I could just tell you…

Al Denelsbeck

Stego
… but it’s better if you find it on your own.

North Carolina doesn’t really see ‘winter’ as many people imagine it – honestly, it’s pretty boring – but we do get cold spells from time to time, and went through one a few days back, after some heavy rains. Things that had collected water were frozen over, and in some cases nearly solid, so I took the opportunity to play around a little.

Above, what you’re seeing is… well, it’s hard to explain. On the underside of the thick surface ice in an old bucket were several thin blades of ice extending down into the water in these curious shapes. This particular image is of the removed ice, inverted and backlit by the sun at an angle that accentuated the contrast (and likely includes a certain level of polarization, if I’m interpreting it correctly.) Usually, I can look at some natural phenomenon like this and reason out what physics were at work, but these have eluded me. I wondered about different layers of water, with varying contamination or salinity perhaps, and these blades marked the levels between them, but that made no sense because they should have been parallel to the top surface. Ice had started down the inner sides of the bucket, close to freezing completely solid, but these blades weren’t parallel to the sides either. Worse, a couple of nice straight lines of them converged, laying over at different angles, completely trashing any ideas that they were dictated by the shape of the bucket or different qualities of the water.

IDontGetItEither
The biggest clue, perhaps, is the bubble tracks nearby also follow the same angle, so my current guess is it had something to do with the ice expanding as it thickened, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Conformity
Bubble trails in ice aren’t too hard to comprehend. Gases (primarily oxygen and nitrogen) that release their bonds with water as the temperature and pressure change rise to the surface, but may be trapped under the ice. As they ice extends downwards, it forms around the bubble and eventually encapsulates it – the vertical expansion is what draws it out into elongated tubes as seen here. But it’s not always vertical, and some bubble trails form at odd angles to others, presumably due to differential expansion rates, though why this takes place I couldn’t say. In most of the cases I’ve photographed, leaves were present in the water and may have contributed to temperature differences; there’s also the possibility of residual heat from the sun having warmed one side of the vessels, or the wind causing greater cooling.

IceShapes
But then there’s this. This is a broken section of ice seen from the edge, a cross-section. The air bubbles are self-evident, but the shapes surrounding them? The appearance is of liquid water surrounding the gas bubbles and enclosed by ice, and my inclination is to see this as greenhouse heating, sunlight that penetrates the ice and warms the gases faster than the ice, but some of this heat is shed into the surrounding water and melts it. This doesn’t explain the flattened tops and bottoms of those channels (the tops I could see, since the air bubble might press against the flat underside of the initial ice layer,) so I’ll just leave it as, “damn if I know.”

I’ll close with another frost pic. This looks largely the same as previous images because that’s really all I’ve seen here so far; the conditions haven’t been right for much more than this, and almost every leaf in the immediate area is exactly the same, thanks to the oak tree that dominates the back yard. I admit to not dragging myself out at dawn to go down to the river for more variety – if someone wants better frost photos enough to pay for them, I can be motivated, but not for my own stock ;-). So I just go for the occasional attempt at an interesting approach, where I can go back inside to warm up easily.

HoarShards

Perpetually confusing

Al Denelsbeck

Infinity is this curious concept, wide open for misinterpretation, but even in its refined sense, it often suffers from one of the biggest problems of philosophy: we believe that since we’ve put a lot of effort into it, it must be important.

To explain the most misunderstood aspect of it, I’m going to steal brazenly from an article in Science ’82, a now-defunct magazine that I cannot refer back to and may have even mistitled (since the title relied on the year of the issue’s publication.) The article included a simple illustration: a cloud of dots disappearing over the horizon labeled, “Infinite number of dots.” Next to it, a long box disappearing over the horizon labeled, “Box the dots came in.” And next to that, a semi-truck also disappearing labeled, “Truck the box came in.” This is a graphic illustration (okay, it’s a text description of a graphic illustration) of Georg Cantor’s Set Theory.

Isn’t that simple? Infinite does not mean, “everything,” it simply means “without end.” It can be constrained in other manners, such as height and width, yet still be infinite depth. And because of this, the box and the truck both have infinite volume even though one can fit inside the other.

Another example is to think of a line. It passes in front of you, but extends to infinity in both directions. Fine. Now imagine removing a one-centimeter segment from the line, right in front of you. What you have done is create two lines, both infinite. The one-centimeter gap between the latter two lines is not, despite our instincts with finite lengths, “infinity minus one centimeter.” Initially, I had said here that, “You cannot subtract from infinity,” but as Set Theory and the non-illustration above implies, yes, you can. Just reduce the height of the box. Will it still hold all the dots? Sure, just put the overflow down at the other end…

Now, let’s have some fun. I propose a number: 0.[infinite number of zeros]1, or if that’s confusing, perhaps we’ll use the ~ symbol to fill in for an unending string, rendered 0.000~1. Is this even possible? How can you put a 1 on the end of a string of zeros that never reaches an end? It’s a nonsense number!

But not quite. It’s what you’d add to 0.999~ to get the sum of 1. Wasn’t that easy?

Since, of course, you cannot add a number onto the end when there’s no end, this is supposed to be the mathematical ‘proof’ that 0.999~ is equal to 1. It is also expressed by the idea that 1 divided by 3 produces 0.333~, multiplied times 3 again gives 0.999~. I simply find it mathematical proof that mathematics is an abstract, and trying to make it define logic is stupid. The issue is not with 0.999~ actually equaling 1, making an infinite series actually end, it’s with trying to use a Base 10 numbering system to represent certain discrete concepts, like division by 3. If we use other numbering systems, like Base 3 or Base 9, we have no issues with it at all, though it may introduce other interesting examples of infinite fractions.

As another example of the flaw, we can refer to a basic logic/math puzzle, where one travels half the distance to a goal, then half the remaining distance, and so on – the goal is never reached because one never travels the entire distance to it. However, if you travel 90% of the distance, then 90% of that, and so on, you’re supposed to reach the goal, according to the 0.999~=1 crowd. Yeah, right.

