Pareidolia Archives - Bliss Photographics

Posted on September 10, 2020September 2, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Mirror Mirror Cloud Art

All work and no play makes Frank a dull boy. This is ART. Did I mention it’s art?. Viper Sky

But I really didn’t do that much to the original image which is a legit Sunset taken from my back yard. I typically can instantly visualize a sky that has been mirrored back on itself in the camera. This one, I saw the possibilities for mirror art before the camera is even involved lol. This is the same photo seamlessly folded back on itself like two mirrors at 45 degrees to each other. The left 1/2 was the original image.

In my Pareidolia infected mind, I see a large Snake with big fangs about to reach out and touch. Alternately there is a WONDERFUL Bearded Old Mans face dead center top frame. I never know what is going to magically appear at the “totem pole” that is usually formed at the “crease” where the two images are merged. I take great care to precisely align the center. Clouds and Trees are my favorite visual materials for this kind of photography and post click mirroring. I did very little to the image after the fact. If you have white clouds AND yellow/golden clouds in the same image. There isn’t much color manipulation that has occurred even though this is art and I have no rules.

This was a storm at sunset with rain falling but evaporating before it was hitting the ground. This is otherwise known as Virga. That would be a good google word for the morning … Have a great day all…

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands.

Title: Mirror Mirror Cloud Art

Posted on September 7, 2020August 30, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Path Through the Rocks

I see the light. Light has a tendency to travel in a straight line unless acted upon. Usually this is by passing through a change in media such as air to water. This refracts the light. As I was carefully wandering in the twilight dusk along a high ridge. I was scanning for imaginary faces in the silhouette. (This image having many for you Pareidoliacs out there).

Having huge deep boulders on the skyline usually makes anthropomorphic imaginings easy. This scene froze me in my tracks. The spot of orange light in the black on the low right is actually showing THROUGH the boulder field. Talk about a gauntlet/light filter lol. I’m not used to seeing straight lines through rocks. My geologic background caused OCD kicks in lolol.

I was walking around with the wrong camera upon first happenstance to see this. “Clever Girl” was up the hill about 4 stories. Climbed up and traded cameras, climbed back down. (Got to stay in shape to do this stuff). I figured I was never going to find the exact same place in 3-D space again. I went back to roughly the same spot with this lens, found the “zone” and clicked. It was visible in a little window about 2 feet by 2 feet. Move outside that box and I couldn’t see it.

It’s an obvious metaphor. Simply put: “Seeing the light is looking at JUST the right angle at the right time. “

Title: Path Through the Rocks

Posted on August 2, 2020July 26, 2020 by Frank Bliss

What Could It Be

Pareidoliacs of the world Unite. I swear on a stack of geology books that I didn’t alter that cloud from how it was that day. The lighting was perfect. There area whole sequence of these photos from two different cameras but I only finished this one. When anthropomorphic faces come out of the natural chaos of things taking notice is prudent. This is indeed a telephoto up close and personal with a floating head (or at least that is what I first and still see in this).

A cloud it may be. If you suffer from Pareidolia as our ancestors did, you have a survival advantage. You see faces quicker out of the edge of the woods, or a human form at distance. In the earlier days of psychiatry, we were considered psychotic with this tendency. I consider it an ability that has been passed on to me through the generations. Apparently it kept my ancestors alive better than those that don’t as easily see faces. (or they just managed to dodge all those mid-evil castle sieges). All of us are a product of those that came before us and these tendencies are handed down genetically from our parents.

So blame your parents if you have this affliction. I must admit as a blond haired boy I would lay on a bank of grass watching the clouds make shapes more than once. Oh wait, I still do it lolol.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands.

