To thine own creepy self…

Al Denelsbeck

DuckweedDragon
“So, Al,” you begin, (“you” meaning someone who reads this blog regularly, possibly an entirely fictitious character, and not necessarily you yourself, but thank you if it applies,) “are you trying to tell us that you spent all that time in Savannah, the edge of the subtropics, and did almost no insect photography? Seriously?” And to that I reply, “Well, my own area is such crap for landscapes and even sunset images, so I was wisely using the opportunity to fill out my stock in other areas.” So there. But I did indeed chase a couple of arthropodal subjects, including some detail shots of one I’ve had on my list for a short while now.

SpindlyLong-jawed orb weavers (genus Tetragnatha) are a curious spider found most often – in my experience, anyway – on trees and reeds alongside water sources, but they also can be very fond of docks and boathouses. They have two outward appearances that are fairly distinctive, which is the pose at right when they’re out in their web over the water (you’re seeing a reflection of the sky in the water, since I’m aiming downwards,) or when threatened, they go to one of their web anchors and draw their legs into a straight line with their narrow bodies, blending into the thin leaves they live near. There are grassland varieties as well, but the aquatic-oriented species are the ones you’re most likely to see, and of course the one I captured here. There is a distinctive feature that they have, their namesake actually, which is only visible when you go in for close examination, and that’s the only warning that you get after the snarky way you opened the topic.

LongJawdBelly
Here’s a slightly better look from the underside. The widest part of the body is their chelicerae, or fangs if you prefer, but it’s more than just the pointy bits that they stab poor unsuspecting mayflies with, since they’re jointed, manipulating digits. The thin little arms between the front legs are the pedipalps, their girth marking this specimen as a female. But of course I had to go closer, and in doing so, the spider spooked and ran up to the anchoring tree, positioning itself against the bark in camouflage mode.

LongJawdBody
Here’s the body shot, and no, night did not fall abruptly. I switched to full-on macro mode, which meant diffused flash unit, small aperture, and high shutter speed, and so the background was no longer bright enough to create its own exposure – especially in the early morning when I was doing these shots. Even as spiders go, Tetragnathas are not pretty examples, but you have to admit their abdominal coloration is interesting. And now you can start to get the impression of how disproportionate their chelicerae are – and also that their eye pattern, two rows of four each, is somewhat unnerving. It gives an idea of just how evolution has shaped us to react to certain details, because the eyes are way out of our comfort zone, preventing us from having the least little sympathy with such species.

LongJawz
LongJawz2Here’s a better look at those chelicerae, the best I managed – my model was shot in situ with only some nudges to try and achieve a better angle, so conditions were a bit limiting. They’re still sufficient to see that the chelicerae are these studded war clubs of appendages, two big cans of whupass with easy-open tops (no, I did not learn my writing style from Shakespeare or Dickens, why do you ask?) While I would like to offer some insight into why Tetragnathas require such huge canines, I’m afraid I’m at a total loss, since their food consists of flimsy slow water flies that certainly don’t seem hard to subdue – perhaps their venom is especially weak so they have to beat their prey to death. As you ponder this, take note of the coloration on the chelicerae and lower ‘face,’ in the image above, continuing the theme from the abdomen and indicating that the carpet does match the drapes (yeah, I’m in one of those moods.)

I feel obligated to offer a little perspective, since these closeups may be provoking the wrong impression. Despite the daunting appearance of this species, my models were incredibly shy, as many spiders are, and getting this close took a fair amount of playing around since all the arachnid wanted was to hide. Even as I gently nudged her with a blade of grass, she timidly dodged aside, and eventually scampered off across the bark for a tighter crevice – I don’t think I could have induced a bite if I tried. Sound effects technicians, faced with having to try and find something appropriate for the menacing giant spider in any given horror sequence, resort to chittering, hisses, or even clattering (of the limb joints I guess,) but a more accurate expression would probably be a puppy whining.

I mentioned above something about how we react to eyes, and species like the one below (photographed at the side of the same pond) generate more sympathetic responses from people. Jumping spiders, however, are often fearless little cusses, rarely hesitating to walk across one’s hand or even jump onto the camera, and the easiest to get a portrait perspective on because they’ll actually turn to face whatever approaches. We find the other eyes easy to ignore and focus on those big two, and create a personality for them even when they have no more, and no less, that the Tetragnathas. Humans are weird.
BandedJumper

Buried at the crossroads

Al Denelsbeck

I wish I could draw political-style cartoons, because then I’d open this with an illustration of an unkillable zombie, or maybe Jason from the Friday the 13th franchise, with the label “Free Will” on it…

This time around it’s an article in Slate from Roy F. Baumeister entitled, “Do You Really Have Free Will?” Baumeister is an ’eminent social psychologist,’ which may explain why he only approached the concept from the psychological angle. Unfortunately, that’s not really where the issue lies in the slightest, and in a way, this makes me glad I never got edumacated since now I can consider topics from angles other than my own narrow specialty.

It’s almost a rule that, when the title of an article asks a question, the answer the article will come to is, “no.” Baumeister, perhaps consciously, thwarts this by maintaining that yes, indeed you do have free will – but then again, it’s there in the subtitle: “Of course. Here’s how it evolved.” To support this, however, he chooses to define free will in his own way, and ignore all of the other points raised ad nauseum over the years. It’s a shame, because the article starts off promising enough:

It has become fashionable to say that people have no free will. Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will. Others note that people are unaware of some causes of their behavior, such as unconscious cues or genetic predispositions, and extrapolate to suggest that all behavior may be caused that way, so that conscious choosing is an illusion.

Good – at least he’s aware of the many points raised, and the original article has links throughout this paragraph to send the reader in search of more info.

Yet, he addresses none of these, treating them as he hints at in the above paragraph as being from a narrow perspective, which he then perpetuates. He says,

Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom,

but then,

These arguments leave untouched the meaning of free will that most people understand, which is consciously making choices about what to do in the absence of external coercion, and accepting responsibility for one’s actions.

Well, yes, that’s the conventional wisdom. The point is, physics operates in very predictable ways, and we are physical beings – the rather obvious conclusion is, we should be able (in theory) to predict what our decisions would be, and that means everything we do is determinable, and thus determined since the start of the universe. The “in theory” part is there because the amount of information necessary to do this is so vast we don’t have words to describe it, and it does recognize that there are probably laws of physics we don’t even know yet. Doesn’t matter – what we do know is working pretty damn well.

Naturally, this leads to the concept of determinism, or predestination if you prefer, and the simple extrapolation from there that we didn’t make the decisions, they were just a byproduct of the physics involved. Which then trashes Baumeister’s simple definition above. The coercion isn’t external, though, it’s internal. Is that what Baumeister is talking about, or isn’t it? Doesn’t matter – it’s what nearly everyone else is talking about, so if he is purposefully avoiding the subject in this manner, he isn’t actually addressing the topic.

Which is funny, because at times, he makes very pertinent points:

There is no need to insist that free will is some kind of magical violation of causality. Free will is just another kind of cause. The causal process by which a person decides whether to marry is simply different from the processes that cause balls to roll downhill, ice to melt in the hot sun, a magnet to attract nails, or a stock price to rise and fall.

Excellent! Yes, our brains are made up of physical matter, and what they do is based in physics. But then,

Different sciences discover different kinds of causes. Phillip Anderson, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, explained this beautifully several decades ago in a brief article titled “More is different.” Physics may be the most fundamental of the sciences, but as one moves up the ladder to chemistry, then biology, then physiology, then psychology, and on to economics and sociology—at each level, new kinds of causes enter the picture.

No. Wrong. In fact, horseshit. There are no different causes. What anyone is using in such cases are what are sometimes called emergent properties, or to be less pedantic, a collective process that just makes conversation easier. Stuff that we eat performs the same chemical energy exchanges as everything else in the universe, but because it occurs in a specific manner common to many species, we call it “digestion.” It is not a different cause – it is simply an easier and more specific term than, “exothermic reaction,” or even, “entropy.”

And therein lies much of the problem, because it is the very idea that there is another ’cause’ that sets off so much of the debate, from those trying desperately to support their idea of a soul or those who like the dualistic mind concept. Does Baumeister address these? No.

As Anderson explained, the things each science studies cannot be fully reduced to the lower levels, but they also cannot violate the lower levels. Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization. Even if you could write a history of the Civil War purely in terms of muscle movements or nerve cell firings, that (very long and dull) book would completely miss the point of the war. Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them.

One of the many benefits of the scientific approach in the past century has been crossover – biology tying in firmly with chemistry, astronomy tying in irrefutably with atomic physics, and even psychology meshing in surprising ways with genetics (please don’t take that to imply, in any way, that psycho-social disorders are all genetic.) What we have found is that physics, deep down, combines them all. Baumeister implies above, perhaps only as misdirection, that physics applies only on the active level, muscles and nerves, and that the mind is something else. Like everyone that takes this stance, he never bothers to explain how this might be and where it occurs.

