Crossings

This Blog Has Moved

2011-08-09T18:16:00.000-07:00

To see the Crossings blog posts after May, 2011, Go to the new Crossings location.

Tokina Test

2011-05-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

After watching the birds in the previous post, I wondered how it would be to shoot macro stuff with the long Tokina lens, and walked through the patio gate and captured the frame shown here.

The tricky thing about shooting macro with a long lens is the distance from the subject. It is really a tripod shot, though this one was hand-held.

Waiting for Lunch

2011-05-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

These two still-downy youngsters waited quietly for lunch for twenty minutes on the telephone wires. Their patience paid off when their mother arrived with worms.

My Nikon 18-105mm didn't have the reach for this shot, so I used the old Tokina 70-210mm manual focus zoom (105-315mm equivalent).

Kodak Sensor Again

2011-05-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

This one is another frame of the old mill in Bellona, NY. Kodak DC 3400 2.1 Gigabyte Kodak sensor, 38-76mm lens (equivalent).

Pastels

2011-05-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

This photograph was made during the last, golden light before sundown at Anza Narrows in Riverside, California.

Antelope Hills

2011-05-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

The aforementioned Antelope Hills, that is. The photo above was taken on a Lumix FX01, not the older Kodak camera. Every time I've traveled from Flagstaff, Arizona on Route 89 through this area, I've stopped to look at the hills.

The map shows the general shooting direction toward the hills. Antelope Hill is beyond, and obscured by, the ridges on the right. Route 89 travels north toward the Navajo Reservation. Route 180 rolls north toward the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

To my senses, there's something prehistoric, perhaps neolithic about the area. I can easily imagine dark masses of bison and antelope moving between the shoulders of the hills...

Movement

2011-05-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago I remarked to an old friend that for a guy who isn't a sports shooter, I seem to shoot a lot of sports. The sequences above and below were shot at f/8 with a 1/250 shutter speed. Preferring blurring balls and bats, I didn't want to completely freeze the action with a faster shutter speed.

Hillside Poppies

2011-05-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

These poppies were shot in 2010 at Diamond Valley Lake, a man-made reservior near Hemet in Southern California.

"When Life Was Good"

2011-05-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

This photo has been floating around since one day last year when I ran into a rider who was close to my (middle) age who had just restored a 1973 Honda CB 350 like the one in the photo, though the bike he restored was red. The photo is not mine, but I can't find the owner.
Near the pumps of a service station, we talked about the bike and the restoration for a couple minutes. The 350 was all stock, just as it should be.
I looked the bike over and nodded. "Very nice." I said. "It takes me back."
The proud owner nodded back. "That's what I like the best about it. It takes me back to the Seventies, when life was good..."

The Mill

2011-05-06T10:58:00.001-07:00

This old grain mill is in the hamlet of Bellona, in Yates County, New York. I lived in Bellona for several years during the sixties when I was still in school, so I was familiar with the mill and the stream that originally powered it, Kashong Creek.
On the day in 2005 the photo was made with the Kodak DC3400, it was the only digital camera I owned. The camera was quite slow compared to the digitals I use now, a Nikon DSLR and a Panasonic Lumix. Both of the newer cameras are now out of date by several years, but I don't anticipate newer cameras any time soon...

Bristol Dry Lake

2011-05-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

This photo was taken in the desert near Amboy, California after a time of rain in early March, 2010, which explains the yellow blooms.
Amboy's volcanic crater sits on the west shoulder of the dry lake, and the town itself is on the north of the old lake shore. This viewpoint is looking east-north-east over the briny lake bed toward the Old Woman Mountains.

In The Canyon

2011-05-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

Sycamore Canyon, that is. These photos were made during a hike in Sycamore Canyon on April 21, 2011. Like every Spring, the hills are green from the winter rains, and the wildflowers are in bloom. Being on the edge of the desert, the greening won't last long. The verdant hills will slowly fade within a couple months, with the plants turning various duns and browns as they dry during the approach of Summer. The plants fringing the hills on the edge of the desert are typically dry eight or nine months of the year, so the green is a temporary visual treat.

The hillsides are blooming. This is the best time of year to photograph wildflowers in Southern California, whether you are heading deeper into the desert, up into the mountains, or across the farmlands in the valleys. Below: Isolated yellow blooms.

As shown in the long view of the first photo above, most of the more prominent flowers in the canyon run toward yellow. The spray of red shown below broke up the dominate color, if only in a small area.

Planned Obsolescence

2011-05-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

Not that I planned on it. But it seems likely that my Kodak DC3400 had an estimated expiration date of a decade. The DC3400 was released in 2000, if I remember correctly (and there's no particular reason to believe that I do).
Mine was bought by my wife Lisa in 2001, and I used it during a trip to New York a few days after 9/11/01. At the time it was a nice "high-tech" point and shoot camera. For a consumer camera, it had a large at-the-time 2.1Meg sensor. And I always liked the way the Kodak sensor handled color.
In recent weeks, the images written to the CF card have been degenerating in quality at times. During the last few days I haven't been able to make the camera write images to the card. Sometimes it writes the framework of the file, but it doesn't put any photo information in the file. I eliminated the CF cards as possible culprits, since they work fine in another camera.
So I have officially pronounced the device dead. The ceremony with monosyllabic chanting, rattling vegetables, and bird feathers will be held later.
My most distinct memory of using that camera was stopping a long motorcycle ride in 2004 to get a photograph of the Antelope Hills north of Flagstaff, Arizona. That photograph remains one of my favorites, largely because of the way the sensor and camera handle color. The color is rich, but there's a subtle difference between Kodak color and the output of other digitals.

May

2011-05-05T10:14:00.001-07:00

There's no particular reason for the photograph. I had been thinking about various color and black and white film types, which somehow led me to the flowers with the digital in hand.
This is the second blooming of the year for this plant. I'm wondering if the plant will survive it's first desert summer.