Want a fun mind bender? Take those lines we messed with above, with the centimeter gap in between. Those lines do have an end, but just one each. So we place the 1 on that end, and extend the infinite line of zeros backwards towards the decimal point: 0.~0001 instead of 0.000~1. I’m willing to bet someone would call that cheating in some way, but it’s the same as taking a piece of super elastic just a meter long and grasping both ends close together, leaving a half-loop of elastic drooping between. Now, take that loop, which represents all the zeros between the decimal and the 1 on either end, and stretch it away from you infinitely.

We haven’t pissed off the mathematicians enough yet, because we haven’t gotten to the real heart of the matter, which is that all of it is just word games. Regardless of how specific you want to make a number, or properties you want to apply to a concept, we reach a very real limit in attempting to use this in any application at all, for instance to measure the smallest object or distance. Even if we ignore the difficulties with clumsy rulers made of a real substance, eventually we reach the sub-atomic level where everything becomes a haze of energy anyway, without distinct boundaries and hard enough to simply pin down a position. At this level, it has become clear that ‘solid’ (and perhaps even ‘matter’) is a term we can only use within a specific set of circumstances – coincidentally, the one we inhabit every day.

Infinity is, in fact, a meaningless abstract. We have no actual examples of it, anywhere, and no real use for it. It’s easy to say that numbers are infinite – we can keep counting forever. But, we actually can’t. Ignoring for the moment that we’re going to die before reaching 11,352,960,000, or that the sun is going to fry the planet at some point in the future, there’s also the very simple fact that we start repeating once we pass a mere ten digits. It’s not infinite; it’s just a pattern. The pattern even gets so unwieldy and boring that we start using shortcuts, like 3×1018.

From time to time, someone says, “It’s an infinite universe; anything is possible.” I’ve even said such things myself (probably elsewhere in this blog.) But it’s not necessarily true. Any of the infinite lines, above, will never cross themselves, even in a curved universe – though in such a case they may form a circle. And if the universe really does run by the laws of physics we know, neither infinity nor eternity will allow certain things to happen, such as heat transferring from a colder (less active) to a hotter (more active) atom, increasing their difference in reverse entropy.

Here’s another example that often sparks confusion and debate. Quantum mechanics tells us subatomic particles can occasionally play silly games and thumb their noses at standard physics, jumping to a position far from their original location, even through other objects. And if one can do it, then there’s a tiny chance that every particle of the billions upon billions in your bobblehead of Quentin Tarantino [I know that’s redundant] will all leap in exactly the same direction at the same time and teleport instantly from your desk into Madonna’s hope chest. The chances of this are, of course, somewhat small, but in an infinite universe, there is an infinite number of chances for reiteration, right? So not only is it guaranteed to happen, it already has, someplace. That’s how the reasoning goes, anyway.

But this ignores numerous factors. For one, the probabilities that we determine for quantum foolishness are based only on our observations, which even if wholly accurate, does not mean such events are typical, or unrestricted by other factors we have not yet discovered. As the universe expands, energy becomes more dissipated, so probabilities on what it is capable of doing constantly change. And then there’s the possibility that any given event is a singular thing, never to repeat again – it’s impossible to calculate a probability for that, and even impossible for us to know that it was singular.

And, how do we know that the universe is infinite? We don’t. We simply haven’t found any edges or constraints, but have found lots of space, a truly staggering amount really (by law, I am obligated to include the word “vast” here.) In every direction we point our telescopes, we find much the same conditions, indicating no border or limitation – we do not, for instance, see stars no further than 100 million light years if we look off in that direction (no, not there; there,) which might indicate the edge of the expanding matter from the Big Bang. But since the universe has been expanding, according to our best estimates, for 13.8 billion years, this is enough time to develop quite a waistline.

What might we expect an ‘edge’ to be like? Well, it could be one of three things. It could reflect back any energy that reaches it, like a mirror. It could absorb and collect any energy that reaches it, like a wall. Or it could simply absorb such energy and vanish it, like, um… we don’t know of anything that can do that, actually. The first would mean that the energy from the earliest stars would bounce back once it reached the edge, probably provoking more star formation at the outer rim and certainly reflecting a lot of light. The second would mean much the same, since the ‘matter’ thereof would gain so much energy it glowed, if not actually producing a collapsing force in itself – an explosion turned inside-out. The third is, really, identical to empty space anyway, so the point is academic. No matter what, however, any potential edge is so far away from us that there’s no chance we could possibly reach it, nor even that any effect that it had could reach us. It could even be made of pepperoni pizza, but if it’s expanding faster than light there’s no way we could even see it.

And that is really what defines infinity for us puny humans: so big we can’t fathom it and have no use for it. It’s fun to speculate about how it works and whether it can actually exist, but there’s really nothing more to it than semantics.

Listen to that voice

Al Denelsbeck

GibbousMoons
For some unknown reason, I have a desire to capture sunrise on Tycho, the prominent rayed crater on the moon. Since it’s unlikely I’ll be able to afford a trip there anytime soon, I’ve been pursuing this remotely, but what it means is capturing a particular phase of the moon at just the right time. Shown above, we have the moon from yesterday evening and tonight, showing the advancement of the phase in about 30 hours. I’ve remarked before, moon observations are usually much more interesting in any phase but full, since the oblique angle of the sunlight makes the rough terrain stand out better, throwing shadows that define details starkly. Note how different things look along the terminator, the shadow line, between the two images.

Now here’s the same image with some guide marks:
GibbousMoonsINdexed
‘A’ is Tycho, though in the blue-sky image all you can see is the barest edge of the crater; a day later it’s fully defined. Don’t confuse it with ‘B,’ which is Maginus; well-defined in the earlier shot, it has reduced to a subtle outline in a day. Below that, invisible the day before, sits Clavius, where the moon base is.

