Location Taken: Sideling Hill, Maryland
Time Taken: June 2007
Oh my. I’m trying out a new program called f.lux that shifts the color of your computer screen heavily toward the warm and dim side of the light spectrum at night, to make using the computer easier on your circadian rhythm. (Not that I have a circadian rhythm. I’ve got more of a circadian randomly-screaming-two-year-old.) So far it’s nice and gentler on the eyes than even my already dimmed-and-warmed settings, so I do recommend the program. It even has a one-click button for turning it off when you need to do color-sensitive things like make art.
Which I don’t really need when I’m looking at photos, at least. The only time I manipulate the color balance on my photos is for the ones I took while in the wrong color setting on my camera, and that’s a pain, so I don’t even do that often.
But the extra tilt towards the reds and browns does make this particular image look even more like it’s of a miniature diorama rather than a full sized mountain. Seriously, every time I look at this photo, those car and trucks look like toys. And that marvelous cut through the mountain, so impressive in real life, looks like expertly-painted foam and wood.
I’m not entirely certain what’s causing it. Though I do detect some hints of a natural Tilt-shift effect. That’s where you add extra blurring to a photograph to make it look like it was taken using a close-up focal range. (Close focal ranges fall off into blurriness rather quickly when you move away from the focal plane, while long ranges barely fall off at all.) The foreground is out of focus, and the background falls away right where you’d expect the blurriness to pick up again.
There’s also the general simplicity of the scene, well within the range of what can be made by an expert model maker. Heck, even amateurs could probably put this together, assuming they had good enough painting skills to make the rocks look right.
But still, it’s a fun illusion. I spotted it days ago, but once I saw the effect of just a bit of a color shift, I knew I had to mention it.
