Category: Photography

Categories
Insects Photography

At the Gardens

I have not been a frequent visitor to the Missouri Botanical Gardens this summer. I don’t care for the crowds the Gardens attracts during the “tourist season”. Though the number of people was still a healthy size yesterday, they also reflect the more easy going nature of the “off-season regulars”.

The Gardens seem especially nice this year. Everything was healthy, lush, and the proper color, most likely due to this being the wettest year on record (to date) for St. Louis.

Mum

bee on mum

It’s too early for the Monarchs; we should be seeing them in the next couple of weeks. However, there were plenty of Cabbage Whites and Painted Ladies.

Painted Lady

The only reason I knew the name of the small, white (and very hard to photograph) Cabbage White is because of an excellent resource for butterfly identification: Butterflies and Moths of North America. You can look up your state, see what butterflies have been spotted in what county and then click through for pictures and more detailed identification information.

Returning to the Garden, the water lilies are in full bloom, which means, of course, dragonflies.

Dragonfly on water lily

dragonfly on lily

Categories
Critters Photography

New Youngling

A welcome break from the flooding occurred Saturday, June 14th, when one of the giraffes at the St. Louis Zoo gave birth to a baby in front of about 400 surprised zoo goers.

I wasn’t there that day, but did go out the following Tuesday to take photos, including this one of mother and son.

Mom and baby

The giraffes are in one of the mixed species habitats, sharing the space with a couple of gazelles and an ostrich. The other critters weren’t sure about this new stranger in their space, but the ostrich, in particular, would follow the baby around.

Family group

The ostrich became a little too aggressive and a little too close and the mother giraffe moved alongside of the bird and kicked her legs straight out to the side, pushing the bird away from the baby. The bird wasn’t hurt, but did get the message.

Categories
Photography Weather

The story, again

Update As of this afternoon, June 17, the predictions now place the crest of the flood in St. Louis on the 23rd of June, and 40 feet. The forecast is now for major flooding in our community.

Tomorrow or Thursday, I’ll grab my camera, as I head out to record yet another flood. It seems like I’m taking pictures of flooding every six months now.

A year ago the Missouri crept over its banks, sending the Mississippi higher, but not to the point of being a threat. Earlier this year, I watched as the Meramec flooded areas not two miles from my home. And now, favorite towns of mine further north—Clarksville, Winfield, Hannibal, Alton— are facing their worst threat, perhaps ever.

Flood of 2007

The main Clarksville city web site says it all, replacing the normal pages with just one picture of the downtown area, showing the river as it gets closer. First there was Wisconsin, then Iowa, now us and Illinois, as too much water drains off the land into the only place it can drain: the Mississippi.

The crest will most likely arrive on Friday for the towns up north, on Saturday for St. Louis. We’re not going to reach the same 1993 flood levels, as the Missouri isn’t as high as it was 15 years ago. It was high waters further north along the Mississippi and high waters in the Missouri, both of which converge just before the city that lead to such epic floods in St.Louis and down south. Still, we’re a scant four inches away from crossing the line from moderate to major flooding, as levees overtop up north, like dominoes falling, one after another; leaving behind a body of water that seems as surprised to see buildings in its midst as we are devastated to see it surround our homes and flow over our streets.

Meramec Flood 2008

The folks of Hannibal assure us that Mark Twain’s home is in no danger because of a levee built years ago. The same levee featured in the first story in Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America , which told of how the levee protected the business area and museums, but didn’t the homes of the poor, and how it is the poor who suffer the most in these floods. Mark Twain would not approve.

We knew this flood was coming months ago, as rains fell throughout the spring, and snow fell into up north and melted late. What can you do, though? Levees can’t be built in a month, and sandbags can only do so much. The water is the blood that flows through the veins of our land, and not only couldn’t we hold it back, we shouldn’t hold it back. All we can do is cherish the river in good times, and run for the hills in bad. Oh, and not build homes in flood plains.

I watched on TV last night as forecasters predicted that these floods will cause food prices to inflate an additional 6%. The waters have filled fields with muck and goo, unlike floods in the past that used to lay down clean, rich, top soil. We’ve contaminated the lands and the waters and the floods don’t bring the benefits the way they used to. Now, you have to have a tetanus shot just to go near the water.

Meramec flood 2008

The Army Corps of Engineers, who believe that we can engineer ourselves out of any problem, call these floods five hundred year floods because there is a .2% chance of them happening every year. I don’t think the experts really know how often these floods will come, though, because earlier this year the National Weather Service’s expert on floods in this area predicted only moderate flooding for 2008, even as we looked out the window at the rains, and one week before the Meramec floods began.

Flood of 2007

Categories
Photography Web Writing

Color management support in browsers

With the addition of support for color profiles built into Firefox 3, it’s time to take a closer look at how the popular browsers support color management. First though, a quick refresher on the importance of color profiles.

