The Sunset That Wouldn't End
The SkyFire sunset forecast in the TPE app on IOS said that the odds of a good sunset were better at Badwater, so we skipped our default plan of shooting Mesquite Flat sand dunes and drove to Badwater. It paid off tremendously: there were no clouds at the dunes at all. This ended up being one of the longest sunsets that I've ever witnessed. On this night the sunset color lasted at least an hour after the sun set. Most people left for dinner, but I was shooting a short time-lapse sequence, so I stayed until the color was gone.
This was taken on December 13, after Badwater Basin flooded shortly after Thanksgiving. With a follow-up storm, the after remained until early January! The water table in Badwater Basin can be very close to the surface. That's how these polygons form: salt-laden water rises up cracks in the salt, until it dries and deposits its minerals at the surface. The polygons re-form after winter rains, when the water table again is shallow enough to send salt to the surface.
My time-lapse video from this sunset was used for the opening of the interview I just had with PhotographyTalk:
Someone proposed on my Instagram account @jeffsullivanphotography that this is too saturated.
So I checked someone else's shots, Olancha Peak was standing nearby:
www.flickr.com/photos/lorihibbett/49243263553/in/dateposted/
(Posted for visual reference in comments below.)
Judging by the position of Venus her shot was taken about 10 minutes earlier, so it's hard to compare the two directly, but it looks like it has essentially the same colors, with less contrast applied in post. I see the same thing with my time-lapse viewed full screen on YouTube: we see the colors develop over the prior 24 minutes. The time-lapse ended right before this shot. The images in the time-lapse were taken at a constant exposure, and the ones at the end were boosted 4 stops in Lightroom and still ended up darker (which is entirely appropriate, as it did get quote a bit darker during that time). So there are going to be differences in this exposure taken much brighter, but the general colors do seem entirely consistent with what we see develop in the video.
By coincidence, I was discussing saturation vs. brightness and contrast with other photographers recently. Since Colors can not only be represented in a 3D color space by RGB (Red, Green, Blue) but also HLS, Hue, Lightness, Saturation, how could changing the contrast, the apparent relative lightness between nearby pixels, possibly change the saturation? Saturation is supposed to be an entirely different axis, unrelated to lightness. They proposed that colors appear more saturated in proximity to dark areas, such as black. The answer may be human perception.
Human color perception is a fascinating topic. To compare the image's display on Instagram on my phone to other instances where no one had proposed it was over-saturated, I determined that this image does look different full screen in Lightroom, at 1024 pixels in Flickr, at 600 pixels on my blog, and at the 480 pixel display resolution here in Instagram, with the resizing making the image look a little more saturated at smaller sizes.
Upon further testing, it turns out that the perceived saturate-with-resize effect is apparently not related to different browsers or Web sites choosing different resizing algorithms. It's repeated when I shrink my Lightroom window to make the image about the same size as in Instagram. So a main factor is resizing, but not different algorithms. It may be how a single resizing algorithm handles sampling multiple pixels and re-representing them in slightly different colors with fewer pixels, but it may also simply be human perception of the same image at different sizes, with the dark and light areas in closer proximity.
There is also often a notable difference with different display technologies between desktops and tablets and phones (as is also seen in the TV market: LCD vs. IPS vs. plasma), but it's interesting to discover the perceived change in saturation with display size on the same screen.
I have more to say on this, but at this point it's looking more like a blog article!
The Sunset That Wouldn't End
The SkyFire sunset forecast in the TPE app on IOS said that the odds of a good sunset were better at Badwater, so we skipped our default plan of shooting Mesquite Flat sand dunes and drove to Badwater. It paid off tremendously: there were no clouds at the dunes at all. This ended up being one of the longest sunsets that I've ever witnessed. On this night the sunset color lasted at least an hour after the sun set. Most people left for dinner, but I was shooting a short time-lapse sequence, so I stayed until the color was gone.
This was taken on December 13, after Badwater Basin flooded shortly after Thanksgiving. With a follow-up storm, the after remained until early January! The water table in Badwater Basin can be very close to the surface. That's how these polygons form: salt-laden water rises up cracks in the salt, until it dries and deposits its minerals at the surface. The polygons re-form after winter rains, when the water table again is shallow enough to send salt to the surface.
My time-lapse video from this sunset was used for the opening of the interview I just had with PhotographyTalk:
Someone proposed on my Instagram account @jeffsullivanphotography that this is too saturated.
So I checked someone else's shots, Olancha Peak was standing nearby:
www.flickr.com/photos/lorihibbett/49243263553/in/dateposted/
(Posted for visual reference in comments below.)
Judging by the position of Venus her shot was taken about 10 minutes earlier, so it's hard to compare the two directly, but it looks like it has essentially the same colors, with less contrast applied in post. I see the same thing with my time-lapse viewed full screen on YouTube: we see the colors develop over the prior 24 minutes. The time-lapse ended right before this shot. The images in the time-lapse were taken at a constant exposure, and the ones at the end were boosted 4 stops in Lightroom and still ended up darker (which is entirely appropriate, as it did get quote a bit darker during that time). So there are going to be differences in this exposure taken much brighter, but the general colors do seem entirely consistent with what we see develop in the video.
By coincidence, I was discussing saturation vs. brightness and contrast with other photographers recently. Since Colors can not only be represented in a 3D color space by RGB (Red, Green, Blue) but also HLS, Hue, Lightness, Saturation, how could changing the contrast, the apparent relative lightness between nearby pixels, possibly change the saturation? Saturation is supposed to be an entirely different axis, unrelated to lightness. They proposed that colors appear more saturated in proximity to dark areas, such as black. The answer may be human perception.
Human color perception is a fascinating topic. To compare the image's display on Instagram on my phone to other instances where no one had proposed it was over-saturated, I determined that this image does look different full screen in Lightroom, at 1024 pixels in Flickr, at 600 pixels on my blog, and at the 480 pixel display resolution here in Instagram, with the resizing making the image look a little more saturated at smaller sizes.
Upon further testing, it turns out that the perceived saturate-with-resize effect is apparently not related to different browsers or Web sites choosing different resizing algorithms. It's repeated when I shrink my Lightroom window to make the image about the same size as in Instagram. So a main factor is resizing, but not different algorithms. It may be how a single resizing algorithm handles sampling multiple pixels and re-representing them in slightly different colors with fewer pixels, but it may also simply be human perception of the same image at different sizes, with the dark and light areas in closer proximity.
There is also often a notable difference with different display technologies between desktops and tablets and phones (as is also seen in the TV market: LCD vs. IPS vs. plasma), but it's interesting to discover the perceived change in saturation with display size on the same screen.
I have more to say on this, but at this point it's looking more like a blog article!