Easter rambling

Unprovable secret histories are the best. Especially when they are so old that there is nothing more you can add to the controversy. Take the Venerable Bede’s contention that Easter comes from the pre-Christian feast for the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre. Did he know that Roman plebians and slaves probably celebrated the story of the resurrection of their Christ in the festival of Paschim six hundred years before him? He was a historian of the church. He would have known. But maybe he also asked exactly what bothers me: how did eggs get associated with this celebration? All this gives me a nice excuse for food photography.

Photographing an egg with a mobile phone seems like an easy job. But when I looked at the brown egg I’d taken out of the fridge through the lens of my phone, I saw that it didn’t get the colour right. I’d read a lovely blog post last week (can’t remember where, otherwise I would have linked to it) about the trouble CCDs seem to have with capturing reds. When I looked at the histograms I realized I’d run into this well-documented problem. There are fixes if you are working with a good camera, but my phone camera is basic. So my solution was to tweak the photo to get some of the red back. While doing this I realized that the coarsening of the condensed water droplets on the eggshell was also a nice thing to pay attention to. Hope you see the progression from tiny droplets to bigger ones which succumb to gravity by sliding off the shell.

The Latin word for eggs, ovum, gives its name to the oval shape. I could extend my research to other red oval shapes that I find in the fridge. So red grapes it was. The same trouble. The photo looked paler than in real life. But the same tweaks brought it to a closer semblance of what the unaided human eye can see.

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