By Al Denelsbeck, on September 15th, 2009
I’m not much for blogging about details of my life, and try to concentrate instead on items of interest. This one falls somewhere in the middle, I think.
 Last weekend, I flew up to central New York – a vast region often called “upstate” to differentiate it from New York City, which is what most people think of when they hear “New York.” If you’re one of those people, go look at a map, and get over it. I grew up in the Finger Lakes region, and returned there briefly for a kind-of family reunion. That was all well and good, I suppose, and I got to meet a cousin I hadn’t seen or talked to in, seriously, 37 years. But I was more motivated to get out and appreciate the area in late summer, because it’s a gorgeous area with some pleasant geography. Not being a winter person, however, I’m glad not to be there when the snows arrive…
With the help of my brother, I got down to see Carpenter’s Falls on Skaneateles Lake, a place I’d never been to despite the length of time I’d lived not far away. Access is fairly easy, though the trails close to the falls require sure-footedness. The flow doesn’t compare to many other waterfalls, but the drop is significant and the view is very nice and largely unspoiled.
As you might be able to see from the photo, the geology is primarily shale in this region, and provides another opportunity to the explorer: fossil hunting. My brother has become quite good at it, and is able to spot likely fossil-bearing rock from a short distance. So after we got done playing around the falls, we checked out an area close by that featured a shale face with easy access, and started searching. You might imagine that fossil-hunting involves meticulous work and those pointy hammers, but that’s only true in some cases, and not in this one. Certain shale layers host truly vast numbers of specimens, and the rock layers can be split apart with finger pressure. You can fill your pockets or a bag with specimens within an hour, easily.
 This region of NY appears to feature fossils from the Devonian/Silurian period border, somewhere around 416 million years ago. Ocean life was abundant, but just starting to get complex, and terrestrial plants weren’t really around yet. Here I have a brachiopod, probably a spiriferidine, which shows the impression of the underside of the shell (towards the bottom of the photo), as well as the petrified remains of the shell itself (the lighter portion in the center of the pattern). The lines sloping crosswise to the “ribs” are growth lines of the organism. Don’t get the impression I know all of this offhand – I found out most of this while researching this post…
 And I have this thin slab, 4 cm across at its widest point, that shows a collection of shells virtually indistinguishable from a modern day scallop – the only thing missing are the little tabs near the joint. Now, think about this a second: in 416 million years, the outward appearance (and primary function) of this organism has changed barely at all. In that same time, the first animals left the sea for the land, developed into countless species (like the dinosaurs), most of which vanished through extinctions, and we ourselves were probably some rodent or lemur-like thing when the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Australopithecus afarensis, commonly referred to as “Lucy” and potentially our ancestor, comes from about 3.5 million years ago and looked only vaguely like us. But “scallops” barely changed at all. That’s what I call a successful organism. Not to mention tasty wrapped in bacon.
 My favorite, from the short exploration, is this one. Splitting it open, I found two fossils overlapping. One of them certainly seems to be a plant, and from this time period, it would have to be aquatic, since land plants weren’t this fully formed. And since they rarely fossilize, I was pleased to see it. It’s draped across something that I haven’t yet identified, but I’m reminded irresistibly of chitin, the hard exoskeleton of something. It’s very thin, and actually has a hollow tunnel directly underneath it from yet another species – it appears it may have even conformed to the shape of the underlying organism. It’s also a distinctly different color from the surrounding rock. And I have both impressions, top and bottom, on the split rock layers. The whole chitiny structure is about the size of a fingernail, so the “leaves” are tiny and delicate indeed.
So, no trilobites yet, though they did exist in this time period, and I’ve found fragments, but this one is a neat find anyway. Where I live now in North Carolina, there are no fossils to be found – the whole area east of the Appalachian is erosion from the formerly great mountain range, which was formed during the collision with North Africa. Hundreds to thousands of feet below me was once a sea bed, but between me and that is silicates and mica, and any fossils that might have been in that have long since been destroyed by geologic heat and pressure. Essentially, the mountains erode into sand and have extended the shoreline from the base of the mountains down to where it is now. What I can find here is mostly pre-sand silicate rock. And clay. Lots and lots of clay. One of these days I’ll get out west and try to find something much younger but more interesting, like dinosaur tracks.
