The Frogman

So many things visit my deck.

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:38:27 -0500

Introducing… Nutholomew the Squirrel
My first subject showed up today during a composition test. I call him Nutholomew (nuh-tholomew). Because he likes big nuts and he has big nuts.
Just a whole lot more nuts than I was expecting.
I couldn’t do any lighting tests today as it was raining off and on. But sometimes natural light is all you need if you time it right.

So many things visit my deck.

The deck drama continues!

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:25:44 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:
Gary the Groundhog was able to climb up and steal a single pecan. But I’m afraid his descent was problematic. And his hard-fought snack was left behind.
It’s a tragedy.
In the immortal words of Linkin Park…
“I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.”
Epilogue!
I believe this is called “twisting the knife.”

The deck drama continues!

I should also mention that putting together these photos is a lot of tedious work. The software has…

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:31:24 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

This thread made me grumpy. And I thought it was just because I am not feeling well and I am easily frustrated when I’m tired and miserable.
But after thinking on it, I think there is something to my grump.
The title of this post gave the impression that these telescope ranches are only necessary because of light pollution. And it also gave credence to the sentiment that a bunch of rich nerds are doing astrophotography on their laptops in their homes instead of venturing out into the wilderness and experiencing the majesty of the universe with their eyeballs.
Every astrophotographer that I am aware of seeks out the night sky as often as they possibly can. Some are so dedicated that they will literally move to isolated areas so they can set up a rig in their backyard. They will go on pilgrimages to various ideal settings, often traveling internationally with all of their expensive equipment.
But eyeballs are limited. And there is majesty in the universe that takes a very long time to see. If you were to float in space next to a nebula, you would likely just see a void. Your eyes cannot collect enough light to see these dim clouds of gas. And humans do not have a long exposure setting on our visual system.
These remote setups are for observing things beyond our perception. They collect light for weeks and months in order to reveal the hidden gems of the universe. The telescopes are on automated mounts that fix on an area of the sky and track it perfectly throughout the night. And they can find that same area of the sky every single night thereafter. They take photo after photo after photo. This allows them to make dim things bright. Software processing can use many stacked exposures to build up the signal and reduce the noise.
But light pollution is not the only variable that needs to be mitigated. If you want to capture an area of the night sky over a long period of time, you need that sky to be clear most of the time. And it also helps to have low humidity and higher elevation in order to reduce atmospheric distortion.
Have you ever noticed a star twinkling? That isn’t the star, that is ripples of distortion in the atmosphere. You can see it in this live capture of Saturn.
So if the sky is always rippling, how do you get a clear image of cosmic phenomena?
That is another advantage of image stacking. If you take 100 photos of the Moon, 1 photo might capture very clear details of a crater. A second photo might capture clear details of the Sea of Tranquility. Every part of the Moon will be clear and detailed within that set of photos. So you need stacking software to identify those detailed bits in every photo and then average them all out so only those bits are used in the final image.
Your smartphone actually does the exact same thing, but on a much smaller scale. Every modern smartphone photo is created from several frames. An iPhone typically uses 4 dark exposures, 4 regular, and 1 long exposure, which are averaged out into 1 final composite.
They don’t all share a better telescope because these are already top-of-the-line telescopes. They have plenty of reach and resolution to create beautiful, artistic photography. Observatories are much more specialized telescopes and the scientists using them are less interested in creating artistic spectacles. The pretty pictures are important and very inspiring, but observatories have much bigger questions to answer and they are booked solid every available second of their operation.
People are not doing remote astrophotography to avoid being under the night sky. They are doing it in addition to being under the night sky.
Light pollution does suck, but these ranches would be necessary even if there was no light pollution. They provide good weather, better atmospheric conditions, and a secure infrastructure that allows them to safely use very expensive equipment over long periods of time without constant supervision.
These ranches are used by amateurs and professionals alike. They expand observation of the night sky far beyond what can be done with our limited number of observatories.
This is not a dystopian situation of automation and modernity. It is a beautiful collaborative effort to help us see the wonders of the universe that elude our human eyeballs.
[ Ian Lauer ]

I should also mention that putting together these photos is a lot of tedious work. The software has a steep learning curve, the workflow requires years of education and practice, and these folks are almost always operating at a huge loss and do this just for the love of space. It is the most complicated artistic photographic process I know of—rivaled only by microscopy.

They are the unsung heroes of astronomy and “doing it at home on a laptop” is about as reductive as it gets.

