kilometer of sky. I juggled a bit to frame the excerpt below to retain enough detail while still conveying the mood from the sky color and clouds, because now, they look a lot more like a colony of bats, which is much cooler.

a flock of seagulls, not bats, but I shouldn't have told you that
In fact, if you want to see a little more detail, you can click on the image itself to see a larger version. If you’re viewing this site on your phone, you likely won’t see much from either version, but that’s your tough shit – stop playing with toys and use a real computer.

On this date 5

snow in fronds of pampas grass
This one goes back only six years (next week’s will be worse) to 2014, one of the January storms that are fairly common for North Carolina; if we’re going to have only one decent storm, it’s generally in January. So far this winter we have had none at all, not even a smidgen – I think a couple of flakes blew around one day for a few minutes, but that was it. We’ll just have to see what happens – previous predictions, including The Girlfriend’s that it always/usually/often/occasionally snows ten days or so after a winter thunderstorm (some Farmers’ Almanac thing I believe,) have all petered out.

With a decent enough snowfall, things can get a lot more picturesque, but there are a few factors that can prevent me from taking advantage of this: no good light following, no good landscapes or compelling subjects in close proximity, and of course, a distinct reluctance to chance the conditions of any particular road solely for a ‘good photo’ – I guess I won’t ever make it big on Instagram. North Carolina does not rank among the best states in adequately clearing the roads during and after a storm, and few of the vehicles that I ever have access to are good winter choices – because we rarely have serious winter here in the first place. So if there’s a chance of bad driving, I just stay home. My first car, after all, was wrecked during a blizzard in New York.

Thus the pic from our own yard. Compelling, timeless, expressive, captivating? No. Interesting? A tad fartistic? Maybe – that’s up to you to decide. But taken on January 29th, so it fits the bill today.

A quick question

So, if I comment that some internet topic is receiving far too much attention – you know, one of those that it seems every damn person feels obligated to add their own take on – does this stand any chance at all of raising awareness of the rampant “me too-ness” that is so prevalent nowadays, or is it simply contributing to the same problem? I really need to know.

But thank fucking dog I dumped Facebook years ago.

Brand spanking

It’s about 2:30 AM as I type this – again, my sleep ‘schedule’ is totally wacked and yet, completely typical for me. And knowing that the posting date will show and that some astute reader may refer to this for confirmation of conditions, I feel somehow obligated to refer to events as ‘yesterday’ even though they were a few hours back and all that. But yeah.

Saturday evening. We’d just come out of the cold snap that hit the East a couple days earlier, and heavy downpours less time ago than that, but the sky was clear and the temperature quite reasonable, and I decided to take a chance on the conditions and headed down to Jordan Lake near sunset. There has been little to photograph and fewer personal opportunities to try, and it seemed like a good time. Especially with… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

post sunset twilight over Jordan Lake
The sunset was unremarkable due to the clear skies, with just a few orphaned clouds catching some color, but that was encouraging to me. The birds were scarce: a couple of great blue herons doing some distant flights and another example that I’ll get to in a few days. I had idly tracked a light aircraft that went overhead before sunset and, in doing so, suddenly spotted Venus riding high in the sky – it can be visible in daylight, generally with magnification, if you look in precisely the right spot, but it took me a few moments to know that I was seeing a planet and not a very high altitude aircraft catching the sun. And I shot a couple of frames of a cloud throwing a shadow across the humidity in the sky, which presented some small misgivings. Still too far ahead though.

small could casting shadow at sunset
I was out there for a specific reason, and one that might not come to pass at all, but there was perhaps no better time to tackle it – I’d missed plenty of opportunities before. However, you remember this post from two months back, where I captured this tiny sliver of crescent moon as it aged towards new? [I love talking as if there are regular readers of this blog – gives me imaginary validation.] I was curious to see if I could top that and bring it down to less than a day from new. And this has to be done right before sunrise, for a waning (fading) crescent, or right after sunset for a waxing one; the moon will be very close to the sun and so you need the sun to be just over the horizon to eliminate as much glare as possible, and the sky has to be very clear. Two attempts since that post in November had been thwarted by clouds, and I knew this kind of pattern may continue for a while.

