Our first new picture of 2021, this image of the old lighthouse on Seahorse Key is roughly 24,900 pixels high by 106,000 pixels across, covering a horizontal field of view of about 210 degrees, and includes 243 photographs.
To learn more, go to its webpage, www.BeeHappyGraphics.com/gallery/CedarKeysLight.html. From there you can follow the link to the full-size image on the Gigapan site, where you can really zoom in. And it is not too late to own the very first copy of this image. (On canvas, this image could be printed up to over 16 feet high by 69 feet across and still have the same detail as any image in our booth. But for you, we would be happy to print a smaller version.)
While working on this image, both of my stitching programs were giving me problems and it occurred to me that both companies (Gigapan for Stitch 2.3 and Kolor for Autopano Giga) were now out of business and not supporting their software. So I bought the best-regarded replacement, PTGui Pro. I’m still learning, but I like its masking and control point options (Autopano may still do better with anti-ghosting, however). I have developed (and will continue to develop) techniques to deal with some of the issues I’ve had and the fact that Photoshop really bogs down when the file size is larger than available memory.
In the last month, we have doubled the number of Gigapans in our collection. We still have several in various stages of development, including one of Fort Myers Pier, which is about 70% complete, and one of downtown Cedar Key from across the water, which may be half-finished. But I have other promises to keep, including St. Augustine Light and Cape Canaveral Lighthouse, for each of which we got special access, as well as other long-standing non-Gigapan projects and blog articles. Stay tuned.
We’ve just finished our image of the old courthouse in Bartow. It is almost 32 thousand pixels high by 88 thousand across and incorporates over 450 photographs.
For more information (and a slightly larger picture), go to its webpage, www.BeeHappyGraphics.com/gallery/courthouse.html. From there you can follow the link to the full-size image on the Gigapan site, where you can really zoom in. We haven’t actually printed any of these yet, so if you want print #1, there may still be time to order.
Ever since we added our Trinidad & Tobago pictures to our website in August 2012, I’ve been torn about the proper place for some of these pictures. We added a couple of them, namely Trinidad Chevron Tarantula and White-necked Jacobin, to our regular collection. Not all of the others met the high fine-art standards of that collection. Still, many had value to a certain part of your audience, so I didn’t want to just abandon them. We’ve decided to recognize that we have two distinct market niches. Now we have started making some of these pictures available as part of our new Birders’ Collection. For now, you can reach them from our Birds Portfolio page. They will be marked with an orange border around the name, as shown below.
This shows how members of our Birder Collection are distinguished in our Bird Portfolio.
As you can see, I’ve already added a few birds to this list. I will continue to add birds from our Trinidad trip as I can since half the work was done in 2012. From there, we can add birds from Africa and even Antarctica, but that will be a longer process. If it becomes a problem for those searching our regular collection, we may have to remove these from our existing Birds Portfolio and make a separate portfolio for our Birder Collection. One would probably access it from the main menu. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, enjoy!
While there, Nancy got a few pictures. This is the one she likes best.
For more information, you can go to our Burrowing Owls page. If you hurry, you can have Print #1 either on fine art paper or canvas up to at least 23″ by 35″. Soon we will be making a few prints for our next art festival, which is still scheduled for Odessa in early Decemberannounced.
Since the nesting screech owls left us (see Our Screech Owl Image – The Rest Of The Story, which is about the subject owl family in our image “Mother Screech Owl with Fledgling” (a link to that page is in the article)), we’ve had a few noteworthy encounters with our local screech owls. In the most recent, we may have saved a life, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In Our Neighbor’s Yard
A few years ago, we were outside with our good friend and former wild bird rehabilitator April Kirkendoll (whom we last mentioned in Nancy’s Photos Are In Book About Bees), when we heard the blue jays squawking in a neighbor’s mango tree. That usually means there is a snake or hawk in the vicinity, so we walked across the street to investigate. As we peered through their chain-link fence, we saw a screech owl fall out of a tree onto the ground. April hopped over the 6-ft fence, retrieved the bird, handed it to Nancy, and then hopped back over the fence. As she inspected the owl, April lifted one wing and then pointed out a large dark area of skin. “This bird has been poisoned!” Apparently, the owl had caught a poisoned rat (or mouse), possibly still alive, but weakened. The poison works by thinning the rat’s blood so much that it ultimately dies from internal hemorrhaging. Whatever eats the rat could suffer the same fate. We buried the owl in the garden.