And now, another pause for thought. Long ago, some sea creatures died, and settled to the bottom. Something happened to cover them in mud – maybe a flood or a landslide, maybe just a storm. But there they remained, undisturbed, as layer after layer piled on top over thousands of years. The weight compressed the sediment, and it changed. And the minerals within it swapped places with the remains of the creatures, without actually disturbing things. Molecule by molecule, the creatures became statues of themselves.
The sea bed moved, thousands of miles at something much slower than a snail’s pace, and eventually lifted free of the waters. High above, hundreds of distant relatives of the dead creatures walked over the surface, never having the faintest idea what lay beneath, not even capable of thoughts of such caliber. Very, very recently, a glacier roamed over the land, ponderously slow yet many times faster than the movement of the rock itself that held the dead creatures, and with the force of gravity and tons of compacted snow and accompanying debris, gouged a huge tear in the landscape, down even past the layer where the sea bed used to be, down past much older sea beds. The glacier melted, and rains came, and the tear in the rock became a long thin lake. More rains, and yearly freezes, broke away flakes of the former mud flow, now rock, and tumbled them further down the ravine. Thousands upon thousands of similar creature remains became rubble, fragments, sand and grit, forever indistinguishable from the rock that used to hold them. But many remained, still in the layers of stone, but rapidly coming closer and closer to exposure.
A path nearby became a road, and rather suddenly, a couple of primate descendants of those dead creatures gathered the last few millimeters of stone encasing those remains, and abruptly exposed them to the light for the first time in 416 million years. A fragment of a story, so close to being lost forever like so many others, is revealed and pondered over. Soon, it will vanish again, but for a brief moment in time, a few dead creatures provide a tiny insight into life so very far in the past.
Maybe this is just the human perspective talking, but damn that’s cool!
By Al Denelsbeck, on September 14th, 2009
Over at the blog Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has a post on September 11th, and on examining the circumstances surrounding the attacks with a critical eye. He makes some great points about distinguishing fanatics from the bulk of a religion’s followers, but says something that I feel misses the mark. I’m addressing it here (instead of in the comments section of his blog) partially because I want to go into greater detail than I should in a comment, and largely because Discover Blog’s spam filters rarely let me through, and I’ve given up trying.
Phil says,
After all, it was science that created the airplanes, science that built those buildings, science that developed the technology to bring the two together at high velocity. You might then say yes, but religion was the pilot; it was the fundamentalist jihadic brand of Islam that guided those men to do what they did.
No. What drove them is undoubtedly something much more complex, and in researching this post I was reminded just how complex this could be.
Continue reading “Cause or symptom?”
By Al Denelsbeck, on August 31st, 2009
So, when you become an experienced photographer, most of the photographs you take are impressive, compelling, and technically competent, right? In other words, a high percentage of shots are “keepers?”
Um, no.
 The truth is, even professionals working high-dollar assignments and presenting stunning images to magazines only keep twenty-five to forty percent of what they shoot, on average, and this is without resorting to the new digital technique of “try it and see what happens.” Controlling every aspect that might go into an image is next to impossible, and even if it weren’t, we probably wouldn’t be very impressed with photos that were meticulously staged. But overall, many, many photos go into the trash, and I’m no exception. My keeper rate runs 40-66%, which sounds great in comparison, but it may simply mean I’m less critical and demanding than others.
Continue reading “Keepers”
By Al Denelsbeck, on August 24th, 2009
 There’s this funny thing about humans – we seem to have this problem with counting above, “two.” I mean, of course we can do it, but we prefer not to. So every time we have to make a decision, we try to cut our choices down to two. And to make this easier, we tend to resort to superlatives, and try to push choices to their extremes so we don’t have to qualify our decisions any more than is necessary. By this I mean, good or evil, liberal or conservative, smart or stupid, healthy or toxic, nature photographer or lowly peon…
Now, all I can do is speculate on where this comes from. The most obvious, perhaps, is to say we have a two-sided brain that shows distinctively separate traits between the sides, and thus forces us to choose either left lobe or right, but I suspect that’s just a coincidence – pop neurobiology, as it were. The same holds true for our bilateral symmetry: two arms, two legs, two eyes… too easy.
