Let’s start off with a lovely Idaho landscape by reader Stephen Barnard, which he labeled, “My Maxfield Parrish impression.” And sure enough, it is (Parrish is one of my favorite popular illustrators.)
He labeled it an “HDR” landscape, and when I asked what that was, he replied, “It’s three shots on a tripod at +/- 1ev. I put them together with an app. It’s easy. Your stormy Chicago skylines would be an excellent subject.”
Click to enlarge:
If you’re unfamiliar with Parrish (1870-1966), here’s one of his illustrations (“Romance,” 1922). He was known for his pastel-ish hues and grandiose, romantic imagery:
Some nest parasitism by birds, photographed by reader Brian Peer, who explains:
I have some photos of my “real” area of research: avian brood parasitism. A couple weeks ago Bruce Lyon mentioned the parasitic cuckoos he photographed in China. Here in North America, we have only one widespread interspecific avian brood parasite, the Brown-headed Cowbird. [Molothrus ater]. Cowbirds, like many of the cuckoos, never build their own nests and lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. When these “hosts” are parasitized by a cowbird they typically raise fewer of their own young, and in some instances they raise only the cowbird and none of their own young. I’m particularly interested in why so few hosts (~10%) reject cowbird eggs in spite of the costs to their reproductive success. [JAC: This goes to show you that some selective pressures don’t elicit a response: nature isn’t perfect. Any case of parasitism, like this one, is a failure of natural selection (in this case on the part of the host bird.]
I’ve attached photos of parasitized host nests. The lack of egg rejection by some hosts is likely due to the similarity of cowbird and host eggs, including the Northern Cardinal. However, there are other hosts that have eggs clearly distinguishable from cowbird eggs (Wood Thrush and Red-winged Blackbirds) yet they accept parasitism.
The cowbird eggs are white with brown and gray spots. The catbird is a “rejecter” meaning that it removes cowbird eggs laid in its nest, whereas the blackbird and wood thrush are “accepters” which accept most parasitic eggs.
Northern cardinal nest with cowbird egg:
As you can see, cowbird eggs are very similar in appearance to cardinal eggs. Cardinals rarely reject cowbird eggs and occasionally reject their own eggs from parasitized nests by accident.
Wood thrush nest with cowbird egg [JAC: note that the woodthrush accepts and broods these eggs even though they’re completely different from their own.]
This photo is a Field Sparrow nest with two sparrow eggs (smaller) and two cowbird eggs. Again, other than the size difference, these eggs are similar in appearance:
Gray catbird nest with cowbird egg [catbirds, unlike wood thrushes reject these]:
[JAC: Here’s the malefactor: a female bronze-headed cowbird, whose photo I’ve taken from Wikipedia. She doesn’t look mean, does she?]:
Finally, a Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus), photographed by Diana MacPherson, who sadly neglected to anthropomorphize this lovely bird:
I see a future posting of ‘spot the cowbird egg’ in cases like the first picture.
Shhh! Don’t give him any ideas!
Lovely landscape.
Jerry, I know you don’t care much for using your phone for photography but there are some terrific aps that will do the HDR trick automatically. ‘Pro HDR’ for iPhone is one such and it could make your Chicago pictures even better.
If you like that sort of thing.
“He labeled it an “HDR” landscape, and when I asked what that was…”
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. The description is adequate. Three consecutive shots at substantially different exposures are fed into an algorithm.
🐔
I noticed this year a paucity of cow birds. There were however, plenty of sparrows. Strange.
Stephen – you should matt & frame your landscapes!
I couldn’t think what the flicker would be thinking. She didn’t stay long & I was happy to finally get a shot of one as they aren’t usually very close.
As soon as I saw your flicker, I thought of Hili in contemplative pose. Feli-morphism?
It was a big cowbird year here. I like having a few around, but not too many.
I guess you got them all this year. Interesting that I did notice a lot more sparrows so perhaps they are the ones tricked most. I always assumed it was the grackles for some reason.
The tail feathers of the flicker are an interesting shape. They cling to vertical tree surfaces and hammer away like a woodpecker, and the tips of their tail feathers would be propped firmly into the tree trunk. So maybe they are tapered like that to minimize damage to them.
Flickers are tough to photograph — very spooky and active.
Flickers are pretty cool. This girl looks like an eastern “yellow” shafted variety. The shafts are distinctly redder on Flickers in and around Calgary where I live.
Yes, she’s a yellow-shafted flicker. I had never actually seen them with their feathers displayed this way as usually when I see them, they are out on my lawn or further down my property on a fence or tree.
My grandfather, a naturalist of sorts (but through no apparent effort to do so for its own sake – he was thoroughly instrumental in his perspective on nature and education) referred to the bird as a “yellow hammer.”
I (however [in-] accurately) perceive that in earlier times Maxfield Parrish has been raked over the coals by omniscient critics, much like Norman Rockwell. But I regale in looking at his work. Perhaps his work “Stars” (1927?) has been too much referenced, but I never tire of looking at it and other works at length.
That’s a good point about Norman Rockwell. His work was once considered kitsch, but now it’s appreciated, deservedly so in my opinion. Art criticism is capricious. Maybe history will vindicate Kinkade, but I doubt it.
I thoroughly doubt it, unless art criticism goes to hell in a handbasket…
Re Parrish: Art Criticism Question.
I know that (in spite of superficial similarities) I like Maxfield Parrish and that I do NOT like Thomas Kinkade, but I don’t have the facility for describing what is good or bad in a painting to put the reasons into words. Any ideas, other WEIT readers?
(One of the disappointments of my August trip to Carmel was to note that the gallery which carried excellent paintings by singer Tony Bennett [all signed Antonio Benedetto] was gone, but the Kinkade gallery was still there!)
Good question. Kinkade was evidently a terrible person who indulged in disgusting personal behavior and fraudulent business practices. He also ran an assembly-line operation, roughing in paintings that were filled out by underlings. (Ruebens and many other renowned artists did the same thing.) Those factors inevitably bleed into his reputation, but they shouldn’t bear on the artistic merit of his work.
I find his paintings to be overly sentimental, more suitable for a wall in a cheap motel than for a gallery.
Kinkade’s stuff is ghastly, yet sells for huge bucks in fancy places like Carmel-by-the-Sea. Have you seen the ones on-line where the waterfalls flow? (they’re as cheesy as those old Keane pictures with the huge eyes).
Carmel sits among a drop-dead gorgeous seascape defaced by faux architecture, populated by tourists and occasionally billionaires checking into their sixth vacation home. It’s a paradigm of bad taste.
Yes the town itself has much in the way of bad taste, but just south of there at Point Lobos is one of the loveliest places on earth, complete with tons of sea otters.
For that matter, almost the entire Pacific shoreline (and most of the old route 101) fits that description….
b&
Yup, and up north of Vancouver, too. As an originally California girl I admit reluctantly that the drive from Vancouver to Whistler is at least as spectacular as the California coast. Haven’t seen any sea otters up there, though. Love those little guys when they float on their backs and crack open abalone shells with rocks.
I’ve seen some beautifully integrated modern architecture on the California coast. It’s the faux stuff that puts me off. Faux reaches its apogee with the Hearst Castle, San Simeon, which is otherwise a fascinating place and well worth a visit, if only for the historical context.
I’ve actually never been inside Hearst Castle. Tried to once but it was sold out. Anyone been to Winchester Mystery House south of San Jose? Never been but seen the tacky billboards.
I recently made a return trip to Oranghe County CA. My main impressions after having not been there for about 17 years:
1. No snow. I crossed the coastal ranges back of the LA basin by air and in February, there was not a single snow bank visible. Absolutely frightening. (In 1997, I was stopped by deep snow in the San Bernardino Mtns below 9000 feet — in JUNE.)
