Yes videos: Kinda polar opposites

Al Denelsbeck

The 1980s were this curious time in the pop music biz, because it became virtually necessary for bands to create a music video for anything that they wanted to become popular, which was controversial in itself – a lot of artists didn’t care for the medium, didn’t like the idea of making little movies, didn’t have good ideas, resented that the rules had changed, and so on. Some – most, perhaps – left the whole thing entirely up to their labels or any director that wanted the gig, and this occasionally resulted in some really lame productions.

This particular pair of videos I find amusing, in that they’re from the same band in the same time frame, actually the same album; that would be the band Yes, and the album 90125. We’ll do them in the order of release.

‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ came out in 1983, fairly early in the game, and the video was truncated for airplay at times because, well, you can determine why:


What starts out as a fairly typical, faux studio session breaks down and restarts as a short, semi-dystopian story rife with symbolism, examining inner turmoil. Notably, it’s cast quite well and shows excellent production values and sets, and while it could barely, if at all, be said to relate to the music, it nonetheless presents a captivating story that keeps us watching; the switches back and forth between color and monochrome work well. The band members appear, but in a manner totally unrelated to music, serving as… agents? Parts of the psyche? Metaphors? Essentially just enough to take part, but remaining mostly extraneous to the plot. Overall, however, it was a major production that showed a lot of creativity and vision, most especially for the time.

The following year, ‘Leave It’ was released:


Even as inept as I am about interpreting music and film, I’m not even going to try on this one, but I suspect the budget was a bit lower. There is likely a story behind it, perhaps even a protest from the band who wanted to keep the focus on the music

[And here, we have a drastic change from the original post, which I was writing as I was waiting for balky pages to load. Because there is a story behind it. First off, it was directed by Godley and Creme, who were particularly known for music video production and did some of the more iconic offerings – which initially made this quite perplexing. But there was a gimmick: there were actually fifteen versions, all submitted to MTV and part of a contest for viewers to determine the differences between them. It’s not hard to see this as a cheap marketing ploy to increase both airtime and viewer attention. You can, if you like, scour the internet and see how many you can find. For my part, it makes for a slightly more interesting aspect of the video, but it would have helped if the videos had been the faintest bit interesting themselves. Though I still like both songs.]

Living in the past XI

Al Denelsbeck

bald cypress Taxodium distichum reflected in water
Today’s entry comes from 2014 – or is it 2013? It was actually uploaded in December 2013 for a post that didn’t appear until January of the next year, though it was taken in 2006, so how does that count, judges? We need a ruling…

I like the image, being one of the uncommon strictly fartsy attempts, but, it suffers from a digital trait that prevents it from becoming a print, unless I do a lot of screwing around with it.

Even at this resolution, if you look close at the gradient tones in the water alongside the tree, you’ll see blotchiness – this is the result of jpeg compression. Jpeg is a method of storing image files in smaller format, a flexible algorithm to weigh space versus quality. Most of the images that I upload here are at about 75% of original quality, and occasionally, like this one, it shows: there are ‘steps’ between neighboring colors. Most times, you would use a setting of higher quality/lower compression to combat this – except that this is an image from the Canon Pro90 IS, originally saved in jpeg, and it even appears in the original to a lesser degree.

This is why many photographers elect to always shoot and save their initial images in RAW format, which has no compression at all. RAW images, however, are vastly larger than even minimal compression jpeg, and this shows quickly in the number of images that can be held on memory cards, and how long it takes to download them, and how much harddrive space they perpetually stake out. I’ve done several tests with RAW formats, including exposure and detail tweaking, and it’s only in situations like this, with a lot of fine gradients (mostly in one color) that it provides an edge; everywhere else, it’s simply egregious overkill, far too many negatives to offset the positives. Even with astrophotography where fine sensitivities in brightness can be exploited/enhanced for better detail, I could find no significant benefit – often none at all – for RAW over jpeg.

Note, too, that larger files take up web server space and slow page loads down, so for web use they should always be reduced in size regardless, and the benefit of RAW would vanish in nearly all cases. Considering that this blog alone has over 6,000 images in it, this can add up quickly. And here’s the thing: had you even noticed it before I mentioned it?

Get back up again

Al Denelsbeck

That’s right, it’s the winter solstice today, or technically it was at 21:48 UTC, the very time when the sun sank as low as… no, that’s not exactly right, it was actually when the Earth tilted… no, that’s not really right either, it was when the south pole of the Earth was leaned as close to the sun as it can be, the very thing that makes winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern. Had, you know, someone not screwed up and misaligned the Earth in its orbital plane, we wouldn’t be dealing with this seasonal crap, and you’d change climates solely by changing location.