No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life,

Well, yes, they can – mostly they tell us that our common definition of “life” doesn’t really apply very distinctly, and needs to be fudged for every application. An atomic chain reaction performs many of the same functions of life, in energy release and sustained reactions, as does fire. If we want it to mean replication of genetic material, viruses do that, but perform no energy exchanges on their own (they co-opt a host cell to for that function.) So, what definition of “life” is he referring to here?

…let alone the meaning of your life.

… annnd so casually, almost negligently, Baumeister introduces a philosophical angle without the faintest provocation. I’m game – what is the meaning of life, from free will, or the psychological angle, or indeed, any goddamn perspective you care to name? Baumeister doesn’t have it either – no one has given it a solid go, honestly – but apparently we are to believe it is a failing of all those vermin who deny free will when they cannot produce it. Tactics like this annoy the piss out of me, and it’s much worse from someone who isn’t grasping his topic very well.

As for physics explaining how the Civil War came about? You’d be surprised at how much it truly can tell us. DNA is a string of molecules bound by and replicated with mutual properties of attraction, the energy exchange of chemical bonds dictated by valences. These strings of molecules guide cells in protein development, which determines what kind of body traits develop, including ‘instinctual’ traits of the brain. Natural selection is a numbers game – whatever organism survives/reproduces best is able to spread its genetic heritage throughout a population faster than others. This gives rise to traits that tend to help the organism (and by extension species) survive. Among the traits that humans developed over their long history are fairness, cooperation, and functions that support tribal cohesion and produce negative reactions to being taken advantage of. At the same time, humans compete for limited resources, and preferred mating status, and optimal social standing. That pretty much describes economics in its entirety, not from a definition standpoint, but from an evolved behavior one – and economics (and fairness, and competition, and so on) pretty much explains the Civil War – in fact, most wars. The path might be very convoluted, and be broken up into distinctions such as ‘cell division’ or ‘proxy-based trade system,’ but it’s not as if physics isn’t involved on every level.

Baumeister is outright saying here that the path isn’t this clear, instead involving some special step therein that thwarts physics and gives rise to the special property of free will – even when admitting earlier that free will is part of the causality of physics. This seems to indicate that he hasn’t really thought the matter through all the way.

The evolution of free will began when living things began to make choices. The difference between plants and animals illustrates an important early step. Plants don’t change their location and don’t need brains to help them decide where to go. Animals do. Free will is an advanced form of the simple process of controlling oneself, called agency.

So, does the sunflower choose to follow the sun? Does the oak tree choose to split and lift the rock? If not, what are they using, and how does it differ from agency and free will? Biologists know that they do not, and that all such distinctions are merely arbitrary divisions in the spectra of living functions. We often create divisions for convenience, but this does not mean such divisions are truly distinctive and separable.

Decision-making is just the same. Faced with two or more choices, we have functions that compare the consequences to select what choice is most to our benefit, for whatever criteria seems to apply – and to assign importance to this choice, making us motivated to consider carefully rather than flippantly (most times, anyway.) This is the realm of emotions, the positive/negative feedback functions we have that we even see in other species to varying degrees (those that want to argue that dogs or mice, for instance, do not have emotions have to define what exactly emotions are first.) But are these different than the functions within a seed that make it sit dormant, in an envelope perhaps, until surrounded by water and nitrogen-rich soils? How does a seed ‘decide’ to sprout?

It doesn’t – ‘decide’ is misdirection. When the conditions are right it occurs. And much the same can be said for free will, which in most uses is the importance we feel in making a good decision. This importance is what makes us react when we’re told we don’t have it, but this is misunderstanding. The deterministic traits of physics also dictates the presence, and activity, of this importance within us. And Baumeister largely says this, but in tortured, ridiculously misleading ways.

Living things everywhere face two problems: survival and reproduction. All species have to solve those basic problems or else go extinct. Humankind has an unusual strategy for solving them: culture. We communicate, develop complex social systems, engage in trade, accumulate knowledge collectively, create giant social institutions (governments, hospitals, universities, corporations). These help us survive and reproduce, increasingly in comfortable and safe ways. These large systems have worked very well for us, if you measure success in the biological terms of survival and reproduction.

If culture is so successful, why don’t other species use it? They can’t — because they lack the psychological innate capabilities it requires. Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there — it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.

Well, no – all that crap is simply anthropocentrism, the idea that humans are special. There are countless ‘cultures’ throughout the animal kingdom, if you bother to define it as common behavioral traits – canids have packs, birds have flocks, whales have pods, bees have hives, meerkats have communal child care, chimps practice adoption, and nothing destroys its environment like we do. Let’s not lose perspective.

All of that is evolved behavior. We can assign any portion thereof a fancy name if we like, but doing so doesn’t make it free from physical laws; we seem able to accept this easily when it comes to other species, just not for us. We’re different.

No, we’re not. Whether we like or dislike some fact of the universe doesn’t make it right or wrong, and the sooner we recognize this, the better. Right and wrong are also survival traits, in fact, part of that decision-making process. But they are also badly abused by misapplication. Decisions can be beneficial or detrimental; people are not right or wrong, and most especially, bare facts never are. They simply exist. However, the ill-feelings that people get when they believe that physics denies something that they consider to be important is responsible for all sorts of semantic jousting.

If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting. It’s what a creature might need in order to adjust its behavior to novel situations, to get what it wants while still following the complicated rules of the society.

This is all just utter nonsense. The complicated rules of society are just the desires within us to act cooperatively rather than individually – just like hyenas and sardines. We’re getting so far off base now it’s frightening. From a cognitive psychology standpoint, this is a hopeless jumble of motivations. We have social tendencies because we worked better in groups than as individuals. We view decisions as important to accommodate the nature of choice – automatic reactions do not leave room for individual variation or changing conditions, so the ability to weigh consequences evolved. Many of our decisions are badly biased by group influences, as can be seen everywhere, while ‘free will’ is, as Baumeister describes it at least, a fiercely independent trait. But in reality they’re indistinguishable – our desire to ‘go with the flow’ will be treated internally just as important as our desire to think independently, because free will is the desire.

The vast majority of species that reproduce sexually select their mate from among many choices. Is this free will? You can call it that if you like, because we define such things arbitrarily just to make communication easier, but this in no way implies that it is a special property. Does the ability to select mates, or nest locations, or foods, make physics stop working as we know it? It’s a ludicrous question, isn’t it? Yet everyone who maintains that free will is a separate, special property is making exactly this argument. Regardless of how you might want to define it, there’s still an underlying set of laws, and these laws tell us, very distinctly and dependably, that energy behaves like this, all of the time, and matter will do this with the application of this much energy, all of the time. No linguistic two-step changes this in the slightest, regardless of how much anyone wants to draw imaginary lines around their favored domain.

But all of that is ignored in toto by Baumeister, which is a shame, because that’s where the debate lies. While he touches briefly on humans operating within physical laws without special properties, he somehow manages to avoid the consequences of this on the asinine concept of free will. And while touching lightly on evolutionary psychology, he nevertheless approaches the topic more from the dualistic brain/mind separation favored by too many philosophers and routinely dismissed by the majority of biologists.

And so, I’ll say it again. Determinism is highly probable – in fact, the only thing we have evidence of, like it or not (and if you don’t like it, at least try to find a good reason to deny it, rather than sophistry-laden philosophical arguments or the grave misunderstanding of quantum indeterminacy.) The functions within us, as determinable as they might be, also work to see that we are pleased with the act, or illusion if you prefer, of decision-making, and whether people eventually stop using the idiotic concept of free will or not will not ever change this. The universe might have a specific outcome, which we could see if we were omniscient, but we’re not, and we can treat life as a journey into the unknown as much as we do any coin toss (also, quite easily, determinable by physics,) any sports game, any movie we haven’t seen or person we haven’t met. While we dance among everything else in the rules dictated by atomic forces, what we experience and enjoy are the interactions we have and the bare fact that we don’t know what is to come. And that hasn’t changed.

Odd memories, part 11

Al Denelsbeck

Okay, this one’s just stupid, but that’s its charm.

Many years ago I worked at an extension of a humane society, a facility dedicated to dog training, wildlife rehab, and activities over and above the basic shelter services we provided – I was onsite caretaker and septic maintenance person (the Director felt it was easier and cheaper to train someone than to pay for monthly visits to examine the septic system – North Carolina has some righteous rules about wastewater.) One of the things added to the property was a small barn and corral, since we occasionally saw livestock and they’re kind of hard to house in a dog kennel.

Something that people never bothered to research, during their popularity in the nineties, was that Vietnamese potbellied pigs don’t stay small and cute, but get quite large as they get older. Come to think of it, they might not have been true Vietnamese potbellied pigs, just some breed bearing a resemblance when they were young that opportunistic breeders started selling, but whatever. The point is, we ended up with several over the course of a few years that ranged between 35 and 100 Kg (80-220 lbs.) As large adults, they were swaybacked, portly, bristly creatures whose eyes were sunk in the folds of the face, making them look like a political caricature of themselves. One in particular carried his dominance of the corral with a regal arrogance, accepting no lapse in obeisance from the others.