And then, there it was.

superfine crescent moon only hours after new
Knowing where the sun had set helped a lot, because the moon was going to be almost perfectly in line with it (and in fact, there had been a penumbral lunar eclipse two weeks previously when it was full, just not around here, and almost exactly a year ago was the total lunar eclipse.) I had set up the tripod and was scanning the sky in the right region when it popped out at me in the viewfinder; earlier attempts with the binoculars, roughly the same magnification, had yielded nothing, but the sky may simply have been too bright only a few minutes earlier.

Now, as I put up a few more frames, an explanation of the orbital mechanics of all this.

sliver crescent moon approaching horizon
You can’t for instance, simply be out the day before or after the ‘new moon’ [when the moon is completely backlit by the sun and thus invisible to us] and capture the same stage, because the moon’s phases are not perfectly aligned with our Earth days and months. So, on the moon, a mere day (sunrise to sunrise) takes 27 days and 7 hours (43 minutes, 12 seconds,) Earth time, and these are the phases we see. Almost. Because as this is happening, the Earth is revolving around the sun and changing its position, taking the moon with it, so to see the same phase from Earth takes 29 days, 12 hours (44 minutes, 3 seconds.) This was the original definition of a month back in them olden days, and obviously, it presents some problems, most especially the idea that, after a few years, January 1st was falling in the summer. You’ve heard about ‘blue moons,’ which basically means the second full moon in our calendar month? Yeah. So even 29 days from now, at sunset, the phase will be slightly different, but I can’t be bothered to determine if it will be a bigger or smaller crescent right now. [Okay, it should be smaller, and perhaps next to impossible to see without a precisely-aimed telescope.]

In fact, here’s where I’m slightly confused, and I’m trying to do a much-needed post and not study all the celestial mechanics right now. Because my handy LunaSolCal 6.3 app from Volker Voecking Software Engineering told me that new moon was falling Friday (1/24) at 4 PM or so – at least I remember it that way, because I was plotting to try and capture the waning crescent. But as I caught the waxing crescent instead, it told me that the moon was 0.6 days old (so, 14 hours?) and 1 percent visible. I got these photos at about 6 PM on Saturday (1/25,) which to me would mean it was something like 26 hours old, so I’m not sure how long “new” is supposed to last – 12 hours I guess? I don’t know – it’s all a bunch of technicalities, but basically, each month the phase will be different by some hours.

sliver crescent moon distorted by atmosphere
Now, two things to note as we get to this image. The first is the obvious distortion that’s coming from the atmosphere, the same reason I was worried when seeing the cloud shadow on, well, nothing, above – the humidity in the air can obscure a lot. But there’s also something visible in all photos, and that’s this ‘thin’ or darker spot about a third up the crescent from the bottom. This would appear to be caused by a feature of the moon itself, perhaps a lunar mare, but it’s going to be difficult to plot exactly. This is partially because it’s falling right on the edge of the visible portion, so 90 degrees around the face we see, and I’d need a complete global map with meridians to try and pin it down (and since the poles aren’t even distinguishable, the latitude would be just a guess.) And then, there’s libration, the wobble of the moon’s ‘captured’ or synchronized orbit around Earth, meaning that it’s likely not 90 degrees from the center of the visible face, but some presently-unknown variation from it. I’m just not into that at the moment, but perhaps it will spring up later on when I’m still looking for topics to post in the winter.

But while I’m here and have the photo already edited, another demonstration of the distortion from the sky.

distant medevac helicopter showing atmospheric distortion
As I was scanning the sky a bit earlier, I spotted this medevac helicopter some kilometers off, almost in the same spot as the moon would descend to, and fired off a couple of frames. The distortion is even visible here, and that’s through a tiny fraction of the air between us and the moon, so, yeah. It’s easy to see that even just a bit of a hazy sky would eradicate any chance of seeing the tiny crescent.

Regardless, I’m going to count this as beating the moon shots done in November, if only by a few hours of phase, and consider it unlikely that I will top it without using a telescope. Which might still happen.

But how? Intermission

Intermission? Does this mean there’s, like, 25 more on the way? Actually, I have two potential topics in the category on my list of suggested posts, but this is more of overall observations that I was making the other morning, kind of a anti-‘But How?’ post. It will become clear in a moment.

