Much Ado about Twigs

They say "it rains a lot" in the Pacific Northwest.  That's not true.  It "drips constantly".  In either case, the impact is not all that felicitous for photography. Apart from the hassle of fiddling with dials while trying to avoid sogging your camera, there really isn't that much to take pictures of.  Perhaps there is a Winston O. Link of rain, but we aint he.  

In addition, Beeham Urb doesn't offer much in the way of man-made artistry.  The town looks like a model-railroad layout gone to rust.  If someone wanted to do a photorama of "The Twentieth Century's Worst American Architecture" Beeham would provide the grist.  So, between the rain and the rust, Rosco  is hard up for things to shoot.

As a result, we end up looking for interest in the banal, which usually provides the dead-end of an oxymoron.  Banality is not the same as ordinariness.  The ordinary can have peaks and poignancy.  Banal is just flat.  Of course, there is a peculiar Hopperian genius which is able to  highlight flats but sometimes a rotting gas station is just a rotting gas station. And so it was, that we ended up taking a picture of twigs.

"Oh look! twigs," I said.  What attracted me to the patch of dried miniature ferns by the side of the trail were the red berries set off against a sea of brittle pale orange filigree.  This could be interesting: red on orange

Rosco was unimpressed. Of far more interest to him was the rusting red fire hydrant at the end of the patch.

Roski  lent me his camera as he scampered off to the marking post and in the brief break of drizzle i took a hurried shot.  We'll see what we get at home.

"I told you it would be boring," Rosco said, you should have taken a picture of the hydrant.  He had a point.  The sea of filigree'd pale tan-orange was less impressive as a photo than as a real bush.  "Maybe you can fiddle with sliders," Rosco said hopefully. 

I think he likes the fiddling more than any result which is always insufficiently blue to his eye.  "Maybe," i said.  So I opened up our new toy, Lightroom, as Rosco adjusted himself in his co-pilot's seat.

We are running an outdated-version of Lightroom and so opening up the camera's raw file involves a preliminary conversion to digital negative.  That done, we imported the negative's image-information into the program. 

A few weeks ago we asked a professional owl what was the most important thing about working with raw image files.  "You can set the white balance and exposure without loosing any color information," he said.  "Once the image is converted to another format any adjustments to those two parameters will loose some color data."

Rosco wanted to know what "exposure" was and i explained to him that exposure referred to how much light hits or is "refracted" onto a sensor chip or strip of film. Maximum light produces blast of white and maximum dark (or no light) produces a blast of black.  Everything in between allows some shade of color to register on the film. I say "shade" because the exposure of film to color and the color itself are not the same thing. Exposure refers to the quantity of ambient light let into the camera not the quality of color that appears on and emanates from an object.

"But," Rosco said, "I thought you said the exposure allowed the camera to see color." 

"It does," I said, we need ambient light from the sun or a bulb or a flame in order to see anything. We cannot see the color of anything in the dark. But as more light enters the camera for longer periods of time, the colors become washed out and less visible, just as the taste of tomato soup becomes less tomatoey the more water we add.  More exposure doesn't turn blue into red, it just makes the blue lighter and lighter until it becomes white." 

"So exposure determines the strength of the colors?" Rosco asked. "I think that's fair," I said, "correct exposure provides enough light to see colors but not so much that it drowns them out.  The exposure slider on the control panel is really a correction tool.  It repaints the photo so as to take out or put back in the right amount of color, just as we would add more tomato juice to soup that was too watery.  But as with correcting weak soup, there are limits.

Rosco looked unhappy.  "But if exposure isn't color what makes for the taste of color?"  "Hold on, Roski," I said,  "Let's take a step back and start at the beginning or at least close to it."  Rosco adjusted himself on his haunchies.

"Color is produced when particles of light bounce off objects like a ball bounces off a wall..."

"And hits you in the eye?" Rosco asked in a clever-funny way.

"Actually yes, Roski," I said, "although balls of light are very very very very very tiny (among the tiniest things in the whole world) and come in streams that we call waves.  Light travelling through space in long smooth  waves produces colors like red, organge, yellow.  We call these colours "hot" because those same waves produce heat and which is why molten iron is fiery orange.  On the other hand, light travelling through space in tight, choppy waves produces colors like green and blue and those waves produce less heat, which is why ice is bluish.

Rosco shifted from paw to paw. "What's wrong, Rosco?" I asked.  "Well, I don't understand why short choppy waves should be blue and long ones red.  Why not the other way around?" I  told Rosco that I didn't know why either but some things just were, had been seen to be that way since as long as we could tell and that was that.

"Okay, then, Rosco," followed up, "why does one stream of balls bounce off in long waves and another stream in short ones?"  "You mean," I asked, "why are some apples red and others green?"  "Say you."  "Say I."  "Why?"

