Feathered Photography is changing. It had to happen and I almost waited too long.
1/2000, f/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in
Three days ago at Farmington Bay WMA I had this Song Sparrow in my viewfinder for quite a while but for most of that time I wasn’t fond of the poses “he” struck. Usually they were head-on where I couldn’t see his tail and there were other issues too. But for 5 quick shots he turned his back to me and gave me this over-the-shoulder look in nice morning light. I just like the aesthetics of the image, including but not limited to the composition.
Whenever I refer to one of my images as being “monochromatic” someone usually challenges me about the label because they can see more than one color in the photo. But for me this image comes about as close to being truly monochromatic as color nature photography gets.
Here’s one definition of monochrome photography:
- “Photography where each position on an image can record and show a different amount of light, but not a different hue. It includes all forms of black-and-white photography, which produce images containing tones of neutral grey ranging from black to white. Other hues besides grey, such as sepia, cyan or brown can also be used in monochrome photography”
So it seems to me that this image fits the definition pretty darn well, though perhaps not perfectly. But when it comes to artistic and aesthetic considerations I’m unquestionably a dummkopf so what say ye? I’m guessing it will depend on your definition of “hue”.
By now you’ve probably noticed that Feathered Photography has a different look about it. That change became necessary because my previous blog theme, Atahaulpa, is old and was out of service and no longer being supported. Various functions were no longer working properly and my entire site could have crashed at any time.
So yesterday I had to act fast and choose a new theme – Nirvana. Nirvana works and looks differently than Atahaulpa and you’re seeing many of those differences already. There’s still some tweaking to do and some kinks to work out.
Here’s one of those kinks, potentially at least. When you comment the first time using this new theme you may or may not be prompted to fill in your name and email address. If you see that prompt you’ll probably also see a check box below it labeled “Save my name, email, and site URL in my browser for next time I post a comment.” If you check that box you shouldn’t have to fill in your contact info when you comment in the future. Time will tell if it works properly.
We may still have tweaks to make and there will likely be other kinks to work out in the future (there always is in these situations). If you find something that isn’t working properly for you or is less convenient than Atahaulpa was or that you just don’t like please let me know in case it can be tweaked. It may or may not be possible.
If you’re like me change is hard but together we’ll get through it.
Ron
Notes:
- One thing drives me a little batty about the new theme. It’s small but annoying. If you’re on a desktop when you pass your cursor over the image the image file number appears – just like it used to which I like. But now when that happens the image loses contrast and temporarily becomes faded and dull. I guess I’ll get used to it…
- Please, please – let me know if some of my images occasionally fail to fully load for you – either on my home page or on individual posts.
- One of the things I miss with this theme is my rotating banner. I thought we might be able to add it, but we can’t. It will continue to work on my home page but it won’t on individual posts.
- Huge thanks to Mia for performing this theme transition for me. It’s a lot of work and I simply don’t have the tech savvy to do it myself.
Lovely alluring sparrow pose, the colors are so calming to me. Wonderful.
Change can be good, scary but good!
Ron, I was worried you were quitting. The sparrow looking over its shoulder with a catch light was very special. Thanks. Diana
Please explain “Pinch $ Zoom” and how to access.
My Blog showed up from wordpress.com
Here’s an explanation, Deena.
https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/p/pinch-to-zoom.htm
Well, I guess I don’t notice as much as I think I do. I wonder if I would have noticed the changes if you never mentioned it. Mind you, I am using my tablet while I visit a friend and everything is smaller, it all jumps around if I hit the sides-annoys me immensely. I like the pose, the colouring, the plant it is perched on, and the blurred background.
Thank you, Jane.
This is such a beautiful photo. I love it. Ron, will we be able to access previous posts on either the other site or this one? There are a few I haven’t read yet.
Thank you.
Yup, all my posts became instantly available with the new theme as soon as Mia clicked the “magic button” yesterday afternoon. Older posts can be accessed using the Archives drop-down menu on the right side of my blog.
Personally, I like to see the whole picture. Sparrows are so pretty.
🙂
There is something so warm and comforting about this sparrow shot. I can’t quite put it into words. May be it’s the raw naturalness and monochromatic coloring “done right”. For whatever crazy reason, I look at this photo and I am reminded of many other things, not just the bird. For instance, my first thought was this reminds me of a time when I was sitting in the old barn among the old faded hay bales, smelling the croker feed sacks and molasses bottles while thinking, I love my barn smells. That’s probably just my overactive imagination(it really can run wild). But, it seems I do that with a lot of photo’s. I see it for what it is and also assign it to what it represents to me in other ways. Is that strange?
As far as monochromatic goes to me, it can be warm and elegant when done right. This is definitely “done right”!
Thanks always for sharing your wonderful photo’s.