Nancy, The Rehabilitator
This last January, our next-door neighbor brought us a screech owl that he picked up at the corner 7-11 (see post on our Bee Happy Graphics Facebook page – that photograph was taken by another non-photographer good friend, Isabella Baldovino). That owl had knocked itself unconscious by flying into one of the 7-11 windows. After consulting with April, we monitored it all day, but it was ready to release that evening.
Figure 1: Nancy about to release a revived screech owl (iPhone photograph taken by our good neighbor, Kristi Sellars)
An Owl Returns To Our Nest Box
A few weeks ago, we were excited to notice an owl face looking out the opening of our nest box. Nancy noticed a resemblance to the owl she released in January. She saw the owl several days in a row, and then it disappeared briefly, then came back, and so on. After one absence lasted at least a couple of days, Nancy decided to check the nest box. From the side door, she saw the owl was still there. She was able to pick it up and noticed two eggs. The owl was very lethargic. It didn’t squawk, attack, or even defend its nest. In fact, it would barely open its eyes. We could easily feel the ridge of the breast bone.
Figure 2: Lethargic mother screech owl with two eggs
Nancy put the owl back in the box and consulted our expert. Together, they theorized that the mate, which we had not seen, may have been poisoned, but before disappearing permanently, brought the poisoned meal to the mother. We tried force-feeding the mother a small piece of raw chicken, but she wasn’t having any of that. We later brought a small dish of wax worm larvae and chicken pieces and placed it in the nest. The next morning, the food was gone. the next dish with larger portions met the same fate. At this point, the owl was a little more lively. We gave her another dish of food. The next morning, the food and the owl were both gone. We left another dish of food, hoping she would return, but the next morning the food was still there, and she was still gone. April had warned us that without the male, she might abandon the nest to save herself. We haven’t seen her since.
What About The Eggs
Screech owls lay their first three eggs a day apart, but then begin to slow down a bitRef 1. Although their average clutch size is four eggs, they have been known to have as many as six. April told us that the mother doesn’t start incubating until they are all laid so that they all hatch about the same time.
The second day after the mother disappeared, I estimated that the oldest egg must be four days old. We decided we’d better do something about those eggs soon. We called the rehab centers in our area but had to leave messages. They never got back to us. April sent us one link for building an inexpensive incubator (“The $3, 30-Minute Egg Incubator”), but I’m sure there are others online. After reviewing those instructions, we started scrounging up materials. We started with an old heating pad and eventually wound up with the rig shown info Figure 3 below. I learned a few things in the process:
Figure 3: The final version of our ad hoc incubator
I set it up in the shop so it wouldn’t affect or be affected by the air conditioner. In hindsight, the air-conditioned environment would have been more stable. I started with just the heating pad, which had three settings: just a little low, too high, and way too high. While it was on the medium setting I tried adding layers of towel as insulation, with marginal success. Then I put it on low and added an incandescent light for fine-tuning. These parts were just lying on our shop table. I would change the distance from the bulb to the egg to change the temperature. I was using a neighbor’s (the one who took the picture in Figure 1) old-fashioned oral thermometer and began checking the temperature every five minutes, increasing the time as the temperature stabilized in the target range (99°Ref 2 ±1°).
Turns out the heating pad was a bad idea. After some initial luck, the temperature would swing from one end of its range to the other (and beyond). I concluded that for consistency, the placement of the thermometer was crucial. The problem was that the temperature gradient created by the heating pad was too great; the surface of the pad might be over 100 degrees, but one millimeter away would be substantially less.
I unplugged the heating pad and got a box to control the hot air from the lightbulb. Using the box, the distance between egg and bulb wasn’t as critical to the temperature as the height of the open edge of the box, which could be adjusted as needed. And the bulb-heated air temperature was much more consistent throughout the chamber and more important, throughout the egg. I got to the point where I was rotating the egg 1/3 of a revolution four times a day, and would only check the temperature twice between rotations (and none at night).
The End Of The Story?
Alas, after three days on the incubator, tragedy struck. I won’t go into details but would like to warn you to make sure your box is well supported. Although it was probably too early to tell, candling the remains of the last egg did not reveal any signs of development.