Probably not, actually – there’d probably be something else that affected all that jazz – but what it means for us today is that, up here in the northern hemisphere, this was the shortest daylight period of the year, and those times will just be increasing again up until late June. Except for, like central New York, which has at least three more months of nearly daily overcast to cope with, because that’s winter in NY, one of the (many) reasons that I left. But we over the hump, is what I’m saying. I would have done something photographically to herald this, but we had near-overcast skies here too for most of the day and, really, there wasn’t a lot to photograph, and even less that was worth featuring. So to cheat (and put up an older image that is not in the Living In The Past lineup,) we have a photo from the summer solstice, June 21, only not the upcoming one but the one just past. This was one of those that I didn’t post then, so it counts as new material. It does.

juvenile bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus singing or laughing or catcalling or something in a dead tree
I would say this is the first of the ‘Caption This!’ contests here, except no one is reading anyway so I’d win all of the prizes, which is a wash unless I find a really stupid sponsor to provide some. Regardless, don’t let your non-existence as a reader prevent you from sending in your entries anyway – the deadline is, oh, shall we say the winter solstice 2034? That should allow up to seven entries to accumulate…

Visibly different, part 51

Al Denelsbeck

extreme closeup of house spider Steatoda or Parasteatoda
Our opening image today comes from 2003, and is only the second frame in my Arthropods folders – all seven of them (at present count.) Since I limit the folders to about 4,000 images for convenience, I’ll let you do the math, but I just started the seventh a month or so ago so don’t aim too high. But this is also the first of the extreme macro images, and was accomplished with the borrowed Sony F717 and one of the lesser-known but easier macro techniques called ‘lens-stacking:‘ mount a standard 50mm lens, backwards, onto a longer focal length, generally 200mm or better. The greater the difference, the greater the magnification. All it takes is a simple reversing ring in the filter threads of both lenses, quite inexpensive, and of course both lenses, but it’s not like it’s hard to find a 50mm around, which doesn’t need to be compatible with your current equipment in the least. The biggest issue is the distortion that will almost certainly get worse towards the edges of the frame, but not too far behind are holding still enough for the extremely precise focus distance, and getting some light onto the subject as close as it is to the lens, which may be only a few centimeters. You can tell here that the source is quite bright, too bright, and coming from the underside, a flash unit on an off-camera cord. Still, I was pleased with the detail on this cobweb spider, probably a house spider in the genus Steatoda or Parasteatoda.

I must note that this was early in my arachnid-handling days and I was still leery of handling something that I knew wasn’t dangerous, and so this one was gassed with acetone, and quite dead for the photo. Yet this also meant that I wasn’t trying to nail focus on a spider that wasn’t inclined to pose, which is a fair number of them.

Now we’ll jump a dozen years later.

portrait of crab spider Tmarus angulatus
This remains my favorite spider portrait, and you can see why. The ‘facial’ detail is excellent, the light in the eyes is slick, in fact the overall light quality is near-perfect from the softbox I was using at the time – the only caveat I have is that the softbox was rectangular and it shows in the eye reflections if you look closely.

Some credit goes to the species (which I believe is a crab spider Tmarus angulatus): it simply had the detail to capture and a curious, uncommon coloration. But other differences are the light quality, as noted – I’d learned how to use more diffuse and broader sources – and the bare fact that the latter was shot not just alive, but in situ atop its egg cluster, secure in a rolled-up leaf. Better framing of course, but let me note that both images are only cropped slightly – the latter had been trimmed on the long side just to eliminate wasted space, so I did the same for the first image to make them comparable, but no other edits were performed. The macro techniques were slightly different – instead of lens stacking for the second image, I used a reversed lens instead, the defunct 28-105 which had been permanently set for about f16, which provided an edge in depth.

The third image used for the ‘Visibly different, part 18‘ post split the difference between ‘staged/captive’ and ‘wild’ subjects – another spider portrait, but this one collected without restraint and slipped onto the water surface of my macro aquarium. At any point in time it could have scrambled away, but the meal it was consuming probably kept it less inclined to do so, and my unobtrusive handling method failed to alarm it. Still, I must give credit to an enormous amount of luck.