Then, we got a medium-small goat, and wanted to see if they would get along housed together, which would negate having to let them out in shifts. So one afternoon I set them loose simultaneously in the corral, with a hose and a pole ready, but remaining outside the fence to let them determine their own dynamic without my presence (this is more important than you might think – even domesticated animals behave differently when humans are about.)

The goat was completely cool with it all, as goats generally are – they’re mellow until things don’t go their way. The big pig, however, was very curious about this new resident, and wanted to ensure that it knew who ran the roost. He began puttering around the field in the general direction of the goat, making a string of little “buh” grunts as if playing with a toy boat – nothing overt, but conspicuously intruding on the goat’s space. The goat, accommodatingly, simply stepped aside to let the pig pass, which the pig took as encouragement – “it fears me!” Subtly increasing the volume and the speed of its grunts, the pig kept turning towards the goat every time it stepped aside, creating a humorous parody of a bullfight scored with asthmatic air compressor: “buh buh buh buh ¡olé! buh buh buh buh…”

The goat, having made the efforts to be Britishly polite, soon realized that this was not simply the blind meanderings of a self-absorbed porker, but an attempt to actually push the goat around, which was a perfidy that could not be allowed to continue. Almost negligently, the goat turned towards the pig, dropped his nose, and delivered a solid butt right smack in the center of the pigs broad, carunculated forehead.

“BUH!” exclaimed the pig, actually popping gently in the air backwards in utter shock. There’s a good chance he never saw it coming, with his eyes buried in flesh, but right there in front of him sat the goat, a mere one-third his own stately mass, svelte and dainty. Where else could it have originated? The goat, for his own part, watched for just a moment, satisfied that his message had been communicated, and dismissed the incident as inconsequential.

The pig pondered this. Obviously something had happened, but c’mon, he was pig! He ruled his land with an iron trotter. And the goat was this anorexic little thing, belly far from the ground and with eyes you could even tell the color of. Surely this was a mistake. So as the goat meandered off to look for vegetation or tin cans, the pig fired up the boiler again and started in the goat’s direction.

The goat, however, was no longer inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. As the grunts drew closer, he turned quickly and dropped his head again, but was still far from making contact.

“BUH!” repeated the pig with an even more frantic note, flinching from the threat yet untouched. No, there was no mistake; the goat was not going to brook any shenanigans from the pig, and had ways to make this memorable. Right there, the pig appeared to come to a decision: it would continue to rule the corral as Supreme Leader and Commander, but curiously it would never find any reason to have to enforce this with the goat.

And they remained that way, the goat doing as it pleased, and the pig pretending that the goat didn’t actually exist as it shouldered its way among the other pigs with great privilege. No worries.

Spectres and splattered bugs

Al Denelsbeck

ColonialCemetery
We had plans to do the whole downtown Savannah thing again this trip, and spent one day and one evening down there. The Girlfriend wanted to do a walking ghost tour again, taking The Younger Sprog with her, but I decided to skip that and do a self-guided tour, starting with Colonial Park Cemetery.

I’m not going to go into the whole history of the cemetery here – there are more than enough places to find it online – but I will say it’s a fairly classic old graveyard, nicely peppered with aged tombstones and twisted trees dressed in rags of moss, but it’s just a little too well-kept to fit the bill for really spooky images. Sunset was at seven-thirty and the gates closed at eight, so I had a small window of time to work with nice moody light, but it was limited. And there was no way I was going to chance getting locked into the most haunted place in America!

Okay, if you’ve read much else on this blog, you know I’m not too affected by that, and even if you want to get those feelings, the cemetery is in the center of town and far too busy for creepy chills. Most noticeable is that it seems, as the top image conveys, too empty to be very old. This is part of the history, since during the Civil War, occupying Union soldiers knocked down (and altered) countless headstones, so while the cemetery is full to capacity, a large percentage of the graves remain unmarked. Some of the markers were gathered up afterwards and affixed to the east wall, where they remain today.

WallofFame
I aimed for some artsy compositions and select vantages, playing with the conditions a bit, slightly hampered by my decision not to lug the tripod around – I just didn’t want the weight, and was glad I did so, because the evening was hot and humid and just the camera bag was taxing enough. But it did mean some of the things I attempted could have been much better with a firm support for the camera.

As the gates closed, I went to the darkest corner of the cemetery and purposely overrode the exposure meter to produce a dim, moody effect, bracing the camera against the bars of the iron fence. Regrettably, the lights therein were not the classic gas lamps visible in many other parts of the city, which would have done so much more for the effect, but I’m guessing the police want to see who’s trespassing in the cemetery after dark (I imagine it’s a common activity.)

BetterMood
After leaving Colonial Park, I wandered the streets a bit, looking for opportunities. A property posted with a “Consideration of Appropriateness” poster caught my eye, in too dim light to photograph. Since Savannah depends on its historic sections, any alterations to buildings within these areas is subject to committee approval – buildings must look as they did in colonial times, or as close as possible. As we found out on a later trolley tour, homeowners just outside of the border sometimes go for more flamboyant exterior colors, just because they can – an almost teenage defiance, though I imagine trying to operate a business in the historic district can be frustrating at times.

I eventually got down to the riverfront, the big draw of Savannah – classic buildings overlooking the slow river and usually forming the barricade along the two-story drop between city streets and docks.

SavannahRiverfront
I have to say I’m not too concerned with how a city looks, whether it’s historic or not, or whether the style is fashionable or whatever – it’s a city, and thus not very attractive to me. I did a few obligatory images, as much for the practice, braced against lampposts and atop walls – usually a few attempts, hoping to get at least one usable image without twitching the camera during exposures lasting as long as three seconds. I will say, at least, that Savannah has kept the tourist-trap, unbelievably schlocky stuff to a minimum – if you really need a sand dollar painted with glitter as a memento of your visit, it can be found, but you have to look for it. Restaurants, however, you can find easily.

RiverStreet
VoodooHouseEventually I met up with The Girlfriend and The Younger Sprog, who’d enjoyed the ghost tour – a different one than last time (there are perhaps dozens of ghost tours available in Savannah.) Their guide was quite good, very animated, and they had decided I needed to see a couple of the buildings they’d gone past. Seen here, the Voodoo House, or its companion (I was getting the info secondhand and websearches on haunted houses in Savannah have given me a headache from facepalming) is one of many with its own sordid history, and of course during a ghost tour at night there’s plenty of atmosphere (that’s a joke, but you have to wait for it to develop.) The house sits back from the street and is completely shaded from streetlamps, rendering it almost totally invisible at night. Some of the people on the tour, taking flashlit images of the house with their digital cameras, had produced the “orb” effect so dear to the ghost chaser, and the guide had imparted some wisdom regarding what the details meant – The Girlfriend couldn’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something like, dust would produce solid orbs, uniform throughout, but those with more halo or edged effects were “something else.” Since The Girlfriend was using a DSLR, both with and without a shoe-mounted flash, I felt sure she wouldn’t be seeing any orbs through her camera, though it occurs to me as I type this that I never saw The Younger Sprog’s pics, taken with a little point-n-shoot – she may have been luckier. Glancing down, I saw the loose dirt in the crevices of the sidewalk was fairly laden with mica, so I scooped up a handful and instructed The Girlfriend to trip the shutter exactly when I told her, making sure the camera was using its little popup flash this time. I counted down and hurled the dust into the air in front of her camera just as she tripped the shutter…

TheyreEverywhereIf you wanted proof that Savannah is the most haunted city in America, there you have it – the little spooks inhabit every grain of sand. I’m sure if you look hard enough you can find whatever kind of shape or face you want – I myself see an owl monkey, and a Tusken Raider (it’s subtle, but the joke is in there.) This is, of course, a simple optical effect, the flash’s light bouncing from reflective objects too close to be in focus, made more distinctive by a dark background – in optical terms, these are ‘circles of confusion.’ I’ve personally done it with mist, corn starch, soap bubbles, and now with glittery sand, and it’s more pronounced when the camera flash is very close to the lens (when the flash is further out, the sand/dust/whatever directly in front of the lens doesn’t get any light, since it passes above, and by the time they’re far enough away to be in the strobe beam, they’re in focus enough to be a tiny speck that’s usually ignored.) Focusing further out helps the effect, too, since close objects are further out of focus. Those that captured orbs on the tour might have caught dust, humidity, and possibly even something the guide provided. So yeah, “atmosphere…”

Our trip coincided with the appearance of the lovebugs – no, not sassy little anthropomorphic VW Beetles, but a species of insect all too well known in the southeast, Plecia nearctica. A little smaller than fireflies, black with red ‘heads’ (actually their thorax,) at times of the year they swarm in vast numbers, mating while in flight, and one ends up driving through clouds of them. It was my duty to clean the windshield, which was necessary every time we refueled. At one point during the daylight tour of downtown, they were so thick they were clustered on the building walls, and we had them walking on us. They’re harmless, and clean off easier than many bugs, but the numbers have to be seen to be believed. As we started down the road one day, a mating pair on the windshield made a valiant effort to stay put; the female was eventually clinging desperately by one leg and vibrating madly in the wind, while the male, facing backwards, was nothing but a blur anchored by his genitalia. Impressive, but I walked gingerly in sympathy for a while after that.