Here is some lighting wisdom that some may find helpful.

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:58:14 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:
The Peanut Thief
One of Katrina’s favorite animals is the mighty squirrel. She befriends them like a Disney character. And I wanted to take the world’s greatest squirrel photo for her. So I put out squirrel-friendly peanuts in the hopes that one of them would step in front of my camera. The squirrels have been shy, but I did catch this rascal in the meantime.
@al-gatone The problem with revealing specific lighting setups is that they teach you cause and effect without revealing much of the why. And when you are setting up lighting in a circumstance that isn’t similar enough, it can be frustrating when you fail to get the same effect.
The lighting was pretty simple. A softbox as a key light and a bare flash as an edge light.
The real challenge, and the reason knowing the “why” of lighting is so important, is figuring out how to scale things down for small creatures.
I had a huge issue photographing birds with artificial light because they are just too small. I wasn’t getting the results I wanted with my studio lighting techniques, so I opted to just study natural light and figure out what times of the day looked best.
The birds looked flat with my lighting.
But if I was patient and waited for the right time of day, I could get a much more dimensional result with sunlight.
The sun is far away, which is a hard light, but it lights up the sky, which is a big, soft light. And it blasts every surface, creating tons of ambient light. This mixture of light sources makes it very difficult to replicate, and it is why you sometimes get better results with that ball of gas in the sky.
But sunlight is fickle and only looks good at certain times. Artificial light is consistent, and you don’t have to wait around for it to be magical.
Lighting tutorials will tell you the best angle and height for the lights. They will explain that bigger lights are softer, smaller lights are harder. But they often gloss over the fact that closer lights are more dimensional. And you can’t easily represent how close a light needs to be in a lighting diagram, because it depends on the size of the subject compared to the size of the light source and the desired falloff into shadow.
My birds were looking flat because I could not put a light close enough to them to get dimensional falloff. When you put a big light close to something, parts of the light are closer and parts are farther away. Light gets dimmer as it is farther away. So there is a gradient falloff from dark to light. But if you put the light too far away, the entire light is roughly the same relative distance from your subject.
It’s best to think in percentages.
If you have a 4x4 foot light placed 3 feet away, the light coming from the corners is about 47% dimmer than the light coming from the center. That’s almost a full stop of falloff.
If it’s 10 feet away, the corners are only about 7% dimmer than the center. That’s barely a tenth of a stop, which is basically nothing.
I cringe when I see a YouTuber purchase $200 softboxes and then put them across the room. They think the expense will get them better light, when a cheap umbrella would do a better job placed 5 feet closer.
They blast themselves with broad, flat lighting usually reserved for pornography.
When you are going for ultimate flattery of naked bodies, broad, soft lighting will fill the shadows of every pore and wrinkle to make them less visible, but you get boring light as a consequence.
But if you take that same fancy softbox…
and place it close enough to get a gradient falloff…
You get soft, dimensional light.
I had to scale this down to match the size of squirrels and raccoons, and I had to devise a setup where they would ignore the camera equipment. I was banking on the fact that… peanuts are tasty.
I bought a small softbox for a human, but a big one for a raccoon. This allowed me to place it much closer.
Then I did lighting tests.
Lots of lighting tests.
I know how light behaves for things human sized, but I needed practical experience lighting smaller creatures. I needed to figure out the farthest distance I could put the light and still get nice dimensionality.
So I started super duper close and adjusted from there.
Unfortunately, the softbox still needed to be very close and I was worried about scaring the animals. But the power of tasty peanuts prevailed and they mostly ignored the light after the first few flashes.
Another helpful tool to add dimension is subject separation.
With artificial light, you can dial in how bright the ambient light is, or cancel it altogether. The brighter you make your light, the dimmer the ambient will expose for the camera. So you can underexpose the background compared to your subject.
You can also blur the background with shallow depth of field. You can use color contrast. And you can add an edge light to outline your subject.
I used a dark background exposure, color contrast with the background, and an edge light.
Working with multiple lights is all about ratios. You need to make sure the key light is dominant and the edge light is subtle.
Again, this is why lighting tests are so valuable. You can play with ratios to find a nice balance.
You gotta take a lot of bad photos before you can make a good one. And preparation is a superpower.
My test subjects did not match the behavior of animal fur, so I used my giant floofy beard as another reference.
There were times when one of my flashes would fire, but not the other. Which is frustrating, but for demonstration purposes, it helps show what each light was contributing to the finished result.
This is without the edge light.
Kinda cool, but you really lose the stripy tail.
And in these, you can see what just the edge light looks like compared to both lights at the same time.
I think part of the reason people thought this was AI is due to not seeing studio lighting techniques outdoors and not seeing it used on wild animals. Nature photography is almost exclusively natural light.
I was inspired to try this partly due to Blair Bunting and his recent tiger project.
He used his studio strobes and modifiers near the fence of a tiger enclosure to get these hyperreal photos.
He also has a very artistic post processing workflow, which adds a layer of stylistic flair. But his style would not be possible without the foundation of great lighting technique. And I think he created some beautiful photographs of these majestic apex predators.
I hope this was helpful. The big lesson is to experiment. Try adjusting different variables until you get a pleasing result. Move the light closer. Try a different angle. Make it brighter. Make it darker. Study each result to help understand how the light behaves.

Here is some lighting wisdom that some may find helpful.

Also…

I always teach new photographers to never finalize their edits right away. Editing is dozens of gradual changes that stack up over time. You easily lose track of how far you have pushed things and your brain is too adapted to the present to remember the past.

It’s best to step away for an hour or two, or ideally wait a day. Look at the photo with fresh eyes.

But I was so excited about my raccoon photo that I didn’t follow my own advice. I realized I made the background too dark. It’s a typical edit to increase subject separation, but I have noticed I tend to overdo it.

In any case, the photo is out there and reblogged and I can’t put all of the toothpaste back in the tube. But here is the version I prefer.

Some lessons require learning over and over.

I got accused of AI almost immediately on this one.

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:18:31 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

The Peanut Thief
One of Katrina’s favorite animals is the mighty squirrel. She befriends them like a Disney character. And I wanted to take the world’s greatest squirrel photo for her. So I put out squirrel-friendly peanuts in the hopes that one of them would step in front of my camera. The squirrels have been shy, but I did catch this rascal in the meantime.

I got accused of AI almost immediately on this one.

I am pretty upset.

I spent a lot of time and energy doing lighting tests and setting up peanut traps to get this photo. Some feel the answer is to show the RAW file or BTS. I do that sometimes for educational benefit. But often I feel like a magician telling everyone how the magic trick was done. The RAW file is data to me. It isn’t a representation of reality. It doesn’t have the color or contrast of real life. And it isn’t the art I am creating.

The look of this photo is just lighting. Lighting is not AI. It’s a skill I have spent over a decade studying so I could take photos like this.

In any case, I will show you a RAW file. But I don’t want to completely ruin the magic, so here is an alternate take where a peanut got stuck to his nose.

And here is a frame where I was really worried the raccoon was going to steal my lighting reference, Baby Yoda.

I am once again pleading with folks not to accuse an artist of using AI unless you have actual evidence. Sherlock Holmes did not rely on vibes to solve his cases.

I was really proud of my raccoon photo. I often feel imposter syndrome about my photography because I am disabled and it is hard to build up experience points when you can only shoot occasionally. And this photo made me feel like I actually know what I’m doing.

And that feeling was immediately torpedoed by AI detectives shaming me for something I didn’t do.

TL;DR

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:41:04 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

RAW-dogging NASA Photos
NASA just publicly released all of the RAW files from the Artemis trip ‘round the Moon. I think it is rude to edit someone else’s photos without their permission. I used to do that sometimes and then someone edited one of my photos and I was all, “I DO NOT LIKE THIS FEELING.”
So when people were taking NASA photos and messing with them, I was annoyed.
However, I believe this release of the RAW files is implied consent for the community to help process this trove of photos.
And this allows me to put the final nail in the coffin of the “Blue Marble” vs “Hello, World” discourse.
You may remember this viral post from 6 months ago.
Keep reading

I used a similar artistic process to edit the modern “Hello, World” photo as was used on the classic “Blue Marble” photo. Here they are side by side.

Also, in the process of researching and writing this post, I clearly triggered the algorithm to annoy me.

This jig is up!

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:21:30 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

thefrogman:
Blatant Nepotism
My bestie made a cute Halloween comic.
Would you do me a favor and check it out and like it and stuff? Engagement for the algorithm and all that.
She has literally saved my life and kept me from being homeless. And it’s hard to repay that level of kindness.
But I’ve got all of you and liking a post is a small thing that makes a big difference.
Here is a sample of her cuteness to further lure you to the link above.
This was partly inspired by a text message between us.
Aren’t we adorable friends?
Like the thing!
This is my favorite thing she has done.
I call it the Fuckofftopus.
One day, perhaps I will send it to my brother.
He stole half of my intended inheritance. And two riding lawn mowers in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness. He was too cowardly to tell me personally. He made his lawyer tell me, then went no contact, and I was pretty screwed.
Katrina and her family have kept me afloat and supported me during my recovery.
So if you have Instagram and you can do the like and follow thing, it would be appreciated.

This jig is up!

I was attempting an uncredited act of kindness but my bestie is a seasoned snoop.

Thank you everyone for supporting my best friend’s art.

Also, sneak preview of upcoming photography shenanigans.

Just waiting on squirrel-friendly peanuts to arrive.

Blatant Nepotism

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:05:39 -0500

My bestie made a cute Halloween comic.

Would you do me a favor and check it out and like it and stuff? Engagement for the algorithm and all that.

She has literally saved my life and kept me from being homeless. And it’s hard to repay that level of kindness.

But I’ve got all of you and liking a post is a small thing that makes a big difference.

Here is a sample of her cuteness to further lure you to the link above.

This was partly inspired by a text message between us.

Aren’t we adorable friends?

Like the thing!

I can’t decide which to add to my portfolio. So I am going to rely on the wisdom of the crowd.

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:49:00 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

The Tree Frog(gie)
I’ve had this one in my brain for a while. I took a photo of a fox and thought this tree growing next to my deck looked magical. I had a vision of myself surrounded by its leafy summer branches. It’s not summer any longer, but I guess the tree doesn’t know that.
⬇Before/After/Alternate⬇
Keep reading

I can’t decide which to add to my portfolio. So I am going to rely on the wisdom of the crowd.

Which version do you prefer?

Gallant green.

Radical red.

See Results

People really seem to love grackles.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:15:53 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

More raptor poses from the mighty grackle.

People really seem to love grackles.

Or secondary eyelids.

Or both.

Reading this again, my rant came off a little more grumpy than I intended.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:03:01 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

Moon Over My Froggie
I took this shot as I was returning from the mailbox. I wasn’t sure if it would amount to anything. I haven’t cut my hair or trimmed my beard in over a year, so I thought it was important to document my lumberjack aesthetic. And I thought it might be fun to see if I could use my editing skills to turn my hirsute selfie into… art.
Photo editing is often my low-energy happy place. When I am bored and exhausted, I retreat into Photoshop to find my zen.
Some photographers hate editing. They justify their low-effort approach and even lionize “straight out of camera” as some pure and authentic artistic process.
In reality, they are just letting the robot inside their camera edit their photos.
Which is perfectly valid. I just get frustrated when they say my work is not “real” photography because I don’t automate my post processing.
It’s just ironic when they try to pass off their camera’s algorithms as a more “human” way to practice this art form.
Organic photography.
All natural ingredients.
In any case, I edited the heck out of this.
I added a moon and stars. I haven’t seen stars in years. I moved a light. I cloned out my unibrow. I made my pale arm skin (which hasn’t seen the sun in two years) nice and tan.
Enjoy my Ultra Processed Photography.
Packed with dense visual calories. Filled with synthetic high fructose starlight. Featuring a photo I took of the moon over a week ago—freshly preserved with chemicals you cannot pronounce. Color graded with premium pink Himalayan salt just to make it seem fancy.

Reading this again, my rant came off a little more grumpy than I intended.

Do you see it?

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:05:01 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

Blue Fluff
Every time I see these grackles strike a pose, I am more convinced they used to be velociraptors. This one has some Cookie Monster chest hair.
⬇Before/After Edit⬇
Keep reading

Do you see it?

Some folks might be sad they can’t see UV iridescence and the color blurple, but our human visual…

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:41:10 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

Absolute nonsense spread to 8000 people.
Crows are tetrachromats. They have 4 color-detecting cones instead of 3 and one of them can detect light in the UV range. Humans can see down to about 380 nanometers and crows can see down to 300.
There is no way to conceptualize how they experience color. Not only do they see more wavelengths, but their 4th cone allows them to process completely new color experiences. Our eyes combine red, green, and blue in many variations. A fourth cone adds another dimension of color possibilities.
Human vision compared to bird vision is a bit like dog vision compared to human vision.
We can roughly simulate the color experiences of a dog, but they just do not have the biological hardware to know what our version of red is like. We are the dog when compared to birds.
So, crows seeing UV doesn’t let them see secret blues, greens, and purples. Those are all colors in our visual spectrum.
And crows certainly wouldn’t appear white.
A quick explainer on reflected light…
Non-metallic objects have two reflections. There is a surface reflection that takes on an image of the light source and maps it onto the geometry of the thing. This is called a specular reflection.
When you look at a crow, you will see brighter white glossy highlights.
Those highlights are just an image of the sun mapped onto the topography of a crow.
And then there is a subsurface reflection. 3D artists often call this subsurface scattering because light penetrates and bounces around, causing it to be diffused. This is typically where the pigmented color comes into play.
An apple is red because its subsurface reflection absorbs all other colors and yeets red wavelengths in all directions.
So the shiny stuff is the specular highlights. The color is the diffuse subsurface reflection. And if the object is very matte (which just means microscopically bumpy), the two reflections sort of blend into each other and become less distinct.
Crows have dark melanin, which absorbs visible light and UV. So whatever a crow’s version of black is, that is the subsurface reflection they will see.
And whatever their version of white is, that is what the specular reflection will be.
However, crows have UV iridescence. They have structural color in their feathers that provides some shimmery color experiences.
But it’s UV.
So we can’t see it.
We can’t imagine it.
We have no reference for what 4-cone bird vision renders in their little bird brains. It won’t be blue, purple, or green. It will be some color we haven’t even named.
Blurple… or something.
So, the pigment will be whatever black is.
The specular highlights will be whatever white is.
And the iridescence will be a shimmering blurple (depending on the angle of the light and the angle of the observing crow).
The best way I can think of to kinda/sorta envision it is to show you another grackle.
(Not my photo)
It will have a dark base, shiny specular highlights, and some shifting colors we cannot conceive.
I’m sure it is quite beautiful and it makes all the crows horny. But it will not be some albino disco bird.

Some folks might be sad they can’t see UV iridescence and the color blurple, but our human visual spectrum is actually pretty great.

Sometimes seeing more is not better.

If we could see into the UV range, we’d be much more aware of bodily fluids. Do we want to know exactly where the dog peed on the fire hydrant? If you were in a hotel room with a big window letting sunlight in, our eyes would CSI way too much.

Infrared would just be constant fart clouds.

In the end, ROYGBIV is the way to go.

This was 13 × 7 pixels, which works out to 0.000091 megapixels.

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:12:17 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

It would seem taking a photo of something 784,418,908 miles away might be too much to ask of a 320mm lens.

This was 13 × 7 pixels, which works out to 0.000091 megapixels.

People are really digging my bumpy-ass street.

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:18:51 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:
The light trail reveals the topology of my street.

People are really digging my bumpy-ass street.

When I went out to look at the full moon, I was a little disappointed that it was mostly obscured by…

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:16:10 -0500

When I went out to look at the full moon, I was a little disappointed that it was mostly obscured by clouds. But then I noticed that when the cloud layer was thinner, the moon would reveal itself. And so I tried to capture something interesting under those circumstances.

I haven’t been feeling well enough to photograph birds. It’s a lot of effort and requires thousands…

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:46:50 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

I haven’t been feeling well enough to photograph birds. It’s a lot of effort and requires thousands of photos to get a few good ones. But I was able to get a cool moon photo.
Moon photography is a bit weird to me. The Moon is essentially unchanging. It is tidally locked, so it always faces us. It’s so far away that it always has the same perspective, essentially behaving like a 2D object. If you line up every photo of the Moon taken from Earth, the features will match up exactly. Every phase of the moon has already been photographed many, many times.
It’s basically impossible to take a unique photo of the moon.
Yet… every photographer with a telephoto lens will take a moon photo.
It’s like a telephoto rite of passage.
Or maybe it is like the Marine Rifleman’s Creed.
This is my Moon. There are many like it. But this one is mine.