I had observed some time after I started the Ask an Atheist page that very few people feel the need to ask atheists anything; they just assume they already know what the answer would be, with a degree of inaccuracy ranging from, “You’re not grasping the point,” to, “What the bloody hell made you believe anyone thinks like that?” – the condescension can run quite high within such subjects. And as I have remarked more than once when tackling some of the ‘But How?’ posts, such questions aren’t actually asked too often either. I am well aware that this hews far too closely to making any or all of these posts mere straw man arguments, answering a feeble caricature or parody of any real issue to make them easy to take down, but then again, I do see variations of these from time to time in various locations; I was active on several forums, sites, and newsgroups for years, before most of them devolved into pointlessness or inactivity, and have seen plenty of the arguments put forth by religious folk, so I’m going to assert that I am not, at least, completely guilty of knocking down top-heavy cartoon characters. I will also point out (if only to myself) that I have not shied away from addressing sophisticated theology, as well as philosophy, on numerous occasions, both here and where other people can be found. Just to get that out of the way.

Right now, I’m going to tackle some musings on why this is: why so few questions seem to be asked over something that is as important as the devout hold it – indeed, if it forms anyone’s worldview and shapes their actions, it is important, and not just to themselves. If you think about it, it’s immensely curious that something which bears so much emphasis across the world, providing the most impact on attitudes and decisions by a huge margin over anything else, is often arrived at/supported by/reinforced with/explained with some really trivial criteria – it isn’t hard at all to poke holes in most of the arguments and ‘evidence’ that I’ve seen, anywhere. And even when long, dense tomes are produced by theologians, it’s difficult to find anyone that even has a passing familiarity with the content; these are not being used to inform anyone in their own pursuits, but only as a rejoinder to any attacks on religious thought (yes, in much the same vein as this post – again, trying to remain self-aware.)

The first thought that comes to mind is the difference between ‘finding answers’ and ‘seeking indulgence.’ Answers are sought openly, with an honest curiosity over How or Why, and most especially, if any answer produces further questions, those are pursued with equal vigor. Indulgence, however, is a means to an end that’s already been reached; the goal is either to justify some pre-existing idea, or to satisfy some emotional desire, and these are often closely intertwined. However, this is falling for an ugly trap, because human beings are always driven and ruled by emotions – it’s simply that different ones have different affects on individuals, and attempting to find something universal, even among a defined group of people of any nature, is a fool’s game. The best that we might discover is a tendency – which may be sufficient, or it may not, and I’m leaning towards ‘not’ at the moment.

Nonetheless, there are quite a few factors that indicate that such things could bear a lot of responsibility. Virtually every religion on Earth has some explanation for what happens after we die, more than, “bacteria run wild in my body and someone else has to discard all my junk,” (and it occurs to me as I type this that it would be a lot easier if our possessions eroded away quickly with our passing – maybe I have to start considering more perishable assets.) And it’s no surprise why this might be – the life-after-death bit, I mean: avoiding death is a key factor in all life, and we have it as a background goal within our minds, far beyond a simplistic fight-or-flee reflex. So yeah, there’s a strong desire to avoid death even when it’s inevitable, making any promise of an immortal soul very appealing. And alongside that, as a social species we’re also concerned with fairness and justice, because we couldn’t be social without them, so post-mortem judgment is also emotionally reassuring.

But while we all have these feelings, they don’t produce the same bias regarding a belief in an afterlife, and the same might be said for any other aspect of religious thought (and countless other things besides.) While the above is one example, much of what I’ve tackled here over the years falls into the same general category: the evidence is superficial, sometimes little more than a soundbite, but that’s enough. Why? What’s the difference between those that find this sufficient and those that find this inane?