I didn’t do many photos downtown during the day – been done to death, really. Meanwhile, where else are you going to go for images of slug sex? That’s right. Anyway, I’ll leave you with a big version of one of my favorites from the cemetery tour. There’s an instrumental from the Simple Minds album Street Fighting Years called, “When Spirits Rise,” and that’s what came to mind even as I was framing this. It’s faintly spookier in grayscale with the contrast boosted (isn’t everything?) but I like the color version best.

SpiritsRise
And if you look hard, you might see the ghost of Cousin It…

Simons and Solenopsis

Al Denelsbeck2 Comments

The reflection of the camera logo in the glass was rather unfortunately positioned...
The reflection of the camera logo in the glass was rather unfortunately positioned…
On Day Two of the Valiant Quest for Chillin’ (that sounds so much better than “vacation,” doesn’t it?) we hit the Georgia Sea Turtle Center on Jekyll Island, still the best wildlife rehab place I’ve seen. The staff and volunteers demonstrated that our previous experience was no fluke; they went above and beyond in terms of personality and assistance. I think we’re all familiar with the plastic, forced-cheerfulness that some businesses believe customers will fall for, and trust me, that isn’t what we found here (or don’t trust me, and go see for yourself.) I had to feature this image taken by Our Female Host, because I loved the perspective, but it also demonstrates how the vet techs, in the medical room behind the viewing windows, will hold up their patients for a brief close look after they’ve done their exams – here, it’s a very young diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) who was getting routine measurements of growth. Diamondbacks are not sea turtles, rather a coastal wetland denizen, but their status is as questionable as their marine cousins due to habitat encroachment.

Moreover, the admission costs and the variety of gifts available in the shop are all quite reasonably priced, and they provide tours and special activities like educational programs and turtle nest walks. Sea turtles lay their eggs on the eastern beaches of the American continents, mostly the warmer latitudes, where the hatchlings emerge on their own and make their perilous way to the water, to spend years swimming some really remarkable stretches of ocean before returning to the beaches to lay their own eggs. Dwindling numbers of sea turtles worldwide, no small part of it caused by humans, has prompted programs to try and protect the populations we now have, and conservation efforts include monitoring nests to prevent damage and depredation by scavengers.
SimonorOz
SimonsChartPlaces like the Georgia Sea Turtle Center also rehabilitate turtles injured by fishing gear, boat propellers, shark attacks, parasitic infestations, and even ingesting those ubiquitous goddamned plastic bags (which they mistake for jellyfish.) Lil’ Simon, above, was named after Little St Simon’s Island where he was found, the sister of our next stop that day. The Center provides charts in the rehab area that list the details of the patients, solely for the visitor’s curiosity, and the staff is always happy to answer questions from the public. There are even large mirrors above the tanks for better views of the patients – the place is exceptionally well thought-out. And since so much of the staff in wildlife clinics are volunteers, always let them know how much you appreciate their efforts and drop a few dollars (or a lot of them) their way. It’s money a hell of a lot better spent than chasing the latest stupid phones or big screen TVs.

Of course, while at the Center, I took the opportunity to chase a brown anole (Anolis sagrei) that was displaying pompously on a bench. I could probably be in a medical clean room and still find creepy-crawlies to photograph…
GSTCAnole

StSimonLighthouseWe headed north a short ways to St Simon’s Island, visible across the inlet from Jekyll, two of the many chunks of land separating the sea from the coastal wetlands that usually get the name “barrier islands.” There, we monkeyed around (seriously – I’m not showing you those pics) on a huge twisted old tree under the lighthouse, did a few portraits, and went for a swim in the inlet. I got some practice on my “block all the ugly unwanted details with foreground elements and cropping” techniques – the area surrounding the lighthouse was loaded with cars and signs – and I looked, once again in vain, for a decent place to do some snorkel explorations. We did the obligatory walk around the touristy areas of St Simon’s before heading back to Our Hosts’ Place outside of Savannah. Now, I probably could have amused myself for the week without leaving the property there, since they had a nearby pond with a lovely cypress swamp area, a beehive, and even some visitors (by now, you should know I’m not referring to humans with that.) They also had a Gator utility tractor that their dogs adored riding in, which we used for some exploring. The pond, alas, was too small to make an airboat viable – no southern swamps are complete without airboats.
OlBlackwater
Unfortunately for me, what they also had, in great abundance, was fire ants. The red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) is a particularly disreputable little shit that I am extremely well-accomplished in locating. I was diligent, this time around, in examining everyplace I walked for fire ant mounds, but this was a pointless exercise, since they simply had the run of the property and could be found everywhere without the faintest indication of their presence, at least until my feet began the familiar itching, burning sensation that heralds their displeasure at human presence. In summer I am either in sandals or barefoot, since my feet sweat profusely in anything more and even my sneakers become some kind of biohazard after a day. I was forced, eventually, to wear socks with my sandals, which horrifies the Fashion Police but no more than the oozing leprosy of my feet would have. Fire ants produce large, pus-laden or fluid-filled blisters, way out of proportion to their diminutive size, and the effects can last a ridiculously long time. Suffice to say I hate the little fuckers and am researching ways to hasten their extinction. I did make several attempts to photograph them in detail (managing not to get stung at those times, believe it or not,) but their movements are so rapid that I could not produce anything useful at all. Then I discovered that I had already gotten images of the same species dismantling a dead honeybee under the hive.
RIFAs
The honeybees, by comparison, were quite mellow and allowed a very close approach without taking the slightest issue, even during their busy times of the day. We were gifted some of Our Hosts’ honey harvest as well, fed by whatever wildflowers the bees had found nearby instead of the commercially-popular clover, and this lent it a buttery, faintly sharp flavor as if it had a hint of molasses – very nice! As a tiny bit of trivia about honey, it is a natural antibiotic and almost impervious to spoilage, and the Georgia Sea Turtle Center (among many other medical facilities) uses it to treat topical wounds since it coats well and doesn’t introduce contamination nor cause antibiotic resistance in bacterial strains.
NoClearance
Yet, there was a distinctive something that Our Hosts could not provide, something that no trip to the subtropics should lack, so we did a short trip to the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge to find… gators!

AlsGatorThe Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog had never seen an American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) except in zoos, and that certainly doesn’t count, so we had to ensure that she saw one in the wild, and the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge is a pretty sure bet. Naturally, she had to show us all up by being the first to spot one, and the largest one at that – she had a rotten vantage point in the back seat on the grassland side of the drive instead of looking over the channel, and still found a beaut. Unfortunately, the height of the grass and decorum over approaching one weighing well over 90 kg (200 lbs) meant we have no really snazzy pics of that one, so what you see here is my meager find, whose head is as long as my blistered foot – just a leetle guy (it must be a male, since Our Female Host kept informing us that he was a Good Boy.) If you look close you can see minnows sharing the water alongside.

What was disturbing was that I spotted this one while the others had wandered elsewhere, did a few shots, and let it be, to find that it was gone when I returned with the others. However, it reappeared immediately and drifted right up to shore at my feet, obviously looking for a handout, which means assholes are going against all recommendations there and feeding the gators. Having alligators associate humans with food is quite obviously a bad idea, but too few people seem able to grasp positive reinforcement (or any kind of animal behavior,) which is one of the many reasons why I push critical thinking so much.

It should be noted that the Refuge’s Visitor Guide actually recommends letting a friend know where you had gone. Not just due to the alligators, but also because the trails are long, unshaded, lacking water, and bordered by swampland, mud, and open channels. People tend to think anyplace welcoming visitors is therefore safe, but this is true wetlands, which is challenging terrain to tackle unprepared. A car can handle the wildlife drive easily, but anyone hiking or bicycling should be prepared for demanding conditions.

And of course, alligators…
GatorTextures
This one’s not as big as it looks – I just used a long lens – but I liked the effect overall. I saw the sun shining on that slit pupil and had to go for this composition. You did not miss the minnows here too, I’m sure.

And a last quick note, before I close this post to and start another, where we actually got into the city of Savannah. Upon getting back, The Girlfriend almost immediately left on another trip, returning just today. While away, she found something that reminded her irresistibly of me, and had to get them. What did she find, this love of mine?
ShesGigglingYouKnowIt
Great.

Sun and Spanish moss

Al Denelsbeck1 Comment

JekyllMossAnd so, slowly, I return to posting, revealing in the process that the last three posts were scheduled ahead of time to appear when they did, since we just spent a scant week in Savannah, Georgia with friends. We fit in most of what we’d aimed for; the primary exception, for me, was being unable to find any scorpions, something I’ve been longing to photograph for a while, and additionally motivated by the recent purchase of an ultra-violet flashlight. Scorpions fluoresce under UV, remarkably so, and I’ve been dying to capture this myself, but it was not to be this trip.