2. No open land between LA and San Juan Capistrano. It’s all been developed. I remember when there were still pockets of undeveloped land. No more. Scary. (I’ve never been south of San Clemente, though I’ve driven all the rest of Hwy 101 from the Olympic Penninsula to San Clemente and all of CA 1 (and all the other scenic detours seaward from 101 in OR and WA.))
And I agree, the road between North Van and Squamish is as beautiful as anything south of there.
I didn’t know about the Tony Bennett paintings! Did see some paintings in SF by Ronnie Wood maybe 10 years ago. Not bad.
Speaking of cheesy, Canada has a kind of Kinkade equivalent in Tricia Romance (her real name, I believe!) I have a friend who loves her stuff:-(
Scientific research confirms the badness of Kinkade’s “art.” Briefly, people exposed to a Kinkade painting liked it less over time, whereas people liked a painting from a respected artist (John Everett Millais) more over time.
You GO Science!!
Maxfield Parrish had a resurgence in popularity in the ’70s, when his lysergic prints adorned nearly every head shop, accompanied by the scent of incense and patchouli oil.
When it comes to cowbirds, some host species do not reject the eggs because the female cowbirds remain in the area. If they return to the nest and cannot find their eggs, they will sometimes destroy all the host eggs in the nest. So my thought is that some species do not reject the eggs because it means losing the entire nest. Also, cowbirds eggs are thicker and bigger and hard for smaller species to move. If they try to, they could destroy their own eggs in the process.
Cowbirds used to move with bison herds, but since the reduction of the bison populations they started settling across the country and have become a big problem for local birds.
I’ll admit to not being overly fond of the HDR aesthetic in general, but Stephen’s example here is well executed. Very painterly, in a good way.
Photography is pretty much based around the assumption that the end result is going to be printed, which means that the theoretical maximum dynamic range goes from pitch black to paper white — with Teflon (PTFE) thread seal tape (what you use in plumbing) being basically the whitest and brightest paper gets. But there’s a problem: real-world scenes often have significant elements that are themselves “brighter than white.” A direct view of a light source is much brighter than the objects it illuminates, and specular (shiny mirror-like) reflections (think glossy paint) are themselves close to the brightness of the illuminant. Also, lighting in the real world is almost never uniform. There’s that whole inverse square law, for starters, and then shadows, and reflections, and lensing (including from holes in cloud covers), and more. As a result, except in very carefully controlled studio settings, you’re going to be taking pictures of things that are brighter than you can even theoretically reproduce — and, often times, orders of magnitude so.
There are various strategies for how to deal with this problem.
One is to pretend it doesn’t exist and let everything “brighter than white” just be white. This preserves maximum detail in the stuff that isn’t brighter than white, but it means that, for example, the colorful lights on your Christmas tree all get printed as white. It’s also going to generally render clouds as flat white and obliterate all the subtle texture that makes them so beautiful.
Another is to make white be some shade of gray. This preserves brighter-than-white highlight detail, but at the cost of making the print in general appear darker and reduce contrast overall.
Next up, you can start playing with the tone curve in all sorts of ways…but, regardless of the tools you use (brightness / contrast sliders, digital fill light, highlight recovery, whatever), all are mathematically equivalent to a simple function that increases contrast for one range of tones at the expense of another range of tones. This is where much of the artistry of post-exposure photographic processing takes place.
Lastly, you can selectively apply different tone curves to different areas of the picture. In the chemical-laden film darkroom, this is done with “dodging and burning,” where you selectively apply more or less exposure to different parts of the image by waving around different implements. You might dodge the clouds, underexposing them, and burn their (much darker) reflections on the water, making each have the same brightness on the final print. The transition area between the two can either be abrupt (better for hard lines, but can appear unnatural) or gradual (appears more natural but at the cost of contrast in the transition area).