Suzy, whether it’s “strange” or not your ability to do that is admirable. And envy-provoking. Good for you!
Thank you for sharing your labor of love with all of us.
In the spirit of constructive feedback:
– the post notice still came through on my RSS feed, which is great
– I’m on a mobile w/ Chrome. The old version I could pinch & zoom on the pictures (& text), which is great to see details on feather structure/coloration (e.g., the wonderful golden tresses on your golden eagle the other day). Alas, at least today, pinch & zoom isn’t working. I’m not sure if that is something others are experiencing or if it is something that can be controlled or if it’s something on my end.
Thank you again, your posts are always the better parts of my mornings.
Craig, we tried to restore the “pinch and zoom” but it won’t let us. It must be a fixed property of the new theme. Sorry.
I just fixed the pinch and zoom.
Good! Mia does her magic again.
Amazing, it works and thank you both!
Only yesterday I was thinking about the absence of sparrows around here. And today you have given them to me.
Thank you.
I accept change (if I have to) but am not a fan. So far so good.
Thanks, EC. I’m not a fan either.
The monochrome definition sorta works. Definitely not polychrome or Kodachrome. More like Dudleychrome.
The Song Sparrow strikes me as very meditative, but then I ascribe that to a lot of stationary beings, both animal and plant🤔
I like the gray background. I’ve been in the habit of switching to reader view (white text on black) to reduce glare, but the gray is even better.
A quirk I’ve noticed on my iPhone:
If there are bullets “•” in the post they can occasionally move as I scroll up and down, sometimes right into the photo.
I think that that might be a q in Jerry Ligouri’s name.
Now I’ll be looking to see if Paul Simon writes a song called “Dudleychrome”…
Moving bullets is a quirk I’ve been unaware of. Geeze…
It’s always interesting to see the regional variations in Song Sparrows. Ours are a richer brown and the strips on the head are much grayer. It would also be interesting to hear the song dialect of your sparrows. I’ve seen some old books that refer to them as “Everybody’s Darling”. Seems like an appropriate name to me.
I see some comments about the gray background. Just to let you know that it works well for me. I’m more critical about such things now because the intense chemo I had severely damaged my eyes, but black on gray is easy to read. As for size, I must now enlarge all text on my iPad or monitor in order to read it. So your changes all seem fine to me.
Good to know the gray works well for you, Dan. I appreciate the feedback, and of course I wish the best for you with your vision issues.
It showed up in my email from wordprss.com almost deleted it.
Others have said the same thing. That’s something I have no control over.
Beautiful, simple sparrow. I love their songs, though of course they are not singing yet. I almost missed this post. it appeared in my inbox simply as “wordpress” and title. Not Feathered Photography. I at 80 dread change even as I welcome challenge, however reluctantly. I panic that I will not be able to sort this new thing out. However simple it might be. I have to deliberately take a breath and calm the panic right out.
You sound a lot like me, Sally. I rarely if ever panic but I sure as hell don’t like change. Just give me my routine and I’ll be happy…
I’m wondering if Ed’s request for a larger font size might actually be met by
a white background ( like you had before ) behind the text, providing more contrast—as I type this response, the box in which I’m typing is showing a
much lighter value than the body of the blog, and though it’s not WHITE, it
is enough lighter to make the reading easier……..just a thought !
Kris, I suspect you view my blog on a mobile device. Actually I never had my blog set to a white background. It was always this color of gray. But one of the problems with the old theme was that it wasn’t working properly on mobile devices which is apparently why you were seeing the white background. Someone else who views my blog on her phone said she used to see a white background too.
I prefer not to have a white background because I don’t think its a desirable color for the background of my images. Most folks, including me, like neutral gray behind photos better.
I don’t remember the “grey” and I’m viewing on my desktop – ?????
Maybe the malfunction was more widespread than just on mobile devices. I dunno…
A lighter background would be easier for older eyes, I believe.
Judy, a few minutes ago we changed the background to a slightly lighter gray.
The lighter gray does help……. 🙂
And you have the top menu bar back. Looks good.
Excellent.
What a cheeky, chunky little monkey — in monochrome! 😄
Got to see a lot of birds on my drive to Marin County and back. The most striking image was a long-distance view of a huge flock of something (too far away to tell) getting flushed and “swarming” in formation until the trouble passed, then settling on power lines. Amazing — had to have been at least 100 birds!
What you describe sounds like starlings to me, Marty. Especially this time of year. We see them doing the same things in flocks of thousands. Blackbirds are also a possibility.
Change is good. It keeps us on our toes❗️I like that you’ve added previous posts. It makes it easy to go back and look at some of my favorites.
Shout to your sparrow, I don’t want to leave him out 😁
“Change is good”
Ha, I’ll have to be convinced of that, Diana. I’m such a creature of habit it’s ridiculous!