Title: What Could It Be

Posted on July 19, 2020July 13, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Windmill Blowing Off Steam

There are all sorts of characters up here on the ranch. This over looking the the now dented roofs of our home stead in our “Back Yard”, this 20 year old air pumping windmill was vent. This is what happens when you hold it in too long I suppose. One never knows what these guys are up to. I really don’t have any control over their actions thusly am just an observer. Not being sure why he was mad as he was. Sticking around wasn’t the best of ideas. I do my best to keep every body to get along. Hate to get involved sometimes. (It’s a years long narrative if your new to my world lolol).

Back to my “normal” programming. (more normal anyway).

Just to mention to you fellow pareidolia “sufferers” the large frog on the left ready to stick his tongue into the fray. There must have been a large insect off frame right I didn’t notice in time. Getting everything in frame is hard sometimes. 4 of the 5 lenses I use daily are zoomable. Every possibility is covered that way. I like to think I can take a photo of anything that I can see and somethings I cant. I only use one fixed lens and it is the widest single lens I own at 10mm. This was 200 mm at some distance from the foreground. Both types of lenses have their benefits. Generally the fixed lens has more accurate images. You have to back up to fit your subject in the lens though lolol. Not with a zoom…😜

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Windmill Blowing Off Steam

Posted on July 16, 2020July 9, 2020 by Frank Bliss

What Do you See

I take photos of cloud formations that look as if they might be a good test for your anthropomorphic visualizations. Pareidolia is the tendency to see familiar shapes in random data. This totally unaltered image of a small late afternoon thunderhead that wants to grow but turned into perhaps a polar bear with big eyelashes and Grouper Fish lips. Everybody that has this “ability” see’s something different though many of us see the same thing as well. There is some commonality in our “condition. Some will see a cloud, others will let their imagination flow and come up with other alternatives. IT was a beautiful Wyotana Twilight. My favorite time of the day.

Of course it is this ability that we are trying to teach to our computers for facilitating facial recognition. Once AI becomes heavily involved, it will be a big deal. Stay tuned for that. The machines ability to do facial recognition now is amazingly sophisticated. Our brains are more creative but not as fast nor as systematic as the AI will be.

Evolutionary Biologists will tell us that the ability to see faces out of limited information (dark forests) kept our ancestors alive longer than those that didn’t have that ability. The psychiatric establishment at one time considered those with this tendency to be psychotic and often would put the “patient” away for a “treatment” in some wonderful home for the insane. Let’s not forget that piece of history as those that forget such often live to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: What Do you See

Posted on July 11, 2020July 3, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Can I Buy a Vowel

Feeling like I was playing “Wheel of Fortune” with Pat Sajack M.C. ing and Vanna White doing the presentations. I took it from a dozen different zoom perspectives and it’s absolutely genuine / unphotoshopped. I swear no tampering with my hand on a stack of geology books.

There is actually have a small but growing collection of natural letter images from the clouds and other objects. It will take a while before I put it all together into an alphabet. There are some hard ones left to get lol. Wasn’t Chuck Woolery an M.C. too ????.. Is it even still on? I watch occasional TV as I mostly watch clouds instead.

For you folks that see familiar shapes in random cloud patterns, there is a nice Goofy™ Dog in there hiding behind the F___ . Pareidolia sufferers, you know who you are. I am terribly endowed with the ability to see shapes of familiar objects in random shaped images. I’m a walking Rorschach visualizing machine. I actually can mirror images in my mind to see the imaginarium with the random data scatter. (I see things in clouds ALL the time). 😜

Mother nature might have just tried to spell my name too and I just need to come back at another time to get the R, A, N, K. I do believe that it would be a matter of time before such letters will be formed by natural processes. The question is will I be there with a camera (rule #1 of Photography) when it happens.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Can I Buy a Vowel

Posted on June 14, 2020June 8, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Old Man North Wind

I laughed out loud and then took dozens of images in all sorts of frame compositions. I liked this particular capture the best. There are several very good cloud creatures in this image. The hoot is the face on the upper gray cloud. The north wind as it were … Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale” The Selfish Giant (1888) exemplifies the North Wind as a man who “was wrapped in furs. He roared all day. I’ve always pictured him in my minds eye as a grey old guy… here he is caught on camera.

