Symbolic Forest

If you’re a Boing Boing reader, you might remember the post from a couple of weeks ago about photographs that look like tiny models. I was intrigued, partly by the photos themselves, and partly by the way we perceive them, the trick that makes our brain think they are tiny.

The pictures were taken with tilt-shift lenses, expensive things which distort the perspective of a photo and move the perspective vanishing points around. However, I don’t think it’s that which is mostly responsible for fooling the eye here. Rather, it’s the minimal depth-of-field that these photos have.

For non-photographers: depth of field is, essentially, the amount of a photo that is in sharp focus. Because of the basic physics of light and camera lenses, distance photos normally have an enormous depth-of-field, and close-ups have a tiny one.^* Tilt-shift lenses, though, wreck your depth-of-field, making every photo look like a close-up.^**

You can fake this effect yourself, given a suitable photo and some image-editing software. Here’s a photo I took earlier. I chose it because it shows an isolated, lonely couple on a depressing, cold, windswept beach, so it’s ideal for Valentine’s Day:

The other reason I chose it is that as it shows a wide, flat, muddy plain, it’s ideal for mucking around with depth-of-field effects. After a bit of trickery to make sure the groyne beacon^*** stayed sharp, I applied plenty of blur to the foreground and background. And – look, tiny little people on a model beach!

(the effect doesn’t really work in the thumbnail, so click on the link to see it properly)

It might not look as good as the photos on Boing Boing, but you can see the effect starting to appear with only a few minutes’ work. The interesting thing, though, is that you probably didn’t know all that stuff I said earlier about depth-of-field and how it varies with distance. Unless you’re interested in photography, I’d be surprised if you did. Subliminally, though, you already knew it all. It’s hard-wired deep inside the visual centres of your brain somewhere, and that’s why these photos look like models.

What I’m not sure about, though, is whether we’re used to this because it’s how our eyes work, or just because we’re so used to seeing photographic^**** images. I suspect it’s the former, but I don’t know enough about eyes to be certain. For my next experiment, I’m going to take a small child who has never seen a photograph and raise them out of contact with pictures or TV, just to see how they respond. Now, does anyone have any spare babies they won’t be needing for a few years…?

* If you have a decent SLR camera lens to hand, you can confirm this, because it will probably have depth markings on the lens. For example on a 1970s Pentax lens I had to hand, with the lens focused on the horizon, it claims things 25 feet away should still be in focus – a depth-of-field measured in miles, in other words. However, if it’s focused on something 18 inches away, the depth-of-field will be about one inch either side.

** It’s all in the tilt – the lens’s imaging plane is tilted so it no longer aligns with the film plane, so the only in-focus part of the picture will be a narrow band where the planes intersect. Another experiment to try at home: if you have a projector of some kind, try tilting your projection screen, and watch the picture distort and go out-of-focus – essentially, that’s what a tilt-shift lens is doing.

*** Heheheh! Groyne! Snigger!! No, I am sophisticated and grown-up really – why do you ask?

**** Which includes TV and cinema for this purpose – the lenses aren’t that different.

Keyword noise: Depth of Field, DoF, fake tilt-shift, focus, miniature, photography, tilt-shift.

Clearly I’m not a Belle and Sebastian fan any more. I can’t be, because I forgot to go out and buy their new album on Monday, when it was released. I did remember to go and get it yesterday, though, and now I’ve got around to listening to it.

If I was still a fan, I probably wouldn’t like it very much, because it isn’t in quite the same style as their first three classic albums. On the other hand, as it says in the sleevenotes, in a response to criticisms like that:

Do you think and do the exact same things you did nine years ago?

One track does sound rather like an attempt at a T-Rex impersonation; but, in general, I have to say: I like this record more than I was expecting to.

Keyword noise: Belle & Sebastian, fandom, indie, music, The Life Pursuit.

To celebrate the 150^th post,^* here are a few search-engine queries that have brought people to this site in the past few months:

autumn days when the grass is jewelled lyrics and variations on that is, by a large margin, what brings random visitors to this site. I did post some of the lyrics, here. The rest of the requests below are rather rarer.
byline photo – no, I still don’t think I need one
what is healthy porn? Porn where everyone is getting plenty of fibre in their diet? I have no idea.
pines forest evil – I’m not, am I?
colleague m was presumably searched for by Colleague M’s mother. Hello, Colleague M’s Mother!
the leviathan pictures – I don’t know whether you mean the philosophy book or the mythical beast, but neither are anything to do with me.
i hear voldemort has no nose how does he smell? I love it when people have the same silly sense of humour as me.
fed up with websites. Well, stop reading them then.

I think that’s enough of that for a few months.

* Update, August 22^nd 2020: well, it was the 150^th post, before I went through and edited away some of the pointless filler.

Keyword noise: Colleague M, leviathan, pornography, search.

As I mentioned the other day, Colleague M isn’t Colleague M any more. She’s now Ex-Colleague M.

Her contract was coming to an end, and her manager was being suspiciously non-commital about its renewal. So, rather than wait to find she was out of a job, she jumped.