A Fair

2011-04-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

My interest in photography leans very heavily toward landscapes. When I think about grabbing a camera and going somewhere to shoot, I’m thinking about landscapes. Shooting people or events rarely filters through my consciousness and as an event photographer, I’m probably an almost-adequate landscape photographer.

Despite my shortcomings in that arena, people continue to ask me to shoot events. On request, I’ve shot parties, parades, baseball and football games, and weddings, among other events. Yesterday’s event was an Easter Fair for a local church. I walked through the fair for an hour and a half, covering the entertainments, the various “booths”, the crowd, and local politicians.

The payoff for me was the kids. Children are often good subjects when they don’t know they’re being photographed, and the fair was crowded enough that they weren’t paying much attention to me.

Snaked Again

2011-04-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

At the end of the hike mentioned in the previous post, In The Canyon, as I walked the last two hundred yards to the parking area, this snake began crossing the trail. I stopped, got down on one knee and framed through the viewfinder to capture the image. The snake had paused as I stopped, as if it was profiling for the photograph.
The Nikon autofocus was hunting for the main subject, so I switched to manual focus and took a few frames. I had seen a couple in their twenties behind me on the trail. They walked up behind me, then stopped abruptly as the woman said, "Oh!"
"There are no rattles, so it probably isn't poisonous." I said. "Looks like it might be a gopher snake. My granddaughter could tell us immediately what it is."
I took a couple more frames of the snake. "It isn't coiled to strike.", I said and stepped around it by the edge of the trail.
The couple hesitated, then walked a large u-shaped detour through the thick undergrowth of the adjoining hillside where there were considerably more likely to be snakes than around the trail. I didn't mention that probability to them. They seemed nervous.

About Color

2011-03-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

This one was about color. I was shooting a wedding for friends, the second time I had engaged in that particular activity. The flower girl squatted down to check out a sprig of roses. I was struck by all the color in the scene and quickly captured a frame. I shot it for myself with no intention of including it in the wedding photo book I was going to create for the bride and groom. Later, when I was putting together the book, I still liked the photo so much that I included it along with the formal (posed) and informal photos.

Zabriskie Point

2011-03-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

The photos below are from Zabriskie Point, in Death Valley, known for its erosional landscape. It is composed of sediments deposited in Furnace Creek Lake, which disappeared around five million years ago.

Twin Towers

2011-03-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

The twin water towers shown in the photo below are in Death Valley Junction, California. I don't remember seeing twin water towers anywhere else, but that may be the result of a memory failure. It struck me as odd when I saw them on a two-day motorcycle ride that Mike Harmon and I took through Death Valley National Park in March, 2011. The towers were part of what appeared to be an abandoned mining operation.
It certainly made sense that additional water storage was needed in the area, since it frequently records temperatures in excess of 120 F during the summer, and holds the record for high temperature for the Americas at 134 F, recorded in Furnace Creek on July 10, 1913

Hiatus

2011-02-05T18:25:00.000-08:00

I've taken on a short "fire brigade" writing contract, and due to that contract, it is extremely unlikely that I'll have time to also blog and work on some other writing I've become engaged in (sorry, the other writing wins out).

So I'm taking a break from this blog. Check back here for more ramblings in April.

Slow Photography

2011-01-30T13:28:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I pulled out the first digital camera I owned, a Kodak DC3400. The camera was a birthday present from my wife Lisa, given in the Fall of 2000. I hadn’t photographed anything with the camera for about seven years. I questioned whether it still worked.

The camera came with an 8MB Compact Flash card, which I upgraded to a “big” card with a whopping 256MB storage capacity. The upgrade allowed me to store 412 .jpeg photos. Four AA rechargeable batteries account for a large portion of the weight of the brick-shaped camera.

Just to play around with it and “remember” how it was to shoot with it, I took only the DC3400 on a group motorcycle ride on January 29, 2011. Photos from the ride appear in Mojave Desert Ride, the previous post.

One of the bonuses of this old technology is the simplicity of the camera. The menu system is very limited, so it is quite simple to change from color to black and white.

This camera was considered an above-average point and shoot digital at the time it was introduced to the public. It was assigned a MSRP of $499, though it was quickly available for around $300 from various retail stores.

The DC3400 forces you to shoot slow. There is no alternative. The specifications say that you’ll have to wait 1.5 seconds between shutter releases, but in practice I’ve never experienced it being that quick. To further slow things down, the default ISO setting is 100. It’s slow shooting speed forces me to take my time, which is probably a good thing.

For another article on slow photography, see

Tim Wu’s Slow Photography.

Mojave Desert Ride

2011-01-30T13:20:00.000-08:00

The map below shows the route for a group ride on January 29, 2011. The 334 mile loop through the Mojave Desert took us from the Inland Empire (Riverside and San Bernardino) on Route 60, Route 62 through Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, Twentynine Palms, Amboy Road to Amboy, Route 66 through Bagdad, along I-40 to Barstow, I-15 through Victorville, then down the Cajon Pass to the Inland Valleys. The map below is courtesy of DeLorme. See Delorme.

The photos in this post were made on an outdated (11 years old, gasp!) digital camera, the Kodak DC3400. The DC3400 was a 2.0 megapixel camera, which was a big improvement over the 1.0 megapixel cameras of the time (around the year 2000). For more information on the DC3400, see the following post, Slow Photography.
As always, click on a map or photo to view the larger version.

Testing out the black and white, I snapped the photo below at a gasoline station in Riverside after setting the camera to –1 stop exposure compensation. It was a very bright day and I didn’t want to wash out the sensor on the Kodak, which tends to happen in very bright conditions.

The photo below was taken at the roadside on Indian Canyon Avenue in North Palm Springs.

The photo below was taken in the pass through the Sheephole Mountains between Twentynine Palms and Amboy. The view beyond Mike Harmon (left) and Dan Underwood (right) looks down toward Bristol Dry Lake and the town of Amboy, many miles in the distance.

Below: There’s no mistaking that you are on the “mother road”, Route 66, which runs through Amboy.