I thought as this was taken, it was an exercise in futility for the old guy. It was early June and 80+ degree days are already past us. My sense of normalcy was safe or so I thought. Of course it’s snowing in the mountains as I type this now. Looks like the old fellow got his way after all. I have seen snow in every calendar month of the year in the 30 years I’ve lived in Wyoming. I now have garden crops in and am hoping we will avoid the worst of the old North Winds effects.

Meanwhile on the rest of the image here overlooking both Montana and Wyoming. I’m also imagining a swan diving it’s head under the surface of a frothy ponds below the old guy. Pareidolia takes no captives and gives no quarter. If you have it, and don’t take definitive action to turn away, your likely to see all sorts of anthropomorphic shapes in clouds. If you do have this tendency, welcome to the club of us “suffering” from this malady.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands.

Title: Old Man North Wind

Posted on June 5, 2020May 27, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Eagle in the Clouds

A series of storms moved through the area a mid- may afternoon late.. I had been photographing them for several hours with the photosession running well into twilight. Shot the heck out of this… Here the sun has set but the clouds are being lit up by the long traveled red wavelengths. Up high the clouds are white which is the unfettered light that is just skipping off the atmosphere. The crimson had to fight it’s way to reflect off those clouds. IT’s a classic red to white cloud sunset gradient projected on the clouds by our star. The colors generated from path differences of the light. The shorter wavelengths just don’t make it that far so you have red (longer light waves).

At any rate, is that an Eagle? Condor? Turkey Vulture? Any body for a Unicorn?? I suffer horribly from Pareidolia (seeing faces or shapes of familiar objects in clouds). Carl Sagan theorized that hyper-facial perception stems from an evolutionary need to recognize — very quickly — faces. There is an evolutionary advantage to those that can see them quickly and act accordingly. I act by grabbing a camera in manual mode, set the ISO to 325, aperture to F11 and speed 1/100th rested 12 mm lens.

That is a VERY wide angle lens grabbing a big chunk of sky for this wonderfully complex sky production. Captured of the trailing back edge of a much larger Mesocyclone where I was driving around the sun lit side of those storms. The show that evening continued well into twilight with me driving two track roads up in the backcountry to capture it.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands (Wyotana

Title: Eagle in the Clouds

Posted on June 1, 2020May 24, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Cloud Mirror by Frank Bliss

I spend a portion of the time spent examining scenes before me for candidates requiring a “Mirror/Mirror” treatment. As I suffer from Pareidolia badly. Seeing faces or familiar shapes in clouds or other random scenes is a genetic defect. I received this from both my parents. I have it so badly that I see 1/2 of a face. This controls compositions with the intent to use the 1/2 face to make a “whole’ face from. I have no control over this attribute of mine. This mental game was considered a psychosis historically. Not so much now… Honestly the tendency runs wild most of the time. I must admit. I’ve been known to cultivate such imaginings a time or two. 😜👀

SO, this is ART…. I re-emphasize the ART part…. If it wan’t ART I would have removed the dark blue (it’s a blue Monday post after all). I find that clouds are mostly grey expect near twilight lol. So I take a real photograph, and mirror it right to left (in this case). Color to taste and that’s all I did to this… 2 minutes maybe extra digital darkroom time over my normal 15 minutes. Nature comes up with the creatures that live in the “totem pole” that runs up the center where the mirrors merge. There are SEVERAL more faces buried in that area if you study it. Now if I could just figure out how to make a living with this

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming / Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Cloud Mirror by Frank Bliss

Posted on May 29, 2020May 21, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Rattle Snake Ridge Twilight

With the addition of a single brush stroke thusly a forked tongue. The silhouette comes to life as the original namers of this landform imagines. I See that rattle snake certainly. Now the story is that a rattle snake den was blown up there in the 1970’s by the owner of our ranch that apparently enjoyed the use of dynamite. In the 1970’s if you owned land in Wyoming/Montana you could easily obtain dynamite for moving stumps, breaking rocks or any other legal purpose. I’m pretty sure it’s fairly difficult to obtain. Just the storage requirements would cost 6 grand (educated estimate).

