Visibly different, part 48

Al Denelsbeck

facade of Savannah Cotton Exchange in Savannah, GA in overcast
The opening image today comes from September, 2013, the ornate façade of the Cotton Exchange building in downtown Savannah, Georgia. I couldn’t begin to tell you the names of architectural styles, and I’m very much in favor of artistic efforts coming after full functionality has been established (having moved too much furniture into someone’s idea of a ‘dynamic’ layout with stupid landings on the stairs,) but there’s a lot to be said for the character of this period, in comparison to the majority of office buildings today. And it’s one of the reasons why this section of Savannah is meticulously maintained as an historic district.

But we notice that the light is muted and overcast, lending a somber air to the scene and not producing a whole lot of color. This speaks to us in subconscious ways, and can affect how we feel about a particular view regardless of what it’s actually of. When you think about it, this is almost silly, because it’s only light, and while it’s associated with weather, is that really all that different? We see rain all the time, it’s no big deal, but try telling our subconscious that.

Now we see it a mere two minutes later.

facade of Savannah Cotton Exchange in Savannah, GA in direct sunlight
Knowing the timeframe, it’s obvious that the clouds were scattered and moving fast, permitting bursts of sunlight and overcast interspersed. Now the color has popped a bit, and the contrast and shadows have increased significantly, all of these changing the appearance and mood of the exact same subject. It’s also clear, though perhaps not consciously noted, that the light is coming from the left and thus the building is facing into the light, which is a subtle positive aspect, while the oblique sidelighting makes the ornamentation sharper and almost tactile. I often point out to my students that high-contrast light is for textures and surfaces, while low-contrast light (hazy to overcast) is for colors; this is partially because cameras, and especially monitors, still have a narrow dynamic range, the amount they can vary between their brightest and darkest registers, so the increased contrast of bright sunlight can actually cause colors to bleach out while shadows deepen far too much. It would have been great if I’d had a flower bed in the foreground to demonstrate both of these in one photo, but while it was entirely possible (given how manicured this section of Savannah is) to have found something in the vicinity to use in this way, I wasn’t thinking about it at the time. I know, what a slacker.

You might also have noticed that the sky in the latter image has darkened, but it might not have – with the increased light on the building, the shutter speed increased, which would have darkened the unchanged sky. So, it’s darker in the image, but perhaps not in reality – I’ll let you classify that as you wish.

Busy bee

Al Denelsbeck

pollen of lemon tree blossoms on brush
The image above, naturally, needs no explanation, because you certainly should recognize it if you are a decent human being – you’re honoring the holiday just like the rest of us. But for all the insolent and sulky teens out there, this is residual pollen – specifically, the pollen of lemon trees – the stuff that remained behind on the paint brush after I came back in from the greenhouse. That’s right, it’s Pollinate The Lemon Trees Wintering In The Greenhouse Day, which is easy enough to celebrate.

blossoms of lemon trees in greenhouse
The Girlfriend obtained a pair of lemon trees earlier in the year, and after a cold snap they were moved into the greenhouse for the winter, where a small oil heater maintains the temperature at a minimum of 10°c. We’re not exactly sure what prompted them to bloom now, but they’re bustin’ out like kittens in the clothes hamper who have heard the can opener, and so given the lack of beehives within the greenhouse (a distinct oversight of ours,) it is incumbent upon me to, um, see to their needs manually. We’re not sure how well this will work, but some of the earlier flowers are showing signs of germination, so I suppose I can add that to my résumé.

