I wake up a lot during the night, and every time I woke up last night, it sounded as if we were in the middle of an Arctic storm: wind moaning and howling, windows rattling and, I could have sworn, sleet and snow being driven against the glass. So I was surprised to find when I got up this morning that very little of the white stuff had in fact fallen.
That's alright, it's supposed to snow all day. It hasn't begun in earnest as I write this, but the wind is still moaning and rattling the windows. And it's gotten colder as the morning has worn on. I'm probably riding the stationary bike today. Outside doesn't sound like much fun.
Later: I went out anyway. The wind was fierce, the roads in some cases treacherously slippery. But I was adequately dressed and walked fast. It was good to be outside in the (very) fresh air.
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Every picture tells a story This one kept coming up today in the supposedly randomly cycling screen saver on my laptop. Maybe it was trying to tell me something.
When Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, burying Pompeii, it apparently killed a little over a thousand people - not that many. The rest of the population, evidently the smarter people in town, had taken the opportunity to skedaddle when the eruption was in its early, less lethal phase. If the volcano blew its stack in a similar way today, the casualties would likely be a lot higher. The population of metropolitan Naples - that's its port and southern suburbs laid out below the volcano in the picture - is over 3 million. It would be tough to evacuate them all.
The picture was taken from the Vomero district, which is on a hill above the centre of Naples. Karen and I and our friend Shelley Boyes had gone up there to see the views and visit the Certosa di San Martino, an old monastery with fabulous art. At the end of our visit, we stopped for a drink at a restaurant right on the edge of the hill. That's where I took the picture.
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Amusing bird facts Or maybe it should be amazing bird facts. I've been reading in Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way about Central American ant-following birds.
Army ants in the Costa Rican rainforest will swarm a small section of forest floor, travelling in a seething mass, destroying and consuming all insect life in their path as they go. Following army ant raids and picking off critters fleeing in front of the army - much as kites and falcons pick off prey fleeing fires in Australia - is a crucial part of the foraging strategies of several bird species, including ocellated, bicolored and spotted antbirds.
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| Bicolored Antbird (© eBird) |
There are a few amazing aspects of this kleptoparasitic behaviour. Many different bird species may participate in a raid at the same time. They're not always competing, as researchers once thought. Rather, each adopts a slightly different, complementary strategy: some hopping around on the ground among the ants, for example, others on low or high perches above the action, swooping down to pick off prey. Some antbirds divide the raid front into zones for the exclusive use of one group or another.
And some of the ant-following species, including the ocellated and bicolored, spy on and gather intelligence about army ant activity by following them back to the "bivouacs" where they hang out when they're not raiding - which they do only intermittently - and then checking back on them regularly. The birds sometimes keep track of a number of different ant armies in the vicinity at the same time.
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| Ocellated antbird (© eBird) |
Furthermore, they evidently communicate with their mates to let them know where the bivouacs are and when raids are imminent. And some clever species that can't or don't engage in this intelligence gathering behaviour can understand the messages passed back and forth between the birds that do. So they know when and where to show up to take advantage of a raid too.
Amazing, or amusing, or both?
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A friend sent me a PDF today with some great photos, culled, I assume, from the Internet. I don't know where on the Web the file originated, so I've taken the liberty of saving the copy I was sent to my Google drive. It's here if you want to look at it.
I mention it because my friend asked me a question that I hear in one form or another all the time, and that irks me a little bit: Did I think some of the pictures were 'doctored'? It irks me because I think a lot of people assume digital photography ushered in a new era of rampant fakery in photography, which is not (quite) true.
I wrote a long-winded response and then decided I'd spare her and post it here instead of burdening her email box with it. It's a little more answer than she might have bargained for.
First of all, all photographers of this calibre - all of the photos were taken by pros or talented amateurs - do some, sometimes a lot, of what is referred to as "post processing." They subtly, or not so subtly, enhance their images after they've been captured, using a whole raft of tricks and techniques.
I'm talking about digital tricks and techniques, of course, using Photoshop or something similar, but many, maybe most, of those tricks are analogous to things that photographers have always done, such as selectively lightening or darkening areas of an image, increasing the 'contrastiness', cropping to make a better composition or to hide unwanted elements in the scene, etc., etc.
There is very little that is done in Photoshop that couldn't by some means have been done, though usually a lot more labour-intensively and probably less convincingly, by film-based photographers. And was done, all the time. That includes out-and-out fakery. (See this Wikipedia article about the Cottingley Fairies, photo fakes perpetrated by teenagers using a simple film camera - in 1917! It convinced many that fairies really exist, including that great advocate of scientific methods Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)
One thing that can be done much more easily in the digital world is increase colour saturation, the vividness of the photo. It's very tempting to create an impression of vividness that simply wasn't there in the scene photographed. In fact, if you take pictures in the JPEG format on a simple camera, the colours are automatically over-saturated - over-saturated in my opinion, anyway. I think it's one of the greatest abuses of digital photography.
I don't think many of the pictures in the PDF are really bad offenders in this regard, but in a few, the colours look to me to be a little too juiced up. One, I was going to say, flips over into the category of obvious fake: the one below of the forest path with the odd purple light. But in fact, that picture is meant to be a fantasy. It's called "Fairytale Pathway" by Sarajevo-based photographer and writer, Mevludin Sejmenovic.
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| Fairytale Pathway (© Mevludin Sejmenovic) |
The other way to answer is to say that any of these pictures could be 'doctored' in the sense I think my friend meant of being fakes. They'd just have to be done less obviously than the forest path shot.
The thing about digital techniques as opposed to old film-based techniques is that they're so much easier to do and so seamless when they're done well that it's difficult to spot them. As an example, the shot with the huge moon hanging over an apartment balcony: it would be dead simple in Photoshop to select a much smaller moon that appeared in the original scene - cut it out, as it were - enlarge it, then seamlessly merge the enlarged object into the background. I know because I've experimented with doing that kind of thing myself.
Also, I mentioned cropping the original frame to hide unwanted elements in a scene. But if the optimal composition after cropping still includes some distracting and inessential elements, it's often very easy in Photoshop to eliminate them by simply copying pixels from the adjacent background over top of the offending elements. I do it all the time.
Does it falsify the record? I suppose in a strict sense it does, but most photographs - certainly all the ones in the PDF - are not meant to be a factual record anyway, any more than most paintings are. They're meant to be attractive and/or interesting images and just maybe 'true' to the subject matter, in a larger, less literal sense. Sometimes a little 'doctoring' helps achieve that.
But I would say most of these are just very good - perhaps in some cases lucky - shots taken by competent photographers.
End of answer.
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