Below: I have too many photos of Roy’s sign, but black and white seemed appropriate.

Below, the tank in this photo sat on display beside the gas station in Barstow when we stopped for the third and last tank of fuel for the ride.

The ATSF caboose shown below also resided beside the gas station in Barstow.

The Ultimate Keyboard

2011-01-19T20:40:00.000-08:00

The following statement is just my opinion, of course. Yesterday UPS delivered the best computer keyboard ever made to my door: The “IBM” 101-key. As I mentioned in The Crown of (Keyboard) Creation, the IBM 101 was manufactured by IBM, then by Lexmark for IBM. It is now manufactured by Unicomp and is available in multiple configurations at http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/ind.html. This particular model, the Customizer 101, doesn’t have the superfluous Windows-specific keys. I deliberately ordered it that way. Those keys, like the human appendix, are totally unnecessary.

I’ve logged approximately 1,200 words on the keyboard in a day and a half, and am happy to report that this board is the real deal. It has the “click-back” of the original 101 board, because it uses the same buckling spring technology. It feels exactly the same as the original keyboards, though that isn’t surprising since it is manufactured to the same specifications.

Compared to the sponge-like and cheaply made Compaq keyboard that I used most recently, it is a joy to type on. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not faulting Compaq for the typing sponge that came with the Compaq machine I bought ten months ago. It is exactly what it was intended to be: A cheap board that allowed the company to trim $50.00 off the price of the tower/keyboard/mouse combination.

But if you do a lot of typing, and loved the old IBM boards, it is probably worthwhile to look at the new Unicomp boards.

The photo above shows the effect of ten months of typing on the Compaq board. The alpha characters are starting to wear off. Click on the photo and the wear will be plainly visible. The A is nearly completely gone, the E is half-gone, and the S is getting quite squidgy around the edges. The characters appear to be decals. They’ll all wear off at some point in time, though it is unlikely that the board will last that long without some mechanical failure.

My wife Lisa used the new keyboard for a time last night. She was and is a big fan of the original IBM keyboards. I asked her what she thought of the new 101 keyboard today. “It feels just like a keyboard should.” She said. “It’s like the good old days, when times were slower, and keyboards were clickier.”

Waiting For The Light

2011-01-15T18:11:00.000-08:00

For months, I’ve watched this view at Anza Narrows. A photo of it appeared in an earlier post. Over time I’ve captured it with minor variations of viewpoint - where I stood or kneeled to press the shutter. But what I’ve been watching for, waiting for is the light, the most critical variable. The light was right earlier today, as shown in the photo below.

Statistics: Nikon D200, Nikon 28mm manual focus lens, Tiffen 0.6 graduated neutral density filter. ISO 100, 1/30 s, f/11.

The Beer + UFO Equation

2011-01-11T07:26:00.000-08:00

This is the story of a proof. Of sorts. In the end it is not a proof of alien visitation, but it does show an anecdotal relationship between beer drinking and UFO sightings. Unfortunately for Alien Visitation Theorists, it does not show the relationship in the manner they would prefer.

For more information on the connection between Beer Drinking and Alien Visitations, see Typewriters???, The History of Beer, and Beer Versus Anarchy.

The photo below was made with a Lumix DMC FX01, a now-outdated 6 Megapixel digital point-and-shoot camera.

My riding group, the River City Riders, was relaxing on the patio of a restaurant in Idylwild, California, in the San Jacinto Mountains. We were paying the appropriate amount of attention to the task of drinking a couple pitchers of beer when I made the photo shown below. It was Blue Moon Beer, I believe.

This photo appeared in an earlier post, UFO, in May of 2009. This photo did not show a saucer-shaped flying craft, despite what it looks like. To find out what it really was, click on this link: UFO.

The Crown of (Keyboard) Creation

2011-01-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

"The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!"

Two or three people may be interested in this, though I'm not sure whom, except former IBM Selectric typewriter operators who still use a keyboard all day. In the deep past, when we were using "AT" level PCs (286s & 386s), one could get an 82-key or 101-key IBM keyboard.

Those keyboards, made by Lexmark for IBM, were wonderful, though somewhat noisy, state of the art keyboards. I loved them despite the racket (or maybe partially because of the racket, because it always sounded like one was doing something). They were a very close match to the Selectric in the area of tactile feel, the result of using the same "buckling spring" technology to produce the classic "click" feel of the key actions. To be fair, the computer keyboards were only half as noisy as the Selectrics, since they weren't accompanied by the hum of the electric motor and noise of the moving mechanical parts. Regardless of the noise, it could easily be argued that the IBM buckling spring keyboards were the crown of keyboard creations.

I had one of the 82-key keyboards which didn't survive the 286 era and two of the 101s that I used on 386s, Pentium, and Pentium III computers (Pentium II computers were such dogs that I wouldn’t buy one). The 101s required periodic maintenance to keep them functional. Maintenance was a matter of partially disassembling the keyboard and cleaning it. I kept the 101s working for years, but both finally bit the dust, or choked on the dust, since I could no longer get them working with a good cleaning.

Whilst daydreaming yesterday about using a Selectric II typewriter to write notes with, it suddenly occurred to me that I could probably find a used 101 keyboard for sale on the Web. It is amazing how often a Web search does not occur to me. I did a search and turned up a couple used ones. I then stumbled upon an article that traced the manufacturers of the 101. Amazingly enough, the 101s are still being made and one can buy them with USB connectors! Here is the link: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/cus101usenon.html.