It’s been a busy week and I’ve had little time to give to the webby stuff, but I should be able to catch up a bit more. Now all I need is something to photograph and/or post about…

Profiles of Nature 54

Al Denelsbeck

Life isn’t fair, and it’s not even well-balanced. We can’t try to get philosophical and consider it a test – that’s just lame. We’re here with yet another Profile after we thought they were dead and gone, with no dramatic, heroic denouement to occur. Deal.

northern mockingbird Mimus polyglottos horkin' down berries
Today we meet Hrisovalantis (‘Hrisovalantisbusbyberkeleydomperignon’ to his friends, because his friends aren’t too swift,) taking a holiday break from his routine diet to stuff himself full of cranberries, unaware that these weren’t cranberries at all, but something with a laundry list of ‘possible’ side effects longer than most pharmaceutical commercials – Hrisovalantis is going to have a fun evening, and so are all the others on the bus he’s taking back home. Note that when we say, “routine diet.” we mean the diet that we’re all on, the one that involves no actual change in food intake but the intentions of such, starting tomorrow, and thus the holiday break is actually gorging himself blind – don’t act like we’re not intimately familiar with this. And when we say, “we,” we’re referring to all of us within this country in a typically wecentric way, and not all of us like we should – we don’t all celebrate the same holidays, you know? But we do here, so we better get over it. We don’t know Hrisovalantis by name but recognize him in that vague, “We should probably know where we met you but can’t for the life of us recall where or why and this is gonna be really embarrassing,” way, because Hrisovalantis specializes in being a background restaurant patron – not in movies or TV series, but in real life, engaging in bland and casual conversations without making a sound, which we don’t notice because we’re too wrapped up in ourselves, unlike some of us. This is not a lucrative skill, but it makes enough scratch to cover the meals at least, and Hrisovalantis always grabs some extra mints and toothpicks to sell afterward, so he’s doing okay – don’t ask who buys them. Nonetheless, Hrisovalantisberkeleybreatheddomdeluise (it’s growing on us) has big goals because they’re easier to score within – we can’t believe we’ve never used this gag before – and will soon move on from restaurants to become a background attendee of sporting events, only one of the non-stupid ones (there are three, and we’ll let us figure out for ourselves whether that means the events themselves or the fans overall – we think it’s a generous overestimate anyway.) Will Hrisovalantis live out his dreams? Will happiness and prosperity reign? We wont know because we never follow up and we’re not even reading this in the first place. Hrisovalantis’ favorite kind of scissors handles are the kind that allows two-and-a-half fingers in one side but won’t easily release his thumb on the other, though we suspect he’s just saying that because it’s a fad.

We may be here next week, or we may not, but we’re probably not done, so we can stop blubbering and jolly well man up – that’s the human ‘man’ and not the gender one, so we can just piss off with that.

Not perfectly clear

Al Denelsbeck

sunset over Jordan Lake showing faint crepuscular rays
Was on the way past and stopped at Jordan Lake yesterday at sunset, even though it looked as promising as always, which means, “Not at all.” True to form, the sun set without a cloud in the sky, leaving nothing to produce nor capture any colors, but as it dropped still lower, the bare hints of high-altitude humidity began to show through faint crepuscular rays. I won’t blame you if you’re not seeing them easily – the first indication to us was so faint that we could see it better through peripheral vision rather than directly, but eventually some streaks were distinct enough, and the lowermost horizon got some nice color. It worked, and wasn’t more than a tad chilly out there. Good enough.

Visibly different, part 47

Al Denelsbeck

This one was inspired when I was going through the folders and realized I had a counterpart that was just done recently (like, since the last Visibly Different post.) We start back in October 2009.

night exposure moonlit self-portrait with Orion
Part of the reasoning behind this was wanting a portrait of myself to use for promotional purposes, only not serious ones – I’m never going to be a realtor so I don’t need the ‘warm smile in some studio’ headshot, plus I scare people. This one was a self-portrait that didn’t quite work, so I eventually settled on the one seen here, which probably should be updated.

But it was also a moonlight experiment, and a ‘ghost image’ one, since I was purposefully present for only part of the exposure, while the camera (the one in the frame – well, both, actually) was present the entire time – the idea was that the camera had a ‘real’ presence while mine was incidental. Hah! Such fartistic commentary! Which would have worked much better against the open sky than the trees, which is largely why it wasn’t ever used. Except for the obvious reason that I scare people.

