On Old and New Avatars
For the entirety of my online life, I’ve had the same avatar. It’s an image of a lilac-breasted roller, which I chose as a teenager because I liked birds and thought this one was very floofy and colourful. For a while, I’ve been thinking about updating it to something new, but have been reluctant to do so mostly because of the stickiness of having used it everywhere for so long.
The origin behind how I actually found the image is a bit confusing. As a kid, I was browsing the art forums on Serebii.net (a website I’m amazed is still active and looks exactly the same as it did two decades ago) and was interested in tutorials where people explained how to use Photoshop to separate the subject from the background of a photo so that the subject can be placed on a white/transparent background. One such tutorial I read used this image as an example, and it caught my eye.
However, the actual image itself was pretty low-resolution and blurry, so I put it into some “free online vectorizer” tool that did its best to interpret the image and turn it into an SVG, which is why the actual image that I use everywhere is a bit “smooth” and doesn’t look like an actual photo of a bird.
One thing that occurred to me is that even though I had used this image as my virtual persona for so many years, I never knew who actually took the original photograph (the Photoshop tutorial either did not cite the source of the image or was something that I neglected to pay attention to). I figured it would be nice to know who was actually responsible for shaping so much of my online life over the last two decades.
With the help of my fiancée, we scoured through pages of Google search results and reverse image searches trying to find anything useful. She noticed that one of the results of the reverse image search wasn’t just another copy of my “vectorized” bird from one of my many online profiles, but was actually the Photoshop tutorial output image that I remembered.
While the page itself was dead (it would be more surprising if it was still up), feeding that image into another reverse image search led to many more results, one of which was a very artifact-y version of the original photo.
Upon reverse image searching the deep-fried photo, and many pages into the results, we stumbled upon chandra.as.utexas.edu/~kormendy/southafricabirds.html and got super excited; this was surely a real human’s personal home page from a university and not just a content farm — maybe even the original photographer!
Disappointingly, clicking that URL returned a sad plaintext 404 page.
Not wanting to give up so quickly, we searched Kormendy UTexas in Google and realized that chandra.as.utexas.edu was still the home page of Professor John Kormendy, and he had simply changed the page structure of his website. Diving a few links deep in his page, we found Birds of South Africa, a collection of photographs of birds he took in 2004 and 2005 in South Africa, and on it was the original photograph of the lilac-breasted roller in its full glory.
Photo: John Kormendy, Birds of South Africa.
I wanted to update my avatar to a “proper” piece of art but still pay homage to the original. Somewhere on Bluesky, I came across the incredibly talented Aled Thompson and really liked the look of his bird art. I figured this was the perfect match, and thus my new avatar was born!