"Remember, Rosco, we are talking about the tiniest things that are. What makes a rock grey or one apple red and another green is that the physical make up of their surfaces are textured in such a way to reflect light at different wave-lengths or intensities. We can actually collect these wave-lenths."

"We can?" Rosco asked. "Sure," I said in my most authoritative and casual voice. "We just line up a lump of coal, a stone, a piece of bark, two apples, an orange, a lemon, and scoop of whipped cream."

Rosco gave me a hard, blank stare; the kind of stare that said, "I may be a dog, ..."

"Really, Roski, it's that simple.  But if you want to see the actual wave lengths so as to prove that they go from long to short, then you need a lot of fancy gadgets which we can't afford. But I have it on very good authority that an array of wavelengths progressing from short to long produces our color spectrum, which you can see for free when rainbows appear in the sky.

"Where any particular color falls on this spectrum is called its chromatic temperature.  The arrangement of these temperatures isn't arbitrary, the color spectrum of the rainbow progresses from purple to blue to maroon to red to orange to yellow because light-energy levels are really, physically increasing in that order."

We could measure these temperatures by the length of the light waves that produce them. But, in photography, this color-temperature is measured on a scale of 0 to 10,000 where 0 = absolute freezing and 10,000 is absolute exploding heat.  Cold, icy blue would measure around 4000 and orange measures about 7000.

"I like blue" Rosco said.  "I know you do." I replied so do I...sometimes, although not as often as you. But what I am trying to explain is how we humans speak of the color variations we see and how the colors we see on an apple, stone, or tree are really light waves emanating from them and hitting the little sensor chip in our eyes.  The energy in these waves produces very light burns on the surface of a film and very small, very temporary irritations in our eyes, and these irritations we call  seeing color.

Rosco said he needed to slurp some water. When he came back he  said "I've been thinking..."  "You have?" I teased "Yes, I have," he replied with a tint of irritation. "Sorry, Rosco; what have you been thinking?" "Well, what about the light hitting the objects? Does it have a color?" 

"Roski, you are a genius."

Wag, wag, wag.

I asked Rosco if he had looked at that bright glowy circle in the sky and he said that he had noticed it from time to time. 

"Well, it's a very very bright yellow, right?"

"I suppose."  

"Okay, but by the time the rays reach all the way to Earth and travel through our atmosphere they're almost a neutral see-through color... sort of like transluscent white."

"I guess"

"Well, at any rate, we humans call it "white light" because it brightens things with almost no taint of its own.  So when this light bounces off an apple what you see is the purest, truest red possible and not some red that is itself colored by another color.

"But what about when we are inside or at night -- what then?"

"That's right, Rosco. In that case we get light from some other source, like the candle I lit the other night when there was noisy water in the sky. Remember what color it was?"

"Yellowy.  It  made everything look greenish."

"Well, maybe to you; but to us, it made everything look pink or orangy.  The yellow rays bouncing off red things gave them a slight pinky-orange tint.  The point is that different light sources, other than the "pure" white of the sun, have their own tint or colors and this accents or flavors the colors of the rays that bounce off objects."

Even the pure white light of the sun gets accented as when it passes through grey clouds or bounces off a brown tree or a silver spoon.  When we look at anything in the world what we are seeing -- what is registering in our eyes -- is a whole big jumble of color wave lengths, emanating at different intensities from different objects and intersecting one another and making a Very Big Chromatic Confusion.

"Doggie Blue is simpler and superior," Rosco asserted with an air of positivity.  "You may be right," I said, "for doggie purposes, no doubt.  However, human eyes have to cope with filtering and compensating for a wide aura of colors."

Rosco looked at me somewhat dubiously. "Well... if what you say is true, how come there is only one slider?"  "What do you mean?" I asked.  "You just said that you two-footers see a whole bunch of colors at one time, all jumbled up, right?"  "I did."  "Well, as far as I can see," Rosco dogged on, "this "temperature" slider here moves from blue to red to pink to yellow, so wherever you move it to, that's one color!"

"Oh!" I uttered, "right you are.  We got lost in a bramble of topics.   It's sometimes difficult to know where to begin.  I was trying to explain what color is and how objects make colors out of the light that hits them.

"But you, Mr. Fuzzy Butt, asked if the light hitting the objects itself had color.  This was an important question because color requires three things:  an object, light hitting it and light bouncing off it.  If the light hitting an object is color-neutral, like see-through plastic, then the colors of all the objects that light hits will be their true, stand-alone color.  But if the hitting light itself has a color  that will influence and bias the colours of all the objects it hits.  That's why when a candle is the only light in the room, all the objects get a greenish glow on them, as you so rightly observed... or, as we see it, yellow.  It's not  all equally yellow but rather a mixture of reddish-yellow bluish-yellow, whatever color there is plus yellow.  