One last Visibly Different post to go for the year, and if all goes well, it’ll be a pair of ‘showoff’ images, but hopefully ones you can appreciate – not spiders, in other words. I’m actually working on them now (well, not right now, but I’m resuming as soon as I’m done writing this post,) yet I’m not sure that I’ll be finished in time given, you know, the other demands of the week. If not, they’ll appear in a bonus installment of the topic just a little later on.

Living in the past X

Al Denelsbeck

unidentified tree hung with Spanish moss Tillandsia usneoides in Colonial Park Cemetery, Savannah, Georgia
I’m kind of doing these in order, and we’re in 2013 for this one, a year dominated by arthropod photos. I’m trying not to get into a rut (well, any more than the huge one that I usually occupy,) and the next entry in this category is quite likely to be another bug, so enjoy this while it lasts.

This was found, appropriately enough, in Colonial Park Cemetery in downtown Savannah, Georgia – I have no idea what the tree is but I love the shapes, and hanging with Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) as it is just adds to the… we can’t really call it charm, so let’s go with atmosphere. To me at least, it has an almost palpable texture to it, enhanced by the subtle colors. I would have liked to have seen it in the dark, lit by the nearby historic streetlamps at low angles, but no one is allowed in the cemetery after sunset so the opportunity wasn’t there. There’s the chance that the lights wouldn’t produce a good effect anyway – in fact, I’m sure of it.

Funny, while it’s the kind of tree you might want to see in an old cemetery, it’s perhaps not the best example that I have – that would be this:

twisted sidelit tree with Spanish moss Tillandsia usneoides and moon in fork
Now you see why I imagine the first tree might look great in the darkness? This is true B&W, by the way, shot on Ilford Delta 400 film, nine years earlier than the first image, while I was riding around looking for good monochrome subjects. Believe me, I’m pleased with it.

Though, despite doing several cemetery sessions while on this monochrome binge, this wasn’t shot in a cemetery, but in a schoolyard. So much for atmosphere.

Odd memories, part 27

Al Denelsbeck

Doing some scans tonight suddenly reminded me of this little anecdote from something like 25 years ago, and this certainly wasn’t my childhood – god I’m old.

Back then I worked as an on-site caretaker and bookkeeper for a humane society, and I owned a pair of birds at that time, both adopted from the animal shelter: a cockatiel named Rio, and a conure named Pygar, who’s the star of this story. I honestly can’t tell you what species Pygar was, since he was unidentified when turned in and my searches just now turned up no matches, but I can say that he was the exact same size as Rio, brilliant jade green (as conures usually are) but with a peach-colored spot on his forehead and small patches of the same color on his shoulders. Regardless, he was fairly even-tempered, got along with Rio perfectly, and while he wasn’t too enamored of handling, he nonetheless behaved himself, which can be hit-or-miss for the Psitticines.

When the weather was quite warm, day and night, I’d moved their shared cage out onto the porch so they could enjoy the fresh air, sights, and sounds. Pygar would occasionally give voice if some bird nearby seemed to warrant a response, but for the most part they both accepted this outdoor life with aplomb. Both had been captives all their lives of course, so their flying activity was limited to within the cage and occasionally around the apartment, which meant no more than six meters or so at a time.

One morning I went out to feed them and unlatched the cage door, which was hinged at the top and so hung closed regardless unless I held it open. For some reason, Pygar was excited that morning, and as I readied the food dish he flew across the cage to clutch the vertical door, which flew right open with him clinging to it and inverted him outside the cage, which caused him to panic and fly off of it. Being outside now, he could really stretch his wings, but he’d never mastered the arts of either turning or descending, and he ended up flying across the road and pretty damn high up into a tree there. Calling him was worthless – he was very excited about his accomplishment, though now unsure what to do about it. I could see him bobbing his head around and voicing some exuberant cries up there, possessing a vantage he’d never dreamed of.

Knowing that birds will often return once they calm down, I let him be, made sure Rio was fine, and went back to work – he’d be getting hungry at some point. From time to time, I’d go out on the porch and call him, and even went close to the tree. By mid afternoon he was now responding to me quite vocally, but still unable to figure out how to manage this feat; he made a couple of attempts that only put him higher in the tree. He’d never glided in his life and did not possess the ability to imagine it, it seemed.

Come early evening with the light starting to fall, he was beginning to get anxious, responding to me with a desperate note in his voice as I called him from the porch – I figured that, given the distance, he’d be more inclined to manage a gentler descent than if I was close to him. If I recall, Rio was now joining in the coaxing, and finally getting up his nerve, Pygar launched himself on a heading for the porch.

