Sir Frogsworth

Warning: This blog may contain verbose ramblings intermingled with corgi pictures. I try to make my walls of text as compelling as possible, but if you have a short attention span (no judgement), this blog may not be for you. Donate Here

[sirfrogsworth]

Grackles are goth badasses... unless there is a dove around.

[sirfrogsworth]

Morning Dove vs Grackle

Choose your fighter.

I am booking them to do battle on the White House lawn.

[thefrogman]

My photos make it look like these birds are in the midst of battle.

In reality, they charge at each other, flap their wings, and then one of them flies away. Lasts about 2 seconds per encounter. But when you use burst mode, you can freeze a moment within that 2 second battle and get some pretty neat results.

That grackle with the blue and purple iridescent head has eluded me so far. This is my first photo of him. Hopefully I can get him in focus next time.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm really loving capturing wing extension photos.

[sirfrogsworth]

I captured something interesting on this mourning dove.

It has an aluminium band on its leg.

And I initially thought this was some sort of undercover CIA bird monitoring all of my woke activities.

And then I learned this is a science bird doing important science bird things.

Bird banding is a scientific research technique in which individually numbered, lightweight metal bands are attached to the legs of wild birds to enable long-term tracking of individuals. In the United States, the practice has been coordinated since the early 1920s by the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, working alongside licensed researchers and trained volunteers. When a bird is banded, data such as species, age, sex, location, and date are recorded and linked to that bird's unique band number. The value of banding comes from subsequent encounters: when a banded bird is recaptured, found dead, or simply observed and reported by a member of the public, the sighting is added to the bird's individual record. Over decades, the aggregated data from millions of banded birds has become a foundational resource in ornithology, informing research on migration patterns, longevity, breeding site fidelity, and population trends. Band sightings can be reported by anyone at reportband.gov, making bird banding one of the more accessible forms of citizen science available to the general public.

I want to report my dove friend, but I only have 3 numbers. Hopefully he'll return and I can get the rest of the digits.

[sirfrogsworth]

Morning Dove vs Grackle

Choose your fighter.

I am booking them to do battle on the White House lawn.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm Tumblr famous!

Again.

[sirfrogsworth]

I found my first appearance on the Radar.

16 years ago. Back when Tumblr broke every 10 minutes.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm Tumblr famous!

Again.

[sirfrogsworth]

Iteration is such a powerful artistic tool. The top photo is one of my first bird photos since I started this project. And the bottom is one of my latest.

It's the same camera. Same lens. But I made a series of small adjustments to my entire workflow. First, I wanted a less busy background. So I got a log to elevate the angle so only the trees were behind the birds. And I think the log has a more natural texture than the railing of my deck.

I was originally adding light from a flash, but I could not get it close enough to the birds to create a pleasing falloff. Light is more dimensional when it is closer. So I stuck to natural light, but now I try to take photos during the morning or before sunset so I get a much nicer, warmer light from the sun being lower in the sky.

And I also improved my post processing. These vivid reds are quite tricky to push and pull. Camera sensors have twice as many green pixels as red ones, so there is less data in the reds to work with. Combine that with a smaller sensor, fewer megapixels, and a 10 year old camera with 10 year old color science, and bright reds are just a pain to process. The difference between not enough saturation and too much saturation is minute. A bigger sensor with more megapixels gives you a lot more latitude in the gradients. But I experimented with dodging and burning and shifting the luminance of the oranges and reds so they blend into each other more naturally.

So I improved my composition, my background, my surface, my light, and my editing. A series of small iterations that added up to a decent improvement.

[sirfrogsworth]

Birds are weird.

[sirfrogsworth]

Whenever I see "skip intro" on X-Men '97 I just think, "that seems unnecessary."

[sirfrogsworth]

The Egg Project

I'm a member of an advanced photography training community. My mentor creates challenges to help demonstrate certain concepts.

This one required shooting a pop-art-style egg photo to show how specular highlights change with hard and soft light.

This was the example image I was to emulate.

A specular highlight is just a direct reflection of the light source.

With hard light, specular highlights are perceived as brighter. To get hard light, the light source must be smaller (or more distant). So the reflection is smaller, but also more concentrated in intensity.

With soft light, the light source is much larger (or closer). So the intensity of the reflection is spread out over a larger area. So it is perceived as dimmer.

Think about looking directly at a flashlight versus shining it against the wall. The same number of photons are involved, but your experience of them is vastly different.

If you are shooting someone with glasses and the light is reflecting brightly, you can move your light much closer to reduce its apparent intensity.

I worked for 10 minutes at a time over a period of 4 days. I got some fake eggs so I wouldn't have to spend energy cooking. Frustratingly, they arrived with a matte finish. They would not take on a specular highlight at all. So I ordered some automotive clear coat and sprayed the fake eggs on my deck.

You may have noticed my context-less egg art on my deck railing in another post. It was drying in the sun.

The clear coat worked well, so I proceeded to glue the egg to some colored construction paper and tape it to the wall in my kitchen.

I don't have a top-down rig to shoot things from above, so I felt this was a creative and low-energy solution.

A bonus aspect of the challenge was to create a Photoshop composite in which I retain the shadows from the hard light example and the gradient specular highlight on the egg yolk. I can't decide if I like that or the soft light version better.