I'm still thinking about picking up a Selectric II in the near future because of the nature of all the notes I've been scribbling using Stage 3A writing technology (paper and pen). I don't like the look of my hand script, and I don't like the act of writing full 8.5" X 11" pages. I should have taken shorthand in school... A slight return to Stage 4 writing technology could make my note-taking easier. But I'm quite happy to discover that it is still possible to get the best computer keyboard ever manufactured (keeping in mind that "discover" means uncovering something that was there all along). I will probably pick up one of the 101s in a couple months. I'll also have to learn to shut the office door when using either IBM keyboard at 5:00 am…

Waiting For It

2011-01-02T09:28:00.000-08:00

These photos are from my first shoot of the year 2011, on January 2. The previous morning was not good for a lot of color in the sky. I typically check the cloud formations thirty to forty minutes before sunrise. When it looks like good photographic conditions will arise, I ride to a favored location and set up the tripod. As often, this morning would be good from Anza Narrows, and I had adequate time to ride there and set up.

So much about landscape photography is dependent on getting to the right spot to shoot. Obviously, if you’re not in the right place, there is no photograph. The rest is a matter of waiting for the light, particularly during the Golden Light of a sunrise or sunset.

The sequence of frames in this post was captured over a period of twenty-nine minutes.

The photo above was the first frame captured. The clouds, ripples of gray just two minutes before, were beginning to split the light nicely, a foreshadowing of warmer highlights.

Above, the fringe of red is beginning to climb out of the east. The long ridge on the left is Box Springs Mountain. The bump in the center is formed by the shoulders of Mt. San Jacinto, some forty miles away. The peak is obscured by clouds (but in a non-Pink Floyd way).

Above, the color looked good, but I knew it hadn’t peaked yet.

The photo above shows the strong colors I was waiting for. This was the peak of the light.

Above, the colors are softening. The light is on the wane.

Above, the light is quickly fading. Within a couple minutes the golden light was completely gone and the sky cover a cold gray-blue.

The Very Last Shoot (Really)

2010-12-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

Well, I lied. I thought that this morning’s shoot at Anza Narrows was the only one I’d get today, the last day of 2010. The mercury climbed up into the low fifties by midday. With just a bit of cloud cover across the blue dome, the sky was cooperating with the clear horizons.

I rode out to Hidden Valley Wildlife Refuge, and climbed a hill, shown above, near the entrance to get these views. The trail grew progressively chewed up by horse hooves. It looked like two horses had gone up the trail two days ago when the ground was still soggy from the recent rainstorms.

The photo above was taken on the shoulder of the hill where the trail leveled out. The background peak is Mt. Baldy in the Angelus Mountains.

The photo above was taken on the crest of the hill. Again, all of the photos in this post were made with a 28mm, f/2.8 manual lens (42mm = 35mm equivalent).

The vertical frame above is a view to the east. The peak of Mt. San Jacinto is visible in the background.

The Last Shoot

2010-12-31T13:39:00.000-08:00

The photos in this post are from the last morning shoot of the year 2010. It was the coldest morning of the year on December 31. The mercury was topping out at 32 F when I rode to Anza Narrows. The short ride was a test of a new jacket. The jacket seems like a good one, and it will work well as a jacket liner under my leather riding jacket.

Since the wreck that totaled my last motorcycle, I’ve been a bit skittish about riding with the windshield attached, since the edge of the windshield opened a 6-stitch scar just under my lip. I was wishing I had put the windshield on about the time I got up into third gear. The frozen air rushing against my face reminded me of the blizzards of the northeast. My face went numb from cold in short order. I was happy that the park is less than two miles away from my garage.

These photos were made with a APS-C Nikon and a prime lens, a decades-old 28mm, f/2.8 manual lens. This 28mm is turning out to be my favorite lens. I like using manual focus, and the extra aperture stop or two, though I use two telephoto zoom lenses when it make sense for sports like football and motocross.

The 28mm lens works out to a 42mm frame on an APS-C sensor. As it is turning out, I’m framing correctly for a photo with my eye before looking through the viewfinder, so it seems that I’m using the lens enough to get used to it.

Despite the cold, it was a good shoot. I liked the quality of the light and the long shadows from the trees. I kept my cloth glove liners on while I used the camera. In the photo below you can see my footprints in the frosted grass.

Art and Function

2010-12-31T12:50:00.000-08:00

When we buy a new motorcycle, we spend a great deal of time simply admiring it. Particularly in the first few days of ownership, we spend hours gazing at it. It doesn’t matter if the motorcycle is new, ninety years from the gates of the factory, or born some time in between. A new-to-us motorcycle is a thing of great beauty.

It isn’t the function of the bike alone that draws our gaze, though it doesn’t hurt that the object of our affection will take us over farm lanes, through woods, along an ocean, across the desert, over rivers and streams, and through high mountain passes. The eye candy is in the way the exhaust pipes flow, cylinders thrust, frame arches, and fenders curl. It is in the way that art, or form, combines with function in perfect balance.

It doesn’t much matter which brand or model. All motorcycles are functional art, a blending of form and function.
The example shown above is my ride, a 1999 Road Star. Yamaha did a wonderful job when they designed the Road Star, known as the Wild Star in Europe. As I mentioned in the Motorcycles post, this is my second Road Star. The first one didn’t survive an attempted-murder-by-automobile.

At the time it was designed, this was a perfect long-haul cruiser. Now it is a bit dated. It would need a 6-speed transmission, and a displacement upgrade to 113 Cubic Inches to bring it current. A fuel capacity of seven gallons wouldn’t hurt, either. It seems unlikely that Yamaha will update the Road Star. During the past few years the company has been content to market the Roadliner, Stratoliner, Raider, and Stryker models, while ignoring the great need to update the Road Star. Why is an update needed? Well, just look at the four newer big cruisers. There are solid power plants buried under the bad design decisions that cover the four newer models. It certainly is just my opinion, but in stock form they look butt-ugly, but not quite butt-ugly cool. They could all be customized to the point where they looked as good as the Road Star for a few thousand dollars, but why bother? Just buy a Road Star and you are already there. Now, where can I get a six-speed transmission for mine?

A Holiday View

2010-12-25T14:29:00.000-08:00

This is a somewhat rare view of Mt. San Gorgonio made on
12-25-2010. It is rarely this clear in the Inland Empire area.
Mountains always look more majestic to my eye when they
are capped with snow.