By the way, despite the various shortcomings, this is a self-portrait, and not a fucking ‘selfie’ – selfies are vain and inept things done with a smutphone and an absence of cognition. Know the difference.

Now we come to this past Saturday morning.

night sky exposure semi-self-portrait
I just cropped this tighter from the version posted a few days back, to emphasize the similarities a little, because this is the exact same spot, and I’m pretty sure those are the exact same stars up there – I mean, they’d gotten out of my sight between the two frames, so I can’t rule out substitutions, but…

Unless you were really checking the background details, though, you might never realize that they were the same location (much less the same person.) The primary clue is the orientation of Orion at the lakeshore, pinning down the view direction and suggesting a closer look, but the lake is so different between the two, especially the water level, that it’s easy to slip past. The base color register throws things off, as does the focal length which shifts relative positions within the frame. The exposure time of course – the first pic was 25 seconds while the second was 303. Though it looks like that outermost tree has died in the intervening years, I think that’s actually a piling you see in the latter pic since it was shot at a slightly different angle. It’s clearly not intended to let us see the figure now, so the underlying ‘mood,’ for want of a better word, has changed. And there’s the suggestion that the temperatures were significantly different, because despite what little you can tell from the shadowy figure in the latest pic, it’s obviously not in short sleeves…

Woo hoo, exciting, right boys and girls? Yeah, c’mon, it’s effectively winter here, except not the kind with snow (yet.) We’ve entered the slow season and the pics will reflect this. Hey, think how I feel…

* * *

A note about exposures like this: If you want to try them, the primary thing to keep in mind is relative light – it’s not the amount of time that something is within the frame that dictates its ‘strength,’ but how much light it reflects. In the top frame, even though the camera is there throughout the exposure while I’m not, the camera only reflects highlights from its black surface, which were still much dimmer than the light reflecting from my hand, so I should have been in the frame much less time. The dark background didn’t help at all, and it should have been against clearer sky (I was purposefully keeping Orion in the frame, so this had an impact, plus the fact that I wasn’t in the frame while framing it.) The brightness of the clothing makes a difference. The best thing is to shoot a bunch of frames with varying percentages of your ‘ghost’ within the frame – 20% of the total exposure time, then 40%, and so on (I think the bottom frame was 40%, but this was also a brighter background.) Holding still is paramount of course, and the closer the portrait the worse this will become. It may take a while (like multiple sessions) before you get the effect you were after. Or you may snag it in one frame.

Make-believe

Al Denelsbeck

It’s cold out there, so let’s pretend it’s nice and balmy, and to assist this I provide a summer shot, a big one.

stitched vertical panorama of Carpenter Falls, Skaneateles NY
This is from 2009, and is actually three images stitched together vertically. Curiously, it looks like I was using a faster shutter speed for the topmost image because the water isn’t blurred as much there, but this isn’t true – all frames are the same shutter speed, it’s just the water that’s accelerating of course.

This is Carpenter Falls off Skaneateles Lake in central New York, by the way – I keep wanting to call it “Carpenters” but that’s not correct. What isn’t apparent is scale, so I provide another image from much higher up.

tourists behind Carpenter Falls, Skaneateles NY
low angle shot of Carpenter Falls, Skaneateles NYI don’t know who these people are, but they did manage not to fall in.

And one more, because it’s the oldest image in the blog folder and has been there for years, and I figure it’s time to either post it or delete it. Since I haven’t been shooting much recently (even when trying,) that means we get this. I was right down in the water for this one, but that doesn’t mean much – with nothing here for scale either, I’ll just tell you that the foreground ‘torrent’ is perhaps 20cm high. But yeah, nice and refreshing in the heat of the day, washing away the sweat and grime from our sandaled feet, the crashing of the water causing small gusts of random breezes laden with cool moisture that couldn’t be found in the still air outside of the valley. Am I selling this enough? Should I mention bunched, sweaty underwear or a lingering lockerroom aroma? That headachey, nauseous feeling when we’ve been working too hard in direct sunlight with too little hydration? How about that yellow-orange filter filmmakers adore for shots of the deserts or Mexico? You know the hue – the director of photography of CSI: Miami must’ve bought a gross every season. But not cold, no sirree.