It feels nice to have accomplished something creative. I am struggling so much with boredom as I recover. And doing anything productive is physically challenging. But I've got my birds and now my egg.

I'm making art again and that is really helping.

[sirfrogsworth]

These blue jays are absolute rascals.

[sirfrogsworth]

The Warrior Pose

I thought I was about to witness some blue jay kung fu fighting, but it usually ends with wing flapping, screeching noises, and then they just fly away. Probably because fighting is scary and dangerous.

[sirfrogsworth]

I am so tired of this discourse. People feel like they are "missing out." But they don't understand the point of immersive composition.

IMAX is a full immersion experience. The large screen is designed to fill your entire field of view. This gives you a sense that your are *in* the movie. But if you outstretch your arm and hold up your thumb, that is roughly the area you can focus on in a given moment. You are not meant to see every detail on screen. You are physically unable to. But if the director did their job correctly, they draw your focus to the subjects on screen and not the top of a building.

Directors compose for the smallest theater screen and then fill in the periphery for other aspect ratios. The idea is that whatever screen you view the movie on, it will fill your entire field of view. If they showed this movie in 4:3 on a wider screen, you would have black voids on either side of your vision. Everything would be smaller. It would be less immersive.

The peripheral information has no important details. You are not missing out on the top of Tom Holland's head. There is no narrative information hiding in the margins. Christopher Nolan is trying to give you the best experience possible no matter what theater you end up seeing the movie in.

[sirfrogsworth]

Sometimes art is best left unexplained.

[sirfrogsworth]

Accidental Bird-aissance

I've got an entire scold of blue jays hanging about. I think they might be some kind of bird gang. They keep bullying other birds and each other. If I catch one of them selling bird drugs, I am going to withhold their peanuts.

[sirfrogsworth]

I've seen a lot of terrible analysis of this photo.

People are either shoving it through an AI detector, asking Grok, or they are peeping pixels with expertise they don't have.

Like, you can't go drawing straight lines on something with a highly skewed perspective that also has a distorted shape.

Let's ask Mecha-Hitler!

Or upload it to a sketchy AI detection website!

They often have the accuracy of a coin flip. Even lab-grade tools are only 70 to 80% accurate in controlled conditions. And yet people are trusting a free website with an ad for boner pills in the corner to tell them if something is authentic.

I have been doing high level photo manipulation for two decades. I'm as close to an expert as you will get on Tumblr dot com.

So let's properly peep at the pixels and do actual forensic analysis.

First, I think this is mostly a real photo. Probably taken at some other point in time.

And I don't think this is fully AI generated. I actually think it is a traditional composite. I think the hand and newspaper are separate assets that were blended. It's possible the hand was AI-generated and then composited. And I think they may have taken a real photo of someone holding a newspaper and replaced the hand.

The first oddity is the fingers.

Typically when you touch an object it creates a contact shadow. One finger has a contact shadow and the other does not.

It should probably look more like this.

The next sign of a composite is the edge of the finger.

There is a sign of a feathered edge.

This is a lazy compositing technique to help edges blend without making a super precise selection. If you look at all of the other edges in the photo, this is the only one that has a feathered edge. You can see how clean all the other edges are by the top arrow and how fuzzy the finger edge is by the bottom arrow.

If I were cutting out his other hand and taking the time to do it properly, I would clean up the edge to make sure it was consistent with everything else in the photo.

If I were in a hurry, I would just feather the edge and hope no one actually zooms in.

And then there is the edge of the newspaper.

This is called a matte line. The newspaper was most likely against a dark background when they cut it out, and they did not clean up the edge.

Again, it's lazy. Because Photoshop has a tool dedicated to fixing this exact issue.

In my expert opinion, I think they generated an AI hand, took a photo of someone holding a newspaper in similar lighting, and then manually blended them into an existing photo.

But I don't think this was 100% AI-generated. You typically don't see compositing errors in generated images. They probably couldn't get the AI to generate the newspaper without garbled text.

What's curious is that the pixel resolution is just barely bad enough that you cannot tell if the text is authentic. But it's not blurred or distorted. It is just low enough in resolution to give a sense of text without being legible. And I think that made people suspicious due to AI's reputation when text is involved.

But from what I can tell, the print size and letter spacing does seem to match.

So I don't think that is the clue people are making it out to be.

Last thing, image analysis like this is not 100% conclusive. I'm pretty sure there are shenanigans, but anyone who tells you with absolute confidence that an image is fake... is probably bullshitting or ignorant.

The missing contact shadow could be explained by the angle of the light filling it in.

The feathered edge could be motion blur.

The edge of the newspaper could be a sharpening artifact.

But the fact that the hand and the newspaper were vital aspects of the photo for proof of life, those three variables make this really damned suspicious.

[sirfrogsworth]

But seriously, this armchair analysis is really maddening.

Let's look at these supposedly incriminating lines compared to a rough 3D map of the surface.

Just ignore all perspective and geometry.

Wonderful detective work.

[sirfrogsworth]

My last post got flagged as mature. It has a mature person in it, but it is safe for work. I hate when I put effort into something and Tumblr gives it a false flag. Then I ask for a review and nothing ever happens.

In any case, if you want to know if that Mitch McConnell photo is fake, I do my best analysis of the pixels.