I left you hanging with yesterday’s end-of-month abstract, so I am making good on it and revealing just what it was now. This is almost disorienting to me, because the weather has changed drastically since it was taken and it really wasn’t that long ago, after the sleet and freezing rain. So let’s take a look at the original.
Note, first, that letting the camera meter off of the bright white sunlit surface was enough to darken the frame down significantly (because camera meters are set to render a middle tone and don’t ‘know’ that what they’re reading from should be white,) and I purposefully darkened it another 2/3 stop to enhance the contrast. As much as it looks like snow, this is actually the crunchy surface left behind by a sleet storm that turned into freezing rain, so a bit coarser and rougher than snow. Perhaps a bit more reflective, too, but at certain angles, the rainbow glittering of tiny reflections was evident, and that’s what I aimed to capture.
But then, I wondered about enhancing those sparkles, and started playing with the Curves function in GIMP.
What this shows is how all but the brightest registers were reduced significantly, and luckily, all those sparkles were much brighter than the icefield. The normal ‘curve’ would be a diagonal line across the middle of that histogram, lower left to upper right, but here it’s bowed down significantly, and you can see from the underlying grey mountain peak in the graph that most of the image was centered on the middle tones. When they were reduced, the sparkles could be seen much easier. Simple!
What did it really look like, in person? Well, something about like this:
… except that I can’t render it more accurately here, because there’s no way to make the glittering reflections almost blinding in nature; the dynamic range of digital images and the monitors that display them is much, much smaller than what happens in real life, and until we have monitors that could make you squint and see spots afterwards, this is as close as we’ll get. I am kind of puzzled by this, though – with all of the advancements that have been made in displays and LCDs and all that, increasing the dynamic range, the gamut of brightness from their version of ‘pure black’ through ‘staring into the sun white,’ hasn’t really occurred. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.
Meanwhile, how come nobody has designed glass that simply filters out all light that passes a certain brightness? You could be driving, and the low winter sun through the trees or that nasty reflection from someone’s rear window is simply rendered as black, or at least a hell of a lot darker. Just selective polarization from intense light. There must be a way to do this…