I could see that little Rosco was getting visibly tired.

"Okay," I said, "lets see if I can pull it all together and then call it a day.  Do you remember how the owl said exposure and white balance were the two most important aspects of a raw photo?"

"Yes."

"And remember how exposure refers to the overall quantity of light entering into a camera and how too much exposure faded colors and how too little blackened them out?"

He did.

And so the "temperature" slider is the other half of the picture.  It adjusts the overall tonal quality or tint of the picture.

Rosco made a sound.  "What's wrong?" I asked. 

"You just said that the top temperature slider adjusts the overall tonal quality or tint.  But there's a slider right below that says "tint".

"Oh, Roski," I sighed, "sometimes we humans get mired in our own words.  But with this one last explanation, all will be clear."

Rosco rested his head on his paws.

"Basically they are two variations of the same thing  The top slider adjusts the overall or net color value of the scene using the purple-blue-red-yellow temperature spectrum we talked about.  This is the chromatic horizontal axis.

But each of these purple-blue-red-yellow points along the horizontal spectrum can also have an aura that is either greenish-white on top or pinky-purple below.  This usually happens when certain types of lamps or lighting are used.  In those situations,, an overall color hue that would be blue in white light ends up being greenish blue or if it would be red ends up looking more wine colored. This vertical color axis is controlled by the bottom slider.  It doesn't often have to be used but when necessary it takes adjustments to both "temperature" and "tint" make up what is called the "white balance".

"Wouldn't color balance be a better word for it?" Rosco asked.  "As a practical matter, for you and me," I said,  "that's probably true.  A lot of terms in photography get borrowed from science and don't help much out of context. It's called white balance because we are adjusting all the colors based on whichever one is selected as the most true and tint-neutral."

"How can that be? Rosco exclaimed.  "It be's because a spectrum is like a chain. All colors will shift left or right, cold or hot, depending on which temperature is selected as  the "just right" middle."    

That is why the owl said that exposure and white balance were the most important adjustments to be made to any picture.  Exposure sets how light or dark the picture is and how washed out, vibrant or darkened out the colors look.  The White Balance or Temperature/Tint adjustments control the overall color cast and any needed tainting.

Rosco looked at me with amazement.  "You must be really very smart to know where exactly to put the sliders," he said with a kind of reverence, at the end of the day.

"No Rosco, I'm not.  There is no right or wrong color for any picture." 

"No?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Well it depends on our audience and what we want to say to them.  If I wanted my pictures to look like what most fellow humans would probably see on that day under those lighting conditions, I would set the sliders to produce that effect. 

But if I were holding an exhibition for dogs, I would set the sliders so as to accentuate the blues and weak color values, so that the pictures would reflect what you and your fuzzy-buddies see.

"Then again, I could adjust the color values to create a mood or make a statement of some sort by exaggerating a temperature and tint.  There is no right answer unless it is assumed that every photograph must reflect some absolute, chromatic value most everyone would agree was correct."

"So what are you going to do with that bush?" Rosco wanted to know.

"Well that's an interesting question," I replied, "it depends on whether I stick with my initial impression or not."

"What do you mean."

"Well while you were getting drawn to the hydrant, what I thought when I saw the bush was "red-on-tan/orange-filigree."  That's the label or concept I stuck onto what I saw and that's the memory I carried with me in my head.

"As it turns out, that's pretty much what the camera saw too; only when my concept got bounced back at me, it wasn't so interesting. It was too one-color smothering everything, and the "filigree" part got lost.

"But when I had the program do a calculated automatic correction, it wasn't really a correction but rather altered the appearance of the bush to what it would have looked like under other conditions."

"Why did the buttons make an incorrect correction?" Rosco asked.

"Because the program assumed that all the orangy color was the result of a yellowy light source and so it mis-corrected it to what it supposedly would have looked like under neutral white light conditions.  But by accentuating the dark spots and making the dried leaves look more tannish, it completely took away the sense of red berries on orange -- on an orange that really did exist in more or less white to pale grey light.

"So what are you going to do," Rosco asked.

"Well the photograph is going to be rather different from my original perceptive concept. I have two intermediate compromises one set at 54% of the automatic "correction" and the other at 27%,

Orig (upper left)  @27% (upper center) @ 54% (low center) Auto Correct (low right)

"I'm going to choose the 27% version because it retains some of the sense of "orange filigree" while making the red berries stand out more brightly and distinctly. At the same time, the darker spots add a dimension of depth to what had been a monochromatic flatness.  But the result is not what I was originally impressed with.

"And what about the hydrant," Rosco wanted to know.

"For you, Roski....