another era

I'm starting to think that Lightroom's "auto tone" is set producing pictures that look like a different era.

So I have these photos, right? They're a bit underexposed (too dark, all the contrast's in shadows). Lightroom, upon hitting the auto-tone button--controlling exposure, contrast, highlights/blacks/whites/shadow clipping--generally reacts as though the photos were taken in the pitchest, blackest night ever and yanks exposure way up.

It reminds me so much of old Polaroid pictures, is what I'm saying.

Here, I'm rubbish at explaining pictures via text. Examples under cut (I tried to make them small! I swear! Someday I will be able to fight with sizes, but Lightroom's export dialogue is obstructive and Photoshop is really overdoing it. But hey they are all the same size, so I can tell you numbers: 3,504px × 2,336px.)

( 3 pictures of the same bird )

Incidentally if you ever wanted to know about grain, or ISO, you can use the size to zoom in. These pictures were taken at ISO 400, and you can see clearly that they weren't enough to offset the dim light--I probably should have pulled it higher. When you zoom in, or even at this size, you can see there is random noise. The colours don't blend perfectly together.

what I'm reading (or rather, have just returned)

I was reading Genome by Matt Ridley, just before I had to return it to the library. I like to live dangerously. It was published 1999, so just as the Human Genome Project was entering its wildly successful stage. It tells the tale of 23 chromosomes and "stories" I suppose of selected genes on each.

And yes 1999, and yes also POP SCIENCE BOOK but I was reading the chapters about psycholinguistics and intelligence and also evolutionary psychology and I started making >:( faces. I am not a biologist. I am not even studying to be one, although I was a pretty good bio student when I was studying the subject. (Labs don't agree with me. I'll never be a scientist.) But the more he talked about some subjects the more my "uh wait what" sensors went up. Especially--

Um I got to there and now I'm having tab explosion because hm, going after an article on 'interlocus contest evolution' (it was about X & Y chromosomes competing, and had some pretty stereotypical writings about male-female interactions). More research required, I'm trying to navigate JSTOR--takes me ages to get through stupid eJournal sites, they always kick me to the landing page for the whole series of journals which started in 1904 when I clearly clicked the "full text for article in January 2004 issue 294" *complaint*

Maybe tomorrow, I'm tired and it's making me cranky.

I also had objections to how he wrote about evolution. Popular science, I know, but evolution doesn't want to do anything. Was under the impression that Noam Chomsky's ideas about universal grammar getting pushback?

In conclusion, I'm actually not terribly fussed about having to return that book, although maybe I should re-borrow it to look up the bibliography/references in the back. I am more sad about having to return Questioning Collapse, which is a collection of articles written specifically to refute Jared Diamond's Collapse, which in a nutshell argued that civilizations make choices that lead to their eventual collapse (with the parallel to modern day environmental mess.) Questioning Collapse is written by anthropologists and historians, people I'm about five million times more likely to trust than authors who write popular books about a field of study, and the case studies are well-cited and backed up by information, and also very interesting. I was in the middle of an article about the Qing dynasty and the 18th century and the eventual mess of the 19th; I really like how varied their case studies were.