The problem with Pareidolia (seeing shapes from random data) is that it is often multif-acted and complex. The snake head silhouette could also be a sedan doing a “burn out” spinning it’s tires smoke trailing behind. So many perceived shapes in random silhouettes. The shark above the snake’s head in the clouds actually has teeth under it’s snout. I can also imagine several variations of the upper dark clouds too but I’ll leave the rest for you to sort out in your own anthromorphizing moments.

The twilight that night from a veiled cloud was just adding layers of makeup to an already golden/orange alpenglow evening. We get alpenglow every month of the year as frozen ice in the atmosphere is fairly common in this region. There are BIG sunsets/Sunrises in Wyotana sharing both Montana AND Wyoming skies.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Rattle Snake Ridge Twilight

Posted on May 24, 2020May 16, 2020 by Frank Bliss

French Poodle or Gorilla ?

If you look at the left side of this and let your imagination go… a french poodle begging… On the right side, a Gorilla looking fierce. Or if you want to really let your imagination go. I see 11 other faces in that rising cumulous cloud. (soon to be a thunderstorm as there was a LOT of lift in the air that day. Many of these thermals grew into big storms that hit to our east. .

Seeing faces in clouds or other natural scenes is termed: Pareidolia. Historically this tendency diagnosed one with psychotic symptoms/ “abnormal”. Now we are teaching computers to do it for facial recognition purposes. Making familiar patterns out of random data is a common “affliction”. It’s not just clouds of course. Hearing hidden messages in music is a similar effect. Any pattern the human mind creates out of literally random data is symptomatic.

Of course the state of medical/psychological science has improved a tad from those early days. I consider them sprits in the sky. This was caught glancing back behind me to the south won a warm evening is a good habit. Many photographers get tunnel vision working sunsets and forget to glance around. The back shows are often better than the main sunset if your chasing light like I do. I suffer horribly from this mental disease seeing faces and animals in almost every scene I look at. Some days it’s worse than others though lolol. 😜👀📸

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: French Poodle or Gorilla ?

Posted on May 18, 2020May 18, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Diamond Back Rattle in the Sky

There are so many things this “look” like. I’ll just keep my Pareidolia mostly in check and limit my visualization of a rattle snake rattle rising from the plains and or a face looking left with quite a hair doo… Back to my “normal” programming…

Talk about uplifting… IT was a day full of isolated thunderstorms with this being the start of one. Just about every direction had a small storm dumping about. This Isolated thermal column seemed unusual to me and I’ve been watching clouds for a while. I usually take images of things that make my jaw drop. I had to yank a really wide lens into service to capture the whole thing. This image is over 110 degrees tall so the top is almost straight overhead to the zenith in the sky.

Working LONG focal length lens most of the time, I have to literally “step back” and look around me. If I don’t I miss many things that are often more interesting than what I’m trying to photograph. I had run up the east hill to see if there were any rainbows behind me (in this view). When rain shower move over the area and there is SOME sun, I’m watching for rainbows.

Chasing rainbows leads to photographing clouds sometimes but I’m not a stickler for being particular. If nature is showing off for me, I’m more than happy to capture her attributes. We need more of that rain

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands. (Wyotana)

Title: Diamond Back Rattle in the Sky

Posted on May 15, 2020May 7, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Siamese Fighting Fish in the Clouds

Siamese Fighting Fish in the Clouds for you Pareidolia “sufferers”. You know who you are lol?. The colorful flowing finned fish living in little pint sized fish bowls as most of us have had one time or the other. Most of you don’t know my wife and I owned the only pet shop in a good sized college town for 6 years… I’ve had fish since I was 12 years old non stop. I still run an aquaponic greenhouse with several hundred pounds of live Tilapia with 128 square feet of vegetables growing off of it lol. In other words, I have fish branded into my brain lol. I also detect several uses in mirroring this image around the 1/2 face in the lower clouds.