If you’ve every worked with a photo in a photo editor, only to have the rich colors leach out when the photo shows in your web page, you’ve run directly into what happens when your editor supports color profiles, but the browser does not. Color profiles are a mapping between device and color space, in such a way that a photo that looks richly colorful in Photoshop, still looks richly colorful in your browser, across multiple operating systems and devices.

The following are two sets of photos, each incorporating different color management. The first in the series shows the photo as I would normally create a photo for publishing on the web: I’d calibrate my monitor, set the gamma half way between PC and Mac, and then set my tool’s color space to the LCD. Then, when I work with the image, the result I get will end up looking relatively decent in both Macs and PCs. The second photo in the series hasn’t been manipulated at all. The third was created after I set the photo editor’s color settings to sRGB, and then converted the photo to this color space. When I saved the photo, I incorporated the color profile.

The first sequence of photos are screenshots taken when the photo is loaded into Firefox without color management. Though a screenshot doesn’t necessarily capture the nuances of color, I think you can see that the color of the last photo from the first sequence of three differs from the color of the last photo in the second sequence of three, which consist of screenshots from Safari 3.x, which does have built-in support for color profiles.

screenshot one screenshot two

The following are the actual photos used for these screenshots. The first shows the photo without any color manipulation and not using color management.

bird with pink feathers

The second photo was made using my old LCD color trick.

bird with pink feathers

The last photo was not manipulated in the photo editor, other than to scale the image. The sRGB color profile was embedded into the photo. I could have also embedded the Adobe RGB color profile, but I stayed with the popular sRGB color profile.

bird with pink feather

If you look at this page using a browser that doesn’t support color management, the first and third photos should be very similar. However, if you look at the photos using Firefox 3 with color management enabled, Safari 3, or other browser or device that supports color management, the last photo should appear more colorful than the first. To get an even better idea of the color variations, the following are screenshots of color swatches in a web page— opened in both a color managed browser, and in a browser that doesn’t support color management. The difference should be noticeable.

Currently, I know of only a few browsers that support color profiles: Safari 3.x, in both Windows and the Mac, supports color management; supposedly Omniweb also supports color management, as did the older version of IE for the Mac (IE 5.5), though I’ve not tried either tool. Now, Firefox 3 supports color profiles, but not without a caveat: color profiles are disabled by default.

The reason Firefox 3 is releasing without color profiles on by default is primarily because of performance issues. Turning on color management in Firefox 3 can really slow load times of a site that uses color profiles embedded in pictures, especially larger pictures. In addition, according to John Resig there are some real concerns about plug-ins, such as those for Flash and Silverlight, that don’t do color profile support, and which can lead to incorrect renderings.

I can understand the issues, though I am disappointed. Support for color profiles with Firefox 3 would go a long way to encouraging color profile support in other browsers. I hope that Firefox 3.1 works through the performance issues and we get support for color profiles by default. You can still take advantage of color profile support in Firefox 3, now, but you either have to set a custom option using a less than friendly procedure, or make use of a color management add-on.

Do I use embedded color profiles in images at my site? I have started to, though not across all sites. If I use color management, I won’t use my LCD trick, which means that the photo won’t look as good for those people using browsers that don’t support color profiles. At the same time, I would really like to encourage better graphics support in our browsers, which means using the functionality we want the browsers to support. We’ll never progress if we keep designing for the lowest common denominator.

For more on color profiles, check out the International Color Consortium web site.

Categories
Photography

Raptor

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t do much bird photography anymore. We’ve had many less birds this year, after the loss of so much seed crop with last year’s bad weather. Our song birds are shy, too, preferring to hide among the brambles and brush. However, I spotting a pair of red tailed hawks I thought I’d try to photograph and dragged my large telephoto lens over to Powder Valley.

When you take your camera, with the big and heavy lens, you won’t see birds, isn’t that the rule? I spotted a few nuthatches, several cardinals, a Steller’s Jay, mourning doves, and what looked like some form of falcon, but too far away for pictures. Luckily, though, I had my camera pointed in the right direction when what I thought was the falcon, cricked its wing tips to bring it in for a landing–long enough for me to grab one single photo.

Cooper's hawk

I wasn’t sure what the bird was. At first I thought it was an osprey, because it crooked its wings in a way similar to an osprey when flying. After looking at various photos, though, I believe it’s a Cooper’s Hawk, a rare, endangered raptor native to our state. It also looks similar to a sharp-shinned hawk, but it was much larger than these birds–much closer to crow size, than jay. If you have another identification, please let me know.

The photo was the first half-way decent one I’ve been able to get of a bird in months. This has not been a good year for birds, so much so that I’m thinking of selling my telephoto, a Nikon AFS VR 70-200mm F2.8 on eBay. I don’t take bird photos very much, and though you can use other settings, the thing is so bloody heavy it’s tiring to use. It’s really meant to be used with a tripod, but I don’t care much for tripod work.

I like my 50mm fixed length lens, and have been thinking of getting an 85mm, though I’m still trying to wrap my head around the sensor sizes and equivalent lens issues. Perhaps what I really need is a 35mm. Or more birds.