It would be easy to assume that there is a difference, perhaps intrinsically, perhaps just learned at some point (like how some personal experiences can have a huge impact on our lives and thinking afterward,) but this is dangerous, and unlikely to be correct – not to mention it fosters this concept of elitism, the idea that atheists, for instance, are smarter/better/more refined/sexier/possess cooler things than, you know, them, something that the various attempts to find a new label for atheism (“brights,” “free-thinkers,” etc.) starts to impinge upon. Hell, the idea of being ‘special’ is one of those factors that may influence religiosity – and yes, I have no doubt that some atheists, perhaps a lot of us, are influenced by the very same base desire. We’re certainly accused of it often enough, but you know, pot/kettle and all that jazz…

Yet there still remains the idea that, on average (perhaps even bordering on a defining trait,) religious folk do not question their beliefs, and in many cases do not even express doubt or the mere concept of fallibility. Often, the idea of religious fallibility is automatically extended to a god rather than remaining personal: of course I cannot doubt a perfect being! This concept being held, of course, without the faintest thought that we haven’t yet established a perfect being of any kind, and the fallibility part was simply on the human end, something that none of us has any trouble accepting. And there is no doubt that confidence and assurances are a mainstay of virtually every religion on Earth, drilled repeatedly into millions of sermons and pamphlets and almost the entire idea of religion in the first place; yes, culture does foster this more than a smidgen. Which is why I promote critical thinking over anything else; doubt is a remarkably useful function, because it makes us seek enough factors to give us confidence, as well as cutting the legs out from under those that would prey on our tendency to believe mere assurances. A simple practice of thinking, Does this make sense? and, Is there any other explanation for this? can reveal a world of deception, self- and otherwise. (You can add in, Who would profit from this? too, to round out the basic questions that should, as far as I’m concerned, underlie most of our thought processes.)

I tend to view this as the key difference between being religious and not – or at least, one of the key differences. We can see other countries that have much lower percentages of religious thought and activity, and higher too, and know that culture plays an important role, and this is certainly no surprise; the human tendency to take one’s cue from others is well-known and used extensively, especially in churches, especially in advertising (“millions of users agree!”) The attendant thought that starts some contradiction is that this, in itself, is a form of doubt, not trusting in one’s own choices but relying on others for more confidence, yet this doubt isn’t the same as that ‘critical doubt’ above, nor is it sufficient to start the questioning of religion itself. So we have the doubt that exists within atheism (or at the very least, self-provoked atheism rather than any instilled by parents or culture,) which causes one to question scriptural accounts and miraculous events and numerous realms of being and/or metaphysics that we can find no evidence for; this same kind of doubt seems to underlie much of scientific thought, perhaps provoking individuals on the path towards science in the first place. And then we have the doubt that causes individuals to ‘go with the flow,’ taking their cue from others and reinforcing the very culture that provokes/promotes such behavior. Often, such tendencies are positive, such as being in a well-behaved classroom or among a multitude of careful and considerate drivers, but it can go both ways, and history is full of examples. Are these distinctly different, and if so, why?

Admittedly, there’s a spectrum even within religious thought, so much so that labeling all of the wide variations as ‘religious’ is both too broad and runs the potential of being grossly misleading. I have seen extremely few people who actually believe all of the malarkey that their scripture delineates, and even among those that insist that every last word of their scripture is absolutely true (to the point of denying vast areas of scientific research, including simple physics,) they seem ready to ignore some of the most ludicrous passages about cutting hair and wearing clothes of two different materials – and more power to them, really, despite the easy target of their obvious hypocrisy. There are millions, theologians and priests among them, who find passages to be mere parables or metaphors, or just edits from some overzealous scribe in the past. I’m not sure anyone has ever attempted a poll to determine who actually believes in two originating humans in a garden, or a cycle of rebirth guided by past actions, and so on and so forth, versus how many simply pay lip service to the concept because they’re expected and encouraged to; I suspect it’s very few, to be honest. And such a poll would be nigh worthless anyway, because a significant percentage of those that don’t truly believe such things will not admit to such, even to themselves. While there are obvious reasons why anyone would not confess any doubts or disbelief within their own congregation, since ‘calm acceptance’ isn’t the most likely reaction that would be encountered, the aspect of self-denial is far more entertaining. Wouldn’t an omniscient being tumble to this immediately? Or do believers simply not ever make that connection? Maybe they believe that wishing despite disbelief is enough to satisfy the holy requirements…

But more importantly, how do we bring to light these differences, and especially start to eradicate the negative aspects of them? I personally have no desire to attack someone over their beliefs or eliminate religion or anything of the sort, though I am more than happy to point out that, if we can definitively show these to be detrimental in nature, then yes, we should eliminate them, happily, and never look back. But more to the point, we should be able to define our actions and even our worldviews in terms of benefit and detriment, not in terms of arbitrary labels and cultural associations from ages long past, nor be influenced by base desires or wishful thinking; the importance of any decision should help define a self-imposed examination and criticism. And I am under no illusion that this is an easy or quick thing to establish. But if there exists some key point of focus or effort, some facet of behavior to address or a better way of establishing the concept, I’d be delighted to know what it is.