It was actually impressive, given his earlier ineptitude, and he came in right on target for the opening at the side (a bit wider that a normal doorway.) But he also had never experienced nor imagined the concept of deceleration, and he blasted right through the porch from one side and out the other at high speed, tracing a broad curve out behind the house as I ran to follow. He ended up crossing the dog agility fields out back, this time ensuring that he did not gain any altitude, and disappeared into the low scrub and trees off the edge of the property. I cursed his almost-complete lack of avian ability; he clearly wanted to be back home, but had no idea how to correct his mistakes. I grabbed a handful of enticing seeds and trudged out back to find him, having taken a bearing on where he was last seen.

It only took a minute or so of clambering through the bracken and calling before I received Pygar’s now-desperate calls in return, and I tracked him by ear. In another half minute I caught sight of him, comically avoiding any flight at all as he clambered through the branches of the small trees in my direction. I got close and gently extended my hand with the seeds in it, hoping not to spook him again, but he was quite done with his adventure, launching himself onto my hand and scooting up the arm to my shoulder, where he crouched pressed against my neck and stay there panting. It had been a big day for him. He never twitched from the spot as we made our way back to the porch.

Getting him back into the cage was more effortless than it ever had been, and he had a nice little reunion with Rio while remaining well-attached to the main perch. I can confidently say that he never made any seriously exuberant moves, in or out of the cage, again. But yeah, both of them got their wings clipped not too long after that.

[If you’re unfamiliar with this, it’s not as heinous as it sounds. It simply means trimming their primary flight feathers down to about half of their length, which prevents the birds from flying adeptly but allows them to still flit across the cage or arrest their descent. Feathers are like hair and have no nerves once fully grown out, so they feel nothing, but this did not stop either of them from biting the hell out of me as it was going on – just not a kosher activity, to them.]

Living in the past IX

Al Denelsbeck

fruit fly genus Drosophila on mirror with secondary reflections
I was going to say we’re now less than a decade in the past, since I first posted this in March of 2013, but then I checked the image details and it was taken in October 2012, so it’s still a bit over a decade old. I know you needed to know.

But what looks like a Photoshop trick, isn’t – this is as shot, and not even a multiple exposure, simply a fruit fly (genus Drosophila) on a mirror. The one showing its back is the real one, the rest reflections. But why so many? It’s because the reflective surface of the mirror is on the back side of the glass, but the front surface can also reflect to a lesser extent, even images coming from behind/within, and so we’re seeing repeated reflections bouncing around within the glass, reminiscent of those ‘infinity’ mirrors and using the same principle. These are more noticeable because the flash was aimed towards the fly and so the background (the rest of the bathroom) was dark.

We can see the bright spot reflection from the back of the fly, showing the direction of the flash, but the underside is also lit quite well, due to the proximity of the mirror.

The whole thing about reflections from each surface of the glass was a big issue in the earlier days of camera lenses, and produced a lot of ghosts and flares, but with better lens coatings and additives within the glass itself, these are kept to a minimum nowadays. Not so much with bathroom mirrors.

More amusing is the fact that, for the slow season, I recycled an image used for the slow season. This says something, but I’ll be damned if I know what…

Trying not to make too much noise

Al Denelsbeck

I know you were wondering if I was going to show any recognition whatsoever here on the blog that this week is/was Expand on Initial Experiments Week, where you sit down with something that you’d tried out before and build upon it, whether it be a recipe, some new electronic device, or seeing how long certain kinds of pasta will stick to the ceiling. Considering that the week ends in less than two hours as I type this, I’m sneaking in rather late and endeavoring not to wake anyone, like that ever works.

The initial experiment came from earlier this year, and hadn’t turned out too badly for that, but I wanted to try something a little different. I’d floated small drops of vegetable oil in water within a clear glass pan and did extreme closeups while I messed about with light sources, including diffraction from the surface of a CD. I’d tried other backgrounds, but they needed to be farther away to produce a better effect.