Beer Versus Anarchy

2010-12-14T18:02:00.000-08:00

The Writing Technology/Beer Drinking/Alien Visitation thread continues….

This post answers a question posed by the author of The Blog of MAB in the Comments section of The History of Beer. See the post below titled The History of Beer.

Beer brewing and drinking has always been a positive force in the history of mankind. In fact, beer drinkers provided the prerequisite foundation for the continuous advancement of a series of innovations in writing technologies and brewing processes, along with thousands of years of records of alien visitations. A side effect of the alien visitation records was the speculations that were the impetus for the invention of myriad organized religions, and the organized religions themselves would not have existed without the former innovation of beer drinkers, writing technologies. As such, brewers and beer drinkers can only be viewed as the primary stabilizing and innovating force of civilization.

In contrast, throughout recorded history wine drinkers have done very little of merit. They have caused many of the evils that have plagued mankind through 10,000 years of recorded history. If you think about it, it becomes obvious that the people like Bernard Madoff, who caused the recent worldwide recession (a polite word for depression) were and are wine drinkers. Here in Southern California we have another name for wine drinkers: Orange County Yuppie Twits. Other areas of the world have other terms for them, which recognizes their inherent evil.

The photo below is an illustration of the difference between beer and wine drinkers.

Note that on the wine side of the photograph, only a couple bottles of wine are shown. That is because wine drinkers generally do very little of value, so nothing besides the wine is shown. Sure, they consume wine, which could be construed as a benefit to the human race, but it could also be easily argued that this produces an unnecessary wasteful demand for grapes, taking up a large amount of usable farmland which could be put to more positive use if planted with wheat and hops. In the English language there is a derogatory word for wine drinkers: “wino”. There is no derogatory English word for beer drinkers.

Wine drinkers are often anarchists, ready to tear down the whole fabric of civilization to get rid of a few minor irritants. They are always ruled by an overwhelming compulsion to throw out the baby with the bathwater. For a historical illustration of this destructive compulsion, we need look no farther than the French Revolution, during which the wine drinking French citizenry overthrew their royalist government and beheaded an entire class of people to simply get rid of powdered wigs, snuffboxes, and effeminate clothing styles.

On the beer side, you will notice that the bottles and cans of beer are closely associated with Stage 3A writing implements for writing things down, and a camera for use in recording alien visitations. Beer drinkers and brewers are always prepared to advance the collective cause of human civilization in a positive manner.

Time Machine

2010-12-14T08:48:00.000-08:00

The photo below was taken in 1954. It is my first memory of a photo being made of me, the first photo I distinctly remember standing still for. I was two years old at the time.

I’m the guy squinting into the sun. Holding my hand is my cousin Sheryl Newland. Holding her other hand is another cousin, Pat “Cork” Irwin. It was typical that Sheryl was holding my hand at the time the photo was made.

My mother gave me a box of prints about a decade ago. I didn’t think much about them at the time. I looked through them quickly, then stored them in my garage. A few years ago while looking for a particular book on the shelves where the photo box was stored, I noticed that the box was separating at the seams, so I replaced the box with a sturdier version.

A couple of months ago, I suddenly wondered if I still had the photograph above of myself and younger brother Joe, which was taken around late 1955 or early 1956. I always liked the photo, but I don’t remember why I set out to look through the photo box for it. The print definitely shows the wear of 55 years. In the process of looking for that photo, I uncovered the first photo above and numerous other photographic gems among the pile of a few hundred prints. Too bad the negatives are not in the box…

The point of this post is that it is enjoyable to wade through that box of old photos you may have stuck on a shelf in the garage or wedged between the rafters in the attic. Take a look. It is full of half and mostly forgotten memories. It is a time machine.

The History of Beer

2010-12-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

This post is an answer to a question posed by Steve Vaughn in the Comments section of the previous blog post, Typewriters????. His question was “What is this beer you speak of???”

Since Steve and I conducted extensive joint field-testing of beer during a two-year period that lasted roughly from 1967 to 1969, I know that he did not ask this question for his own education. Steve is a scientist, adept fly fisherman, and humanitarian concerned with the education of younger humans (and most humans are younger than the two of us). I have no doubt that Steve referred the question to me because I am a professional ‘Splainer, as in “How do you ‘splain this Lucy?”, a phrase that was frequently uttered in the iconic prototypical TV sitcom of the 1950s, I Love Lucy. ‘Splainers are also known variously as writers, scribblers, beer drinkers, hippies, nose-pickers, lunatics, and infidels, depending on one’s social circle and/or cultural viewpoint.

Sumeria

The Sumerians were the first human society to develop Stage 2A writing technology. They were also the first society to discover, develop, and refine the brewing of beer. Beer, as we now know, is the very engine that has driven the progressive advancement of human civilization during the past 10,000 years.

The Sumerians were no mental slouches. They were very aware of the importance of beer to humankind, and even had a god, Ninkasi, who was the goddess of brewing and beer, and brewed the beer that the gods themselves drank. An illustration of Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with the “Hymn to Ninkasi” is shown below. Within the verses, the hymn contains a recipe for brewing beer.

As I previously stated, the Sumerians were no mental slouches. Not coincidentally, since they both discovered beer and developed the first permanent writing technology, they have handed down to us the first written and illustrated records of alien visitations. They didn’t have words for aliens and spacecraft. They called the aliens “gods”, and their conveyances “chariots”. Alien visitations led to a couple side effects of drinking beer; writing things down, and the unbounded speculations which led to organized religion.

Egypt

Ancient Egyptians were beer drinkers. Not surprisingly, they also developed Stage 3 writing technology to record their beer recipes. Like the Sumerian Ninkasi, the Egyptian god Osiris was said to have taught humans how to brew beer. It was used as the common mealtime beverage and in religious ceremonies. Ancient Egyptian beer was most commonly brewed from malted barley and emmer, a type of wheat. Hops were not used in the brewing process at that time. Using variants of their Stage 3 writing process, the Egyptians also recorded numerous instances of alien visitations.