Secretly, I was hoping that she was going to leave in a dramatic, destructive way, and reveal all the little secrets of the colleagues she didn’t get along with. Which of them are the most two-faced and hypocritical, for example, or which ones use the work computers to download porn. Unfortunately – as M is slightly more sensible and rational than I am – she decided not to. Bah. I’ll let you know how her job-hunting goes.

Keyword noise: career, Colleague M, colleagues, resignation.

New Channel 4 comedy series The IT Crowd starts tonight; being a big geek, of course, I had to watch it. And, overall, it’s rather good.

So far I’ve only seen the first episode, and I think you have to give the first episode of any new series a little leeway. It takes a lot of time to make sure the characters are all properly introduced, after all. Nevertheless, it seems to hold up rather well.

In writing this, I’m trying not to take the easy route and start comparing it to Father Ted. It’s written by one of that show’s writers, it has a similar production style, and it has a central trio of characters. Moreover, both have a small kernel of darkness which is occasionally revealed. It might not be as gloomy and despair-filled as, say, Peep Show, but the darkness is there.

Of course, the main reason I like the show is probably the comedy of recognition. The writing isn’t particularly technical, but they do have a ZX81 lurking in the background,^* not to mention the Perl Camel stickers and Flying Spaghetti Monster posters scattered around the set.^** I don’t get beaten to a pulp by the non-technical staff on a regular basis, but only because they think I’d probably enjoy it. And, of course, there is that stalwart technical advice of IT staff everywhere. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

* Unlike my own, modern, up-to-date IT office – our last 1980s computer in service was retired last summer, and the last one on the spares shelf was sent off to long-term storage a few weeks ago. Scarily, I’m not joking here – until last summer one department did rely on a mid-80s PC running MS-DOS 3 and with Windows 1.0 installed on it

** Update, 4^th February 2006: another thing I’ve noticed in the background of the set: a poster of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa

Keyword noise: Channel 4, comedy, computing, Great Wave At Kanagawa, Hokusai, IT, review, television, The IT Crowd.

Quite a few people, recently, have come to this site looking for information on Aramiska, the European satellite ISP which apparently collapsed last week. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any information, anywhere. The company promised to release a statement on January 30^th; it never appeared. Their disappearance is still a mystery.

Moving on, this email came in to one of our work addresses yesterday:

I noticed whilst browsing your site that there were problems with some of your links, when I tried again with Internet Explorer the problems were not there so I assume that they were caused by me using the Mozilla browser.

Very nice and helpful, you might think.^* However, if you read on, you might get a little more suspicious…

I have enclosed a screen capture of the problem so your team can get it fixed if you deem it an issue.

Hah. If you’re not suspicious yet, you probably shouldn’t be allowed near the internet. If you look a little closer, the attachment is a .scr file – which could, I suppose, look like “screenshot” to the non-technical. If you try to open it,^** then: congratulations, you have a virus, one known as W32/Brepibot. It’s a “backdoor”, a tool that then enables hackers to connect into your computer and harness it for their own nefarious purposes. Well done.

* As our work website was designed by an apparently-clueless PR chap with no previous knowledge of website design at all, it is also entirely believable.

** and you’re using a Windows computer, and don’t have up-to-date virus protection

Keyword noise: Aramiska, Brepibot, broadband, internet, ISP, out of business, satellite, satellite broadband, security, service, trojan, backdoor, vanishing, virus.

When I was still a student, as a researcher, I was always a bit rubbish. I’m one of those people who hoovers up random, unconnected pieces of information like anything; but when it comes to use it I can never remember where it came from. Little factoids are no good unless you can judge how true it is likely to be, and you can’t do that if you don’t know their provenance.

For example: everybody knows that the Tower of London maintains a family of ravens, for there is an ancient legend that states that should they ever leave, the Tower, the monarchy and the nation will fall. Their wings are therefore clipped, to try to lessen the risk of them wandering.^* Everybody knows about the legend, and its ancient origins. Just how ancient is it, though?

There’s an article on the ravens and the current Tower Ravenmaster in the current issue of Fortean Times. It claims that it was Charles II who was first warned that the ravens must never leave the Tower; but that there is no actual evidence for their presence before the end of the 19th century. So, possibly another of those ancient traditions invented by the traditionally-minded Victorians. Possibly not, though. There is another, older myth on a similar theme; but it wasn’t about literal ravens at all. It’s a much, much older myth, and it isn’t even English.

On Sunday, after reading the FT article, I spent a good hour or two reading up about it, and writing a post about it, but accidentally deleted it in a fit of stupidity, by pressing the “reload” shortcut when I meant to type the “open new tab” shortcut. It took an hour or two because, as I said above, I can remember a lot of things, but can’t remember why. So, I spent quite a long time reading the wrong books in search of information I was sure was in there. Bah. I’m going to go and reread them now, so I can go and rewrite.^**

(read part two here)

* and, incidentally, the Tower now has a well-equipped isolation aviary to which they’ll be moved if there’s a bird flu outbreak in Britain.

** and to give me an excuse to break this over-long post up into parts.

Keyword noise: baking, birthday cake, cake, castles, Celtic, Celtic mythology, cooking, English, history, kitchen, London, mythology, oven, ravens, research, researching, Tower Of London, tradition.