The Girlfriend and I drove down, accompanied this time by The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog, who hadn’t been to Savannah before. The drive is about five-and-a-half hours road time, and our early start meant we arrived in time for lunch, before jumping back on the interstate again to drive another ninety minutes down to Jekyll Island. There were multiple motivations for this move; aside from Our Hosts only being free for the weekend, The Girlfriend was itching to return to the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, and I was itching to photograph sunset, at least, on the driftwood-strewn north beach. Since we’d arrived fairly late in the day by this point, I got to be satisfied first.

Before sunset, however, we had a few hours to poke around and see what could be found on the beach. I scared up a few tiny hermit crabs and a massive horseshoe crab for The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog to photograph and she, in turn, located a feisty blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) in a shallow tidal pool for me. This one put on an amazing display of bravado, actually clapping its left and right pincers together audibly, and we soon discovered why this might have been (other than the bare fact that blue crabs are ridiculously aggressive little suckers): the crab was just beginning to molt its old shell.

BlueMolt
I took up a position nearby, perched on a convenient piece of driftwood, and tried waiting out the process so I could have a complete photo sequence of this in optimum conditions, testing the patience (though they deny it) of Our Hosts, since I watched for over an hour. Seen above, the chitin has split along the rear and the crab is backing out, freeing first its hind limbs with the swimming flippers. The legs are drawn out in turn, and the pincers last, leaving the crab soft, pliable, and very vulnerable. However, this ended up taking so long, and I felt so guilty about making everyone wait for me, that I eventually gave up and rejoined the others for fluids and a snack (and bug spray,) before returning to the shore for sunset.

SunsetDriftwood-sNow, there are two things that negatively affect sunset photography. The first, rather obviously, is overcast or stormy conditions. But the second is the polar opposite – skies that are too clear produce weak colors and no interesting cloud lighting or moody backgrounds. And unfortunately, the latter was what we had for our evening on Jekyll. While the light from the setting sun will go amber at least, seen here and in the opening image, to get the deep reds and purples that make for the groovy landscape shots takes significant humidity, and that just wasn’t present. I’ve said it before: nature photography takes a bit of luck in getting the right conditions – the skill part is knowing how to use them and being in the right place when they appear.

A small tip for the digital camera users: set the white balance to “sunlight,” especially avoiding the “auto white balance” setting, which tries to recognize color casts and shift them more towards neutral. You want the color cast – that’s what communicates ‘sunset.’ You can even enhance these by using the “open shade” or “overcast” settings (which compensate for the reduced yellows and reds of those conditions by adding them in within the camera,) and you can even use a colored card to set a custom white balance if you really want to be tricky. It’s easier to do this in post-processing, in an image editing program, but of course we’re now talking about significant digital enhancement. All I did here was use the “sunlight” white balance setting.

KeyholePerhaps the most-asked question from my photo students is about getting decent sunset images, because it’s actually a bit tricky. The camera’s exposure meter aims to produce middle-tones, a nice average light level, and has no idea where it’s aimed or what’s in the frame – it just reads light and adjusts exposure according to a simple idea: that most images are made up of middle tones. Aiming into the sun, naturally, is flooding the camera with light, and to produce a middle tone from this means darkening the image way below what we’re seeing with our eyes. This may enrich the colors of the sky, but render virtually everything else into a silhouette. Or if the exposure meter gets a reading from a foreground object (the shady side towards the camera,) it may produce an exposure for that and bleach the sky out entirely white. There are several ways to deal with this – exposure compensation, bracketing – but the easiest is knowing how to aim the key metering area in the viewfinder at something that will produce the light level you want and locking the exposure there with the Auto-exposure Lock button (marked “AEL,” or sometimes with just an asterisk) and then re-aiming the camera to frame the image the way you want it. While this is a tighter crop of a larger image, I locked exposure while aiming half onto the log, half onto the water under the sun, producing an exposure that left the sky a little darker but brought in some detail from the shady driftwood. It is one of several different exposures, the one I liked the best. I shifted to let just a fraction of the sun peek through the gap in the wood, and a small aperture was what produced the sunrays.

UseIt-sAnd then, I made a small mistake: I let Our Hosts book our suite without asking them where, exactly, we were staying. There wasn’t anything wrong in the slightest with our room – quite the contrary – but it meant I made no plans to be up at sunrise to chase more images, unaware that we were a short walk from the east shore of the island and ideally positioned for such pursuits. I woke early anyway, but didn’t venture out until the sky was fully light, to discover the beach so close. It meant that the light was much fiercer than preferred (again, pretty clear conditions,) but I still chased a few images anyway, joined a little later on by The Girlfriend and Our Female Host. There was some delay caused by camera lenses that had been sitting in air-conditioning overnight and were thus cool enough to attract condensation from the warm sea air, requiring several minutes to warm up and get clear. While you can wipe condensation away, it’ll return immediately until the glass temperature is right, and for dog’s sake don’t switch lenses in these conditions; condensation on inner surfaces, especially in a zoom or on the camera mirror, can take forever to clear. But while waiting, I used the fog as a soft-focus effect and tried a few shots anyway, with halfway-decent results. I admit to tweaking contrast slightly higher for the image at right.

Just a short while later, I got a small break: a few spare clouds on the horizon blocked the sun for a minute, allowing some landscape shots with no glare and some interest above the horizon. I’m pleased with the steely appearance of the water, but did not get lucky enough to have a boat or some birds available when the sun was hidden. Next time, next time…

JekyllSunrise
Of course, immediately after breakfast, we headed over to the Sea Turtle Center where The Girlfriend obtained even more stuff to decorate the car, but more on that in a later post. Right now, we’ll backtrack briefly to the sunset again, because of a curious thing I’d inadvertently captured. Below, one of the shots that included the fishing pier off the north shore, again cropped from a wider image.

OverHere
NoHereAnd to the right, an inset of the same image, contrast enhanced slightly. While The Girlfriend and I were shooting down amongst the driftwood, it seems Our Hosts and The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog were trying to attract our attention from the pier – you can just make our Our Female Host waving. I hadn’t the faintest idea they were there, being only millimeters tall in the wide-angle lens I was using, and only discovered this a few days later when they asked if we’d seen them and I happened to check the images closely. Sorry about that, guys – I would have framed you against the sun had I known.

Not your typical view

Al Denelsbeck

This isn’t something that’s ever come up before here, but I’m a little bit of an aviation enthusiast, especially World War II. The air war in Europe and the Pacific was a unique period in history, in a niche that combined powerful aircraft with personal combat, something not seen with the slow, flimsy craft of WWI, and that vanished in the jet age. There’s also something special about the engines of that time – throaty, deep-voiced piston monsters. I remember long ago in central New York, hearing the bass growl of four rotary bomber engines approaching and watching a Consolidated B-24 Liberator passing overhead – there’s simply no other sound like it, not even close. Years later on, I found out too late that there was a small fly-in taking place in the airport behind where I worked, unable to take any time off to visit it. A fellow enthusiast and I stood in the parking lot after work and listened to a North American P-51 Mustang take off and fade into the distance, disappointed that it didn’t even fly out on the runway near our end. We didn’t know that the pilot had circled around for a close pass until just before the plane reappeared at less than 500 feet and better than 300 knots, hurtling down the flight line at a velocity that put everything else out of that airport to shame, emitting a howl that could be felt in your chest.

Yes, that's me
Yes, that’s me
In reading the details about the aircraft in the upcoming video, I noted that they said it was the only flying B-24J in existence – since I’d seen a B-24 go over in New York, and had walked around one at a show several years later in North Carolina, I had to wonder if it was the same one. Alas, my attention to detail was lacking; upon a little research, I discovered that the crucial bit was the “J” model, introduced late in the war – there are other models around, and I had seen the Commemorative Air Force’s B-24A at the one show, and likely overhead as well. The organizations that display the classic warplanes are like that; their income (and thus the ability to maintain the aircraft) is in part promoted by the uniqueness of the experience, so small distinctions like model are exploited.

Anyway, the video. Someone talked a crewmember of the Collings Foundation into attaching a GoPro video camera to the end of a gun barrel on the retractable belly turret of this (only flying) B-24J, and produced a fascinating perspective of this aircraft in operation.


The first noticeable bit is that the wind noise unfortunately overrides the marvelous sound of those engines. The second thing is the impression of being a rickety crate that comes from watching the vibration and flexing of the fuselage – except that it’s not the fuselage that’s moving, but the gun turret to which the camera is attached. It’s not surprising (or bad) that the turret has some play, because it has to traverse a wide field of fire and is supported by a single hydraulic column rising vertically in the center of the aircraft.