As I’m wrapping this up, it occurs to me that maybe my initial approach wasn’t quite so incorrect after all (purely by happenstance): the questions that I’ve tried to answer were rarely ever asked, but nonetheless should have been, and perhaps this has been highlighting the omission in itself.

On this date 4

turkey vulture Cathartes aura and black vulture Coragyps atratus perched together in tree
Today’s feature comes from 2013, and is somewhat appropriate because these two are waiting to feast on the decaying remains of the blog.

Okay, it’s not that bad – it’s just a typical winter slump, and overall a bad time to chase photos for myriad reasons, free time, weather, and fighting to get over a sinus infection among them. But in comparison, I already have more posts for this month than the month this was actually taken, so I’m not going to feel too bad about it. What we have here are a turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) on the left, and a black vulture (Coragyps atratus) on the right; same Family, which is Cathartidae, but different Genus between them. That said, there’s the more obvious appearance difference when seen perched like here, but other details that are more visible when aloft, since the heads become very hard to distinguish at any distance. The turkey vultures have silvery-grey undersides to their flight feathers, which amounts to the ‘trailing edge’ or back half of the wings, while the black vultures have such brighter coloration only on the six feathers at the wingtips, giving them a pale ‘palm.’ Also, the turkey vulture has a more distinct tail that the black, with a visible length in contrast to the little rounded ‘bump’ of the black vulture’s tail. Once you get used to seeing the differences, they’re obvious at the first good ventral view.

I’m almost certain these were perched in a tree not far from the old house, hanging out as the thermals died down. Vultures are soarers – obviously, because that’s how we all know them, wheeling in circles with little or no flapping – and they count on strong updrafts to help them fly without expending much energy. When the day isn’t gusty or producing updrafts, they more often simply maintain a perch and conserve energy until things change. I took the opportunity when I spotted these to record the visible differences between the two species, up close anyway – I can’t recall if I have both species in the same frame in flight, so you could see the wing and tail distinctions, but I suspect not. Maybe someday.

One more thing while we’re here, and I think I’ve mentioned this before but this topic can never be repeated enough. I used to rehabilitate injured raptors, and while most of the hawks and owls presented formidable opposition to handling with both their beaks and their talons, vultures tended not to wield either in this manner; their beaks were sharp enough but they simply had the habits and inclination to use those sharp edges only on dead things. However, their defense method was in many ways much more dire, because a threatened vulture will vomit on its foe, and this is just as horrendous as you imagine it, if not worse. I had a seasoned animal health tech apologize quickly and flee the room when it occurred, even though I’d recognized the hurking gestures from the vulture in my grasp and aimed its head towards the trash can. Thankfully, my rehab trainers had adequately warned me about such fates and I never got directly ‘assaulted’ in this manner, but still, the aroma of regurgitated carrion is not exactly piquant. One out of five stars; cannot recommend.

‘Contrived’ is an ugly word

Hey hey hey, and ‘wahoo’ even! Today is Retro-Amphibian Day, also known by its European moniker, Dig Out An Old Photo ‘Cause Yain’t Postin’ Shit Day, and so, slave to tradition that I am, I present this image from a little over six months ago, saved in the blog folder for this exact purpose.

unidentified juvenile amphibian sprawled across grass tips
Along an overflow channel for the nearby pond, I was belly-down in the grass with the headlamp late one night, checking out the critters in the water, and found this tiny little spud very close by, once again making me self-conscious about how I moved. No more than 15mm nose to butt, it was too small to be spotted casually, and even a careful examination of where I placed my feet could easily have missed it. I shuffled a lot after that, very slowly, hoping to spook any others before I accidentally smooshed them.