Pfeh

Al Denelsbeck

So not only did I get out to view the ‘peak’ of the Leonids meteor shower on Thursday night/Friday morning, I returned on Friday night/Saturday morning for the predicted surge. Though you wouldn’t know it in the slightest – yeah, it was that bad. The first night was notably cold, dropping below freezing, which I realize doesn’t hold a candle to some northern weather but it’s still miserable standing almost motionless on the edge of a lake for over an hour, and my sinuses were protesting painfully. I had two cameras with me, as suggested in an earlier post, but the second one used older batteries, nor was it fully charged, and as a result it pegged out after twenty minutes. I warmed the batteries in my hands in my pockets for about ten minutes and got another exposure out of them, but that was it. Waste of time anyway.

ten-minute time exposure of night sky pinned to Polaris
This was ten minutes at f8, ISO 400, looking mostly north as you can see – semi-dark in that direction, but near the one meteor that I saw for both nights – just, not while either camera was aimed that way. I couldn’t even find evidence of a satellite. This was the first night, by the way, and I took a moment and boosted ISO for a detail image without (noticeable) star trails:

night exposure showing Orion, Taurus, Pleiades, and Mars
This is with the ultra-wide at 11mm (thus the leaning trees from fisheye distortion,) 30 seconds at f8 and ISO 6400, and shows Orion slightly left of center, Taurus above and to the right of that, with the Pleiades cluster further in that direction. The bright star at lower left is Sirius, while the brightest star isn’t; that’s Mars, between the horns of Taurus. Clicking on the photo will provide a larger version for more detail (and more noise, but whatcha gonna do?) Technically, Uranus is in this photo too, right on top of another star that’s dimmer, so at least one of those little dots is mostly light from Uranus – I’ll let you find it with Stellarium if you like. It was a distinctly clear night, and except for the cold it was ideal for watching a meteor shower – shame one didn’t show up. I would have braved the cold longer had I seen more than one brief, tiny little meteor, but it was clear that the show wasn’t going to be engaging.

I returned the next night because ‘they’ predicted a possible surge about 1 AM, and I was dedicated enough to be ready for it. But the humidity had rolled in heavily, obscuring all but the brightest stars, and I knew the bounceback from light pollution would make exposures much worse.

night exposure in hazy conditions showing Orion and Mars
That’s Orion again near center, Mars near the top of the frame – only 200 seconds this time at f8, ISO 400 and you can already see too much sky glow. This was the clearest portion of the sky, too – to the west, brilliant Jupiter was barely visible through the heavier clouds, so nothing else could be seen, and all but the brightest fireball would have been obscured. I made a few attempts and waited to see if the sky might clear, but if anything it was getting worse and absolutely nothing made an appearance.

I tweaked one of the exposures just for the sake of it, though:

night crepuscular rays from Durham against too-humid sky
All I did was boost contrast a little to enhance the effect – the crepuscular rays really were like this. This isn’t from the sun or the moon, but from the city of Durham, a 300-second exposure, and I couldn’t tell you what caused the shadows in the light pollution, but combined with the star trails it almost takes on the appearance of a blast. I’m guessing from this that the humidity layer was quite low, but that’s only a guess. By the way, I just spent too long trying to determine which stars are actually visible here, but can’t pin them down, even though I knew which way I was aimed.

One last, for giggles:

night exposure over Jordan lake showing Orion, Mars, and bystander
Yes, that’s Orion and Mars again – and me, holding still in the frame for two minutes out of the five that the exposure took. You can see how bad the horizon was getting. I was alone out there, so I had no idea how it was framed, and it wasn’t worth further playing around – shame that two cars passed after I’d left the frame, otherwise there’d be a nice gap in their lights and reflections. Maybe next time.