There are some details I’d like to draw attention to in the video. I’m not sure why the camera was mounted facing towards the turret rather than in the direction the guns faced, but it allowed us to see things like the cartridge chute underneath the barrel for ejecting the empty bullet casings, and the pair of dice suspended inside the ball turret (showing snake eyes.) The gun barrels themselves are shrouded in heat dissipating sheaths; .50 caliber (12.7mm) machine guns generate ridiculous amounts of heat, enough to warp the barrels with sustained firing, so the outer layer, connected to the barrel at numerous points, was intended to absorb heat away from the barrels and give it greater surface area to dissipate into the slipstream – this is much the same way a car’s radiator or the heatsink of a computer works. The holes simply increase airflow and thus energy transfer. Visible throughout the video is a bar extending from the belly of the aircraft just aft of the turret position – this is a bumper to prevent striking the tail during a nose-high landing.

At 5:38, watch the main glass in the turret to see the chase plane come into view – it appears multiple times in the video, and I think it’s the Foundation’s North American B-25J Mitchell. At 8:25, the bomb bay doors open; the B-24 was the only bomber with rolling “garage doors.”

As the turret traverses, you can sometimes see one of the waist guns projecting from the sides of the fuselage, closer to the tail – the J model carried ten .50 caliber machine guns for protection, which gives a faint indication of the demands of the European theater. Throughout most of the war, the Allied Air Forces had to operate almost entirely out of England, crossing the channel and usually a significant amount of the continent before reaching any bombing target. The bombers had the fuel load to accomplish this – the escort fighters generally did not. For much of the war, the bombers would have fighter escorts as protection for only part of their journey, but long before reaching the target the fighters would have to turn back through lack of fuel, so the bombers usually went unprotected into the most dangerous areas, where Axis fighters were thickest and closest to their own supporting airbases. While they had gun emplacements all around the aircraft, they couldn’t maneuver much at all when stacked into bombing formation, and wouldn’t have been a match for the agility of the Messerschmitt and Focke Wolf fighters anyway. Tracking an attacking fighter from a gun emplacement, accurately enough to do sufficient damage, was exponentially harder than maneuvering a fighter to nail the larger, slower, and predictable bombers, and countless bombers were lost under the onslaught despite the number of protective guns. And this says nothing of the anti-aircraft rounds, “flak,” that were fired from ground emplacements scattered thickly around likely targets.

Now, a note in general about restored WWII aircraft. Almost all of the ones you might find anyplace today never saw combat, for the simple reason that those that did were never shipped back to the states – that was an unnecessary expense in the wake of everything else post-war. In fact, the large majority of aircraft were scrapped, especially if they’d seen battle damage – the risk of airframe or component failure is sometimes accepted in wartime, but unwarranted in peacetime. Most of the restored aircraft in this country are ones that never got shipped overseas, being models not fitted for combat or that sustained damage before posting, and very often pieced together from multiple aircraft, whatever can be found.

The Collings Foundation’s B-24J is an exception, having served as a bomber and transport in the European theater before being transferred to the Indian Air Force, where it was retired in 1968. In 1981, a British aircraft collector found the airframe and paid to have it shipped to England, and then sold it to the Collings Foundation which paid to have it shipped to the States – as you might imagine, this was an expensive prospect, as was restoring the aircraft to flying condition. Parts are hard to find and often have to be machined by hand, and even original mechanical drawings are scarce – technology had moved on and no one saw any need to keep obsolete documentation. Restorations are usually by non-profit organizations staffed by volunteers, and funded by the public appearances.

So if you get the chance to see one of these birds up close, don’t balk at the costs – one day these will only be dusty museum pieces.

Commemorative Air Force's B24A
No, these images aren’t from the 60s, but they are close to 20 years old from negatives that didn’t weather well. This is the Commemorative Air Force’s B24A, converted to air tour duty with the removal of the bomb bay doors and addition of windows – it has since been repainted. Later models had elaborate nose and tail gun turrets, a top turret, and the belly turret we’ve just seen.

I’m not going to embed another video in the post, but go here if you want to see the startup and takeoff of three of the Collings Foundations aircraft, including the B-24J in the above video (second one that appears.) It’ll give a good idea of the sounds they make, though you’ll have to wait until the takeoff at the end. You’ll also see the difference in the nose configuration between the A and J models, and just why the belly turret had to be retractable. Or you can take a tour with Jay Leno through the interior of the B-17, very similar in layout to the B-24.

Don’t take it personally

Al Denelsbeck

It’s funny; I first read the posts which prompted this over a week ago, and have been thinking about this ever since.

To set the scene as briefly as I can, the first post can be found here, which details some highly questionable practices from a particular nature photographer, but admits that this is not isolated. The post covers everything from posed subjects to animal abuse, but the critical-thinker in me interrupts with a reminder of the distinction between “evidenced” and “inferred” – a few too many accusations in that post aren’t substantiated very well.

Now, just that single sentence in itself is enough to send too many people off into the accusation that I’m making excuses for the photographer, or think he was doing nothing wrong, or any variation of trying desperately to cram the whole issue into just two bins, “approve” or “disapprove” – this is partisan thinking, as if there are only two choices. However, that sentence means nothing more than exactly what it says; I issue this as a helpful guideline, because if anyone can’t understand that distinction or count higher than two, this post is going to be way over their head (Sesame Street is probably way over their head.)

The first post then linked to this “must-read” from Nicky Bay, a seriously accomplished photographer himself. Bay gives a detailed description of the proper ethical approach for nature photographers – or at least, his own take on it. Because the bare truth is, the term ‘nature photographer’ really only means ‘someone who takes mostly nature photos,’ and implies no particular approach, goal, education, ideology, or anything else. Everyone has their own preferences, and their own reasons for having them. For instance, Bay frowns on any kind of studio shot, and any kind of interference, up to and including getting leaves out of the way – he cites the negative impact he created once when doing so.

However, it’s not hard to find numerous nature photographers who not only violate these, they have good, rational reasons to do so (though the definition of rational is, naturally, a bit subjective.) More interesting though, is what you find when you start to examine the issue in detail. There is, quite distinctly, no such thing as “zero impact” – everything that humans do has some affect on their surroundings. While Bay may not wish to disturb a leaf because of his personal experience, I think it’s safe to say that he did not obtain his equipment by picking it up from under the Nikon tree where it fell naturally, nor does he live in a cave and use the all-natural internet. Walking up to his photo subjects undoubtedly wiped out thousands of tiny critters, as does simply going down to get the mail, to say nothing of hurtling through space in a car or airplane. I don’t want to pick on Bay here, since I’ve seen ethical guidelines from numerous different photographers, I’m just using his as an example.

I could point out that humans are not an unnatural species on this planet, having evolved with everything else, so the distinction of natural doesn’t have a viable meaning. I could point out that the leaves he purposefully avoids disturbing are continually eaten by herbivores or dislodged by storms. Both of those indicate that quantifying ‘impact’ in either a negative or positive manner requires a purposefully narrow perspective. I could also let this whole idea delve into trying to define avoidable and unavoidable impact, but that’s an unending argument, and one that moreover misses the crux of the matter. This crux is missed by damn near everybody, which is funny, because it comes from the very word that everyone uses blithely and assumes has a good definition: “ethical.” This stumbling block is always present, and nearly always ignored, often by people that should know better.

So, let me ask this: What does ethical mean, or if it’s easier, what is the goal of ethical behavior? If someone says, “We shouldn’t harm other species,” the first thing I’d point out is that this is manifestly impossible. Then I’d ask why we think our species should have special rules that other species don’t have, since the predator/prey thing, as well as the host/parasite concept, is everywhere we look. I’d also start messing about with the obvious history of mankind as an omnivore, and ask what makes this new ‘no harm’ rule functional?

It doesn’t take much to realize that ethical is defined solely by personal opinion, but it takes a little more thought to recognize that it’s a bare emotion masquerading as a discrete concept – while anyone can create a rationalization of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find even a broad consensus of what it means, or should mean. And even that ‘should’ part is loaded, because who or what makes us think anything should be, as opposed to simply seeing what is?

I’m going to save a lot of time, especially since I’ve been over this before, and say that our desire for an ethical state of affairs comes from badly mislabeled and misunderstood social behavior development. Because cooperating socially produced the greatest advantage to us, millions of years ago, it evolved to become an inherent part of our being. Like so much of our behavior, we feel better when we engage in certain social actions, because those worked better than any alternatives (such as being individualistic) – we might not like believing that we’re as guided by instinct as a housecat is when covering its excrement, but there really is no significant difference. And the primary ‘goal’ of any evolved behavior is survival. Or to put it more accurately, such behavior is what reproduced most effectively, so that’s what we ended up with – with any attendant imperfections as well.

This means that our desire for ethics is just an extension of survival behavior – and really has no application towards any other species not directly impinging on our survival. Whenever we say, “We shouldn’t harm other animals,” try asking why. What effect does it have? Should we care about how a bumblebee feels, or whether we’ve deprived a panda of its mate? How are we impacted by carrying a spider outside rather than squashing it? If, for instance, I don’t care while you do, does this make either of us right or wrong?