Sunsets in the backcountry fall into so many varieties I have to develop a way to catalogue them. The high white clouds are in unfiltered sunlight passing through very little atmosphere. The lower clouds are bathed in light that has traveled many miles through surface air. That filled with particulates and moisture. Only the longest red wavelengths at the base make it through the longest path through the thickest air. This is a pure red, yellow green, blue, darker blue twilight gradient. The sun is still up in this capture. The sun is highly obscured . It might as well be twilight lol.

Location: Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Siamese Fighting Fish in the Clouds

Posted on March 14, 2020March 6, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Protective of the Sun by Frank Bliss

Protective of the Sun by Frank Bliss (This is an ART/PHOTO Hybrid)

Do you see things in Clouds? 👀📸 What do you imagine here?

Now that I mentioned this is art, I would point out that only 1/4 of it actually is art, the rest of it is a 100 percent real image. All work and no play make photorealistic Frank a Dull Boy. I like to follow up on the potential for this kind of work on a particular image if I get the time/chance. I usually have to make the time in the middle of an otherwise photorealism filled day. In the world of the digital darkroom, I get to play a bit. This is a slightly modified Wyotana borderland sunset from last week. One week is my turn around time now from taking an image to possibly posting it.

To create this, I took the original image which just didn’t have the left side eye. The nose is a real lens flare which I carefully lined up in the camera to the 12 o’clock position. The flare was in the original capture. So I mirrored the right eye and the clouds onto his left cheep from the original side. Then up high I mirrored the outline of the head right to left. So the left eye/cheek, part of the clouds up high. Nothing else was messed with other than color a bit. But this is art and all rules go out the window. As I was taking this, the possibilities were obvious to me in the composition stage of this capture. Long before the click.

Location: Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Protective of the Sun by Frank Bliss

Title:Protective of the Sun

Posted on February 4, 2020January 30, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Who is Watching Who

Seeing faces in clouds or other natural scenes is termed: Pareidolia. Historically this tendency diagnosed one with psychotic symptoms/ “abnormal”. Now we are teaching computers to do it. It’s not just clouds of course. Any pattern the human mind creates out of literally random data is symptomatic. Of course the state of medical/psychological science has improved a tad from those early days.

I’m thinking this is a cloud version of Mount Rushmore. Looking behind me to the eastern back show a bit after sunset on summers evening is a good habit. Many photographers get tunnel vision and forget to glance around. The back shows are often better than the main sunset if your chasing light like I do. Usually associated with a disruption in airflow, called Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, aka billow clouds or shear-gravity clouds, and they look like breaking ocean waves. Taking many forms, these clouds can be impressive.

Typically by topography such as mountains causes the “ripples. . The interface between two layers of atmosphere with different temperature / density properties causes the phenomena. A series of waves with crests and troughs are created at the two air masses boundaries. The shapes are random but usually fairly consistent in one way or another.

I swear on a stack of geology books that I didn’t alter this image in the digital darkroom. It’s a totally natural scene. If you look enough at clouds, you see some very odd things :). The hard part is being there with a camera (Rule 1 of Photography).

Location: Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Who is Watching Who

Posted on December 19, 2019December 13, 2019 by Frank Bliss

Perspective BackCountry Pi

If you have ever taken a math class or √100 classes, you might recognize π if you see it. I’m always on the look out for natural letters for my “alphabet” collection. I never expected to find Pi in the backcountry.