Tycho has a large central peak, a strange artifact of large impacts, and my goal is to photograph it just as the sun is illuminating this peak, a bright spot in the darkness of the surrounding crater floor still in shadow. In the first image, the sun is only shining on the edge of the crater, but 30 hours later, it has advanced far enough that the peak is no longer throwing a shadow that I can discern with my longest lens.

Lunar days are 29.5 Earth days long, so sunrise takes a while but, obviously, the gap between my two photos was too much. Yesterday as I looked at the images I’d taken, I told myself I should go out a few hours later, not long before the moon set, and see what I captured then. Yet I ignored that voice, when it now seems likely that I could have captured just that image. One part of my brain is currently gloating “I told you so,” while the other part is muttering petty insults in return.

Anyway, there are still a few details that show nicely between the two. The small but deep crater that appears on the terminator of the latter image is Copernicus, sitting near the end of the curved mountain range known as the Lunar Appenines, much better defined in the earlier image. Towards the top, visible in both, is the crater Plato.

The sharply defined dark region at upper center, the one bisected by a brighter line, is Mare Serenitatis, or the Sea of Serenity. The brighter line is a ray from the crater right at the lower edge of the Mare, Menelaus. While the ray appears to continue out of sight towards the top of the moon, it actually intersects a ray from Thale crater at the upper edge, which cannot quite be made out in these images – it is, however, responsible for that bright region at top.

A quick bit of trivia while I’m on the subject. There is an account from 1178 of five monks that observed a peculiar effect on the crescent moon, the tip splitting into two and giving off “sparks.” For a while, it was suspected that the monks had witnessed the creation of the Giordano Bruno crater (not visible from earth – it was found by orbiters.) But recently it was determined that this was very unlikely; not only is the crater much older than that, the effect would likely have looked entirely different from what they described, and it would have resulted in a week-long meteor shower on earth. Any of those craters showing rays would have produced enough ejecta to escape the moon’s gravity and be captured by our own. I would dearly love for this to happen sometime in my lifetime.

You can use Google Earth to examine detailed images of the moon (look for the Saturn icon,) including some great videos from surveying satellites, but it’s also a little tricky. First off, all images are taken during ‘local noon’ which is a rotten way to define craters, making them hard to match up to images like this. Worse is the distortion that occurs as you zoom in, rolling details away and out of sight over the horizon quickly – the only time the proportions match what you see in my images is when the moon is zoomed as far away as possible. But check it out anyway.

Meanwhile, we’ll see what happens next month as daybreak on Tycho rolls around again…
GibbousMoonLarge

It’s a tad humid

Al Denelsbeck

DecemberDiamondback
I got out the camera to chase a particular subject, which disappeared on me, so while the strobe was still charged I decided not to waste that electricity and went looking for something else to photograph. Yeah, I really do think that way sometimes, though if I do find another subject, I’ll fire off a lot more frames (and flashes) than if I simply discharged the capacitor before putting the strobe away. However, the power didn’t go to waste, so calculate that any way that works for you.

Above, an angular spittlebug (Lepyronia angulifera) relies on its camouflage, in vain, while waiting out the recent saturating rains on the rosemary bush. You’re looking down on top of the head from the nose-end of the insect, and just behind the antennae you can make out the compound eyes breaking pattern, one of which sports a raindrop at its rear corner. The insect would look almost exactly like a new bud, except rosemary doesn’t grow that way.

I had initially identified this an a diamondback spittlebug (Lepyronia quadrangularis,) a variety of leafhopper, but now believe I was wrong, based on the slope of the head. Curiously, the images on BugGuide.net that convinced me of this were taken by my photographer friend back when he lived in this area – should have known he’d have images of the species. This was the only angle I could manage, and the specimen catapulted away when I tried to nudge it into a different position, so here are a couple of images of one from earlier this year, to give a better idea of the shape.

DiamondbackSpittlebug1

DiamondbackSpittlebug2
shortshooterDo you get the impression that their exoskeleton is good at repelling water? It’s actually incredibly good – they coat themselves with an internally-produced substance called brochosomes, microscopic soccer balls that exploit water’s surface tension to prevent adhesion. Definitely check out that article, because it also talks about why leafhoppers, alone among so many insect classes, should do this; it’s the lack of toilets.

Earlier this year I featured a post on sharpshooters, leafhoppers that fling their feces away without even the benefit of hands, making them the envy of most monkeys. But not every member of the Cicadoidea has a bowel-cannon, though most may have equally sticky excrement. To prevent coating themselves with their own copiously-produced ka-ka, they kryptonite themselves first with brochosomes – we have to wash our hands after communing with nature, but they have to wash their entire bodies before (you are welcome to use that to convince your kids they have it easy, if you think it’ll help.) Yes, this means they are one species which can brag that their shit doesn’t stick.

One could ask why wouldn’t they have feces that isn’t sticky? If they have to produce a completely separate substance that then has to be applied manually to their external surfaces, wouldn’t it have been more efficient to, perhaps, produce feces in the same manner as the brochosomes? But this is a perspective that almost assumes planning, which is entirely the wrong way of viewing it. Evolution often involves repurposing an existing trait or function. Numerous species exude one substance or another to protect their exoskeleton, skin, or feathers, often requiring it to be distributed by ‘instinct,’ and many insects already have habits to clean themselves of dirt, oils, or parasites; it’s not a huge jump to combining and/or changing these two traits for leafhoppers. The alternative is to change their digestive structure so the feces comes out in different form – for leafhoppers, their digestion is remarkably quick, since they pull very little from the sap as nutrition, expelling the rest. A system that changed the expelled sap so distinctly would not only slow down this process, it would take energy of its own, and likely require repurposing something else within the alimentary canal of the insect.

And then, there’s just the luck of the draw. Natural selection doesn’t produce any changes on its own – it simply works with changes that occur (more or less) randomly. If Gland A changed in a slightly more beneficial way before Organ B could, that’s what gets selected and incorporated into the species’ repertoire, though Organ B might have done it much better. Then, even if Organ B does later change, it would have to impart its own significant benefit over and above what Gland A does for selection to even act upon it. This is why ‘design’ is such a stupid concept to apply to nature, since what we see everywhere are actually examples of modified structures forced to do the job.

FennelTipI hadn’t originally intended to include most of that above – it came from suddenly recalling Ed Yong’s article while thinking about those water drops. What was intended was to include this other image from the same photography session, a lone raindrop hanging from the tip of the dog fennel flowers (see here for a shot of ‘typical’ perspective.) This was taken at night, freehand, the one frame I attempted, since there remained a slight breeze and the long arc of the stalk was drifting around under its direction. This is the exact same magnification as the top photo, so go back and look at that, paying attention this time to how short the range of sharp focus is – if it helps, the foreground stalk at bottom left is a rosemary leaf, and the whole insect is less than 4mm wide. Get the idea? Good. So when I tell you that this water drop was wandering several centimeters unpredictably right at eye-level, and I waited for it to come into focus range, you might realize just how precise the timing had to be. Luck had a lot to do with it, trust me – there’s a reason I only tried one frame before giving up the attempt for better conditions. I occasionally spend a lot of time trying to set up a particular shot and never achieve the result I was after, so getting this image so sharp on what was a casual, throwaway effort is a little ironic. But I’ll take it anyway.

The hurdle

Al Denelsbeck

With this entry I thee wed tie with 2011 for number of posts made in a year, and everything past this will be bonus content. Or something. It’s nonsense, really – I just vowed to try and do more posts, vaguely motivated by those who can apparently do seven a day (not looking in Jerry Coyne’s direction when I say this, no no.) But I’m comfortable with the current rate, and there really isn’t any point in trying to exceed this for the sake of numbers. As long as I don’t drop back to 2009’s stunning 30 posts*…

Anyway, in honor of this non-event, I provide a link to Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World, a post about interpreting statistics and figures in a critical, logical way. Simple, overriding rule, one of the few you can count on 99% of the time**: mainstream media articles are written to attract attention, and thus are overdramatic and, very often, completely wrong.

This is where critical thinking really comes in useful. If we accept the headlines and inferences at face value, assuming that they wouldn’t be featured unless they were important, well, we’d be complete suckers. And if we consider the dramatic tones and inflections from virtually every newscaster or commentator to be indicative of something, that would be even worse. Unfortunately, this happens all the time.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is with misunderstanding percentages. By venturing into the crawlspace under the house, I increase the risk of death by black widow bite as much as several hundred percent! Some people would take that to mean it’s virtually guaranteed, but it all depends on what the base rate was in the first place – in reality, I might have driven it as high as 0.5%, but that’s probably overstating it. I’m far more likely to die of infection fostered by gouging myself on something sharp down there, and that’s still not high enough to warrant any fear response.

Anyway, more pics coming soon.

* If you look at the Archives list at right, you’ll see 31 posts – that’s because I started the blog with a post on December 28, 2008, but the old software crashed and I restored in WordPress in 2009, so earlier posts got counted in June.

** Yes, that was intentional humor. Stay with me.

Such efforts

Al Denelsbeck

WetBokeh
Just playing around the other evening while the holiday lights are up, trying a bunch of experiments. The raindrop on the lights was a subtle touch – while I’d like to do some shots against a nice layer of snow, that’s always an iffy thing at this latitude. I may annoy about half of the people in the country with this, but I was shooting in just a t-shirt (or is that tee-shirt?) Thursday night as I got this, and it was even warmer Friday. If it helps, The Girlfriend would have had at least a sweater on – it was 19°c (66°f) at 1 a.m.

The above shot required a little paying around; the soft globes are the neighbor’s lights across the road, rendered as round (and not hexagons) by using maximum aperture. They were significantly dimmer than the blue one of ours in the foreground, so this is a 1.3 second exposure, triggered with a long remote cord as I flipped the light switch so ours would be on for only part of the exposure. Any slight breeze would shake the wire and blur the closer blue one, and getting the right ratio of light levels was a timing thing, so I made several exposures. I even waited for a car to go past on the road, which would have painted some streaks across the bottom of the frame, but our road sees few cars at that time of night, and while I was waiting the neighbors shut their lights off for the evening.

WetIvyI also did lots of other night experiments, but none of them turned out quite the way I wanted; getting the light balanced for night exposures can be tricky, and the LCD on the camera is only partially useful in that regard – it doesn’t give a very good idea of exposure levels, especially not subtleties. During this I was trying to figure out why some of the images seemed to be coming up blurred, almost in a fog, while others were sharp without changing focus at all, until I realized my breath was sometimes fogging up the LCD ;-)

Some of my ideas required sitting down on the wet front steps, or shooting from ground level out in the yard, which meant I got more than a little damp, and still had nothing to show for it. I tried again on Friday evening, but by then the gentle breeze had become raging winds and nothing was going to hold still for a time exposure, plus we no longer had the wet conditions that provided raindrops and shiny surfaces. So, they’ll wait for another time.

Which brings us to these images from earlier in the day Thursday. When light is getting this dim from heavy overcast, it’s definitely recommended that you use a tripod. I’m sometimes as annoyed over fussing with them as anyone else, so I wasn’t using one here, and thus this is the only frame of five that was sharp enough. Had I wanted a little more depth-of-field I would have been out of luck, or forced to use the tripod, but even then it might have been difficult, since my position in among several trees was not exactly conducive to the wide leg spread. My primary tripod is a model that can mount the center column sideways as a horizontal arm, allowing a bit more flexibility, but this doesn’t fix every problem; the weight of the camera limits how far you can extend without some kind of counterbalance, and the arm works strictly horizontally. Often it’s easier to simply shoot a lot of frames and hope I was steady enough in at least one of them.