HDR is a variation on this theme, but it (dramatically) improves image quality by merging separate exposures, each optimized for the tonality being rendered. Overexposing shadows leads to noise and grain, and highlights often get clipped on the camera’s sensor with nothing to recover. But if you’ve got an exposure already overexposed in general but with the shadows “properly” exposed, those shadows have no more noise than the midtones in your middle exposure (even though the midtones are too bright and the highlights nonexistent). Similarly, if you’ve also got an exposure already overexposed, there’ll be full detail in the highlights even though the shadows are solid black.
There are many different ways to do the “tone mapping” of HDR that combines the (two or more, possibly many more) exposures. My personal favorite is to start with the best overall exposure, and then to manual paint in selected bits of the other exposures with varying amounts of opacity. There are also automated tools, such as the one that Stephen used, that use various algorithms to merge bits based on different parameters.
Lastly…the most frustrating bit about all of this is that, even with today’s high-performance digital cameras capable of capturing insanely wide dynamic ranges and today’s electronic displays capable of actually displaying real brighter-than-white imagery…all of the processing tools and even the file formats themselves still assume that the brightest pixel in the image is paper white. The film industry, especially in the CGI parts, has some rudimentary support for absolute luminance values, but damned little, and there’s nothing at all in the consumer still photography world. It’s a real shame, because our lives as photographers would be much simpler if photos recorded the actual brightness of the scene instead of the relative brightness of pixels; we’d then be able to intelligently and easily and intuitively control how to map such brightness to different media. That’s what we do anyway…but the means is much, much, much more cumbersome than it needs to be….
Cheers,
b&
Cheers,
b&
Ugh…sorry for the multiple formatting fails….
b&
But there’s a problem: real-world scenes often have significant elements that are themselves “brighter than white.”
Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.
I rarely make prints of my photographs. I have exactly one in my house, which isn’t that good, and I’ve given a few to friends and relatives, but I aim at laptop LCD screens. Preferrably, retinas.
The big problem, of course, with displays is calibration. Even if your display is perfectly calibrated…you still have no control over whether anybody else’s is. And, of course, calibration requires dedicated hardware, perhaps not cheap, and anywhere from a little to a great deal of knowledge and skill…and then, just like printers, different displays have different gamuts and not all can display the same (saturated) colors….
Just as charcoal on limestone is never going away, neither are prints. The (immediate) future, at least, is definitely Web or other electronic display, but prints are likely to retain their position in the fine art realm a lot longer than film has as a capture medium.
b&
I try to optimize for my up-to-spec MacBook Pro Retina. Anything else is someone else’s problem. 🙂
They’re great displays…but they have more display-to-display variation than you might expect, and the default calibration isn’t colorimetric…again, even if they’re much better than average….
b&
Much 17th Century European landscape painting — Dutch, Flemish, English — was high dynamic range. The artists painted what they saw, as realistically as possible, before cameras and film were invented.
It’s a really complicated (and interesting) question of where physics meets physiology and psychology.
It’s possible, using off-the-shelf equipment and a lot of uncommon know-how, to set up an almost arbitrary scene, photograph it, make a print, and set the print up next to the scene (and carefully illuminated) such that the two are essentially perceptually identical. The same number of photons per bananosecond will reach your retina from the respective parts of the scenes.
But that’s not necessarily how a painter would paint a “faithful” representation of the scene — and the painter has some powerful arguments for the “distortions” being made. Specifically, the painter is going to focus attention on the various parts of the scene. In so doing, the complete visual system from iris to brain “normalizes” the exposure for just that part of the scene — just as you do with HDR when you expose for the different parts of the scene. The painter then paints that bit with a normalized exposure, focusses attention to another part and paints it with a normalized exposure, and so on — exactly what photographers do with HDR. In so doing, fine details are made more apparent that would have taken more careful observation in the original scene, but the overall tone map is unfaithfully rendered — the shadows were actually much darker than they appear in the painting / print, and the highlights were actually much brighter.
That’s why it’s called, “art”….
b&
The human visual system is similar to a camera, but different in important ways. We view a landscape as an organized whole, as a gestalt. As our glance shifts from here to there, the focus changes and the iris contacts or expands, integrating a general, reliable, veridical representation — everything in focus and all detail exposed.
And the gross physiological changes in the eye are just the beginning! Look at all the optical illusions for the very active role our brains play in vision….
b&
Spot on. Most, or perhaps all of the most interesting visual illusions are cognitive — an attempt to construct a gestalt from distorted information. My favorite is the Ames Room.
http://psylux.psych.tu-dresden.de/i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/ames_room.html
When we look at a photograph or a realistic painting or drawing we experience an illusion. The photograph is taken from a particular point in space with a particular orientation, focal point, and focal length. But when we look at the photograph from a wildly different perspective, we effortlessly and immediately make perfect sense of it.
Yeah, those are mind-blowing.
One of my favorites is Adelson’s checkerboard:
http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html
It’s a perfect example of how our visual systems functionally operate as contact spectrophotometers as opposed to the emissive spectroradiometers the mechanisms superficially resemble. That is, we’re great at estimating the surface reflectance properties of substances, and pathetic at gauging absolute luminosities.
Remember Adelson the next time you do an HDR rendering, and see how it influences the way you tweak the knobs!
b&
Not to mention all the stuff our primary visual cortex edits out before passing it along to the next step. Poor conscious brain is really left out.
Woah…I just experienced — or, rather, realized — something that’ll forever change the way I approach sharpening. Stephen, especially, you’ll have to try this for yourself.
Find a very simple well-lit real-world scene with simple geometric shapes and high contrast. In my case, it was laying down on the bed for a moment on the bed, looking up at the near-black ceiling fan blades against the all-white ceiling.
Look at the same part of the scene for long enough for persistence of vision to start to do its thing, and now shift your focus (but not necessarily your eyes) to the edges between light and dark.
Thanks to the effects of persistence of vision, the edges of the dark bits will appear darker and the edges of the light bits will appear lighter — which is exactly what we digitally do when sharpening images. Overdo it digitally and you create visible halos; keep your vision on the scene long enough and you see similar halos.
I’m going to have to study this effect in some depth. The “radius” is much, much wider than what I generally go for in sharpening photographs, and the contour of the tone curve is, I think, perhaps a bit more complex. The popular technique of two-step unsharp masking with both a large and small radius is not a bad approximation, but I think it can be improved upon.
I think my first step is going to be to reproduce the effect as faithfully I can, and then try to figure out how much is best to actually dial in with photographs…the same physiology is going to be at play with photographs as in the real-world scenes, and I suspect that a full duplication of the effect is likely to be serious overkill.
…anyway, we now return you to your regularly-scheduled whatever already in progress….
Cheers,
b&
See what having coffee helps you with?
You know, I actually did wonder how much the physiology of the caffeine in my system today played into that observation…which is why I’m going to repeat it tomorrow.
It’s also worth noting that I had a small glass of chardonnay with lunch, and this was before making the observation. (And I drink about as much wine as I do coffee, for similar reasons…love the stuff for culinary reasons, don’t care so much for the physiological effects. But the one seems to counteract the other, so of late I’ve taken to pairing them on the same day….)
b&
Maybe you need to mix the depressants with the stimulants. Try Spanish coffee!
…or Irish….
b&
I don’t like Irish coffee. The whiskey clashes too much.
Must admit, I’ve never tried either….
b&
like myself too often, that flicker appears to be waiting for the bus.
Love the nest pics, Brian. Let us know what you discover about this parasitism.
Reblogged at My Selfish Gene
Ben and Stephen: I enjoyed your discussion around HDR, range, and perception. Very interesting. Can’t really add anything except that I love digital.
I resisted for a LONG time. Initially felt no interest in post-processing.
This all changed really quickly once I started to tweak the dials (even simple global adjustments) in SW. I went from PS Elements 6 to LR3 and PS5 in about 6 months I think.
I found I was able to “salvage” (beautifully) many old KR64 or Fujichrome slides where I just missed the exposure. Some of those had been big disappointments; and saving them was very gratifying.