Thus, this evening. I fetched up an old window pane and supported it between two chairs so there was open space beneath, and put the glass pan on that. Beneath, I put a cluster of holiday lights.

oil bubbles in shallow water with colored lights in background
I was using the Mamiya 80mm macro with extension tube to get the focus right, and because it could be used wide open so the aperture would not be shaping the bokeh. This meant focus depth was very short, which I initially thought wouldn’t be an issue; I was focusing on the oil bubble on the surface. What I found was that the bubbles themselves were one focus point, the images within the bubbles of the lights beneath were another entirely, and I had to chose one or the other.

oil bubbles in shallow water with colored lights in background
Not only that, but if I attempted to focus on the lights within the bubbles (which were acting as little lenses themselves,) the focus distance was different depending on the size of the bubble. Keep in mind that all of these are cropped, so what I could see in the viewfinder was much smaller than this. I needed to keep the pan as still as possible because some of the shutter speeds were quite slow, and at macro magnification (the end of the lens being roughly 16cm from the surface of the water,) even slight movement could show in the image, so every time I shifted to get different bubbles, I had to let things die down for a bit. I could kick around the lights underneath to change that effect without issues, though.

oil bubbles in shallow water with colored lights in background, showing merging bubbles
In this one, you can actually make out the wires of the cluster of holiday lights simply dumped on the floor beneath the glass – but the focus is widely variable among the bubbles. What you can also see is that I inadvertently snapped the shutter just as two bubbles in the center merged, with the shutter speed being just slow enough to blur this motion.

oil bubbles in shallow water with colored lights in background
I closed down the aperture to f16 I think for this one, and it definitely helped the bubbles appear a bit better, while it also resolved the background lights outside of the bubbles from mere color patches to more distinct blobs. This is enough to recognize, if you look very closely, that the bubbles are inverting the background image, which is typical.

oil bubbles in shallow water with colored lights in background
But I like this one the best. Instead of trying to focus on the background lights through the bubbles, I just focused on the surfaces of the bubbles themselves, letting the images within defocus into bokeh. A strong sidelight gave definition to the bubble shapes, emphasizing the spherical aspect (or at least the appearance of such.) Now all of the bubbles are similarly focused, lessening the confusion of the image.

So overall, not bad for a couple hours work all told (yes I’m calling it “work” shut up.) I’d done some previous experiments with just the light strands themselves, significantly defocused, and one tip I can offer is that the LED lights, while departing from that yellow incandescent cast of the old ones, nonetheless put out significantly more light in the blue and purple spectrum, and thus these lights can overpower the frame. Not only that, but too fast of a shutter speed will net you a blank frame too often: alternating current causes all lights to blink on and off, generally about 60 times a second (60Hz,) but the glow from incandescent filaments doesn’t fade quickly and so the blinking isn’t captured – not so with LEDS, which switch off instantly. That’s another experiment, though I’ve already captured some initial images.

Do you know this spider?

Al Denelsbeck

Just a brief video clip here, that I captured while after other subjects back in September – I didn’t take any still photos and the spider was in view for only a minute, so this is all I have to identify it.

My own search through BugGuide’s photos turned up nothing that looked like a good match, and I haven’t tried contacting them to find out if there’s a way to show them this video. The closest two species that I found are:

Paraphidippus aurantius

Pelegrina galathea

Neither of these seems correct, judging from both the pattern on the abdomen and the coloration of the forelegs; the average size of P. galathea also seems way too small. This was perhaps the largest jumping spider species that I’ve ever seen, and there was a noticeable tap when it landed on my arm; where it jumped from to get there, I can’t say, but I’d been sitting in the grass waiting for anoles to do something interesting, so it probably launched itself from my shoulder or thereabouts.

If you have any suggestions, or better yet a positive ID, you can comment here or reach me through the Contact Page, and I’ll update this post. Kindly don’t tell me that it’s an extremely rare species that you would have paid big bucks for – I’ve been having a good year.

Living in the past IIX (or is it VIII?)

Al Denelsbeck

You know, why use four digits when you can use three? I never understood that convention for Roman numerals, but then again, Arabic doesn’t make any sense either – they’re just what we’ve been taught.

Anyway, another from 2012, and it wouldn’t be hard to figure out the exact date.

2012 transit of Venus in front of the sun, naturally filtered by clouds
There was a lot of media attention regarding the transit of Venus in front of the sun, but I’d made no plans to capture this; it was occurring in late afternoon and I had no solar filter for the camera, and wasn’t about to spend the money on something that I’d use once (well, it would have been twice at least, since I would have put it to work again with the total solar eclipse five years later.) But then as the day wore on, I saw the clouds getting thicker and occasionally obscuring the sun just enough, and set up and waited for the right conditions. I was shooting at the limits of the camera – minimum aperture and ISO, maximum shutter speed – but it worked, and I captured something that I’d missed eight years earlier and wouldn’t be seen again for 105 years, and I’ll probably miss that one too.

11 days later, Venus was already noticeably different.

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