Revisiting Images from Loring Site 15

Back in May of 2011, I shared some of the details of my search for Loring site 15.

http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2011/05/sound-of-one-hand-clapping-loring-site.html

By Loring site I mean one of the rock art sites documented in J. Malcolm and Louise Loring's two volume monograph called Pictographs and Petroglyphs of the Oregon Country.

In that post, I noted that, "Many of the paintings seem worse for wear when compared to the Loring drawings…to the degree that my identifications are not always certain."

Since that trip, D. Russel Micnhimer, of Oregon Rock Art (http://www.oregonrockart.com/index.html), has introduced me to a specialized bit of software called DStretch by Jon Harman (http://www.dstretch.com/). As Micnhimer said to me in a Facebook message, "It's the closest thing I know of to absolute magic; (it) will make the invisible appear."

So what follows is a series of my pictures from Loring site 15 that I've enhanced with Jon Harman's DStretch plugin for the graphics program ImageJ (http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/index.html). I hadn't posted them previously because I couldn't really see anything. In each case, the original picture is presented with its enhanced version for comparison purposes.

Seriously? I thought there might be a ray-arc here,
but a trio of little crew-cut guys was kind of unexpected.

Mr. Harman's vast experience with documenting rock art has allowed him to find optimal settings for an algorithmic procedure called decorrelation stretch. And I have to admit I'm pretty impressed with the detail Dstretch can pull out of ordinary digital images.