Once again, I could play with the various issues that arise, such as how this perspective introduces nihilism or some shit like that, but I can head them off handily by saying such arguments are the same exact thing already in discussion: whether someone likes the argument or not, whether their social instincts have kicked in where they do not have a distinctive impact on survival or even benefit.

There is no judgment being passed on this whole idea – see the bit above about partisan thinking. It simply illustrates that, to translate from, “I like/dislike this,” to, “this is important to us as a species/culture,” we need functional definitions of ethics and morality, which includes understanding what falls outside of such considerations. It shouldn’t be entirely up to what we feel, but what we have determined to be a useful goal. All of the philosophers who believe that science can not, or should not, mess about with morality somehow managed to miss this entire issue, and the huge difference between instinctual reactions (that are ridiculously subjective) and something with a measurable benefit.

Having thrown so much of our assumptions into question with all that, now I’m going to switch to another approach, because I have to have my fun too.

Using the images in that first linked post (repeat link) as an example, I can tell you that much of the reaction to the images, and especially the revealed techniques behind them, depends on what someone assumed about them in the first place. Any halfway knowledgeable naturalist or nature photographer knew at first sight that the images were staged. Red-eyed tree frogs don’t appear in those habitats nor around those plants (which in some cases are blatant fakes anyway,) raindrops do not appear that thick anywhere, nor rarely in such lighting conditions, and on and on and on. I can’t produce an accurate idea of how common or uncommon such image staging actually is, but genres like the greeting card industry adore such images – the byword is, “cute,” not, “authentic.” When acres of rainforest (and thus thousands of tree frogs) are being destroyed every day, what makes someone get all fired up over the staging, and potentially the stress, of a few isolated subjects? Mostly, it’s because they reacted to the “cute” while believing nothing untoward was behind it; they assumed circumstances without knowing. And in some cases, they then think someone else is to blame for their misconceptions. Yet, the greeting card industry is going to keep plugging right along, regardless of the implausibility of the images used, isn’t it? Because someone’s always going to buy them…

Now we can start asking all sorts of other questions. Does staging photos for greeting cards represent some form of illegitimate pursuit? [I’m going to ignore, for the moment, the purposeful misrepresentation of the conditions from the photographer, in that first link – let’s assume he admitted staging the images for this particular market, in open recognition that it changes other people’s perspective for no apparent reason.] If the market bears it, how does one define the ethics of it? What about paparazzi? They’re in public, getting images that magazines pay good money for, making a living with their particular skills – is this better or worse than a machinist for a defense contractor, one that specializes in ways of killing people? How often does someone bend over backwards to dismiss the latter situation as, “working hard to make a living”? Doesn’t the death of people rate a hell of a lot worse than abusing animals or annoying celebrities? Or do we separate the fabrication as a neutral pursuit, versus the end-use?

Paparazzi exist because so many people seem to think that a celebrity photographed on the street is somehow fascinating. So is it the photographer who deserves the derision, or the public that creates the demand? Before you answer, know that I can easily find a hot button for anyone out there, producing an ‘ethics’ question over the unhealthy nature of the food someone eats, or how little money anyone donates to charity, or the resources used to recharge and maintain goofy little phones that people love so much. And, to be sure, anyone can do the exact same thing to me. It’s easy to see that ethics should not simply be defined by disapproval.

This is the primary problem with generic ethics discussions, the kind philosophers love to believe they’ve got such a grip upon (while still not providing any useful insights after centuries of toying with the topic); ethical considerations remain completely vague and capricious unless a specific goal is defined. The feelings we possess naturally – empathy and commiseration and a desire for positive social interaction – are all survival-oriented; they worked better than other behaviors and thus won the selection lottery. So we could say that ethics should only deal with optimizing human survival. Yet, that’s not going to wash – killing baby ducks isn’t something most people will ignore, and they’ll fight to see that ethics includes this somehow, though the rationale behind it will either be vague, or overreaching, precisely because it is a rationale. There is no survival advantage to saving baby ducks; our instincts to protect infants just aren’t specific enough to exclude non-humans. Again, feelings, not functionality.

So what we come to is that ethics have to be decided for specific circumstances, with clearly-defined goals. In many ways, we already have this: business law, physicians’ oaths, athletic behavior, and many others. It’s possible to get a decent grip on ethics when it’s confined within specific circumstances, making it more like a corporate mission statement. This takes it out of individual interpretations and provides a base structure. Making the field or circumstances too broad is problematic, because few things that we might engage in can fall under giant umbrella rules without issues arising.

We’ll return to nature photography for an example. What do you think are the chances of seeing the underside of a beetle without disturbing it? Pretty small, you say? So if you’re in a biology class and trying to learn about coleoptera anatomy, how is it going to be illustrated, or should it simply be left up to imagination because no one wants to disturb the beetles? The photographer that sells their work for textbook illustration and related uses has a different set of goals and approaches than the one that produces habitat images, or artsy shots, or yes, even greeting cards. It’s not really feasible to say that there’s a set of ethics for ‘nature photographers,’ any more than there’s a set of ethics for ‘farmers’ or ‘parents’ (I suspect many parents even have different ethical rules depending on the age of the child – lying, for example.)

It’s fine to have a personal set of ethics, and this might be used to judge what actions to take in regards to others – by not purchasing animal greeting cards, for instance. Someone can chose to be a vegan because they don’t want to harm animals; others may chose to drive small efficient cars in order to reduce environmental impact. But there’s a difference between personal choices and what anyone else should be doing, and this distinction is lost way too often – opinions and feelings do not translate into goals for human behavior. Yet there may be good, rational reasons to possess some viewpoint, and it’s these that should be used whenever ethical discussions arise; establish the structure and the goal, rather than the assertion or the ideology.

This also surmounts all of the issues with using religion, politics, or nationalism as a guideline for ethics, all of which fail the objectivity test against anyone else’s personal ideology. But once you’ve established an agreement on a goal or purpose, then the rest is much easier to define, and harder to argue against.

The other thing to remain aware of is how much ethics is driven by ego. Nobody thinks they’re unethical, and even dictating what ethical behavior should be to someone else is enough to start them bristling at the judgment being levied – truth be told, there are far too many circumstances where this is exactly how ‘ethical’ is wielded, producing a pedestal out of nowhere for someone to sneer down from. It shouldn’t ever be a manner of (de)valuing others, just a method of reaching acceptable, fruitful goals – that’s the only property of ethics that deserves any respect in the first place.

I have purposely avoided indicating what I do personally, or what my approach to nature photography is, because that’s just another emotional thing for someone to latch onto and potentially cloud their judgment. And I think emotional reasons are just fine – for actions affecting just the individual. Whether you squash the spider in the bathtub or carry it outside is something that ultimately you feel better about – and just mentioning it is enough to generate the idea that the decision might have been entirely emotional, isn’t it? Nothing wrong with that, unless the realization suddenly produces guilt of course (isn’t this fun?) But when it comes to what a group, cultural, society, or species-wide behavior should be, the emotions need to be recognized and given the appropriate weight against pragmatic goals.

Here’s an example that pops up from time to time (mostly as an exercise): in both Germany and Japan during WWII, some pretty horrendous medical experiments were performed on people – it’s safe to say virtually everyone finds these unethical (though certainly too few did at the time, enough that it occurred, and this presents some interesting examination in itself.) However, the question that is posed is how ethical it is to use the information garnered during these experiments; should we benefit from the gross mistreatment of other humans?

Responses can actually be influenced by how the question is phrased, curiously enough, which indicates that impressions and emotional reactions often have their say in the matter – how it’s phrased really shouldn’t make a difference, should it? And the question is little more than an exercise, for two reasons. First, that information is used the moment you know about it; you can’t intentionally forget something, and it’s rather stupid to pretend you don’t know something that can have an impact on a present patient. Second, most of the information is already incorporated into medical journals, so it’s all, pardon the phrase, academic.

More importantly, though, what is either action going to change? Why, for instance, would you not use the information garnered? It does not suggest any complicity or even approval of the methods used, nor does it insult any living relative. It certainly doesn’t change whatever happened. If anything, the knowledge gained could be instrumental in helping someone later on, and it is certainly better than rediscovering some form of medical trauma by accident. It’s kind of a stupid question, when it’s considered critically. That, of course, is where the issue lies: critical consideration is often lacking, and sometimes even discouraged (see above about how the question is phrased.)

So, while anyone can consider disagreement over any action to be an ethics issue, this really doesn’t tell us anything – it may even be gross misdirection. Find the goal or purpose to agree upon first, and then determine what action best suits this. That’s the functionality of ethics, and the part that gets buried under too much other garbage.

In one of these images, the subject was placed in position; the other was taken without interference. Can you tell which is which? Is it important? Does it change either, or make one better than the other? Or does it only matter if I lie to you about it?
In one of these images, the subject was placed in position; the other was taken without interference. Can you tell which is which? Is it important? Does it change either, or make one better than the other? Or does it only matter if I lie to you about it?