WetDogFennelA tripod would have been no real help with this one – it wasn’t the movement of the camera that was the biggest problem, but the gentle bobbing of the saturated plants in the breeze, so the “take lots of frames” technique was the only thing I could count on. In the foreground are the remains of the dog fennel plants, once towering over my head but now drooping from their age and burden of water, while in the lower background is one patch of pampas grass, still bright green but topped with their feathery gold fronds. The camera’s white balance for all of these was set for sunlight, which is essentially no compensation for the color of light. This keeps the blue-grey conditions accurate, which is what we expect to see with the rain; using Auto White Balance or the setting for overcast would have produced more neutral, warmer colors that reduced the atmosphere of the image.

When I selected the dripping tips as a subject, I shifted around a bit to see what background was going to work; I had the choice of open sky, bare tree branches, deep shade down below those branches, the lawn, and the pampas grass (not to mention a road and the neighbors’ houses, ruled out pretty quickly.) While I took a few different ones, this is the one that worked the best for me – there’s a hint of a hand reaching down, so the pampas grass had to represent an “object” as a target of the hand, which is another way of looking at the framing. Or you could just consider it as minimal interference between the dominant colors of the image, if that works. Any of these involved tiny shifts of position, and the belief that the background should work with the subject. The same holds true with both images above: the position of the lights at top required careful adjustments of the tripod, and the ivy leaves were specifically framed to extend across the corners, as well as giving a face-on aspect to the dominant leaf that used the short depth-of-field to advantage, preventing any part of it from going out of focus. The light angle also had to be a certain way to demonstrate the wetness of the ivy while not getting too much reflection that would wash out the colors and detail, something faintly visible in the third leaf. Even the dog fennel pic required finding a group of drops roughly in the same plane so the focus would be sharp for most of them, though one could also select a single drop to concentrate on, making it the focal point of the image by being the only sharp one.

But yes, hard work – exhausting, even ;-)

Give the gift of sense

Al Denelsbeck

It is that season, and despite watching virtually no television at all, I still peripherally see many of the advertisements that spring up in vast numbers this time of year. One type in particular goes beyond annoying into the realm of criminally reprehensible, and if you think I’m being overly dramatic, read on.

No buildup here: I’m talking about diamonds. It still isn’t common-enough knowledge just how vicious the diamond trade really is, despite the efforts of many, and my own post won’t reach more than a tiny fraction of the people who need to hear it, but hopefully, I can spur a little greater awareness, and encourage everyone to help the spread.

Diamonds are mined almost exclusively in various countries in Africa, and while there are a few major industrial diamond mines, there is also a lot of mining that is done by local labor, often isolated tribes in underdeveloped parts of the countries. The dynamic that the price of diamonds puts upon these areas is overwhelming and horrendous – without regulation or even law enforcement, local overlords control the activities of peasant laborers and the territories where diamonds can be found, and the methods are just as bad, if not worse, than the worst of the slave owners from past US history. One of the fear tactics used to keep the workers and townspeople in line is to grab a child and chop off a limb with a machete, to demonstrate the consequences of failing to yield to the overlords’ demands. The conditions in such mining camps are appalling, and its safe to say that the ‘trickle-down’ economic plan is not in operation here – the ridiculous price that consumers pay for diamonds does not reflect a commensurate amount of income into these areas. Even if it did, I think we can safely say that mutilation and murder aren’t really justifiable with any economic stimulus.

This has spurred at least some response, in that many people are now aware of the phrases, “conflict diamond,” or “blood diamond,” meaning ones that are produced in such conditions, and there are efforts to identify ‘legitimate’ diamonds, ones that, supposedly, have originated from acceptable practices. There are two primary problems with this. The first is, it’s not exactly hard to forge any of these identifiers, since there is no regulatory agency in place that can enforce them. The second is, this isn’t solving the problem, which is not how diamonds are obtained as much as why they are in the first place. And that why is solely, inarguably, and crassly, marketing. Nothing more.

Everyone in this country, and I think throughout Europe and most of Asia, recognizes the tradition of diamond engagement rings, and the phrase, “diamonds are forever.” We all know that diamonds are the hardest substance known to man, and various folklore about their quality and sparkle and all that. Which is all complete and utter bullshit. There is no tradition of diamond rings – this concept did not exist before 1938, when it was introduced as a marketing campaign. Moreover, take a moment and think about why doing anything as a ‘tradition’ makes any sense at all – I’ve tackled the subject before. Why should we care in the slightest what anyone before us did? Should we believe they were smarter, or that we’re carrying on a ritual that accomplishes something?

Yet, there’s far more to it than that. Diamonds are hard, but not the hardest substance known (otherwise they couldn’t be shaped, could they?) They can actually be produced industrially, without any mining at all, since they’re simply refined, high-pressure examples of the most abundant element on Earth; this is, in fact, how numerous tools are made, since industrial diamonds are produced routinely. True enough, those are typically colored, mostly because there’s no reason to keep tool-grade diamonds perfectly clear, but also because there’s no market for it. More on that in a second.

Diamonds are, let’s be blunt, completely boring without the stories behind them. They’re indistinguishable from glass, except by experts, and don’t even sparkle half as nicely as crystal treated with some common chemicals, routinely used to coat whatever someone wants to make pretty. There are hundreds of other gems that look much better, that actually indicate to someone else what they are without having to be explained. In fact, the only real value of diamonds is in the explaining, since not only does anyone need to be told that it really is a diamond, but just how big it is or what purity it possesses. It’s not the stone itself, but the story that serves the purpose. This is reflected in all the nonsense about the cut and facets and blather, but also in the whole engagement ring horseshit as well. “A good guide on how much to spend is two months salary.” So the potential bride not only is showing off her bauble, but how much money her beau makes – and he might realize this too, and spend even more just to look more prosperous. Yet, think about how idiotic it is to finance a ring. We’re supposed to believe this is a reflection of love, but isn’t that the crassest thing ever? What kind of man thinks money is somehow affectionate, and what kind of woman demands that? How fucking shallow can we be, and how badly can we misunderstand what love is about?

Even worse, how badly can we be played? Diamonds are a commodity through the efforts of just one monopoly cartel, and that’s De Beers. They’re the ones that created all of the mythology of diamonds, including the sayings, the fake traditions, and the handy guides. They own most of the diamond producing areas in Africa, and control the vast majority of the diamond trade. Through their lobbying, the have prevented ‘industrial’ (manmade) diamonds from being used for jewelry – otherwise their value would have plummeted drastically, and yes, perfectly clear diamonds can be manufactured with only a little more effort than currently being used routinely. De Beers even maintains a stockpile of diamonds that can be dumped on the market to drop the trade value, should any other source of gem-grade diamonds be discovered in the world and someone not under their control try to market them. Diamonds are not anywhere near as rare as many other gems; the price is rigidly fixed, and way out of proportion to the efforts needed to obtain, shape, or distribute them. When we talk about monopoly companies and strangleholds and such, we never even come close to what De Beers has accomplished, and the horseshit that they’ve sold to the public.

I haven’t provided any links, and it’s for a specific reason: all of this is remarkably easy to discover on your own, and I encourage you to do so. That way, you won’t feel like I’m feeding you biased information. If you’re skeptical (and I encourage this,) you should see for yourself how much information is out there. It’s far more than I could feature in a post.

But here’s another thing to consider. Jewelry is fine if you like it – it’s for attracting attention and looking nicer, but that’s really all it does. Possession of something expensive that doesn’t serve any other function is solely about bragging, and how much do we really need that? I know it’s an old saw, but should we really seek to impress someone whose sense of value comes from how expensive something is? How much of this is classism, and snobbery, and an attempt to provoke jealousy? Most especially, is there a good reason to mistake this for any form of affection, or use this to manipulate those we claim to love?

Why not simply find something appropriate, not from the standpoint of society, but from the standpoint of personal feelings? Find something that demonstrates how well you know the recipient, or even make something yourself – wouldn’t those express your feelings better? But seriously, if nothing else, stop playing puppet to the most manipulative, reprehensible trade on the planet, and don’t fall for the bullshit.

There it is!

Al Denelsbeck

MantisEggs13
When you spend all spring and summer tracking the praying mantids that have hatched and taken up residence locally, naturally you want to see the whole cycle, and that means the production of the egg sac as well. Of course, they’re not inclined to do this for an audience, so a bit of luck is involved, luck that I did not have this year. I watched one particular female molt into reproducing adult phase, growing fatter with her meals, and knew from her girth that she would be laying eggs soon. I tried to keep an eye on her, but spotted her only sporadically.

SlimfastThen she reappeared with a much more trim figure, and I knew I had missed it. In the days leading up to this, she had been found newly molted on one of the front patches of pampas grass (there are three, of two different species,) then spotted on the butterfly bush, a tomato plant, the rosemary bush (where she likely ate one of the green lynx spider moms,) and finally here on the larger patch of pampas grass closest to the porch, which is a favorite haunt of the adult mantids. This led me to believe she had placed her egg sac in the pampas grass, and since this gets cut back every year, I was determined to locate it before this happened. However, on a whim today I started poking around in the azalea bush where the young had first appeared this past spring, and found the sac immediately. The azalea is not three meters from the pampas grass – it’s not like she had a ways to go. The sac is in a fairly easy location to view, so I should be able to keep an eye on it, though we’ll have to see what happens in the spring when the bush starts to leaf out and flower. I may end up cutting a little channel through the branches where I can lie underneath the bush and photograph the nymphs emerging. I could always cut the branch and keep the sac in a terrarium until the young hatched, but I’d rather leave it where it is.

And even if I miss the happy event, there will be plenty of tiny mantids running around afterwards, so I’ll have lots to photograph either way. If I were superstitious, I might have avoided saying anything at all, since too often on this blog I’ve announced something that I’m trying for that never pans out. This is nothing but confirmation bias, or negation bias if you prefer, since there are other circumstances where I have captured what I was after, and I’ve always got an ongoing list of things I’m chasing at any given time – some of them just won’t happen right away. If I fixated on them, I might get frustrated, but there are lots of other images I get in the meantime so I really can’t complain. To me, that’s the best approach to take – keep plenty of goals in mind and chase whatever presents itself. Do what you can to plan, but it’s not all in our control – just roll with it.

This year’s mantis saga, in chronological order:
Bugfest
Don’t mess with a nature photographer
Just a drop, please?
Not him again
A peek at the process
I had to
The stories go on (linked above)

Pics from the oceanfront

Al Denelsbeck

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A friend of mine in Kansas (you know, the one who won’t go to a water park,) wanted to one-up me on the frost pics, which is fine, since mine were extremely limited. We’ve always had this minor competition going on since he got into nature photography, a nice motivation to keep improving as long as your ego can weather it – it’s disturbing how many photographers I’ve come across who can’t handle that, believe it or not.

The image above is a little eye-bending because the line between ice and open water appears to be the edge of the water itself, with the bank and its own reflection being a curiously symmetrical rock face. It’s also easy to get the impression that the reflected sun has melted the ice, but I’m more inclined to think instead that the open water has better flow and never got the chance to freeze. The juxtaposition of blue ice and yellow sunlight is also cool. The shale, however, prompted me to research the geology of his area, and it turns out that it might be an excellent place to find fossils. 300 million years ago, that area was the edge of a tropical sea, one coast of the Pangaean supercontinent, and went through repeated depositions as the sea’s edge fluctuated over the centuries. Shale is remarkably easy to search for fossils within, so I’m presently trying to get him out there to look.

