close your eyes and hope for the best

Granny Smith Pumpkins
(click image to enlarge)

…I had stumbled upon something potentially a hundred times more territorially sensitive than a Hell’s Angel’s marijuana farm.

“Sorry Mate, but this is fer y’own good.”

One of the rough-looking characters who had confronted me pried open the canister of Velvia with his 12-inch croc knife, exposing my film to the bright austral sun. He looked like a heftier version of Clint Eastwood (if it’s possible to imagine a somewhat overweight Eastwood). The other, who could have been a blond Keith Richards explained, “If the boss ever thought someone had a picture from here…” He didn’t finish his words, but made a cutting gesture across his slightly too-thin neck.

Their pickup had come out of nowhere and cut me off in a cloud of outback road dust as it deliberately spun sideways to block the route and force me to stop. How had they spotted me? I had only been outside my rented jeep for a couple of minutes, just long enough for three or four quick, furtive compositions.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been warned. The dirt road had been clearly posted “No Public Access / Unauthorized Passage Strictly Forbidden”. I had proceeded onto it anyway. I imagined Aussies as among the least uptight people anywhere, seriously disinclined to go nutters over a tourist who had taken a wrong turn.

About thirty miles in, I had passed another sign which said “No Stopping / No Photography”. This was decidedly bizarre, I thought. Why would anyone want to? The novelty of the occasional hopping kangaroo had long worn off, and there had been little to look at except flat fields and nondescript bushes, the distant horizon promising only more sameness, the defining characteristic of scenically challenged landscape everywhere. I must be entering some kind of military zone, I speculated. A short distance further I came to an unavoidable and unequivocal sign with big, red letters: “ABSOLUTELY NO PHOTOGRAPHY”. Just beyond was this field covered with bright green balls that turned out to be…pumpkins!? Or an Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The pumpkin patch belonged to a wealthy agricultural industrialist who had built his fortune and reputation on his work with GM crops….
The “boss”, it seems, could potentially parlay that pumpkin patch into assets rivaling those of Bill Gates.

My encounter with the guards of these evidently paparazzi-paranoid gourds ended with no further trouble. They drove off in the same direction they had come from with what even seemed like a courteous “G’Day”. And I still had my photos! They had demanded I open my film camera (brought along for backup and comparison testing) which was in a large case with my extra lenses in plain view on the back seat. But I had shot digital, and the smaller case with just my Canon 5D and its usual 24-105 zoom was on the floor in front for quicker access. It had escaped their attention.

Returning to the closest settlement, still slightly unnerved, I stopped in the local bar for a badly needed pint of Fosters. I asked the bartender if he knew anything about “those Granny Smith pumpkins”. A couple of guys eyed me suspiciously, while he made a silent head gesture towards a man sitting by himself at the window. It cost me a four well-spent pints to get the story from Jack (not his real name), who looked carefully around the room before leaning closer across our table to get my assurance that I hadn’t heard it from him.

It turns out I had mostly answered my own question. The pumpkin patch belonged to a wealthy agricultural industrialist who had built his fortune and reputation on his work with GM crops. I had stumbled across what were indeed Granny Smith pumpkins, the grand vegetable of our autumn genetically modified to have the texture, flavour and juiciness of the famous green apple. The Granny Smith in fact originated in Australia not far from where I was, and I learned that the Granny-Smith festival, held in October, was northern Sydney’s largest annual event.

But why the crazy idea to cross the apple with a pumpkin? I came to quickly understand that this was no mad scientist’s project. Apparently the idea had first come to our geneticist because his kids had taken an interest in Halloween. It is becoming increasingly popular in Australia but there’s an obvious problem because the last day in October is the middle of spring in the Southern Hemisphere. No pumpkins. Yet have you ever eaten a soft, mushy Granny Smith? If one could cultivate a pumpkin that could retain it’s firmness and freshness the way this legendary apple does, pumpkins harvested in May could keep long enough to be around for Australian Halloween. Not to mention the same in New Zealand, South Africa and South America.

There’s a fortune that’s not small to be made there, but that is only the beginning. With the new pumpkin having characteristics more closely resembling those of its apple parent, it could be juiced, made into preserves, etc. Pumple pie, anyone? And given the flavour, large size (with attendant benefits of economy in harvest and transport) and resistance to spoilage of the Granny Smith pumpkin, it’s easy to see that it could become a staple crop world wide. The “boss”, it seems, could potentially parlay that pumpkin patch into assets rivaling those of Bill Gates.

So why the secrecy? I would have thought the owner of such a product would welcome as much publicity as he could get.