I added a fun explainer on iridescence.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 13:37:12 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:
This is one of my least favorite “fun facts” that won’t die.
Partly because it is wrong.
But also because magenta is more interesting than this explanation.
Why is it wrong?
Well, if magenta doesn’t exist, then neither does white. Then neither do a lot of the colors coming from your screen.
Magenta is an “extra spectral” color. This just means it is made up of more than one wavelength.
Pure spectral red has a wavelength of ~700 nanometers.
Pure spectral violet has a wavelength of ~400 nanometers.
What happens when your eyeball receives both at the same time?
Magenta!
But if extra spectral colors are “fake,” then white is super duper extra fake. Because it contains every wavelength in the visible spectrum. White is what happens when you just blast the entire spectrum into your eyeballs at the same time.
All data needs to be interpreted. It doesn’t matter if it is done by a scientific instrument or our brains. You collect information, it goes through an interpretive layer, and then it is processed into a form that can be understood.
If a spectrometer collects red and violet light, it measures the wavelengths, interprets them into digits, and gives you a reading of 700 and 400 nanometers.
If our eyes collect red and violet light, the brain will process the simultaneous wavelengths and give us the experience of magenta.
Every color display is made up of red, green, and blue pixels. Screens do not give us any other pure spectral colors. So anything not red, green, or blue would be an extra spectral representation using simultaneous, combined wavelengths.
So if you see yellow on a screen, is that “fake”?
Every piece of sensory data your body collects is processed and interpreted. If magenta is fake, then touch is fake. Sounds are fake. Your entire human experience is fake.
This is the same annoyance I have with people who say money is fake. Intangible constructs are real. They exist. When your rent is due and you don’t have enough money, it doesn’t feel very fake in that moment. If you are going to go down that philosophical path, then you’ll have to contend with love and sadness and poetry and music all being fake. Many mental constructs require physical constructs to represent them. Sadness produces tears. Poetry is crafted with pen and paper. Music escapes the brain through instrumentation. And our experience of those physical constructs just goes straight back into that interpretive framework in our noggin.
If interpreted data is fake, then nothing is real.
The interesting thing about magenta is that its component wavelengths lie on either end of the visible spectrum.
Our eyes have receptors that interpret short, medium, and long wavelengths of visible light. What makes magenta unique is that it activates the short and long receptors.
The electromagnetic spectrum keeps going in either direction to infinity as a line of wavelengths. But our brains cannot interpret gamma rays or radio waves. Instead, it turns this infinite line into a closed loop of only the data we can actually process.
Enter the color wheel!
So when you have combined wavelengths of red and violet, magenta is the area where the brain does the color loop-de-loop.
I think that is much cooler than the claim of non-existence.
But if you are dead set on arguing that there is a color that does not exist, black might do the trick.
Well, the experience of black, at least.
From a physics perspective, black is the absence of light. Zero photons existing within a given area.
The color we commonly experience as black is actually very dim white. Photons are sneaky and it is actually quite difficult to be in a space with zero visible light. Even the darkest of rooms might have a few bouncing around.
So when we see a black car or a black cat or a black screen, we are still registering photons, and they have all of the same wavelengths of white light.
Here is a gradient of blues.
On one end, you have light blue, and on the other end is dark blue. But we are comfortable referring to all of these shades as a form of blue.
But if you look at this gradient, you have white, gray, and black. We consider them to be very distinct colors. You’d never say light white and dark white.
But the only difference between these colors is their intensity. They all emit the same rainbow of wavelengths.
When does white become gray? When does gray become black?
That is where interpretive context comes into play.
Gray is only gray in the proper context. The stuff surrounding gray determines its grayness.
Take this famous optical illusion.
The top shape is gray.
The bottom shape is white.
Right?
If you were to objectively measure the intensity of the shape faces, it’s the same shade of gray.
When we see a black car, it reflects the same component wavelengths as a white car. But its contextual relationship with its surroundings is what causes our brain to interpret it as black.
But true black, or “blackness,” is impossible for humans to experience. Even if we close our eyes and put on a blindfold with a perfect seal, we cannot visually experience nothing. The receptors in our eyes are still sending data to our brain. Some people see Eigengrau or “brain gray.” Some people see a sort of visual snow. Others see various visual artifacts.
But it is never… nothing.
So, like magenta, the color black absolutely exists. But our brains refuse to let us see the void. Black does not exist within the human experience.
It’s all just noise in the data or very dim white.
@broken-horn-of-equius What you are referring to is “structural” or “interference” color. It is a fascinating quirk of reflected light.
Let’s start with pigmented color.
This cool cardinal I took a photo of has red-pigmented feathers.
White light hits the feathers, all colors except for red are absorbed and turned into heat, and red reflects back into our eyeballs.
This is the same effect that causes leaves to be green and pumpkins to be orange.
Pigmented color is the most common way color reflects. But it is possible for us to see non-pigmented color.
When you look at feathers very close up you will see they have layered, barbed structures.
This creates a lot of surfaces for light to bounce around.
In certain circumstances, with certain feathers, the light will combine with other light or it will cancel out other light.
The *structure* of the feathers *interferes* with the light.
So when you look at my photo of a grackle, you can see it has some reds and purples despite its feathers having no red or purple pigment.
Structural color is both constructive and destructive.
Constructive Interference is when the crests of the two returning waves line up perfectly, and they amplify each other. That specific color wavelength becomes incredibly vibrant and highly saturated.
Destructive Interference is when the crest of one wave lines up with the trough of the other, and they cancel each other out, removing that wavelength from the visible reflection.
Depending on the angle of the light and the angle of the viewer, these interference patterns can shift and change.
This is also how those iridescent car wraps work.
They have a layered microscopic texture that capitalizes on this interference effect, just like layers of barbed feathers.
It took a lot of expensive R&D to figure out how to synthetically engineer this effect, while nature has been doing it for millions of years so peacocks could get laid.