No, I’m inclined (from my vast uneducation) to think it’s a survival trait. Fast decisions mean quick responses, which can make the difference between life and death when the choices are serious, and it wouldn’t take long before the fast deciders outnumbered the ponderous thinkers when you’re talking about getting the hell away from saber-tooth kitties, or turning the Flintstones-mobile away from the cliff. As the old joke goes, you don’t have to run faster than a lion to escape it, you just have to run faster than your buddy.
The problem with this whole “two choices” thing is, we don’t live in a world of black and white. There are a whole lot of grey areas – in fact, everything is. So when we resort to trying to categorize our choices into one of only two bins, we end up having to change them to fit. Sometimes, a lot. But are we making decent decisions if we change the details so we don’t have to think too hard?
Our brains are amazing things, capable of tracking billions of bits of information, though most of that seems to be annoying tunes. Douglas Adams once observed, however, that we can calculate momentum, wind resistance, and gravity so quickly that we can actually catch a thrown ball, and this says nothing of striking it with another object and redirecting it in an arc out of reach of outfielders. We can calculate the growing distance between two headlights and determine that an oncoming car is not only not far enough away, but approaching too quickly to pull out in front of (except, of course, in North Carolina, where people seem to have lost the ability to do this).
So, two choices? That’s ludicrous – we can handle hundreds without breaking a sweat. But we avoid it, over and over again, and try to make everything good or bad, rather than dealing with simply, “A is better than B, but not better than C.”
Even worse, we fall for a really bad trap, the trap of, “my mind is made up.” Having narrowed our choices down to two and slotted each to their own side, we refuse to reconsider, or readjust if we receive further qualifications. That’s part of the problem in dealing with absolutes – you can’t have something that exceeds them. You can’t have something that’s darker than “black” or brighter than “white.”
But there are no absolutes in our world. There is nothing that is absolutely good, nothing that is perfectly black – the Hubble telescope demonstrated this nicely with its Ultra Deep Field photos (and yes, if you haven’t seen these, follow that link). Everything is shades of grey, everyone is somewhere in the middle. They may do things we agree with (by which we call them “good”) and may also do things we disagree with – and I’ll bet vast sums of money, this can be said of everyone we’ll ever encounter, no matter what our criteria. For instance, I can hear someone denigrate photography and still not consider them evil incarnate (though it’s a struggle).
Right now in the US, our political system has become so ridiculously polarized that the current president, considering socialized health care reforms, is routinely compared to Hitler! There is such a thing as trying to avoid using any brain cells at all no matter what, and this is a prime example. And after all, Hitler routinely executed the mentally ill, which would have eliminated those making the argument in the first place. We need to stop using our two bins and start actively considering all of the factors involved in any decision. It’s certainly possible to disagree with various factors within reform programs, but to compare all such programs to a genocidal maniac is evidence that we’ve allowed this quick-decision trait to exceed our brain’s primary function.
In the photo above, the lighthouse is painted black and white. But the black and white portions both have their own light and dark areas, and in fact, the bright areas of the black stripes are brighter than the dark areas of the white. And as much as I hate analogies, this is an illustration of seeing things for what they are, rather than going for the quick answers. We’re better than that.
By Al Denelsbeck, on August 20th, 2009
I bet you’ve asked yourself that dozens of times, haven’t you? Admit it. Well, the answer is, “Pretty much the same thing other people do.” Now that I’ve resolved that burning issue for you, you can remember me in your will.
But, from the more egocentric universe of this blog, on occasion, nature photographers (meaning me) venture out and try to find things not visible or possible during the day. This may include long exposures by moonlight (I’ll have a post on that later on), starfields, or nocturnal critters. A few nights ago, I strolled around my property with an LED headlamp to see what I could find. The days had been very hot and humid, and the night was only slightly less so, but this meant the dew was slow in coming.