The stories go on

Al Denelsbeck

MuggingMantis
This is the follow-up to several different posts made earlier in the year – it gives an indication not just of what life in the arthropod world is like, but how I pursue nature photography as well.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been five areas of the front yard that served as “photo subject preserves,” areas where I could frequently find something to photograph. Early on it was the holly trees, only a little taller than I am, and the only thing green during the slow arrival of spring. These have long since become almost barren for buggy life, since too many other choices are better now.

The azalea bushes right off the porch were the next go-to, hosting the juvenile mantises and the green lynx spiders. In the periods just before and after blooming, they were brimming with chitiny residents, and thick enough to provide plenty of hiding spaces. But as the days’ heat became more intense and the flowers died off, many things moved away.

FPMantisMoltThe first to go were the mantises, which departed in several directions – one that I knew of made its way completely around the house before vanishing for good. But two others began to inhabit the pampas grass patches, once they had grown to decent size. These are plants that do best when cut back and burned off in the winter, one of those tasks I view with mixed feelings. We have two different species, but both possess nasty leaves that can slice into skin surprisingly well, one more so than the other, which means cutting them back in the winter requires heavy sleeves and gloves, and still results in numerous “paper cuts.” But the pyromaniac in me (I’m male – ’nuff said) appreciates the burning part, since by that time they’re dry and catch easily. But this means they start the year as blackened stumps and take a bit of time before they’re thick reedy clumps up to three meters in height, becoming attractive to the mantises by then – each year they’ve played home to several.

One morning after a rain I found a molted mantis skin dangling from the pampas grass, and soon found the newly-emerged adult (top photo,) identified as such by her new wings. What had been an eentsy hatchling not a centimeter long was now a formidable insect the length of my palm. She remained in the pampas for just a few days before deciding that she needed a new home, perhaps prompted by the mating drive. So she moved to the butterfly bush.

This had been planted in the middle of the yard in the hopes of attracting hummingbirds, which it didn’t accomplish, and pollinators, which it did. It’s rather small to accommodate an adult mantis, but she made the most of the attractive properties of the flowers. At one point, I caught a katydid and moved it from the thick obscuring clusters of the dog fennel plants (more on them in a moment) to the butterfly bush for pics, then left it there and watched. Katydids make hearty meals for mantids, and I didn’t have long to wait since the katydid wasn’t holding still.

BushAintBigEnough

KeepYourHeadDown

WhyWhyWhy
There’s a mantis egg case coming soon, and I was hoping she’d choose to put it on the easy-to-monitor butterfly bush, but she moved off after a few days and has appeared in various locations around the yard.

Before she did so, however, she had a brief standoff with another resident of the bush, a green lynx spider. They sat facing one another for a long time, the mantis even tapping the spider on the back with its antenna, twice, but then the spider caught a fly and the mantis lost interest. Here I thought the distraction would have been the opening the mantis was waiting for, but it appears instead it was just a game of staredown.

Standoff
KingOfTheBushI’m almost positive the green lynx spider is one of the many that hatched out of a case on the pampas grass last fall, and first reappeared this spring on the azaleas. After a long period they left those bushes and three took up residence on the butterfly bush, where they ate like gluttons. Especially impressive is that they caught several of the Hemaris moths that I’ve chased earlier, surprising to me because of the size of the moths and the fact that they don’t land, but lynx spiders are wicked hunters. I’d love to show you a sequence of capture images, but there would be nothing to see without investing in some expensive equipment – it’s all over in a fraction of a second, and even a single frame would require either blind luck or timing that I, so far, haven’t nailed. But I’ve had the chance to see which butterflies are better than others at escaping the pounce, and one species of pollinator, common on the bush, that the spiders avoid. I also observed one of the spiders appearing rather agitated, making motions almost as if it was wrapping prey in webbing (which lynxes don’t do) while nothing was there. Then a nasty stench came to me, and I suspected that she had attempted to catch one of the stink bugs that frequent the bush. Since I never saw the bug I was never able to confirm this (she would have dropped it in the litter beneath the bush,) but the smell was pretty strong evidence. Heh.

FatLynx
One lynx spider vacated the bush quickly for points unknown (potentially even something’s stomach,) while two others set up shop in the bush for weeks, getting rather rotund in anticipation of laying eggs. Another specimen appeared on the rosemary bush and quickly spun her own egg sac therein, though she wasn’t anywhere near the girth of the one shown here (who did eventually produce her own eggs.) And one of the butterfly bush residents took advantage of a windy night and transferred to the dog fennel to create a third – I can always tell when the night has been breezy because the yard is crisscrossed with strands of web cast by traveling spiders.

The dog fennel has been an interesting accident. First appearing where I’d planted a variety of flowers last year, I left it alone because I had no idea what any of the flowers looked like when sprouting, and once I’d determined it wasn’t anything intended, it was already playing host to numerous species, and provided entire galleries of shots last year, mostly of lady beetles. It returned without effort this spring and is three meters tall, again providing homes to arthropods but largely not the same species as last year. The ambush bugs, curiously, have gone through little change while the development of the others species is easy to spot.

FemaleAurantiaCase in point: the black-and-yellow Argiope aurantia that I perved on earlier, who spent some time within the fennel plants before also deciding the butterfly bush was good pickings and setting up shop there. She has grown to a massive specimen, conspicuously suspended in mid-air over the bush (using one of the hummingbird feeders as an anchor and preventing me from refilling it – there are two more, so don’t fret.) Yet she’s gorging on swallowtail butterflies that can’t take the hint that there’s a web there. She has had a succession of suitors, which I’m able to differentiate because the number of legs keeps switching. I got to see one that was more agile than the first I’d photographed; once he’d get down to business and the female would make a sudden aggressive move, he would instantly drop out from under her to dangle 20cm beneath on his own safety line, giving her a few moments to cool down before making the attempt again. If anyone is annoyed at the dogged persistence of frat boys on the prowl, this is evidence that they’re closely related to spiders – feel free to quote me on that. Meanwhile, I would guess that someone was successful, except that making this assumption based on her waistline is one of those things you’re never supposed to do. I’ll know for sure when the egg sac appears.

In closing, I’ll leave you with another image of the mantis, shutting off the flash this time and shooting wide-open in the dim, soft light of approaching rain. The short focus effect made an almost surreal tableau that I’m rather pleased with.

PastelMantis

Heads up!

Al Denelsbeck

On Friday, September 6th, at 11:27 PM EDT, NASA will be launching the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) satellite from the Wallops Island launch facility on the Virginia peninsula. Viewers on the east coast of the US may be able to see it as it heads towards lunar orbit, since night launches allow the exhaust plume to be seen from great distances. See the post at Universe Today for more details.

My location lies within the viewing range, but the launch vehicle will be less than 10° above the horizon, which is a total writeoff unless I find someplace elevated, or a big lake facing the right way. We’ll see what happens. Though it may be a while, since the following week is going to be a busy one and I may not have the chance to post any results – any posts that may appear then will likely have been scheduled ahead of time.

LADEE Minotaur V Launch – Maximum Elevation Map The LADEE nighttime launch will be visible to millions of spectators across a wide area of the Eastern US - weather permitting. This map shows the maximum elevation (degrees above the horizon) that the Minotaur V rocket will reach during the Sep. 6, 2013 launch depending on your location along the US east coast. Courtesy: Orbital Sciences
LADEE Minotaur V Launch – Maximum Elevation Map
The LADEE nighttime launch will be visible to millions of spectators across a wide area of the Eastern US – weather permitting. This map shows the maximum elevation (degrees above the horizon) that the Minotaur V rocket will reach during the Sep. 6, 2013 launch depending on your location along the US east coast. Courtesy: Orbital Sciences
** Text shamelessly stolen from Universe Today

The Minotaur V launch vehicle is a new design, a five-stage unmanned rocket that will carry the LADEE satellite into orbital position around the moon. The lower stages are powered by solid fuel, which undoubtedly helps it to be visible along such a broad portion of the coast – liquid fuel boosters tend to burn with a clean flame and leave little smoke, while the solid fuels produce a highly visible exhaust that glows brightly much further from the nozzles; see here for a daylight comparison. The space shuttle used both, and if you look closely at any launch video or photos, the difference will be clear – it’s the solid-fuel boosters on the side that make all the smoke (though right at launch, the thick white clouds are actually steam from the launch suppression system that protected both pad and launch vehicle.)

Be aware that launch times often slip, so if you’re trying to see the vehicle crawl across the sky, it’s not a bad idea to stay connected to the mission site if you can – you’ll notice there’s a countdown clock on the page I linked to. Good luck!

A small, weird addition

While looking up the Wallops Island Launch Facility on Google Earth, I found a strange effect from the imagery dated 4/29/2010. A lot of people believe Google Earth uses all satellite images, but in truth most of them are taken from survey aircraft, and for some reason, the images used for that date all show the shadow of the aircraft, many times over. Either that, or a huge fleet of P3 Orions, some without tails, was going over at the time.

WallopsIsland
Yes, I think that’s the actual launch pad, middle left.

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