I used to harbor dreams of a 4X5 field camera and daarkroom to match. That idea is gone now. I’m about to donate my enlargers to local schools for thier programs. Haven’t had a darkroom set up for a couple of decades. Sigh.
That said, I’ve been able to get more, better, faster prints out of my old B&W negatives using scanner/SW/printer than I could (or at least did) in the darkroom.
And all that said: I LOVED Tri-X-Pan. (Developed in Microdol X, 3:1, 75°F, holding temp constant throughout the development and fixing processing.) The range and linearity in that range were astonishing. And the grain was not bad at all with the Microdol.
Cheers.
Digital photography, these days, is, to use a trite phase, “insanely great”.
There was a long period where digital significantly lagged behind film in all technical aspects: resolution, dynamic range, color gamut and fidelity, and the rest. But, several years ago, digital leapfrogged film and left it in the dust on all technical measurements. That writ, there remains (and always will) some very powerfully compelling aesthetic reasons to use film, and we can expect it to survive basically forever, the same way that charcoal on limestone has and will.
Probably the most useful tip that I can offer to novices for digital post-processing is to begin by cranking the saturation to the max, making the image look the best (or at least least worst) you can, returning the saturation to normal, and stepping away from the computer for a minute or three. That’s especially the case for adjusting color balance. All your adjustments are greatly amplified with the saturation cranked, with problems made to appear that much worse. But your visual system will also get fatigued by the time you’re done with the edits, to the point that the super-saturated version will make the normally-saturated version look flat and faded when you first move that saturation slider back, which is why you need to take a break before continuing with your edits.
b&
One of my buddies is going retro, big time. Snapping up a lot of very cheaply obtainable medium format equipment (really nice stuff for a song). He has been cranking out some very nice B&W with it.
(It’s amazing, even the telephoto lenses for that stuff is (at least some times) pretty affordable now, with so many dumping it and going to all-digital.)
Another friend is taking another retro tack: He’s buying up old Zeiss and Leitz glass (and others) and using adapters with his Canon 5D. Especially in the portrait, wide-angle, and fish-eye areas, he’s getting some amazing results. I guess this is a farily big thing now; but I didn’t know about it. The portrait lenses are very sharp but don’t have the snappy contrast of the current bunch of digital-era lenses. But for portrait, it’s fine. Sort of a very slight soft focus effect.
I clung to my last few favorite film lenses for about 10 years and then finally sold them a couple of years ago after doing comparison tests against my digital-era lesnes. I knew I’d never be satisfied with the IQ using them, so why hang onto them? I hadn’t shot film in about 10 years at that time.
I used to be an all-manual, all the time guy. I didn’t even use a light meter for daylight work with KR64 and Tri-X.
Aging eyes and the the advances in AE and AF have converted me. I generally always shoot in Aperture priority and diddle the exposure comp. as needed. And I really need the AF with aging eyes. And it works so well now.
Ben, I like your tip on using the saturation slider as a visualization tool. I will try that on puzzling images. I have a bunch of presets that cover 90% of my basic adjustments. Color balance is tricky. I sometimes diddle it even after using the white balance tool.
I still have my old film cameras. I actually have an old Minolta that I used to take moon pictures with. It came with a 55mm lens that was really lovely.
I find the most common adjustment I make is making pictures “warmer” only because I often shoot in shadow due to where the animals are & the time of day.
Canon cameras have the shortest distance from mount to sensor of any major brand, which means that you can adapt pretty much any lens to them. And the advances in lens design is almost as shocking as the other technical advances…Sigma, for example, has a new 50mm lens out that’s relatively inexpensive that’s better than all but two or three other 50mm lenses ever made by anybody.
For exposure, I actually photograph a ColorChecker Passport, and use an ICC profiling workflow to normalize both exposure and white balance in a single step in post-processing. But the process isn’t exactly intuitive…see here for more details than I’m sure you want to know:
http://trumpetpower.com/photos/Exposure
b&