India

Indian beer was brewed from rice meal and wheat. Sugar cane and various kinds of fruit were added as sweeteners. Beer was brewed in this manner starting approximately 5,000 years ago. Indian writers of this period gave the world a rich, full bibliography of accounts of alien visitations and sightings of spacecraft. Those ancient accounts include very detailed records of “wars in the heavens” between aliens.

Rome

Beer was a common Roman drink for a few hundred years, but they were not particularly good brewers and it did not have the generally pleasant taste of the brews produced in Sumeria, India, and Egypt. Romans later began experimenting with the production of wine and it became the drink of choice for the majority of citizens because they were apparently incapable of brewing a decent jar of beer. The Romans did not leave to history much in the way of literature about alien visitations. After wine drinking became widespread, Roman civilization entered a protracted period of cultural decay, then eventually succumbed to the invasions of robust beer-drinking groups like the Huns, Goths, and Visigoths. The Huns, Goths, and Visigoths left few written records of alien visitations because when they overran the Roman heartland they picked up the nasty habit of drinking the wine they found stored in the cities and farmlands.

Medieval Europe

After the fall of Roman civilization, tax collectors in togas and their pernicious propaganda about wine no longer plagued Europeans. Left to their own devices, they began to slowly rebuild and advance human knowledge by returning to the tried-and-true method of brewing beer. In the year 1500, the German Hieronymus Braunschweig published Liber De Arte Destillandi, The Book of the Art of Distillation. This was shortly followed by the passage of the first Reinheitsgebot (German Beer Purity Law) in the city of Ingolstadt, Bavaria on April 23, 1516. The standardization of beer purity via the Reinheitsgebot was the catalyst that accelerated the Renaissance, and allowed the Europeans to colonize and dominate the continents of Australia, North and South America, and the tip of South Africa within a couple hundred years. Although few medieval Europeans were able to read or write, there was a surplus of beer-drinking painters, sketch artists, doodlers, and other illustrators who indulged in the widespread incorporation of illustrations of alien spacecraft in the religious art of the period.

Non-Beer Drinking Societies

Due to the enduring influence of Rome, Italians were (and are) wine drinkers. One of the effects of this was the long-term fragmentation of Italy. Italy was a mishmash of small, disorganized city-states for a much longer period than the other nations of Europe. Italy’s attempts at overseas empire building in Albania and North Africa were dismal and complete failures by the 1940s. If only Italy had been able to produce a decent quality beer, things might have been different for Italians.

Similarly, France is and was a nation of wine drinkers. France’s attempts to develop overseas colonies all failed. As far as conquest or colonization goes, the only bright spot in France’s history was short lived and largely the result of the efforts of a single man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was a Corsican, and thus not really either French or Italian. France’s dreams of empire largely died at the same time as Napoleon. Now in the 21^st Century, as it has been for over two thousand years, France contains very few beer drinkers, and produces nearly zero documented alien spacecraft sightings.

Russia was and is a culture of vodka drinkers. Because they didn’t have the requisite beer drinking population, Russia lost its only overseas colony, Alaska. However, Russia did become an empire, because even without much beer, Russians could walk to places like Irkutsk and Siberia, places no other nation coveted and due to the vast size of the Russian empire, it produced a large amount of documentation of alien visitations and phenomena, including the Tunguska explosion of 1908.

Modern Beer-Drinking Societies

The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch eventually, and indirectly led Germany’s National Socialist Party to dominate the country in the early 20^th century, then nearly conquer all of Europe. Despite a substantial beer drinking population and a large library of documentation of alien visitations, Germany was defeated in its attempt to dominate Europe. Germany was defeated in 1945 due to the efforts of a coalition of other beer drinking nations; Australia, Canada, The United Kingdom, and the United States. All of the coalition nations possess records of thousands of alien visitations.

Summary

Beer, in many forms, styles, and flavors is now readily available to all humans on this planet called Earth. This is a reflection of, and was the cause of the heights of technological innovation humankind has achieved and now enjoys. A photograph of a modern beer reefer, or refrigerator is shown below. A reefer is a device that keeps beer at the constant optimal temperature for the enjoyment of beer drinkers.

The cultures of beer drinkers and brewers have dominated the history of mankind, and in turn, driven civilization and technology to its present high state. Beer drinkers and brewers were also responsible for the accumulation of 10,000 years of documentation of alien visitations, spacecraft, and phenomena, which led to the invention of thousands of religions by the members of primitive cultures.

Author’s Note: It is ironic, at the very least, that the collective compulsive obsession of beer drinkers who observed alien spacecraft in the ancient skies, then invented religions to explain the phenomena, will have their religions utterly destroyed by the eventual and inevitable contact with the non-earthling beings who piloted the spacecraft and apparently introduced humankind to the knowledge of brewing.

Typewriters????

2010-12-10T21:43:00.000-08:00

This post is an answer to a question posed by an anonymous reader of this blog in the comments section of the One Million Monkeys post. The question was, “What is this typewriter you speak of????” See http://crossingsrralexander.blogspot.com/2010/08/one-million-monkeys.html.

This is a serious question for anyone born after 1985, so I feel it is my duty to answer it. To fully explain the historical significance of typewriters as a writing technology, I did extensive research, then placed it in the following timeline.

Typewriters were writing devices that were widely used in the 19th and 20th centuries of the Common Era. An example of an advanced typewriter, the IBM Selectric, is shown below.

The history of writing technologies and the place of typewriters in that history can be thought of as occurring in the following stages.

1. Lump of charcoal on rock. Drawing pictograms on rocks with partially burnt wood. This method of writing was quite impermanent since rain and wind tended to erase the pictograms unless they were applied to the rock walls of caves. When pictograms, drawings of mammoth and antelope hunts, and alien visitations were applied to cave walls they lasted thousands of years. Beer was not typically brewed in caves at that time, so no recipes have survived.