Jack was politely exasperated with my naivety. It takes numerous crop cycles to develop a new plant before you can take out a genetic patent, he explained. If some other outfit, like Monsanto, became aware of the idea…. It then dawned on me that I had stumbled upon something potentially a hundred times more territorially sensitive than a Hell’s Angel’s marijuana farm.

Now at this point, my friend Dale Wilson, whose superb pictures and stories grace this blog, having dutifully read this far, will probably say that I’m full of it again, that I’m putting people on with this story. (What do you mean, “again”, Dale? And you of all people should know what can be done with breeding pumpkins, as the famous, patented and trademarked, Atlantic Giant , was originated a mere fifty miles from your home. Go ahead and check my links - you’ll find that my assertions, regarding the Granny Smith apple, Halloween in Australia, etc, are all accurate.)

It needs perhaps to be pointed out that there is a big difference between making things up and making things up. That is to say, a serious distinction can be made between Margaret Atwood and George Bush. I’m starting to digress - but only a little.

In writing, the important property of successful fiction is that we can find ourselves believing it. The same applies to fiction in photography. Assuming you accept my story, the pumpkin image is entirely believable for two reasons I’ll explain below: a) the editing colour space and b) fluke.

Regarding the first, I’ll start with a question “”How much Photoshop work did I do on the above image?” Truthfully, next to nothing! I made no selections of any kind, used no layers, no blending modes, no paint or dodging tools. Definitely I did not use the Color Replacement Tool, or the Hue/Saturation dialogue. All I did was a two-point curve adjustment, one so simple it is actually built into the program and can be done with two quick keystrokes, that’s all. The photo is almost exactly what came out of the camera - or at least sort of almost.

Now while everything on this blog is strictly copyright - text and photos - provided you don’t distribute it anywhere else I don’t mind if you drag this image to your desktop to try the following experiment, in fact I would encourage you to do so. When the image is in Photoshop, do this:

Image>Mode>Lab Color
Image>Adjustments>Curves
In the a Channel, move the bottom left corner of the flat curve to the top left corner, and move the top right to the bottom right. (I’m assuming the standard default configuration of the Curves Dialogue, and that Preview is checked on).

Alternatively and even more simply, after switching to Lab Mode, just Command-click-2 and Command-click-I (Control click on a PC) and you’ve done exactly the same thing.

That’s it. You should find that the resulting colours in the picture, especially the radically different ones of the pumpkins, look almost as natural as in my image here. (Or maybe even more so?)

What is significant is that you can’t get even close to the same result in RGB mode. The curve adjustment described is an Invert. If you tried this in any of the RGB channels (or CMYK channels, for that matter), you would get colours weirder than anything seen in some of the last scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The reason why has to do with the fact that the channels in Lab separate luminance from colour while those in RGB and CMYK don’t and to understand this in detail one should do a lot of reading of author’s vastly more knowledgeable than I.

Which brings me to a point I personally feel is worth exploring. There are many excellent books on Photoshop, but believe that none betray a deeper understanding of the subject than Real World Photoshop by David Blatner and Bruce Fraser and Professional Photoshop by Dan Margulis. Now, the former hardly even mentions Lab Mode at all, effectively asserting by default that it is of little practical use in colour editing. Margulis, on the other hand, feels that in many cases editing in Lab offers indispensable capabilities, so much so that he has written a second book devoted entirely to the subject: Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace.

Who is right? I certainly don’t have the expertise to judge. But the image here suggests it could be Margulis. In practical colour editing, one would normally never do adjustments as radical as what I used on this image, but if Lab allows for possibilities that RGB or CMYK editing don’t in such an extreme example, it seems logical that the same could be the case on a more subtle level.

Which brings me to the second reason the image is believable: fluke. As it happens, the a channel inversion turns pumpkin orange into near-perfect Granny-Smith green. It also affects the other colours in the image, but by pure luck, the other parts of the picture still make perfect sense. Faded-green pumpkin leaves were turned into light reddish-brown, natural-looking enough for dying vegetation. Some of the bushes in the background have had their fall russet reversed back into green. Meanwhile, the mostly neutral colours in soil and cloud were little affected, and the same was true for the blue sky, which has most of its colour in the unchanged b channel.

I suppose it’s time I came completely clean and admitted that I have never been to Australia. I suspect that the climate there might be too warm and dry for effective pumpkin cultivation in any case. However, it turns out that the essence of my story is quite true, as the Granny Smith pumpkin is in fact being developed in Ireland - for real! (If you don’t believe me, go ahead and do a Google search of Ireland +green +pumpkins: you’ll get nearly half a million hits.)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Copyright J.A. Kraulis 2007

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 2:14 pm and is filed under J. A. Kraulis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.