The first interesting thing I found was something I’d heard about before, but never witnessed very often. Having a light source fairly close in line to your eyes (in this case, emanating from approximately the center of my forehead) can show some distinctive reflections that aren’t visible if the light is farther away. I’ve used this before to find alligators at night, back when I lived in Florida – their eyes produce a brilliant orange reflection almost as bright as a highway marker. Tonight, the effect was dimmer but a rich blue-green color, a tiny star on the ground.
Continue reading “What do nature photographers do at night?”
By Al Denelsbeck, on August 11th, 2009
No apologies for putting that song in your head.
Others have approached this subject, but I felt the need to post about it because a) no one has covered all the details that I think need to be covered, and b) I don’t think, in our culture right now, another voice chiming in is too many.
In the United States at this time, there is this strange perception of science. It’s as if there’s a breed of people that call themselves “scientists,” and the strange rituals that they practice are called “science.” There is a distinct set of rules that everyone must obey, and pronouncements from scientists are considered beyond reproach. Naturally, those that seem to hold this perception are part of the resistance, referring to ivory towers and scientific dogma. Alongside this is the kneejerk reaction to a perceived elitism – in essence, people being defensive over their own level of education (and/or lack thereof,) and allowing as to how they never needed none of that book larnin’ and have been doing just fine. This is the “common man” that politicians and TV programmers like to pander to.
But in a far more subtle way, science and scientists are often held as a distinct subculture, one that borders of the fringes of proper society. Scientists, unable to integrate or even understand common culture, involve themselves in their own little world and, should they dare to intrude, are treated with thinly disguised contempt.
Continue reading “She blinded me with “Science!””
By Al Denelsbeck, on July 25th, 2009
Over at the blog Twisted Physics, Jennifer Ouellette relates her views on an encounter during The Amazing Meeting 7, which prompted me to put out my own viewpoint, just as much for the sake of showing what “the other side” thinks.
In that post, she tells of being approached by an atheist who felt distinctly disadvantaged when speaking with someone who believes in an afterlife, because the atheist outlook seems so bleak by comparison. I blinked at this point, and repeated, “Bleak?”
Continue reading “Bleak?”
By Al Denelsbeck, on July 20th, 2009
Today marks the 40th anniversary of a remarkable accomplishment for us, as a species: Walking on the surface of another body in our solar system. Despite the politics, despite the nationalistic fervor, despite the questionable use to us at a time when we had lots of more important things to think about on our own planet, despite even the fact that Armstrong flubbed the line (I’m sorry, really, but he did), this one event will stand forever as a milestone for all humankind.
I was three years old – I missed the awe and the excitement by a mere smidgen of attention-span and understanding. And I’m sorry to have missed it. But I also grew up on the space program, collected books and photos and posters, built models, and watched the later Apollos and soon afterward, the Skylab missions. Even at a young age, I could absorb some of the amazement at how much we were accomplishing from an engineering standpoint. As I grew older, this has only grown – the space program was a peak in our scientific problem-solving capability that I feel safe in saying we haven’t surpassed since. We flirted, in so many ways, with disaster, and regretfully witnessed it a few times. Not just Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, but Bondarenko’s pressure test fire and Soyuz 1. There are those that feel that any lives lost represent both too much risk, and a failure of the programs. I can’t agree – some things are worth the risk, and every one of those who lost their lives in these endeavors knew just what the stakes were. Hell, give me the choice of a rocket exploding underneath me on the way into space, or dying in bed of cancer, and I’ll go with the rocket every time.
