I noticed this headline in the news today:

Uganda shelves plan to convert rainforest

Now, let's imagine a non-native English speaker comes across this headline but doesn't know that “shelves” is a verb meaning “to suspend indefinitely” and instead thinks that it's the more commonly seen plural of “shelf.” The headline still makes complete syntactic sense, although the part of speech played by every word changes.

What had been the verb becomes the subject, what had been the subject becomes an adjective, and so on...

I might have some of those labels wrong, but the point is that everything was able to change to keep a syntactically valid sentence.

Semantics (the meaning), of course, are another matter entirely. You don't need to be a native speaker to know that it makes little sense to talk about a shelf in Uganda making plans of any sort, so the student of English is forced to wonder what the heck this might mean. Shelves are normally made of wood.... rainforest wood? Is the story about people in Uganda planning to convert rainforest wood into shelving?

Where would one even start to look for their misunderstanding?

When they got around to considering the second word, well, looking up “shelves” merely tells them what they already knew: it's the plural of shelf.

I'm sure much head scratching would ensue, to be relieved only if they miraculously guessed to look up “shelve”.

What a silly language! I'm so thankful that I speak it natively, and so very much respect Fumie and others that have learned it artificially. Japanese is much easier than English, I think (which is why I have no excuse for speaking as poorly as I do).

Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue is full of interesting English like that shown above, enough to make your head spin if you're a native English speaker, and to want to kill yourself if you're a student.

Newspaper headlines are often a source of this kind of humor/horror. When I was a kid, my brother Alan had a clipping on the fridge for the longest time: Councilmen butt heads at meeting.

On the drive in the mountains yesterday, after the lovely field of purple flowers, we came across this farmer preparing one rice paddy in between two that were already planted.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/60 sec, f/4.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Preparing the Paddy

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/90 sec, f/4.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rice Waiting to be Planted

For actually planting the rice, the tractor takes an attachment that holds tray after tray of rice seedlings, and automatically puts them into rows as he drives along. The clump in the foreground above are some such trays, likely left over when the foreground paddy was planted. I suspect they'll use them in the paddy being prepared in the photo.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/60 sec, f/4.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Just-Planted Rice

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/90 sec, f/4.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/250 sec, f/4, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Wilty-Looking Purple Iris

While on a drive in the mountains of northern Kyoto today, we came across a pretty scene... a small watter-filled field of wilty-looking purple flowers, with a backdrop of the sun setting behind some mountains.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/1000 sec, f/4.5, ISO 500, — map & image data — nearby photos

To me they were “wilty-looking purple flowers,” but Fumie guessed they were one of three kinds of flowers, each of which turns out to be an iris of some sort when I look up the Japanese names she offered.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 48mm — ¹/1000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Enjoying the Flowers and the Frogs

The field was apparently filled with frogs, their loud din similar to that mentioned the other day.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/125 sec, f/4, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/500 sec, f/4, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Hideo Kubo, R.I.P.

The field held a grave marker for a Hideo Kubo, who was (according to the stone) rather high up in the Japanese Navy at some point in his life. The Japanese Navy hasn't existed since WWII (Japan now has a “Maritime Self Defense Force” rather than a Navy).

The stone doesn't say when he passed, but the condition of the stone suggests closer to now than to WWII; just because the stone mentions his WWII (or prior) military service doesn't mean that he died while in the Navy, but merely that he wanted to be remembered that way.

Turning around and looking the other way shows part of a very typical mountain village, with a garden and a sturdy modernish house in the foreground, with more traditional Japanese countryside houses and some rice fields further back.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 30mm — ¹/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Typical Japanese Mountain Homes

After the ugliness of my last post, now I just want to see some interesting pictures, so here are a few random shots that I've been wanting to share....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 44mm — ¹/30 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — full exif
Just So

These were strawberries that Fumie prepared for the kids when Anthony had some friends over. They lasted for about 30 seconds before the plate was clean. A similar shot was featured on one of my Lightroom posts.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 23mm — ¹/200 sec, f/7.1, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Stark

A tree at Anthony's preschool last January. Being in a valley, it seems that Kyoto's sky is always hazy, but on this day it was crisp and deeply blue.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 48mm — ¹/320 sec, f/9, ISO 320, — map & image data — nearby photos
Up Close and Personal

A goat at the petting zoo that visited Anthony's preschool.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 32mm — 30 sec, f/8, ISO 200, P.P. boost: +0.80EV — map & image data — nearby photos
Water Steps

A long 30-second exposure night shot I made the same evening as these, of some of the waterfall steps on the Kamo river about three miles from my place. Across the river above the bank was a brightly lit hotel.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 50mm — ¹/250 sec, f/11, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cute

Taken on the amazing-blossoms trip during cherry-blossom season. I like it for some reason.

It's been just over six months since I released my long writeup on digital image color spaces, and it seems to have been very well received. I appreciate all the wonderful feedback I've gotten about it.

However, I've recently realized that it contained a relatively big mistake. I've corrected it now, but in the original version, I repeated the “conventional wisdom” that most applications on Windows blindly treated color data as being sRGB color data. I called these applications “Color Stubborn.”

However, it seems that was wrong. Today I tested IE6, Firefox, and the popular IrfanView image viewer and found that they were “Color Stupid” in that they performed no color management at all.

This is depressing in every respect. It's depressing that this sad state of affairs exists, and it's even more depressing and embarrassing for me that I didn't test this for myself much earlier (such as, for example, before I published the writeup).

I should have fixed this error sooner. I was alerted to the issue two months ago when Matt Thomas left a comment telling that his experience was that Windows browsers and applications were Color Stupid. It raised my eyebrows at the time because I had taken the conventional wisdom at face value and had never thought to question it. Unfortunately, I was really busy at the time and neglected to follow up on it, and then it slipped my mind.

Someone brought up the issue in a forum at Digital Photography Review today, which prompted me to do some tests on my Windows XP system. I know that Photoshop is properly color managed, so I viewed the colorful petunias of yesterday's post in Photoshop and very carefully compared it to what I saw in IE6, Firefox, and IrfanView, and found the Photoshop rendition to be subtly but perceptibly different.

I then used Photoshop's soft-proofing function to view the sRGB image without monitor color management (that is, just letting the monitor deal with the sRGB data directly instead of converting to the monitor's color space first), and then saw exactly what I saw in the other applications.

I've updated the color-space writeup, but really, this is an unforgivable and horribly embarrassing error on my part. I hope no one ever finds out about it....