Nonetheless, we are going to declare this experience a success. Most likely, we saved the mother screech owl from certain death. It is even possible that after a year or so, she will have recovered, found another mate, and could even return to the nest box to raise another family. As for the eggs, the cards were stacked against them from the beginning. According to the Barn Owl Box Company (Ref 1), even under normal conditions, only half of all screech owl eggs hatch (compared to over 80% for some owl species). But these weren’t normal conditions. And what about the father, and this recurring poisoning theme? That is up to all of us. Nancy and I, and many of our friends, are trying to do our part. Are you?
Thanks for listening. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, leave them below.
Nancy just took this photograph last month. We’ve had these woodpeckers in our yard before, but never did one just hang out in the Jatropha tree (where our bird feeders and other birds are) just outside the kitchen window before. There were no screens in those windows at the time, so Nancy carefully rolled up the awning windows and took a few shots while standing in the kitchen. We almost never see the red belly, so this shot was even more special.
At our next festival in Bradentonannounced, we should have a matted print of this picture available. For more information about this image, see our webpage Red-bellied Woodpecker.
I recently posed the question “What’s Wrong With This Picture”blog about a modified landscape photograph of a foggy sunrise in Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge in Goodland, Florida. It turns out Deborah Gray Mitchell, one of the commenters, was right; the image was upside down.
To see the Note click here.To hide the Note click here.
Ms. Mithcell has her own website (www.dgmfoto.com), but several other sites have information about her. Just Google “Deborah Gray Mitchell”.
To be more precise, I flipped the image vertically and took steps to remove ripples in the reflection and such so that the answer wouldn’t be so obvious. You can see the original picture at “Foggy Sunrise” on our website. Now I’d like to discuss reflections and the clues that should have given the answer away.
Reflections
Figure 1: Perspective showing differences between the direct and reflected image
. . . Of Your Subject
First of all, the reflected image should NOT look like a mirror copy of the unreflected image, because the photographer has a different perspective or viewing angle of the reflection. As your high school physics teacher may have told you, in reflections, the angle of incidence (e.g. α2 in Figure 1) equals the angle of reflection (α1), so the view you have of the reflected image would be the same as if the subject had been flipped below the reflecting surface, as shown in Figure 1 above. I know that may sound like I just contradicted myself, but it is the subject itself I just flipped, not the direct image of the subject. Notice in Figure 1 that in the reflection, the two trees appear the same height, as depicted with red sightline C, while in the direct image the far tree looks higher as shown by green sightlines B1 and B2. The further away the subject is, the less of a difference this makes.
Figure 2: Alternate perspective of reflected view that’s better for showing effects on the sun
. . . Of Celestial Bodies
Here’s another way to look at the effects of reflection; it is as if you had been flipped below the reflecting surface, as shown in Figure 2, instead of flipping the subject. Although possibly less intuitive, this interpretation yields the same results, as shown by lines B1, B2, & C, but makes the effects of the reflection of the sun more apparent. In the image under consideration, as in most cases, the sun would have been your biggest clue. The sun is 93 million miles from us, but even our closest celestial body, the moon, at under a quarter of a million miles (say 238,900 miles), is much further than what your lens considers to be infinity. All light rays from the sun are virtually parallel (or come in at the exact same angle), no matter where you are.
To see the Note click here.To hide the Note click here.
This detail helped Eratosthenes figure out how large the Earth was 2,260 years agoexplained and was crucial to celestial navigation. It is also important in the creation of rainbows. I might be addressing that aspect in an article about my quest for a midnight rainbow. Stay tuned! (See My Midnight Rainbow Quest – Tougher Than I Thought.)
This means that the sun will always be higher in the direct view than it appears in the reflection (compare the angle between sun ray A and line B1 to the difference between comparable sightlines D and C).
So There You Have It
I hope that clears things up. This information should make you better at spotting fake reflections, or as a photographer, help you create better forgeries by knowing what mistakes to avoid. Good luck!
Of course, you may share your reflections on this or any related material (or questions) in the comment section below. Thanks for stopping by.
It has been almost sixteen months since I submitted my last suspicious photographannouced and I just don’t have enough material to make this a regular feature, but here we go. Nancy took this picture here in Florida. I made a simple change (and cleaned it up just a bit). So what is wrong here?
All comments and guesses are welcome. You have at least two weeks to figure it out and respond but don’t dilly dally. Good luck!