What’s funny is that, now that I think about it, my perspectives on this as I grew up seem to parallel our country’s perspectives on the space program. Early on, it was fascination, awe, wonder, and a pretty powerful desire to do that myself someday. Then it began to get more detailed as we got past the excitement of walking on the moon and began seeing what else we could accomplish with Skylab, living in space and working in shirt sleeves. Still very cool, but not “exploring” and “new frontiers” so much. Then the promise of the space shuttle, going from initial sketches to the idea that this really was going to fly, soon marred by the budget and design issues. The various tests of the shuttle would perhaps have been more fascinating if they didn’t seem to be repeats of the Mercury and Gemini tests – now it was almost beginning to be routine. And finally, we started seeing the shuttle from a cost-effective viewpoint, all grown up now and trying to balance the budget. It’s a shame, really, because the space program gave us so much wonder and pride, and the energy to do just about anything, and now we seem bound up by responsibility.
In direct contrast to this public attitude, it seems to me, is what we have added to our body of knowledge during that same time. I grew up with books that speculated on where the moon came from and where the age of the universe was “between 10 and 20 billion years.” And I watched all of this change, and not gradually either. Black holes, speculative when I was even in high school, are now virtually proven, and we have mapped the variations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, the dissipating heat from the origin known most unfortunately as the Big Bang (13.7 billion years ago, now). Astronomical knowledge has grown, well, astronomically, and we add to this constantly. We have a satellite in orbit around another planet that took a photograph of a planetary probe as it descended by parachute! Not impressed? We have hundreds of satellites in orbit around our own planet, and to the best of my knowledge we have no photos of any spacecraft entering our atmosphere.
Take a look at that photo above. Right in the center, there’s a dark lunar Mare, and to the immediate right, there’s a brighter portion about like a chicken head eating a speck. From this perspective, just below and to the left of that speck is where it all began. That’s Apollo 11’s landing site. Yuri Gagarin was a hero himself, don’t get me wrong, and so were all of the other spacefarers who contributed to every country’s program. But right there, 40 years ago, we knew what we could accomplish. We walked on the moon.
If you lived through it, or even close, be sure to take aside someone much younger and try to convey some sense of this spirit. We still need it.
By Al Denelsbeck, on July 14th, 2009
…or perhaps, with certain people doing so.
No, I’m not going to attack what other people choose to write about or how they do it. This is a blog – it’s supposed to be about me! ;-). What I’m starting to find now is that I don’t like writing something as a “stream of consciousness” or introducing an idea. I’m a personality type (I think, anyway) that likes to present something as a complete work and orderly concept, rather than as an initial thought. So, while I have ideas for posts that occur to me several times a week, I don’t like the idea of just hurling them out there. I much rather prefer a finished form.
There’s perhaps something good about this, in that I’m not writing something that I’m more likely to look at later and cringe (note that I said “likely”). I’m never really sure of how “public” such a thing is, at least at this stage – I might have four readers right now, so that counts as less public than many things I do for my job. But, perhaps, that may not always be the case, and will I feel comfortable with what I’ve written before?
The problem with “finished form” is that, too often, there is no such thing for me. Some ideas that I have that I consider compelling just seem to lead further onwards. Do I pick a stopping point? Or should I try to flesh it out better and complete the path? If I choose the latter, I find that I’m now trying to write a complete magazine article, self-edited, with fact-checking and sources. While not a bad pursuit, that kind of defeats the purpose.
I’m also sensitive about writing something that I think is pretty cool, that’s actually been examined in depth by someone else – I feel like that’s just showcasing my ignorance (“Hey! What if we sliced bread ahead of time?!?!”). There’s a trap to this way of thinking, in that there are very few subjects that are unique. It’s the same kind of trap that I fall into with photography, and that I have actually argued against – the artist that insists on being unique has got a huge challenge ahead of them, and may only achieve “being weird.”
And finally, there’s this last little concern: giving away an idea. I’m writing stuff for eventual publication right now, or so is the goal, and there’s a certain amount of competition to that. I have to be sure in my mind that I’m not going to want to develop some post idea further and do a full-blown article on it. First of all, having the same thing in short form on a blog seems to indicate to an editor that I have too few ideas (maybe? I could be imagining this), but it also could mean that someone who’s a faster writer runs with the idea before I do. This is probably the least of the worries, but it’s a factor nonetheless.
