Ignoring the Trees for the Forest

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Date Taken: April 2010

Do you know how difficult it is to get a good shot of a forest from inside the forest? Forests from a distance are really easy, and individual trees are fairly easy, assuming you have good light, but a Mid-Range forest picture? Those almost never turn out.

There’s a few things working against such pictures. First, the lighting is almost always iffy. Forests are full of shade, which, while delightful to walk in, isn’t the best thing for interesting photos. Second, all the trees kinda, well, look alike. And if you have a particularly interesting tree, it’s better to make that tree the focus – which makes it no longer a photo of the forest. Otherwise, you have many similar shapes that, thanks to the disorganization of nature, tends not to make a decent composition. The tree trunks tend to go straight up and down, which only serves to lead the eye out of the photo – which is not what you want to do. And the undergrowth tends to be a chaotic tangle, with no discernible lines to lead the eye anywhere.

Just about all the forest photos I take end up flat and uninteresting, no matter how nifty the forest was to walk in. The lighting removes all contrast, or the composition does nothing.

It takes a pretty rare combination to pull it off. This photo actually manages it. First, it was taken near sunset, with the light coming through the trees at a low angle, which actually let it bypass the shading canopy. Second, this patch of trees is above a river. It is a little tough to tell, but the hill behind these trees slopes down rather steeply. This lets the trees in the foreground stand on their own, rather than fading into the mess that is other trees. Third, because of the hill, the trees are growing at slightly odd angles. Very few of them are straight up and down, stopping them from just sliding the eye off the image.

Now, it isn’t perfect. The composition still is lacking something, mainly a clear focal point. There’s a few contenders for that point, which leads to visual clutter. And the top part is silhouetted against the bright sky, which is a tad too bright. It washes out the trees rather than letting them do a proper silhouette.

Still, it is nice to see a forest photo actually turn out, for once.

  

Icy Serenity

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Location Taken: Caseville, MI, USA
Date Taken: December 2008

Yes, this is actually a photograph. I did not in fact just patch together two monochrome gradients in Photoshop. This is an accurate photo.

I took this photo at my paternal Grandmother’s home on the Thumb of Michigan. She lives in a cottage on the shore of Lake Huron, complete with beach access.

Unlike just about all the other retirees who live in this area, she stays in Michigan all year round.

During the winter, snow falls and the freshwater lakes freeze up some. This was one of the years when it was frozen all the way to the horizon. Add in a gray, overcast sky, threatening with the standard snow, and you get scenes like this.

Quiet, lonely, peaceful.

Quite pleasant, really.

  

All We See Tis But Illusion and Superstition, my Friends!

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Time Drawn: April 2012

I realized that, purely by coincidence, I happened to post a picture of a four-leaf clover on a Friday the 13th.

So what the hey, let’s talk about superstition!

I’m simultaneously superstitious and skeptical, which doesn’t really work. It’s more like I keep catching myself changing my behavior because of a superstition (like going out of a way to collect the 14th of an item rather than sticking at 13), reminding myself that it’s a superstition and I don’t need to worry about it, and then, as a further level, reminding myself that I may have needed that 14th item anyway, and superstitions aren’t all bad.

Most superstitions tend to come from one logical fallacy or another. Perhaps the most common to cause this is a form of observation bias. People notice a pattern between two connected events (good or bad) that actually has nothing to do with the events, such as “It rained when I went for a walk on the beach, twice” or the classic “I won both ball games while wearing this pair of pants”. Then, that person, largely subconsciously, starts assuming that the pattern influenced the outcome of the event. “I can’t take a walk on that beach, I’ll get wet” or “These are my lucky pants! If I wear them, I’ll win!.” Then you toss in a bit of the pattern continuing, such as winning the next ball game, and the superstition gets set. After that, even if the pattern and the event aren’t connected, the brain will pick and choose which memories take precedence, and will pick those that matched (this is where the observation bias comes in). We humans tend to like patterns and things that confirm our beliefs, so we always remember the times that confirmed the superstition better than those that didn’t. Thus, even if, say, you lost as many ball games as you won wearing your lucky pants, you still will be convinced that you are gaining luck from said pants purely because you remember the wins better.

Mind you, this is actually a rather helpful thing to have, in most cases. Superstitions come from the same learning process that causes us to improve our skills. Say it was a new way of throwing the ball rather than pants, one that actually does provide better results than the old way. Again, the brain notices a pattern, “throwing this ball this way makes me win more” and sets the “superstition” in place. In this case, though, it is not considered a superstition as it is actually something that does cause the outcome to happen. Causation rather than correlation, if you prefer.

The superstitions are merely a side effect of how our brains learn about the world. The tough part comes in sorting out what beliefs you have are false superstitions and which are true superstitions, since, after all, they’re stored the same way in the brain. At least the true ones tend to get additional confirmation that helps shunt them from superstition to a more permanent fact.

Oddly enough, for me, Friday the 13th seems to be more lucky than unlucky. Mind you, this is merely because the probability of a day I consider “lucky” is much higher than a day I consider “unlucky”, and, because of the cultural superstition about Friday the 13th being unlucky, I actually pay just a little bit of attention to how lucky the day was. It’s pure baloney that the day is a lucky one for me. Still, it is somewhat amusing thinking about it, so it sticks in my head over the years.

And this Friday was a good day for me, far more productive than most of my days were. I mean, I finally fixed a long-standing problem with my mother’s computer, and I took a long walk where I took (exactly) 100 photos, many of which turned out well.

Hmm, maybe there is something to it…

Just kidding.

  

Fireflower, Fireflower, explode so gently into the night.

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Time Created: December 2006

I’m pulling out one of my older pieces here. I made this six years ago, using a program called Apophysis.

Apophysis is a fractal flame editor. What that means is that you open up the program and mess with various settings until you find something that stands out enough to keep. The art is all created using fractal algorithms, and all it requires is someone to mess with sliders and a discerning eye. You see, 99% of the images it creates are just a mess of colors and shapes, and what the artist does is pick through them until something worth keeping appears.

This piece was not just worth keeping, it is downright beautiful.

I call it Fireflower. The “fire” comes from the colors, all the oranges and yellows glowing against the black. And “flower”, well, the shapes remind me of organic growth, especially pines, and while those don’t have flowers, “firepine” just sounds like a wildfire in the making. Besides, fireflower is an alternate “pretty” name for fireworks, which this piece also reminds me of.

I don’t do too much with Apophysis. I haven’t really touched it in six years. But for a bit there, I was delighting in the various shapes and forms that it could create, looking at one after another.

If you want to try making art that doesn’t require an expensive camera or the artistic talent to draw better than stick figures, try this program. Not that stick figures are bad, mind. There are some rather nice webcomics that use stick figures, including the excellent xkcd (which you should check out if you haven’t encountered it before.)

And, for another plus, it’s completely free.

Some types of art really don’t require much investment, actually. It can be rather nice if that’s where your artistic talents lie. Or your “I just feel like making pretty things” talents. Or even your “Oooo, Shiny!” talents.

  

The Sweet Sweet Light of Sunset

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Location Taken: Agewa Bay, Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

I’m feeling in a sunset mood today, so here’s a lovely sunset picture.

This is yet another from the highly photogenic Agewa Bay. I’m not sure why I got so many good photos in the one night I was there, but I did. Some of it was the scenery, of course. It is a quite lovely bay, after all. Other aspects were the time of day (twilight) and the air quality (quite good).

Perhaps I should explain more, whether you like it or not.

With photography, there are two times of day when you will get better photos just due to the angle of the light: dawn and dusk. Midday, the light is coming from straight above. This leads to flatter levels of contrast on your subject, and unappealing shadows. It also tends to be a bit harsh and washes out the image. Night is obviously not the best lighting either. Dawn and dusk both have the light coming in at an angle, creating dynamic shadows, and the light is dimmed some due to coming through more atmosphere. Dusk also has the advantage of having very warm lighting, since the heat of the day builds up humidity and particles in the atmosphere that shift the wavelength of the light even further to the red.

If you want a further explanation about the science there, here’s a basic description. I don’t fully feel like going into it in this post myself.

Now, on to air quality and photography. There are certain days that just have the right combination of weather, humidity, sun angle, etc. that produce light that is neither too harsh nor too dim. This means it has to be either clear skies or only a few clouds, since full clouds change the light to indirect lighting. Indirect lighting is caused by the photons hitting the water vapor in the cloud, bouncing a few times, and losing its original angle by the time it escapes the cloud. This means the light from the sun is coming in from multiple angles. More of an object is lit, but it dims the light (since less is hitting any one spot) and removes all traces of sharpness to the shadows. Indirect lighting can be useful for certain subjects, but such photos usually aren’t as dynamic as those using direct lighting. The soft shadows and dimness lead to lower contrast, after all.

Days with ideal air quality are fairly rare, all told. Usually one of the factors is off just enough to matter. Still, when I spot a day with good air quality, I will often go out to take photos. I did that this Friday, actually. It tends to lead to a higher percentage of photos that come out exactly as I wanted them to. And to places that will show up more on my Saturday photos, like Agewa Bay did.