I added a fun explainer on iridescence.

Full disclosure: There is a popular opinion among color scientists that magenta is fake.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:53:05 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

This is one of my least favorite “fun facts” that won’t die.
Partly because it is wrong.
But also because magenta is more interesting than this explanation.
Why is it wrong?
Well, if magenta doesn’t exist, then neither does white. Then neither do a lot of the colors coming from your screen.
Magenta is an “extra spectral” color. This just means it is made up of more than one wavelength.
Pure spectral red has a wavelength of ~700 nanometers.
Pure spectral violet has a wavelength of ~400 nanometers.
What happens when your eyeball receives both at the same time?
Magenta!
But if extra spectral colors are “fake,” then white is super duper extra fake. Because it contains every wavelength in the visible spectrum. White is what happens when you just blast the entire spectrum into your eyeballs at the same time.
All data needs to be interpreted. It doesn’t matter if it is done by a scientific instrument or our brains. You collect information, it goes through an interpretive layer, and then it is processed into a form that can be understood.
If a spectrometer collects red and violet light, it measures the wavelengths, interprets them into digits, and gives you a reading of 700 and 400 nanometers.
If our eyes collect red and violet light, the brain will process the simultaneous wavelengths and give us the experience of magenta.
Every color display is made up of red, green, and blue pixels. Screens do not give us any other pure spectral colors. So anything not red, green, or blue would be an extra spectral representation using simultaneous, combined wavelengths.
So if you see yellow on a screen, is that “fake”?
Every piece of sensory data your body collects is processed and interpreted. If magenta is fake, then touch is fake. Sounds are fake. Your entire human experience is fake.
This is the same annoyance I have with people who say money is fake. Intangible constructs are real. They exist. When your rent is due and you don’t have enough money, it doesn’t feel very fake in that moment. If you are going to go down that philosophical path, then you’ll have to contend with love and sadness and poetry and music all being fake. Many mental constructs require physical constructs to represent them. Sadness produces tears. Poetry is crafted with pen and paper. Music escapes the brain through instrumentation. And our experience of those physical constructs just goes straight back into that interpretive framework in our noggin.
If interpreted data is fake, then nothing is real.
The interesting thing about magenta is that its component wavelengths lie on either end of the visible spectrum.
Our eyes have receptors that interpret short, medium, and long wavelengths of visible light. What makes magenta unique is that it activates the short and long receptors.
The electromagnetic spectrum keeps going in either direction to infinity as a line of wavelengths. But our brains cannot interpret gamma rays or radio waves. Instead, it turns this infinite line into a closed loop of only the data we can actually process.
Enter the color wheel!
So when you have combined wavelengths of red and violet, magenta is the area where the brain does the color loop-de-loop.
I think that is much cooler than the claim of non-existence.
But if you are dead set on arguing that there is a color that does not exist, black might do the trick.
Well, the experience of black, at least.
From a physics perspective, black is the absence of light. Zero photons existing within a given area.
The color we commonly experience as black is actually very dim white. Photons are sneaky and it is actually quite difficult to be in a space with zero visible light. Even the darkest of rooms might have a few bouncing around.
So when we see a black car or a black cat or a black screen, we are still registering photons, and they have all of the same wavelengths of white light.
Here is a gradient of blues.
On one end, you have light blue, and on the other end is dark blue. But we are comfortable referring to all of these shades as a form of blue.
But if you look at this gradient, you have white, gray, and black. We consider them to be very distinct colors. You’d never say light white and dark white.
But the only difference between these colors is their intensity. They all emit the same rainbow of wavelengths.
When does white become gray? When does gray become black?
That is where interpretive context comes into play.
Gray is only gray in the proper context. The stuff surrounding gray determines its grayness.
Take this famous optical illusion.
The top shape is gray.
The bottom shape is white.
Right?
If you were to objectively measure the intensity of the shape faces, it’s the same shade of gray.
When we see a black car, it reflects the same component wavelengths as a white car. But its contextual relationship with its surroundings is what causes our brain to interpret it as black.
But true black, or “blackness,” is impossible for humans to experience. Even if we close our eyes and put on a blindfold with a perfect seal, we cannot visually experience nothing. The receptors in our eyes are still sending data to our brain. Some people see Eigengrau or “brain gray.” Some people see a sort of visual snow. Others see various visual artifacts.
But it is never… nothing.
So, like magenta, the color black absolutely exists. But our brains refuse to let us see the void. Black does not exist within the human experience.
It’s all just noise in the data or very dim white.

