Skies – Trees – Tug Boat – Guest Ron Barrons
I was very happy this week to get a couple of gorgeous images from our friend Ron Barrons. Ron lives in Hamilton, Ontario where our son and his family also reside. We’ve had many happy times in Hamilton with family and visiting Ron and his wife, Brenda. Ron has been a guest on Madang – Ples Bilong Mi here.
This one gives me goose-bumps. I could bore you to tears with my analysis of this image. It’s got it all. The composition is perfect, using just about every rule to perfection. Note at the right side on the horizon that you can see the bridge connecting Hamilton to Toronto. Click to enlarge (I wish I had a higher resolution image for you) and you’ll see it better:
That bridge makes a wonderful focal point in the enlarged image. All of the lines and shapes seem to point to it. You can’t keep your eyes away from it, but it doesn’t dominate.
Here’s another fine composition by Ron. Though I hate being cold, I do envy the photographers who live in temperate regions with beautiful deciduous forests that glow with surreal colours in the autumn. Ron beautifully captured the serenity of this scene. I don’t know where the image was shot, but I’d like to go there and sit for a while, in a warm coat with a cold Chardonnay and a cigar:
Nice job, Ron. Please, keep them coming!
Well, I feel a little inadequate this morning to compete with that. Hey, it’s not a competition anyway. It’s a sharing. So, A couple of mornings ago, I got this mid-telephoto of the sun rising above Madang Town across the harbour from our house:
The shot shows the limitations of the sensors in point-and-shoot cameras such as my Canon G9, my carry-about camera. No matter what I did, I could not bring up any decent detail and colour in the shadowed town. The dynamic range of brightness in the scene was just too much for the sensor to capture.
The main advantage of a big, full 35mm frame (called FX) sensor in an expensive digital SLR (single lens reflex) camera is that each ‘bucket’ (pixel) that collects photons of light is bigger. This means that the number of photons counted from adjoining buckets will be more accurate because the random fluctuations caused by several factors will be smaller. In other words, there will be less noise in the image. Noise shows up as little speckles that shouldn’t be there. The bigger buckets also collect more photons, so the calculations in the computer in the camera can more accurately deliver a wider range of brightness levels (dynamic range).
Here’s how I think of that. Imagine marking off an area in your yard ten metres square. First, put out 1,000 little buckets filling the area as best you can and wait for a big rain. Now measure the water in each bucket. You’ll find a comparatively large difference between buckets, when you would have expected them to be all the same. This is noise. Now remove the 1,000 buckets and replace them with 100 buckets filling the area (they will have to be bigger buckets). Now wait for a rain which drops about the same amount of water. This time, when you measure the water in the buckets you will find that there is much less difference between them. You have reduced the noise. That’s one important reason why bigger sensors are better. You don’t want more pixels, that can make the noise worse, because each pixel must be smaller. What you want is bigger pixels.
There are other reasons that bigger sensors are better, but those are even more boring.
This shot made me a little happier:
It’s a little fakey looking, because I had to massage it pretty vigorously with Photoshop, but it’s cheery, so I’ll satisfy myself with that.
I went a little crazy with the panorama concept in this one:
If you click to enlarge, you can see quite a bit of detail in Madang Town, including a blurry band around the tall coconut tree to the left of centre where Photoshop failed to blend properly the adjacent frames when it was building the merged image.
We’re having fish tomorrow! Somebody bring the tartar sauce.
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Very nice shots from your friend….looking at them, I missed NE autumn for about 3 seconds, then came to my senses, remembering what follows autumn in NE. After 33 years of NE winters, I so happy to be in this northern CA climate. Not as warm as Southern Cal, but it’s so sunny here, and mostly warm, especially compared to what I left behind. Berkeley is my paradise.
Btw, your “big bucket, little bucket’ explanation of pixels was brilliant. I learned a lot. That’s the kind of writing we looked for in our freelancers for kids textbooks, but sadly, few hit that level of clarity and good analogy. I usually had to rewrite the hell out of what we got, sometimes wondering why we even used out-of-house writers if their copy was going to need that much work.
Yes, Ron has a keen eye. I wish he would send me more of his work.
I never could figure out what was going on with the last images that you sent. I’ve never seen that error with Photoshop before and there’s nothing useful about it on the web. If you’d like to send me images to put up on the journal, just send me the file directly as it came from the camera if you don’t mind me fiddling with it before I put it up. I imagine that you always have your camera handy when you’re walking around your beautiful Berkeley. Of course, you’re going to be needing them yourself when you get your science site up. How’s that going, anyway? I like your Metta Refuge site – very clean. Though I have to admit that a great deal of it is over my spiritual head.
I dig what you say about the differences in climate. I grew up in Indiana and lived there until I was about 35. I wouldn’t survive a winter there now. The last time that I was there in the wintertime was in 1990 when I thought that I’d gone home to die of cancer. Whoops, wrong diagnosis! It was only a leaky appendix which had given me low-grade peritonitis for ten months.
And thanks, Steven, for you complement concerning my explanation and my writing skill, if I may call it that. If you’re aware of any of that kind of work floating around, I would be happy if you direct it my way. We got more bad news today about our financial support. Looks like I’m going to be a full-time freelance writer and photographer well before I had planned. Anyway, I needed a boost this morning and you provided it.
Hey MadDog. As to the writing, as Joe Friday would say, but not to you, “Just the facts, ma’am.” I’ve edited hundreds and hundreds of science and history articles, and I know good, creative writing when I see it. I’ll definitely keep you in mind if any queries come my way.
Sorry to hear about the financial support; I’ll say privately. Glad I could give you a boost when it was needed, bro!
“It was a rainy Thursday afternoon. We were working the Bunko Squad . . . .”
Interesting story you got here – Sven – marine student Norway