Naturally, I had little control over how and where my model here was going to pose, and so could do nothing about the ragged brown tips of the mowed grass, which detract a bit in my opinion. [Quick aside: I’ve long considered ‘mown’ a word, as in, what grass is after mowing, but my computer’s spellcheck tells me I’m wrong, and Merriam-Webster is taking the same side. However, spellcheck also thinks ‘int’ is a real word, a typo that gets past me every once in a while, so as far as I’m concerned, if you like ‘mown’ better, insert it as necessary. It may be a Northern thing.] The toe-pads tell me this is likely a treefrog, and the immediate area is a big favorite of the Copes grey treefrogs, so that’s the way I’m leaning, especially since the evidence so far is that the species doesn’t develop any distinctive identifying characteristics until a little older than this. My confidence in this ID, however, is less than 50% – but that’s still higher than for anything else at the moment.

Anyway, I thought we needed a little greenery right now, and lucky for all of us the holiday happened along, eh?

On this date 3

sapling against foggy lake
This week we jump back six years, when the day dawned wonderfully foggy and I scampered out to make the best of it. This was back at the old place, and the options were fairly thin there, especially in the narrow timeframe that fog often provides; you may have an hour, but often less, to do something with it, so finding a photogenic area better happen quick or the conditions will clear before you get there. In this case, there was a reservoir lake not too far away, very limited vantages but better than my immediate surroundings, so I rushed down there.

No herons, ducks, or other whatsits were providing any foreground interest, so I selected this evergreen sapling sprouting from a large boulder just offshore and framed it within the open space – it wasn’t elaborate, but hey, it was January, so I was lucky to have anything to shoot. I know, I know, after offering advice on what to do in the winter too, but it’s situations like this that fostered some of that advice in the first place, such as finding something nearby that worked with foggy conditions to keep in mind when such conditions arrived. I’d been looking out for photogenic lone trees in fields, old barns, old cemeteries, things along those lines, but had nothing within easy reach. Even the horse farms nearby, occasionally good for some figures in a field, were overnighting their livestock indoors in January.

same image with brightness tweakI’d left the exposure as normal to use the gloom, but it meant that what I captured was almost certainly a bit darker than what it actually looked like – the fog evened out both the sky and the reflections in the lake, so the meter read all of that and rendered it in mid-tones, that ol’ 18% grey that exposure meters are calibrated for. To the right is more likely what it actually looked like at 9 AM (though it’s merely the same image tweaked a bit brighter). It’s hard to describe this accurately, but bear with me. On a sunny day, the skies would have been brighter, but so would all of the rest of the frame, and the shutter speed would have shortened commensurately. Meanwhile, shadows would have been deeper, the distant trees themselves actually darker because they wouldn’t have been shrouded in fog, while the northern sky would have been blue, so the camera meter would have had a more average range to work with and would not have darkened the scene much, if at all, in attempting to expose for an average scene, as opposed to the largely light-grey scene that I had that morning. Make sense? Maybe it’d be better if I illustrate it more directly.

same location in radically different conditionsSame location a little over two years earlier, slightly different shooting position (like I said, the available perspectives were few,) and a little more foliage. More colors, more difference between the brightest and darkest areas, or ‘dynamic range.’ While overall this scene is notably brighter (the difference in exposure from the original at top is 1.66 stops, not quite four times as bright,) the average light coming from all areas is closer to a good middle, rather than everything being medium bright grey in the fog shot because the fog even eliminated almost all of the darkest shadows. Had I included more of the sky-reflecting water in this frame, like above, the exposure would have changed a little because of the additional brightness, but bear in mind that water reflections are always darker than the original because of polarization, something visible even in both examples of the fog shot.

One more thing to point out, for giggles: if you look closely at the overhanging tree close to my vantage, you’ll find fishing bobbers – they’re most visible in the larger image, but still here in the smaller daytime shot too. One of them is possibly the same in each. This is a common sight in any area that might appear to be good fishing; it seems the skill to cast a line away from overhanging trees isn’t well-developed in enough fisherfolk.

(And neither is the skill to take their fucking trash with them, but that’s a subject of another post.)

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