Ice Plant, Tree Houseleeks, and Orange Poppies: ttftw 2023w17

Three things from this week.

California is having a superbloom. As far as I know that means there are a lot of pretty flowers in bloom all at once. It’s as if all the plants that were holding something back during the drought got together and decided today’s the day to make it all pop. It makes the world look brighter and more colourful everywhere that anything is growing. That goes for the hedges filling in around the highways and medians, the mundane little buds that pop up between the sidewalk and the street, and even every little potted plant seems to just be going all in this week. I saw a something bright and orange bursting out beside a curb this morning and that plant was so cheerful it that it put a smile on my face too.

So for my post this week I picked three plants. I didn’t pick them, I photographed them. I didn’t photograph them, I video recordered them. Then I tried to make NeRFs from them to show just how nice they look. The videos came from my cellphone (a Pixel 7), not from gammacam. Cell phones take great photos and videos that are nice to look at. So when I want something quickly that’s nice to look at then a modern cellphone camera is an easy way to capture the moment while staying in the moment. I love that the quality works well to make a NeRF. Pretty pictures aren’t the same as accurate pictures, but I’ll come back to that later.

Ice plant

The first time I saw Iceplant it was on a trip to Catalina Island 15 or 20 years ago. It struck me as some exotic pudgy version of creeping charlie. Apparently it’s an invasive species that California Department of Fish and Wildlife would rather people would stop planting. The pretty flowers bloom in bright yellow and purple. Apparently it’s also called the hottentot-fig and there’s a photo of the fruit on this page about it at Berkley, and also in this much more informative blog post.

Here’s a close-up of some of one of the yellow blooms I saw in Santa Cruz yesterday.

Aeonium

The aeonium plants I’ve seen usually have waxy green leaves but sometimes they develop a rich purple-red hue and I have always suspected it indicates that they are happy inside. They look like they’re related to hens & chicks. Apparently hens & chicks are houseleeks and aeonium are tree houseleeks. I don’t really know plants so if that doesn’t make sense then you’ll have to take it up with Wikipedia. The cool thing that I discovered while browsing pictures of aeonium is that they can also produce a brilliant yellow inflorescence. Basically they can develop a long poker of bright yellow blooms. It looks like a completely different plant when this happens.

My source video was about 35 seconds long and I pulled 10 frames per second out of it to make this pointcloud.

This tree houseleek is in a pot and it has happy purple leaves but you can see there’s no sign of flowering yet.

California poppy

If you drive on any highway in California you might see these orange poppies beside the road. They’re just as beautiful as they are common. We have some orange poppies coming up in the yard and my wife put a couple in a vase in the kitchen. By the end of the day the petals had fallen off but I had captured a quick video in the morning.

The camera in your pocket

Since I shot these with my cellphone camera I feel like it’s a good chance to explain why I didn’t reach for gammacam this time and what the difference is. The flowers are pretty and the pictures are pretty. The camera in my pocket is a great way to hold on to a memory of what I’ve seen in the world. Coming back to the ideas above: pretty and accurate aren’t really the same.

There are a lot of stages between the point where the photon touches the lens and the moment when the photo puts a smile on your face. There always have been. In the past, individual artists developed film with an array of chemicals applied in different ways for different amounts of time to coax some emotion out of the emulsion in the darkroom. Now we have some pretty advanced transistors multiplying lots of numbers really fast to reflect the reality as we want to remember it. And in between then and now there have been a thousand variations of subjective input applied to generations of photography equipment.

I built gammacam in a way that encourages control over the components used to build your camera and therefore allow you to be deliberate about the types of processing that are applied both during and after images are captured. Being deliberate requires a little deliberation, that is to say it takes some time to think about what parameters are important to your research. In the simplest case, you may need to know the specific gain and exposure parameters. You might also need to know that the pixels captured bear a simple linear relationship to the colours sampled on the sensor. The camera application on a cell phone is free to fill in details that look good but aren’t real and in the most extreme case it could just flat out replace a white dot with a picture of the moon.

If you’d like to understand better how cameras work and which camera to use for what task, the best and most thorough introduction I can recommend is Marc Levoy’s Lectures on Digital Photography (slides are available too).

The superbloom has been a surprise and a treat that put a lot of flowers front and center for me. Whatever is in bloom around you this week, take a closer look and maybe you can find something growing that you didn’t notice before.

• ttftw