Full disclosure: There is a popular opinion among color scientists that magenta is fake.

But that is only because they believe all color is a hallucination.

I don’t agree with that notion. I think it invokes too much philosophizing within a physical science, as it has broader implications about all human experiences being real or fake, but I do think it is a more defensible position than isolating just magenta and calling it fake.

Brains are imperfect instruments of data interpretation. Our interpretive layer is very subjective. Our experience of color is not always consistent. We may have varied individual experiences of color from person to person. Our experience of color is very different from that of dogs and cows and birds. And, as I mentioned, there is contextual color. Our perception of black, gray, and brown is heavily dependent on the surrounding environment. Sometimes our brain will interpret dark orange, sometimes it will give us brown. Same wavelength, different visual experience.

But I think our experience of color and the relationships between colors map pretty well onto objective measurements. The reflectance of an apple measures a certain wavelength, and the human visual system will experience that wavelength as red. Even if my red isn’t your red, the differential relationship between colors is fairly consistent, predictable, and precisely quantifiable. As long as the difference between my red and my green is roughly the same as yours and it matches objective measurements of wavelengths, that is real enough for me.

Fretting Fingernails - A Small Tribute to Dolly

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:58:06 -0500

sirfrogsworth:

All of the Dolly stories people are sharing keep turning on the waterworks. I’m worried I am going to dehydrate myself.
This one is tough.
I don’t think a celebrity death has hit me like this since Robin Williams.
I was never a huge country fan, but I was always a Dolly fan. If the music is good, I like it. I definitely swim in certain genres more than others, but I never hold the genre against an artist. If they have talent, I will love their music.
I saw a comment today where someone said they “weren’t a fan of her music,” and I just thought… she wrote over 3000 songs. There is something for everyone in that catalog. If you aren’t a fan, you just haven’t put in the effort.
Did you even know she covered Collective Soul?
Only Dolly could stick a fiddle solo into that song and make it work.
What about her classic duet with that infamous K-named singer?
I think she did something with some Kenny guy too.
The thing that always amazed me about her musicianship was her nails. She was a great rhythm guitarist. Underrated, in my opinion. And nails on the right hand can be a huge advantage. But Dolly was nothing if not symmetrical and she had giant, shiny nails on her fretting hand and it didn’t slow her down. It’s like when I went to the DMV and saw this lady type faster than me with long bedazzled nails. Felt like I was witnessing a magic trick.
One of my favorite Dolly moments was from a 1979 episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The interview is a definite sign of the times. They awkwardly talk about her weight loss and Johnny pulls out a box of cereal for an on air advertisement. Dolly is very reserved and shy. Her full stage persona had not been fully formed. But also, she loved Johnny and was a bit star-struck. He was a big part of her initial success and you can tell how much she appreciated that. To show that appreciation, she wrote a song just for Johnny. She was infamous for how fast she could write songs. I just feel like this was such a sweet moment and the song is genuinely good.
(Song starts at 11:45)
A lot of people have talked about her theme park, her philanthropy, and her genuine good nature, but she consistently wrote amazing music. If you don’t think you are a fan, I encourage you to dig a little deeper and give her a chance to beguile you with her dulcet tones.
Anywho, here is a video of Dolly being adorable and making musicians so happy they cry.