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But let’s get to the frost pics. This time of year is virtually monochromatic in the mid-latitudes, primarily greys and browns, so a splash of color is exploited for everything it’s worth. This type of crystal formation is commonly called hoar frost, specifically air hoar, spiky crystals that sprout from surfaces when the surfaces drop below the humid air temperature.

JLK-2-IMG_0486Sometimes, the surface is as fine as a spider web, which are the best conditions to watch for because a frost-covered orb web is a great photo subject, as you might imagine. I have yet to find all those conditions in place myself – orb webs are often long gone by the time the frost conditions roll in – and to the best of my knowledge Jim hasn’t found them either.

As mentioned earlier, these conditions can be a little tricky. Direct sunlight will eradicate the frost in a hurry, so one either works very quickly or before the sunlight is present. The latter means much lower light levels, slowing the shutter speed, and of course much bluer light. This last bit is okay – we associate blue with cold, so it reinforces the conditions to the viewer, and overriding the white balance to keep this color in place can be quite effective. Normally you might use a white balance setting for open shade or even overcast in this kind of light (if you simply didn’t use auto white balance) – those conditions suffer from reduced yellow and red light, so these are increased in-camera to compensate and not leave the image looking too blue. So to keep the blue, you could use the setting for direct sunlight – this is pretty much white light and the camera makes no compensation. To really enhance it, go for the setting used for incandescent light; such light is very yellow, so the camera compensates by increasing the complementary color, which is of course blue. Experiment freely – the difference can be remarkable, and very expressive.

JLK-4-IMG_0497Which should make the conditions of this next image very obvious – I’m guessing that Jim was working just as the sun broke through, because there’s still frost visible and I imagine it didn’t last long. Either that or it was freakin’ cold. As indicated in the previous post, these are higher contrast conditions – note the bright highlights and distinctive shadows, giving some enhancement to the shape of this seed pod. It also made the bare branches in the background stand out a bit sharper, slightly distracting – much more and it would be working against the image too strongly. Ideally, this is where you try to find a dark background, like a patch of shade, to position behind the seed pod, using that contrast to really make it stand out, but such things can be hard to accomplish. Here’s a sneaky little trick, if you’re prepared: put the camera on a tripod, using a remote shutter release if necessary, and use your own shadow to provide the darker background.

It may seem nitpicky – there’s a certain number of people who never noticed the lines in the background until I mentioned them. If I have to point them out, are they really distracting? Yet, there’s a difference between conscious awareness of such details, and the subconscious effect of them. Nearly everyone is able to tell that this was taken in bright sunlight, but many cannot specifically tell why – their minds see the light qualities and automatically say “sunlight” without necessarily saying, “because yellow light, and higher contrast.” When it comes to distractions, there’s usually a certain number of them in any image, details that we might not include if we were painting the image, for instance. The goal is to keep these to a minimum, making the image have a stronger impression. While those lines aren’t anything bad, not having them is better.

[This how I get back at Jim for some of his insect shots with the MP E-65mm macro lens. I never said it didn’t get petty… ;-) ]

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This last one is curious. I’d suspected he was shooting in infra-red, but he told me it’s simply greyscale (the conditions were “pretty close to monochrome anyways”.) Nonetheless, there’s definitely a hint of color in there – look at the centers of the flowers – and it’s an RGB image when checked in an editing program. This was taken with a newer Canon EOS M body, and so I’m now guessing it was shot monochrome in the camera, rather than converted afterwards, and it’s not quite perfectly neutral. It also makes the file larger than it needs to be, because each color channel is simply mimicking two others (more or less, anyway.) I always shy away from in-camera effects, preferring the greater control from editing programs, and I think Jim does too, and was only trying it out to see how it fared.

So now, with all the talk about backgrounds, did you notice the little arms flanking the flowers, almost ‘holding them up’? It’s just another subtlety that enhances the subject, great when you can accomplish it.

On composition, part 20: Contrast

Al Denelsbeck

Main light from the strobe, backlit by the sun. Notice how the edges are defined brightly by the sunlight, especially the antennae, which makes them stand out.
Main light from the strobe, backlit by the sun. Notice how the edges are defined brightly, especially the antennae, which makes them stand out.

I find it hard to believe that I never actually tackled this in a separate post before – I guess I kept thinking I’d done it early on, and have certainly touched on it in numerous posts. But it’s such an important part of photography that it really deserves its own specific, detailed treatment.

First and foremost, and something I teach my students right off the bat, is that photographs by nature have increased contrast over what we see through our eyes. They have a narrow dynamic range, a term that straddles the border between explanatory and pompous. We all know, for instance, that dogs can hear higher pitches than we can, and perhaps you know that we only see a narrow spectrum of light, unable to discern infra-red and ultra-violet ourselves, much less gamma rays or microwaves. Well, the camera’s much worse than we are, partially because of sensitivity, but mostly because of the limitations of the medium. You can aim right at the sun and get a shot (not recommended actually,) but printed on paper or glowing from a monitor, it will never make anyone look away in tears – it will simply be white. The image has to dump a lot of brightness levels just to work.

This means that it’s easy to have a photo where different parts are both too bright and too dark. Most especially, this occurs in bright sunlight, which reflects the most light right back to the camera, forcing the exposure meter to try and handle that and thus leaving behind the shadowy areas. Anyplace where a distinct shadow is visible can demonstrate the property too, and this is most noticeable when the shadow falls across someone’s face, from a tree branch or a hat brim. Generally, this means such bright conditions are, despite common belief, rather poor for photography and should be avoided, but there are uses for any kind of lighting conditions. More important is recognizing that the camera is going to increase contrast and being able to spot the situations where this will be bad for the image, which takes a little practice.