But yeah – typical luck with a meteor shower. This is getting tedious.

Those ugly signs

Al Denelsbeck

Nobody likes getting old, which means we deny the signs too often, trying to pretend it’s not happening to us, or not as fast as it is for others. But occasionally the evidence rears up and attempts to bite our noses off.

Back in August I was on an outing and spotted several snakes, considering myself pretty sharp-eyed for finding them, and featured the images herein. Yet just as I was going through the stock folders for images to use in the previous post, I suddenly find I’m not as slick as I liked to believe.

image of more than one northern water snake Nerodia sipedon sipedon
This is full frame, with my target nicely centered, the one I spotted at the time. But how the fuck did I miss its companion?

two northern water snakes Nerodia sipedon sipedon
That’s not a handspan away, and more exposed that the one I focused upon, and while it was using the roots to advantage, I was right there taking several frames of the first and didn’t see it until cruising through the stock images months later – I even missed it when sorting. It would have been even more embarrassing if the second was visible in the post, but I’d shifted for more of a profile angle for that image.

Don’t talk to me. I’m gonna binge on Metamucil smoothies and Matlock. Maybe develop some film. Keep that damn music down.

Visibly different, part 46

Al Denelsbeck

brown anole Anolis sagrei displaying dewlap
Our opening image comes from 2004, in Florida, the territorial display of the brown anole (Anolis sagrei.) That big sail under its chin, called a dewlap, is only displayed when a male anole is marking its territory, typically when another is nearby, though I’m unsure if there can also be a sexual element to it. What I’m drawing attention to here, however, is the bright orange color with the yellow border, helping identify the species. You might think the “brown” part of its name is sufficient, but the Carolina anole (formerly known as the green anole,) can also turn brown when the situation warrants, though it is not as mottled as this, usually only showing variation in a diamond pattern down the spine. The brown anole, however, remains brown.

Contrast this with the dewlap of the Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis):

Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis displaying dewlap
While catching it backlit can make it take on an orange-ish hue at times, the dewlap of the Carolina anole is brilliant pink and lacks a border color. I used to believe that they would only do this at the appearance of another anole, but multiple times this year I’ve witnessed this at my presence with no other anoles visible, so either they’ll do it on principle regardless of the interloping species, or I’m even odder-looking than I believed (though I think anoles have a great appearance so I’ll take it as a compliment.)

But then there’s this, from two years ago:

territorial display of male Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis
Same species as immediately above, but different circumstances; this one was in an active, aggressive and physical dispute with another male, and so we see a different display, with the dark ‘eyeshadow’ and the raised crest on the neck, and possibly even some deepening of the green along the snout. If they do this for you, you’d better get ready to throw down, because they certainly will. Always happy to help protect my readers, no matter how imaginary they are.

It’s that season

Al Denelsbeck

Coming through the kitchen yesterday, I saw something cutting across the sprawling frontage of Walkabout Estates, and quickly grabbed the camera.

white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus buck in author's front yard
Just a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus,) a moderate-sized six-point buck, which normally don’t start becoming visible until dusk, though this was middle afternoon. I shot this through the storm door glass, where it apparently couldn’t see me because of the reflection; when I opened the storm door for a clearer view, it bolted, thankfully towards the back and not the road.

For trivia’s sake, the reddish-brown mass in the foreground is the Japanese maple that has formed the setting for so many of the images herein, and in the upper left corner of the background you can make out a branch of the oak-leaf hydrangea, which has served as well.

It’s rut season for the species, which means they’re present on the roads a lot more often, and a lot stupider – never the most astute of animals, white-tailed deer become very single-minded this time of year and often remain unaware of cars, so keep your eyes open. Know, too, that there’s rarely ever one; if you see one clear the road ahead of you, another may follow soon afterward, sometimes a whole herd. I can’t count the number of times I’ve spoken to people who saw the first but struck a follower, assuming that the coast was clear. Stay vigilant.

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