SOoooo, I really liked the view this old fallen soldier this mathamatical snag. A high vantage overlooking this remote borderlands backcountry scene . Fallen wood lasts a long time here in the semi-arid 14 inch per year precipitation environmnet. We have MANY snags left over from the big fire in the 1930’s that “burned till the snows came”. 90 year old snags usually don’t have their branches in piles so I’m guessing 50 years or less. Being on a steep slope has protected the branches from as many cattle from rubbing against them to scratch. The sun had barely risen with direct sun light JUST starting to touch parts of the high ridge I’m on. Click. Close/Far perspectives in the backcountry… be still my heart, a few visual tunnels here. 📷

I walk backcountry ridges routinely for significant distances. Exactly how far depends entirely on how much gear I’m carrying. Some of my camera lens combinations that I would walk around with weigh up to 8 pounds. If I’m walking a long distance I carry a pack of gear and a chest rig of cameras weighting 20 or more pounds depending on what I’m doing. THe trick of course is not to fall down a hill or into a cactus patch while looking through a long lens and moving. More than one photographer backed up “Just a little more” a bit too far lolol.😜

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana

Title: Perspective BackCountry Pi

Posted on December 14, 2019August 8, 2020 by Frank Bliss

Trees Beard at Sunrise

Pareidolia:

This phenomena is the ability to imagine faces in common objects. The scientists say it developed in our species due to infants need to smile when they see a face. The smile engenders loving care in return. The babies (a million or so years ago) that smiles more, were cared for better on average. They grew to adult hood and reproduced. Rinse and repeat cycle over and over and over. We are teaching computers to do facial recognition using essentially the same process. The ability to see shapes out of random data is a survival skill.🤔 This “ability”/curse used to be considered a sign of psychosis “back in the day” before it was recognized as being absolutely normal lolol.

Taa Daaa. (or un taa daaa? which is a classic reference), This captures was during a wonderful morning of bronze mottled/rippled cloud deck with the sun just cracking the horizon. IT was dead calm on this ridge top which is not that common for me.

Trees Beard here is of course a distant cousin of the Ent’s of Tolkein’s masterpiece. (If your not a geek and don’t know). They were walking/talking tree creatures of great age that watched over the forest like shepherds. That’s all within the frame work of the Two Towers book out of the trilogy.

At any rate:

I also see a wolf’s head outline in the negative space the trees provide. Some may see a horse. Something else?

Location: Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands.

Title: Trees Beard at Sunrise

Posted on October 31, 2019November 16, 2019 by Bliss

Halloween Sky: Who Do you See?

“Halloween Sky: Who Do You See” …… was done off a pretty impressive sky to start with (still have the original still in the raw timeline somewhere. But I instantly saw the possibilities in the image. Lore from our Pagan (pre-christian) past works it’s way into the present with this holiday mixing with christian practice in the middle ages through out Europe. Much of Halloween Lore is handed down over countless generations from parents to their children along with the handed down/cut out witches on brooms and cardboard pumpkins from many childhoods ago 😀🎃🎃

So in the pursuit of this image result…. all attempts at being photorealistic went out the window and this turned very quickly into an ART/Photo Hybrid project lolol… . Did I mention this is ART for Halloween?? (Pssst, Don’t tell the kids”. ) I will always tell you when I totally mess with an image lol.

Personally I imagine the Cartoon Character “Tigger™” in this capture (its about 95 percent real and 5 percent art, just a tweek here and there really ….a little mirroring selectively. Certainly not the whole image). I would bet some dragons and devils come out of this “Rorschach Test”.

Geeky Musings:
So what is the tendency to see faces in clouds (random data) called? Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, which is a more generalized term for seeing patterns in random data. I am horribly Apophenic and anthropomorphize virtually every scene I see more or less automatically.

This tendency to “see things in clouds” was once considered a symptom of psychosis…. (Let that sink in for a second and go figure lololol) but now is considered absolutely normal. (probably not by some 😜). Humans have even taught computers how to see faces from random data. (Facial recognition and all that). There are also those poor folks that have no ability or interest in such folly but I consider it a sign of artistic talent perhaps hidden away in the rooms of your mind just looking for the door. :).

At any rate: HAPPY HALLOWEEN !
Share freely to a few special ones that just don’t look but actually see. 🙂

Location, overhead plus in my workstation, Bliss DInosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands