On Black Sands and Pink Cats

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Photo #336: Diverse EcosystemLocation Taken: Trout River, Newfoundland, Canada
Time Taken: July 2012

Mmmm… Diverse ecosystems…

I love seeing a nice mix of plants in the places I visit. Especially a mix like this, where none of the plants are really that weedy, and all of them have interesting colors and shapes. There’s even a bunch that have gorgeous purple flowers!

It’s right on the shore of a lake that has black sand, and while the plants can form small colonies in the sand, they haven’t claimed it all.

You know, that’s one of the interesting things about humans and colors. If you look at the color of the sand in this photo, it’s not black. It’s actually a mid-range grey with a bit of brown mixed in. But, because most of the sand we encounter is of a much lighter shade, and “black sand” sounds better than “grey sand”, we call it black.

And you know, if I made a painting of this place, I would probably color the sand darker than it really is. Since my brain thinks of it as “black”, I’ll start with a darker base color than if I thought of it as “grey”, even if it’s the same color I’m thinking of.

It’s amazing how much language and culture influence how we see color. I’m quite used to seeing pink as quite separate from red, despite it being a cultural construct. Pink is just red mixed with white, just as light orange is just orange mixed with white. But I still see pink and red as separate color profiles while light orange and orange are in the same set.

Which actually can make it tough to figure out what color to make the bright areas when I’m painting red objects. For the other colors, assuming a white light source of course, I’ll just add a bit of white to the color to create the highlights on the image. Perhaps just a touch of yellow as well, to make the bright areas a bit warmer looking to help them pop more. But adding pink on top of red just looks wrong, unless I add enough of another color to make it stop looking pink. It’s actually rather annoying to have to follow a few extra rules because red is considered a manly color and pink a womanly color in my culture, and mixing the two creates mixed messages.

Now if you excuse me, I shall go back to playing my Charr Mesmer in Guild Wars 2. Charr are a feline warrior race, with a proud history of honor and battle, and my Charr is a proud member of the Blood Legion, which lives up to its name. He is, of course, currently dressed in pink clothes.

  

I wonder if the Cheetah thinks the Zebra is tasty or an old pal?

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Photo #335: Cheetah EndLocation Taken: National Zoo, Washington DC
Time Taken: March 2010

Do you know how challenging it can be to take good photos of zoo animals? Especially if you’re just a visitor to the zoo and not an official photographer who can actually get in closer and everything.

For one thing, you’re dealing with animals, and they don’t always act the way you’d want them to. Like this cheetah. It was pacing around in the back of its pen, usually at a bad angle to me. It wasn’t even too interested in the zebra in the adjacent pen, despite the angles I got in this photo.

Oh, if you didn’t spot the zebra, it’s along the upper left edge of this photo. I didn’t see it in the thumbnail version when I was picking this photo, and just noticed it was there when I opened it up full-size.

That’s another good point, actually. A lot of animals have natural camouflage to help keep them from, say, getting eaten by a cheetah. Which means that they blend in to the background quite well. Which is not at all helpful for getting nicely dynamic photos. Especially if you’re like me and only go to the zoo on cloudy and rainy days to avoid having to take photos of the massive crowds surrounding the pens.

And the pens themselves don’t help the zoo visitor photographer. Now, they’re very nice pens. We’ve come a long way from bare floors and small cages. There’s plenty of places for the animals to explore and hide and do whatever their little animal hearts (or big animal hearts, in the elephant’s case) desire. But there’s only so many ways to disguise a fence, especially if you still want to let people see the animals on the other side. So well, that means a lot of my zoo photos have fences in them. Which kinda make it all too obvious that this is a zoo animal, which cuts out the “unseen nature” appeal that a lot of animal photography has.

We suburban Americans really don’t encounter too many animals in our lives, after all. We’ve kind of cordoned ourselves off from them. And a lot of them it really isn’t good to approach too closely, both for our safety and theirs. So photography is one of the few ways to help remind us that there are large areas of the world where that’s not the case, where hippos rule the rivers or polar bears roam the streets.

Of course, even in zoos you can’t get too close to the animals. There’s a lot of safety barriers, and only a few of the animals hang out right by the visitor’s side of the pen. They’re more likely to be by the access points for the zoo workers, you know, the ones who feed them. So just about all of my photos have this same angle to them. And my zoom only goes so far. I only got close ups of the birds and the like that have smaller pens or (in some ducky cases) no pens.

Ah well, it’s still pretty awesome to see the animals at the zoo.

  

She’s not Demonic, that’s just some Red Eye from the camera- I think…

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Photo #334: Watched CookiesLocation Taken: Valparaiso, Indiana
Time Taken: January 2007

Do you ever feel… watched?

I certainly was, whenever I went to the small snack bar in the Student Union at my college. Well, at least during the short time when my sister was working there, and I was pestering her.

That’s her, in case you couldn’t tell. Yes, that’s a neon camouflage fleece hat. My sister has awesome hats.

And the cookies they sold were rather large, and sold rather well.

Not that I ever tried them, though. My dad bakes chocolate chip cookies using a really good family recipe at least once a week, and has done so for well over a decade, probably approaching two at this point. And this isn’t some tiny batch, either, this is several dozen cookies. He takes them to church, and to gaming sessions, and to meetings at work. It’s mainly because he likes baking, and finds it relaxing, and the people who get the cookies certainly don’t complain about helping him take care of the excess baked goods.

But what this meant was that I had a few really good, fresh baked chocolate chip cookies every week for years. Just a few, though, since I’d feel icky after eating more that three or so.

I didn’t learn that I was full out allergic to chocolate until I was at college. I can still eat it, mind you, I just have to keep the quantity I eat really low so I don’t get that bad of a headache.

To this day, I don’t really care for cookies. After eating fresh baked cookies for years, any that aren’t homemade taste like the preservatives the stores have to use to keep them fresh while waiting for someone to buy them. And any fresh-baked ones still make me feel a little off, even if they don’t contain chocolate, just because I still sub-consciously expect that to happen. It’s very tragic, really.

I can still eat raw cookie dough just fine though. And I still occasionally snitch some of the cookie dough Dad mixes up, if I spot him mixing it in that key time right before he adds the chocolate chips. It’s quite tasty then.

  

Round Roof Birds – if I was a music geek, I’d say that sounds like a name for a band…

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Photo #333: Round Roof BirdsLocation Taken: Valparaiso, Indiana
Time Taken: January 2007

There are birds on the Science Center…

Well, make that “were birds”. This is a 6-year-old photo, after all. I suspect that same flock still rests on the lip of the roof even to this day.

I’m not actually sure why that particular roof is curved. My first though was “Hey, it’s the physics and astronomy building, maybe it’s a planetarium!” But I did take the basic astronomy class there, and we never went into that room. There’s a full-out observatory hiding in the darkest corner of the campus that we used instead. And if the basic astronomy class doesn’t use the planetarium, it’s probably not a planetarium.

Alas, I never did go in that room. Never even really considered it odd up to now. And I only had two classes in the building in the course of my studies at this college. Well, three, I guess, if you count Astronomy and the associated Astronomy Lab to be separate classes.

The other was Classical Mythology, which was just using a spare classroom in the building.

That was one of my “for fun” classes. A few of my friends had taken that class and said the teacher was excellent. And I’ve always liked studying Mythology (like I said two days ago), so I gave it a whirl.

And sure enough, the teacher and the class were excellent!

Though I may be a little biased. I rarely studied for the class because, well um, I knew a lot of the material already. And when it’s material you know at that level, studying is redundant because you’ll know what the stuff is for the tests just fine.

And well, I got the highest score in the class, and 100% on all but a handful of the tests. A couple I goofed on a question, and one was on smaller myths that I hadn’t encountered and I had forgotten that I actually needed to study for that test… Still got 70% or so, though.

But then, I’ve always been good at tests. Might be related to the fact that I enjoy learning, so I actually file away all the nifty things we learn in class into my long-term memory rather than dump most of the info like so many people seem to do. I’m that (probably somewhat irritating) person who finishes the test first AND gets the highest score on it.

Don’t be too envious, though. Since I learn the material so fast, the homework seems pointless and redundant to me, so I kept putting it off and never finishing it. My grades were certainly not all A’s, just the ones for classes that graded on tests and in-class projects rather than homework. And my sister both learns just as well AND has a perfectionist streak that makes her excel. She was the one in the family with the straight-A high school career.

We both maintain that the other is the smarter one. And in some ways, we’re both right. I’ve got a stronger tendency towards problem solving and I do it everywhere, while she’s got the work ethic to apply her intelligence properly. Both tend to fall under what “smart” people do. To use RPG terms, we’ve both got the same high INT score, just use it differently.

  

Sweet Little Clouds – no, don’t lick them, they’re not actually sweet!

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Photo #332: Small CloudsLocation Taken: Canadian Prairie, along the Trans-Canada Highway
Time Taken: June 2010

Mmmm, prairie clouds…

These are some smaller ones, but they draw the eye nicely. And the rolling hills below just add to the beauty.

I really need to move somewhere with fantastic clouds. Though alas the prairie just doesn’t call to me. I like my land a little bumpier. Which only occasionally mixes well with clouds.

Though really it’s the clear air you need to get fantastic clouds. It’s the haze of pollution and dust that makes the clouds in Maryland boring. The edges blur and the bright white color fades, and they no longer catch the eye.

But then, the air has to travel all the way across the country before it gets here. That’s how it tends to work in this latitude, after all. Frontal boundaries are the order of the day here. Don’t really get monsoon seasons and the other various forms weather can take. And it doesn’t help that the not-so-clean air coming across the continent hits the really-not-so-clean air we produce in this people-heavy area.

Ah well, I keep thinking I should move to someplace with better weather anyway, I’ll just add this to the list of reasons and call it a day.

Maybe one day I should stop thinking about it and actually move…