So, my posts are less frequent than many – but that makes them better quality, right? Yeah, sure, that’s it…
Anyway, feel free to chime in with your own thoughts.
By Al Denelsbeck, on July 9th, 2009
Okay, this is kind of a frustration. It’s also kind of an accomplishment. What you’re seeing above is a northern black racer (Coluber constrictor constrictor) that has just captured an eastern garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis).
I was cutting up a trail through the woods while at work when I heard a rustle practically at my feet. One of the things I teach in my classes and seminars is about finding photos with your ears – sounds can lead you to photographic subjects quite frequently. In this case, it led to what I initially took to be a black rat snake alongside the trail, roughly a meter long. His head was hidden from view, and curiously, after the initial sharp rustle, he was motionless. I started edging around to get a better view of his head, and spotted the body of the hapless garter snake, still writhing. I wasted no time in scampering up to the parking lot and snagging my camera from the car, as well as my cell phone, which I used to summon a couple of co-workers up to see this. While I waited, I stayed still and unobtrusive so as not to spook the snake under cover. The snake had made it clear it knew I was around as I returned with the camera, because it gave a vigorous vibration of the tail.
[A quick side note: Many snake species, not just rattlesnakes, vibrate their tail as a warning. Rattlesnakes just have a handy noisemaker. But other species can produce much the same noise as the tail drums against dry leaves, and it’s an impressive sound, let me tell you.]
Once the others had their opportunity to see it, I maneuvered into the brush a bit to get a better view of the head, and eventually secured a nice keyhole in the brush that allowed me to see the dramatic scene above. The accomplishment part of this was even seeing such behavior, much less getting a reasonably clear shot of it. Snakes feeding in the wild are incredibly hard to find. They know they are quite vulnerable during and immediately after a capture, and usually, to even effect a capture in the first place, they have to be motionless until prey comes within reach. We humans, with our noisy blundering way of moving about (even me), tend to let every species within earshot know we’re about. Now, snakes don’t have ears, but they can feel vibrations through the ground, so while we’re slightly more subtle to them, it’s not by a huge margin.
The frustration part of this was twofold. The first is that it was difficult to get any kind of view at all of the drama, as it were. Even cropped tight as this is, you can see in the photo the out-of-focus brush to either side of the subject (the tan haze to the right side is a branch too close to the camera to be in any kind of focus, but still illuminated by the camera flash), and this was as good as I was going to get. Trying to get closer would either have spooked the snake into deeper cover or caused it to release its prey. And as I said, it was well aware that I was around, and not happy about it. Thus the second part of the frustration: while I would have loved to photograph the remainder of the story, there was no way it was going to happen. The snake would undoubtedly have moved into deep cover to finish the meal.
As I thought about this afterwards, I realized I might have even been a factor in this tableau. Considering that I witnessed the death throes of the garter once I spotted it, this meant that the racer’s strike had not occurred long before, and was perhaps even the rustle sound itself. Coupled with their proximity to the trail, my sudden presence might have spurred the garter into the racer’s range, or maybe even have fatally broken its attention from a faceoff between the two.
Now, here are two things of interest from this particular shot. The first is that, the difference in the size of the two snakes is not a big one (though it’s hard to determine from just this image). This is a significant meal for the racer, and would last it at least a month from my estimate.
The second is a subtle one that adds a lot to the scene without, I suspect, most people realizing it. Snakes don’t have eyelids, and don’t change expression in any way. Both species have a natural ridge above the eyes that we tend to see as an eyebrow, and gives them a slightly mean frown to our eyes. In this case, the angle of the garter’s head hides the ridge and gives it a wide-eyed look, while the angle of the racer’s exaggerates the ridge and makes it look nasty. Given the poses, we automatically expect such expressions, but there’s no expression there for either of them. What we imagine we see, however, fits with the brutality we assign to this action. It’s important to remember that we can’t assign human traits to this, and what we’re seeing is simply normal behavior in a world we pay too little attention to. There’s no animosity, no emotion – the racer was hungry, and the garter not fast enough. So it goes.
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