2. The stick and mud method. Writing with a stick in the mud on the banks of a river or creek. This was an impermanent method for obvious reasons; Floods, rainstorms, and sandals all erased the writing in short timeframes. Since they were important sources of water, beer was often brewed near rivers and creeks during this time period, but due to frequent flooding, no recipes have survived.

2A. Stick and mud, advanced. Clay tablets were substituted for mud, then after writing, the tablets were baked. This was a more permanent writing method because the clay tablets lasted thousands of years if protected from moisture. Permanent records of beer recipes and stories about Nimrod and Gilgamesh were recorded this way in Sumeria with cuneiform writing. This writing technology was important to the rise of Sumerian culture, and was illustrated by their most important saying, “Bread And Beer”, which meant that with those two things, mankind would be forever happy.

3. Papyrus and brush. Form reeds into sheets, then write on them with brushes. This was also a more permanent type of writing than the stick and mud method. Being a relatively enlightened culture, the Egyptians used this writing technology to maintain their beer recipes for thousands of years by copying them every hundred years or so.

3A. Paper and pen. Quill pens were used to write with ink on paper sheets made out of cellulose fibers. When cotton was mixed with cellulose fibers, paper could last for hundreds of years, which is why we today have copies of important historical documents such as the Magna Carta and Martin Luther’s recipes for ale.

4. Typewriter. The typewriter was a mechanical device. One pressed a key corresponding to an alphanumeric character, then via a series of metal pivot points and levers, the machine caused the corresponding metal type to strike an inked ribbon held in front of a sheet of paper. This was magic compared to writing with pen and paper, and considerably more uniform than handwritten script. A trained operator could use a typewriter to produce a 250-word beer recipe in five minutes or less!

(Author’s Note: Though Ernest Hemingway used a combination of Stage 3A and Stage 4 writing technologies to produce classics such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, he drank very little beer and typed using the two-finger-hunt-and-peck method with his Underwood typewriter. He only averaged 500 words per day when writing his novels. Coincidence? I think not.)

4B. Typewriter, advanced. The advanced typewriter was powered by electricity, rather than heavy pressure applied by fingers. One merely lightly touched the keys to type a character, and the machine used the power of electricity to do the heavy lifting necessary to make the type strike the inked ribbon and paper. One did not develop the fingertip calluses necessary to use the purely mechanical typewriter. Because the development of fingertip calluses was not an integral part of the brewing process, it was simply a waste of time.

5. Word Processor. Word processors were simply electric typewriters that recorded every keystroke in a document onto a cassette tape. One typed a document once and simultaneously recorded it to a cassette tape. Later, when one wanted to give away multiple copies of a new beer recipe, one would put the cassette tape back in the word processor, then print out numerous copies – usually only stopping when one ran out of paper.

5A. Word Processor, advanced. The advanced word processor used 3.5” floppy discs to store documents, rather than cassette tapes. The advantage to this was that one could store hundreds of recipes on one floppy disc, and even include ales and stouts along with the usual lagers and pilsners.

6. Personal Computers. Personal computers were really very advanced word processors, though at this time we began calling particular programs “word processors”. One could then use a dialup telephone connection to post beer recipes on virtual bulletin boards, where they could conceivably be read (and printed out by) hundreds of people.

6B. PC & Internet. This stage is really just an incremental technological advancement of stage 6, but had massive consequences for humankind. Due to advances in computer technology and Internet bandwidth, one could then throw away the damn beer recipes, and simply order a case or two of Blue Moon or Tree Frog beer, and the order would be delivered in a couple days by UPS or FedEx. This freed up the kitchen space formerly used by over 6 Billion people to brew beer, and as a group, homo sapiens began experimenting with cooking more of the various foodstuffs that taste good while drinking beer.

Hidden Valley

2010-11-25T19:03:00.000-08:00

This is a reprise of the blog post titled A Missed Setting. The two photos below were taken from Hidden Valley Wildlife Preserve.

I made the photographs in the morning early in October 2010. When I reviewed the images that evening, I discovered that I hadn’t reset the ISO after the previous day’s low light shooting. Everything from the Hidden Valley session was shot at ISO 1600, rather than my usual 100 or 200, and I was annoyed by how grainy the images were.

While sorting through photos a couple days ago I stumbled upon them again, took a good look, and decided that they aren’t as bad as I initially thought.

Random Frames

2010-11-25T18:57:00.000-08:00

Sorting through photos from the last year recently, I found a few frames that slipped between the cracks. These are all photos that I like for one reason or another.

The first frame is from Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. It didn’t make it into the Red Rock post. I’m not sure why.

The flowers in the photo below are unknown to me, which isn’t particularly unusual. This frame was captured near Nuevo, California.

The photo below is a view of the east side of the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. I had an apartment on this side of the Inn in the winter of 1971-1972 when I first arrived on the West Coast.

The photo below was made in Sycamore Canyon. I thought of it as a “practice” frame when I captured it, but I keep viewing it, so I suspect there’s more to it than that.

The below view is from Anza Narrows. The buildings in the middle distance are in downtown Riverside. The far ridgeline is the San Bernardino Mountains, including Mt. San Gorgonio.

Below, another view from Anza Narrows. The shadow is on Box Springs Mountain. Mt. San Gorgonio is obscured by clouds.

A night photo from my street in Riverside, California. I like the orange light from the streetlamps.

This long view is from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.

A Redirect Post: Stolen Photo

2010-11-08T19:44:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to make a habit of this. But.

Sometimes I run into an article or blog post that is just so good that I want to share it with my somewhat tight circle of friends in an email. The blog post mentioned below is one of those.

I started to write an email to my circle about this post, then thought better about it, because it really deserves wider circulation. Not that my blog has a huge readership, but it does have a small number of readers scattered across the globe in places far beyond the confines of the United States in countries such as Russia, China, France, Canada, Viet Nam, Slovenia, South Korea, and Malaysia, for example. I don't know why people in other countries are reading the blog, but I like the fact that they are. If you read this and are from a county other than the USA, please feel free to comment on any post you like (or hate, for that matter), and mention your country. Of course, you can comment if you are in the US - I'm not anti-American, heh, heh... I'd love to hear from you. For instructions on posting a comment see http://crossingsrralexander.blogspot.com/2010/04/posting-comment.html.

