DeArmond.net

Within the next week or so, this site will undergo a significant upgrade.

Since its inception, DeArmond.net has been operating via the blog software WordPress. While WordPress has been an excellent development platform for my site, I have aspirations that go beyond its capabilities.

Over the past six months, I have been working with another Content Management System (CMS) called Drupal. I believe that Drupal has what I'm want for now and the proper environment for me to grow in the future.

All of my previous posts have been copied over so that neither my content nor your comments will be lost. However, the URLs for all of the content will change. This means that if you have linked to any page or post other than my home page, you will have to relink. Also, my RSS feed address will change, so if you have subscribed to my RSS feed, you'll have to resubscribe. Here's the new URL (it doesn't work yet, of course):
http://dearmond.net/rss.xml

Another thing you may notice: I will drop the "www" at the beginning of my web address. If you try it with the "www", it'll work, but it'll redirect you to a url without.

After I make the switch, I will post another announcement describing in more detail some of the improvements I've made.

This shot was taken on Highway 88, the road up to Kirkwood. There's a turnout with a beautiful valley view. Lots of snow and trees and a little bit of a lake (though in the winter it's all covered with snow) on the south side of the road. I've seen lots of cars parked there, people outside shooting the landscape. The beauty I saw is on the other side of the road. Here's where CalTrans (or whoever) dug away at the mountain so there's a wall of rock which, very rarely, is revealed so that you can see the icicles forming as the snow melts and the water falls. The rest of the year, this wall is either covered with snow or completely bare.

Photography in the snow is not as easy as you might think. There are many things going for you (lots of light, beautiful scenery) but the fact is that there's TOO much light... well, actually it's just the wrong type of light. Up in the mountains there is less atmosphere to diffuse the sunlight, and at the same time, the snow and ice on the ground tends to reflect the light right back at you. You get very harsh light. Sharp light. LOTS of contrast.

Have you ever taken a photograph in the snow with a color camera, but when you look at the print, it looks black-and-white? There's SO much contrast in the mountains, it's VERY difficult to bring out any detail.

Let's think about this for a second. It brings up an interesting concept that I'd like to discuss: Dynamic Range. When you see things with your eyes, you have the benefit of pretty good dynamic range. Your eyes can see detail in shadows and detail in the bright areas, particularly if you sit there for a while and let your eyes adjust. Depending on how long you wait, your eyes can see a contrast ratio of tens of thousands to one. It can even see as great as a million to one, but you have to sit there for about half an hour.

A camera isn't that good. Generally digital and printed images only give you contrast ratio of a few hundred to one. If you're looking to buy an LCD TV or monitor, take a look at the advertised contrast ratio. If the product has a high contrast ratio, the blacks will look darker and the whites will look brighter. I've seen LCD screens with 1000:1 contrast ratio and higher. Not as good as your eyes, but it'll do for now.

Take a look at this shot. There's bright snow and there's dark shadows. Photoshop helps with that fantastic adjustment function called "Shadow/Highlight". With that, I can make the shadows lighter and the highlights darker. It's not as pretty as in person, but it'll do for now.

Here's another shot from that dive at Point Lobos. This guy is some sort of rock cod (maybe ling cod?) that I ran into at about 30 feet. Continuing with our discussion on interesting camouflage techniques, here's a cool example. Notice that there's a lot of red in this photograph. The coral is red, the fish is red, even those weird little shellfish stuck to the rock are red. A common thought would be that since everything is red, the fish must be camouflaged; however, that's not exactly the case. We tend to think of red as a very obvious, stand-out color; but under water, it's a very different story. If you want to hide under water, red is a very good color to be. Here's why:

Red light dissipates faster than blue light.

Have you ever asked yourself (or, more likely, have you ever had a five-year-old ask you): Why is the sky blue? Why is the ice blue? Why is the ocean blue? Why is the lake blue?

Is air blue? No, air is clear. Is water blue? No, water is clear (see comment). So why does it look blue? When the white light from the sun passes through a clear medium (like air or water) the low-frequency spectrums of light (reds) get absorbed quickly while the high-frequency spectrums of light (blues) get absorbed more slowly. Hence, the blue light is the light that you tend to see. The denser the medium, the shorter the distance required for this to noticeably take effect.

So when sunlight passes through 30 feet of sea water, by the time it hits a red fish, there's very little red light left to reflect. The fish is essentially hidden.

When air is the medium that the light is traveling though, it takes a much much longer distance for this to take effect... miles, not feet. That's why red sports cars get more speeding tickets.

So, there's one more unanswered question: If there's no red light left, why did my photograph turn out red? Easy: I introduced new light via a flash, and since I was only a couple feet from the fish, the red light didn't have a chance to dissipate.

This guy here is a Decorator Crab. It mastered the art of disguise by picking up various life-forms and sticking it on its shell. It can crawl across the reef, but when it holds still it's practically invisible in plain sight. Pretty cool.

This guy was hanging out at Point Lobos State Park in about 40 feet of sea-water in Whaler's Cove. This is my favorite (local) SCUBA spot. You have to make reservations well in advance since they only let in 30 divers per day, but that makes for a very pleasant experience. They have a boat ramp, bathrooms, picnic tables, and gorgeous nature paths to keep you occupied during your surface time. These are also very nice for those who don't do the whole SCUBA thing.

Underwater photographer is probably the hardest photography to get right... with the possible exception of astro-photography. It's much easier in the tropics where the visibility is measured in hundreds of feet rather than tens. In Monterey Bay, it's more like a jungle while the tropics are more like a desert. In any case, there's not a whole lot of light available and using a flash tends to just light up all the sediment in the water. In fact, that was the case for this shot. There was a ton of sediment that I had to clean out in Photoshop.

Spot the butterfly yet?

This guy was one of a kaleidoscope of Golden Hairstreak butterflies that I watched erupt from the ground, fly around for a bit and then apparently disappear as they land. The ground was covered in similar-colored leaves so that you really couldn't tell what was a leaf and what was a butterfly... which is, of course, the point if you happen to be a butterfly with an evolutionary will to survive. There's that classic history about Peppered Moths in England that shows evolution in motion. It's fantastically interesting that some species of butterfly are so colorfully bright, with no regard to how yummy they would look to a passing bird, while others are so destined to hide. The Monarch butterfly answered that by eating milkweed as a caterpillar and becoming poisonous. The Viceroy butterfly solved it by looking like just a Monarch.

One of my favorite subjects are camouflaged animals. I'll post a few more soon. Long after I shot several such photos, I found a coffee-table book of photography by Art Wolfe. It's called Vanishing Act, and it's all sorts of animals camouflaged in their natural habitats. It was so wonderful I had to buy it despite its $50 price tag.

This photo was taken several years ago as I walked upstream at Luis Creek. Where the rocks are huge and water abundant, it's very nice to have a compact (and relatively inexpensive) camera to carry along.

Okay, so I cheated a little bit with this photo. Call it Photoshop Magic, if you will. This is actually a composite of two photos that I took one right after the other. One of them had the leaves in focus, and the other had the butterfly in focus. A little cutting, pasting, and blending, and you probably wouldn't have been able to tell if I hadn't pointed it out, right?