Two Snails and a Slug

Walter Piorkowski · Post by **Walter Piorkowski** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 8:46 pm

Canon Pro90 IS camera
Close up lens-500D

On a recent vacation to northern California I shot these fine specimens. The upper critter on a rock close to the sea shore along a river bank. The middle on a decaying redwood log. With unfortunatly, a hard fill in flash. The bottom image is of course the famous banana slug of the region. This one grabing a lung full of fresh air as its picture was being taken. It measered about 6 inches long.

Walt

Mike B in OKlahoma · Post by **Mike B in OKlahoma** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 9:06 pm

Interesting, I'd heard references to the banana slug (my favorite of the three pics) but knew nothing much about them. I looked them up on Wikipedia....It seems the Gov of California vetoed a bill to make the banana slug the official California state mollusk! In fairness, I think the abalone or something more cuddly than a slug would be better PR for the state! Though one university has the banana slug as its mascot (and I don't want to see what kind of outfit some unfortunate freshman has to wear on the football field....

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 3:37 am

The only banana slug I have ever heard of is that of one being hit by one, a banana that is. Quite an interesting looking creature I must say. Never seen on before until now but then again California has some bizzare looking creatures as it is. Someone once commented that the US at one time was on its side and all the wierd stuff slid over to the west coast and stayed there after everything else had settled back down.

Great set of images there Walt

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 8:19 am

Interesting pictures, Walt -- as a lifetime resident of the Pacific Coast, I always appreciate tributes to our endemic flora and fauna.

You didn't happen to see any jumping slugs, did you? Probably not -- California is a bit too far south for those beasts. Not quite weird enough, either.

BTW, the colors in these images seem way off compared to your usual. Image #1 looks OK, but #2 seems oversaturated (like the greens are nothing but green), and in #3 the forest litter looks blue. Different camera, different settings?

--Rik

MacroLuv · Post by **MacroLuv** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 9:14 am

Too much strong blue component in all three images on my monitor.

Did you apply "autolevels" instead of "levels"?

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 12:09 pm

MacroLuv wrote:Too much strong blue component in all three images on my monitor.

Good eyes, Nikola. Yes, Photoshop histogram shows a strong blue spike in all three images. For #1, it's centered around value 188, where for images #2 and #3 the spike clamps at 255.

I'll be interested to hear what this turns out to be. (Says the man who once left his camera set on incandescent, shot some yellow flowers outdoors, and completely failed to notice the problem

).

--Rik

MacroLuv · Post by **MacroLuv** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 2:24 pm

Actually it could be an inappropriate white balance settings? I can't read EXIF data white balance settings from JPEGs.

Walter Piorkowski · Post by **Walter Piorkowski** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 7:10 pm

Thanks everyone. I hesitated even putting some of these in for the problems they had but felt that the content was interesting. Now to wipe the egg off my face, here is some explanation Rik and Nickola. The two lower images were done using the cameras built in flash as the amount of daylight in the forest was not enough to stop motion. This old camera does not always seem to properly TTL the flash shutdown point overexposing sometimes several images before it gets it right. The exposures usually have an excellent white balence or temperature setting on the default values. The beautiful colors of the sea anemoni I shot were at the same values so, go figure, as they say. Other stationary subjects shot minutes afterwards without the flash were perfect. You smart fellows may be able to glean more from the data stored with the original images but this is my story.

Walt

Walter Piorkowski · Post by **Walter Piorkowski** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 7:12 pm

I forgot to add gentlemen that my Photoshop skills are at best rudimentaryand I did my untrained best to clean them up. Walt

Adrian · Post by **Adrian** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 8:04 pm

wow that slug is an interesting specimen.
it reminds me of the squid from "10k leagues under the sea"

my monitor is calibrated, and the color looks fine to me.

from my experiance it looks like to much contrast, the tones have been clipped to much at both ends, this would allso explain the increase in saturation.

im sure if you open them in photoshop and check the histogram, you will see that there is excessive clipping on the left side of the histogram (dark tones).

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Jul 09, 2007 9:31 pm

Walter Piorkowski wrote:Thanks everyone. I hesitated even putting some of these in for the problems they had but felt that the content was interesting. Now to wipe the egg off my face, here is some explanation Rik and Nickola. The two lower images were done using the cameras built in flash as the amount of daylight in the forest was not enough to stop motion. This old camera does not always seem to properly TTL the flash shutdown point overexposing sometimes several images before it gets it right. The exposures usually have an excellent white balence or temperature setting on the default values. The beautiful colors of the sea anemoni I shot were at the same values so, go figure, as they say. Other stationary subjects shot minutes afterwards without the flash were perfect. You smart fellows may be able to glean more from the data stored with the original images but this is my story.

Walt

Hhmm... Perhaps this explains why I commented that the colors on the sea anemone were so clean and brilliant! I'm thinking now that those colors on the anemone might have been rather more saturated in the picture than they were at the seashore.

We may never figure out exactly what that camera is doing. The part about "too blue" could be explained by the camera using daylight color balance (or lower), even in cases where most of the light is actually coming from the flash. But #2 seems clearly oversaturated as well. As Adrian notes, that could be explained in part by too much contrast. But it's interesting to note that the "white" glare in #2 is actually not white as in R=G=B=255, but rather R~222, G~233, B=255. Nothing simple comes to mind that would explain that effect.

Unless somebody else has a better idea, I'm planning to settle for "this camera does strange stuff with mixed lighting!"

They're interesting pictures, at any rate.

--Rik

beetleman · Post by **beetleman** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 3:42 pm

WOW, I never heard of a banana slug. Awesome looking creature.

Mike B in OKlahoma · Post by **Mike B in OKlahoma** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 6:19 pm

Walter, are you shooting RAW? It isn't a cure-all, but it gives some hope in fixing this kind of problem.

The Pro90IS is a very excellent camera. It was the first "serious" camera for me, as opposed to film point-and-shoots.

Walter Piorkowski · Post by **Walter Piorkowski** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 6:56 pm

No Mike I usually only shoot JPEGs unless it is something really important. I am aware of the benifits RAW provides. The Pro90 was for me too my first serious digital but boy is there shutter lag.
Walt