Figure 1 – Atlantic Brown Pelican, Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel Island, FL, (c) DE Wolf 2024.
The brown pelican of yesterdays post was intentionally ethereal and ghostlike. So I thought today that I would post a more typical image of the Atlantic Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis). This bird is a giant despite being the smallest species of pelican. Mature individuals measure one to one and a half meters in length and have wingspans of two to two and a third meters. And in follow-up to yesterday’s poem, it is a misconception that pelicans store food in their gular pouches or sacs. They do not.
Figure 1 – Atlantic Brown Pelican, the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel Island, FL, (c) DE Wolf 2024.
The pelicans, both West and East coast, are always fun to photograph, and I love it when they engage me with their eyes. I photographed this Atlantic brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), complete with little Mohawk, at the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida. He was swimming in the shadows when he spotted me and started swimming towards me. I liked the eerie bluish shadows that the shade trees caused – very ghost-like and other worldly. Like the white, ibis whom I recently posted about, he clearly has his eye on me, in this case I think curious. But perhaps I feed my ego and he is merely indifferent.
A wonderful bird is a pelican, His bill will hold more than his belican. He can take in his beak Food enough for a week; But I’m damned if I see how the helican.
Figure 1 – Limpkin, Fort Myers, Florida, The Six Mile Cypress Slough. (c) DE Wolf 2024.
Another impressive bird of Southern Florida is the limpkin (Aramus guarauna). I encountered this one in Fort Myers at the Six Mile Cypress Slough. Now that I am returned to birding in the Northeast, I am even more impressed with the diversity and the density of Florida wildlife and this despite the very obvious decline of both. It is a very gnawing sadness.
“Try as she will, the trackless world delivers No way, the wilderness of light no sign, The immense and complex map of hills and rivers Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design.”
Figure 1 – Roseate spoonbill coming in for a landing, Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel Island, Fl (c) DE Wolf 2024
In the wildlife refuges of Southwest Florida everyone is looking for the colorful Roseate Spoonbills (Platalea ajaja). It’s almost an obsession. They always seem to be either hidden behind trees or somehere off in the distance, as if they are challenging you to get a good photograph. I find them, as I think Figure 1 taken at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge indicates, kind of clumsy fliers – seen here crashing into the trees because of its huge wingspan.
Figure1 – Horsehead Nebula Barnard 33 taken with the Seestar 50 s and processed in Adobe Photoshop (c) DE Wolf 2024.
The other place that I was interested in experimenting with or exploring AI sharpening is astrophotography. The Seestar 50s is a wonderful little smart telescope but without very long exposures it tends to produce very noisy low resolution images. I thought it would be a perfect place to try AI denoising and upscaling. Figure 1 is an image that I took of the Horsehead Nebula, Barnard 33, which I took with the Seestar and processed with Adobe Photoshop. Figure 2 is the same image subjected to Topaz AI processing. It is in fact the case that internally the Seestar is already doing lots of image processing the nature of which is not revealed to the user. It is also the case that so far I am processing the stored JPEG images rather than the raw images. Still so much more to be understood.
But the point is obvious. Topaz AI denoisng and upscainge do an excellent job of smoothing out what is referred to as shot or statistical noise in the image. I could have just smoothed or blurred it out in Photoshop but this would have removed detail from the image.
Figure 2– Horsehead Nebula Barnard 33 taken with Seestar 50 s sharpened. denoised, and upscaled with Topaz PhotoAI and Adobe Photoshop. (c) DE Wolf 2024.
Figure 1 – Anhinga, the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel Island, Florida (c) DE Wolf 2024.
When I first got interested in birds some fifty or more years ago, like everyone else i had my Perdersen field guide and was always fascinated by the couple of plates labeled “Florida Specialities.” Perhaps chief speciality among these was the anhinga (Anhinga anhinga). Admittedly this “snake bird,” much like a cormorrant, has been reported as far north as Wisconsin, Pennsylvannia, and New York. It is a star in the everglades where it can often be found lazily spreading and drying its wings in the sunshine. Here is my favorite capture of the trip photographed on a rainy day in the Everglades at the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge.
Unless you’re very lucky or very good as a bird photographer you find yourself needing to do some image sharpening – no shame in that! Several years ago I tried Topaz Sharpen AI and decided that that I could really do as well with Adobe Photoshop Smart Sharpen. I have been following the development of the Topaz products for the last few years and recently decided that it was worth a revisit.
So I downloaded Topaz PhotoAI and began the adventure. This is a complex story, but I thought I would begin with seeing what the software would do for me straight out of the box. So I opened up the original version of the bald eagle image that I posted a few days ago and sharpened it on Topaz. This was a picture that I wasn’t quite happy with from my recent Florida trip. For reference the Adobe Photoshop process image is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 – American bald eagle, Sanibel Island, Fl, processed with Adobe Photoshop smart sharpen, (c) DE Wolf 2024
There are three issues with standard sharpening algorithms. First, if you’re not careful, you can get a kind of comic book effect; second you tend to sharpen the noise as well as the subject, the image becomes annoyingly grain; if the main subject of an image is a small part of the image, say a person’s face or a bird’s head, the resolution is poor and only becomes worse on sharpening.
Now imagine that the photograph was a painting, a talented painter could get rid of the noise and increase the resolution of the image. Increase the resolution? The intelligent painter is applying his/her knowledge of faces and bird heads.
The key word is, of course, intelligent. An AI program takes the part of the painter, recognizing noise features from true feature, adds pixels and intelligently fills them. That last process is referred to as upscaling. An upscaled image has many many more pixels than the original image.
So using Topaz PhotoAI and with very little knowledge of it, I created the improved image of Figure 2. Actually, I first sharpened with Topaz PhotoAI and then processed, but didn’t further sharpen it, with Adobe Photoshop. The noble eagle is now, well more noble. There is less noise and there are four times as many pixels. Although this is somewhat lost by image compression for loading on the website. To see the sharpening and noise reduction zoom in on the eagle’s head. I am a bit concerned about the eye possibly being over worked, but I need time to learn.
Figure 2 – Bald Eagle processed with Topaz PhotAI and Adobe Photoshop, (c) DDE Wolf 2024.
About ten years ago I posted about the Hand of God Nebula and the general concept of Pareidolia, things that look like something else. I think that people have different abilities to see these things, and maybe it is a form of mental illness. This morning, I was going through this past winter’s photographs and came upon the image of Figure 1, snow in the branches of a giant pine outside my bedroom window.
To my eyes, it is filled with the heads of giant snow elephants, complete with ears, eyes, and slightly shortened trunks. We may even argue, based on the ear size, whether they are African or Indian elephants. Do you see them?
Figure 1 – Yellow-crowned night heron, Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel Island, FL, (c) DE Wolf 2024
The other “night heron” in Southwest Florida is the Yellow-crowned (Nyctanassa violacea). The subject of Figure 1 was photographed at the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island.