“But when it comes to artistic and aesthetic considerations I’m unquestionably a dummkopf so what say ye?”
I will not agree with this statement and my daughter Sheri who is a very accomplished artist agree. You have a very good eye for the artistic and it is demonstrated in your work. The phoo is beautiful and your description fits perfectly.
I also struggle with change but will try to appreciate the new look as well as I did the old one. Thank you for all your work and information.
I appreciate that very much, Betty. Maybe, just maybe, it’s that my aesthetic instincts aren’t bad. But my knowledge on the subject is substantially lacking so I’m also lacking confidence.
Btw, I had a nice visit with Sheri at the Wildlife center just a few days ago (the morning this Song Sparrow photo was taken.)
This is definitely a coquettish head toss to see if you are watching. 🙂
Arwen, I actually considered using that word again while I was composing this post.
Fairly recently you made a comment about an over-the-shoulder look could appear flirtatious, although I don’t think that’s the work you used. This one is definitely alluring. Love the detail in the plant (frag?). Because your birds are often so much larger, we don’t get to see the details of the perch.
The only thing that I don’t like about your new format was that the From line said, “WordPress.com” I almost didn’t open it. I was thinking, “Gosh, I hope nothing bad happened to Ron,” when I didn’t see the usual From line.
Nancy, I think the word I used previously was “coquettish”. And yes, the perch is a phrag head.
I noticed that change in the post email when I received mine this morning. Hopefully folks will soon figure out what it is when it comes in.
Looks pretty clean from here.
Thanks, Neil.
Artistically and aesthetically, this image is close to perfect and very pleasing. Gives that nice warm, sunny feeling of early morning sunrise. The Song Sparrow os more fitting than, say a Northern Cardinal or bluebird.
As far as the new tech goes, we all must move along and your previous blog has served you/’us for a long time. It has a plainer look to it but I hope there is some way that we can still go back to your old posts. I have enjoyed rereading and catching up on those I missed over the years.
I do hope our info is secure. I seldom enter info that gets stored somewhere.
Judy, I’m confident it’s secure. The only place that info is stored is on your own computer.
There should be no problem reading old posts. When I changed themes the new theme was automatically applied to all of them, old and new. At least theoretically… 🙂
I’m quite comfortable with your use of a relaxed definition of “monochrome” — seems to fit the sparrow image well.
To me, the page has an overall clean and uncluttered appearance. The font is one that’s pretty easy to read. Two things might be worth considering, though. A small font size increase might improve the readability for those of use with a few years behind us. And I remember reading, in a Web usability book I think, that studies had found that paragraphs with text line lengths of about 80 characters were easiest to read.
Thanks very much for the suggestions, Ed. I’ll look into them.
No argument from me on whether monochrome or not. Looks good as does the pretty Song Sparrow. Agree with Kathy about missing your former banner across the top. Definitely good that you made the change before the old program crashed. Sure you will be doing lots of tweaking as time goes by. Font looks fine to me.
Thanks, Everett. I miss that rotating banner too. I’ve needed to update the photos in it for a long time so if we can get it functioning properly again that’s one thing I hope to do.
I received my email as usual, and think the new format is just fine. It seems cleaner, and it’s easy to read and navigate. I especially like the combination of the gray background and black text. I think the gray works as well as black as a background for photos, and there’s enough contrast that it’s easy to read.
Best of all, it still has your fine photo(s)! I thought your comment was interesting, too. I enjoy sepia-toned photos, and always have thought of them as monochromatic, even though most people I know use ‘monochrom’ as a synonym for ‘black and white.’
Thanks, Shoreacres. I always appreciate your insight. Some have said there may not be enough contrast between the gray background and the black text. It will be interesting to know what others might think about it.
Well my thoughts of monochromatic are exactly like yours…this beautiful photo fits the bill exactly…and beautiful it is. I find Song Sparrows a very appealing bird; there is much to see when you study them. I noticed the ‘Word Press’ notice in my e-mail; I’m glad I read through it because I would have missed your post as I was looking for your old alert. I do miss your wonderful banner across the top but your content is what I look for each day so ‘all is well’ !
Kathy, that rotating banner is one of the things I’m looking into. It may only be available on my home page rather than on my individual posts like it was before. I’ll see what I can do…
I agree on the monochrome – it fits and the sparrow’s pose on the fluffy plume is delightful. 🙂 Doesn’t seem as easy reading as the “old was” – may be font/font size……. A lot of work to set up I’m sure! 🙂
Judy, can you be more specific about what you don’t like about font/font size? Yesterday I thought the space between text lines was too large so I had it reduced.
Seems a bit small and letters/words a little too close together for these “old eyes”……..
Ok, thanks Judy.
May also be the contrast between the black font and grey background that shoreacres mentioned also now that I “look at it” again……. 😉 Just “work” for me to read………