Ouch
Ouch
Another factor to note is that there is a specific level of light to bring out peak colors. Very dim light doesn’t produce vivid color, no shocks there, but beyond a certain brightness, colors start to bleach out and look too pale – this is very noticeable in the highlights on a shiny subject, which often go to pure white. Many digital sensors seem to have different sensitivities for different colors as well, meaning that a red jacket may become much brighter than a blue one in the exact same lighting conditions. Exposure meters are sometimes biased as well, failing to produce a proper exposure when the metering area is predominantly a problem color.

Hazy or overcast days produce very low contrast lighting, since the light is scattered by humidity and comes from many directions, producing very diffuse shadows to none at all, and subjects therefore gain fairly even illumination. While this means the light is dimmer, the shadows are often the same darkness as a sunny day while the highlights not nearly as bright, meaning that the two are closer together and, regardless of where exposure is obtained, can more easily fit within the dynamic range. The same scattered light effect can be done with artificial lighting, through the use of multiple lights, reflectors, or diffusers of some kind. The idea is to get light from more than one direction so highlights and shadows get reduced or eliminated. When doing this, especially with multiple lights, one can produce shadows of whatever intensity works best by varying the effective strength of the lights from different sides, often as easily as moving one light source further away from the subject.

A broad guideline is to match the subject matter to its opposite in light conditions: if the subject is high contrast in light or reflectivity (significant differences between bright and dark portions, but not necessarily color,) go with low-contrast light, and of course if the subject is low-contrast, that’s when a bright direct light source can bring out more detail. An example of the former is a flower garden in full bloom, varieties of bright petals and dark leaves or shadows – these typically benefit from soft diffuse light to prevent overexposure of the white petals or harsh black areas of shadow, and to keep the colors in the richest ranges. While on the opposite side, something as simple as a textured surface makes use of bright, high-contrast lighting to accentuate the shadows produced by the texture or shape – this is where black & white photography gains the greatest edge as well. This might mean coming back to a subject later on when the conditions are right, but a little planning can do a lot for the resulting image.

Both color and lighting - notice how the leaf is shaped by the shadows, which would have been far less visible on a hazy day.
Both color and lighting – notice how the leaf is shaped by the shadows, which would have been far less visible on a hazy day.
But there are other uses of contrast. First off, it’s not just light but, as hinted above, contrasting colors too. Regardless of light quality the red flowers of the poinsettia stand out against the green leaves of the same plant, and white clouds against a rich blue sky. Our eyes often seek sharp contrast, so taking advantage of this in your subjects can help a lot. Whenever possible, place your point of focus (such as a model’s head) against a contrasting background for best effect – portrait photographers often select their backgrounds based on the color of their model’s hair or clothes, while I will look for the right foliage in the background, or even introduce something for macro work. While certain colors may ‘clash’ in a fashion sense, for photography this is rarely the case – such juxtapositions simply accentuate the difference between one area and another, and capture the eye irresistibly.

Which is sometimes not the best thing – as noted in previous composition posts, you want the viewer’s eye going to your subject, and not necessarily anything else; you must direct their attention. So contrast in the background itself, like a red soda can alongside the forest path, is to be avoided if you do not want the distraction from your main subject. Even well out of focus, prominent contrasts can detract from the image. Ideally, of course, your background should have virtually no contrast at all if you want to keep attention focused on your subject, but this can be hard to accomplish.

Then there’s contrast as the subject itself. Contrasting focus – sharp subject, blurry background – is what depth-of-field is all about, but there are also contrasting patterns and the break in pattern, the contrasting subject that appears different from the rest (one oddly-colored leaf on the tree,) and so on. Sharp contrast can provide a texture that the viewer can practically feel, while the subtle shadows from the shape of a cloud or an ocean wave may produce a pleasant, mellow effect.

The camera allows a limited amount of control on its own. Back in the olden days (and still today,) films had different levels of contrast and could be selected as the subject demanded, while digital cameras have the ability to change contrast settings on the fly. If your camera features multiple preset parameters, it’s often a good idea to have a neutral middle-of-the-road setting, then one for low contrast, and one for high contrast – this way you can pick what will work best for any particular subject, or even experiment to see if one works better than another. Again, you would use the reduced-contrast settings for a high-contrast subject, to offset the potential problems. These will not overcome the limited dynamic range of photography, but they can help mediate it a bit.

There’s also the simple trick of fill flash. When natural light is bright but casting deep shadows, firing off the camera strobe can illuminate these shadows a bit and lessen the contrast. The strobe will never get as bright as sunlight, and the range is limited, but it can soften the shadows to a point where they look acceptable. A reflector to bounce sunlight in from the far side can do much the same, but of course it has to be aimed, hard to do without an assistant or fancy stands. In the image at the top of this post, I was aiming up from underneath the beetle, where natural light had produced mostly shadow, so the flash provided necessary detail. Note the shadows underneath the insect, and the highlights on the legs, pincers, and eye.

Then there are the few manipulations which can be used after the image has been captured. Saving the image in RAW mode (in camera) sometimes gives an edge on handling contrast, but not to any great extent that I’ve found, and the increased memory usage can slow down both actually getting the image (from internal processing time) and downloading and editing – personally I stopped using RAW and stuck with JPEG at no compression, and concentrate on using the right light. High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques, which combine multiple images exposed for at least highlights and shadows separately, can overcome the media-induced contrast, with two caveats: all images should be taken from the same vantage point, focal length, and position (usually meaning a tripod is required,) and experienced photographers and editors can usually spot an HDR image a mile away – light simply doesn’t behave like that. Take note, too, that both of these approaches can do nothing for portions of the image that have exceeded the limits; once the highlights have gone to pure white, or the shadows to pure black, nothing is going to bring them back.

So pay attention to the light and shadows, and with experience, you’ll know what conditions will work best for any given subject, and gain the control you really want.

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