In any case, the blog post by Kirk Tuck titled Sometimes getting a photo stolen is flattering. A little. is definitely worth a quick read. Go to http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/ and scroll down to the 5th post (as of November 8, 2010), which has the title mentioned above.

Anza Views

2010-11-07T07:38:00.000-08:00

November 6, 2010. Like every morning, I walked outside to look at the dark sky and decide where to go hiking. The direction I would take depended on the cloud formations. If it didn’t look particularly good for photographs – no clouds, or one big uniform misty dome – I’d head for Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Preserve on the eastern rim of the valley. If the clouds looked likely to produce a photography-friendly sunrise, I’d head for Anza Narrows or Hidden Valley, since both parks have good long views of the valley and the mountains in and around it.

The clouds looked promising, so I loaded the saddlebags and rode up to Anza Narrows. I thought for a passing moment about taking the Subaru, then remembered the gate at the park: If it was closed I could only get in with the Road Star, since I could ride in on the sidewalk, bypassing the automobile entrance.

When I arrived at the entrance the automobile gates were unlocked. The County apparently doesn’t have enough workers to lock everything up every night. That’s a recent development, brought on by years of government mismanagement at both state and local levels.

Photo above. From left; Mt. San Gorgonio in the San Bernardino Mountains, Box Springs mountain, Mt. San Jacinto in the San Jacinto Mountains. Statistics: ½ second, f/11, ISO 100, -0.3 EV, 28mm (35mm equivalent).

Photo above. Left: Box Springs Mountain. Center, far distance: Mt. San Jacinto. Statistics:1/4 second, f/22, ISO 100, 67mm (equiv.).

Photo above. Mt. San Jacinto. Statistics: 1/13 second, f/11,ISO 100, +0.3 EV,157mm (equiv.)

Golden Hour

2010-10-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

This post appeared earlier. I updated the search terms, and the editing software stuck it here. Nothing I can do about it, though it is now out of sequence. Let's pretend this is a "feature" of the editing software, rather than a "bug".
In photography, the first and last hour of sunlight during the day is known as the Golden Hour. At those times, when the sun is near the horizon, the light appears softer and warmer, and shadows are longer. "Hour" is used quite loosely, since the length of the warm light varies with cloud cover and latitude.

The photographs in this post were made in the golden hour around sunrise.

In landscape photography, the warm glow of the low Sun is considered desirable because of the way it enhances the colors of a scene.

Although generally warm, the color palette of the golden hour can vary widely depending on atmospheric conditions.

All of the photos in this post were made while hiking on Mt. Rubidoux. For more information about Mt. Rubidoux, see http://www.mt-rubidoux.org/.

In cinematography, this lighting is called the "magic hour". The 1978 Terrence Malick film, Days Of Heaven was photographed in golden hour light.

A Hunt For Herons

2010-10-25T18:00:00.001-07:00

The photos in this post are from a group ride on Saturday October 23, 2010. For a number of reasons it was a poorly-attended ride. Only three of us, all at least 58 years old, could make it to the assembly point in Banning, California. The object of the ride was to photograph the clouds of Herons, specifically Snowy Egrets that during other years gathered on the shoreline of the Salton Sea in the Fall. In the photo below, taken by Dan Underwood, Mike Harmon (shading his eyes) and I (back to camera) search the shoreline near an old resort, now a community center, on the north east end of the inland sea.

Below: Startled when I walked too close, a Snowy Egret took flight.

In all, I counted only six Herons all day. It was a poor showing, but we were perhaps a few weeks early. Below, a single Snowy Egret stood on a wooden pole emerging from the water near a group of Pelicans.

We rode around the sea, stopping to look for the favored waterfowl at the Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge. Below: A view of the Refuge’s marshland from the observation platform at the south end of the sea. Nearly a mile from the shore at the platform, it was too muddy to chance riding our heavy road bikes any closer, and we were running out of time to walk to the edge of the water, though we could hear thousands of water birds hidden in the rushes.

The photo below shows the thick growth of “cattail” rushes. The rushes reminded me of my grandfather, who in the 1950s, gathered the rushes and used them to cane the seats of antique chairs, though that was nearly 3,000 miles from the Salton Sea.

Before leaving on the ride I had commented to Lisa that when it is only the “old guys” riding, it is often a somewhat slower, more relaxed ride. Oddly, that ride was over a hundred miles longer than our typical ride. My theory for the longer distance is that we got so involved in looking for Herons that we forgot to make the usual stop for beer…

Review: Velocity Micro's Cruz Reader

2010-10-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

This isn’t much of a review of the Cruz Reader. But it is a review of the business and customer support practices of Velocity Micro, the company that makes the Cruz.

The Cruz shown in the photo below was bought by my wife Lisa, as a birthday present for me in September 2010. I had done a good deal of research on eReaders and the Cruz looked like it would be the right eReader for me. In addition to being an eReader, it had a color screen which I could use to display photographs, would display Office documents, and would do email.

The Cruz arrived in twice the time paid for: Lisa paid for two-day delivery. It took four days to arrive, which is typical of UPS, in my experience. The Cruz seemed to be working properly for approximately 48 hours, then the WiFi went south (and no, it wasn’t dropped, heated, or hammered upon, etc.). Without the WiFi working properly, the Cruz was of little use to me since I couldn’t easily download books, Office documents could not be displayed because the Android application that handles that is Web-based, and email was impossible because it requires some sort of internet connection.

After several phone sessions with Velocity Micro (VM) support technicians it became obvious that I had a defective Cruz. Other devices such as an iPod Touch and a netbook had no problem connecting with my WiFi network, whose signal strength was listed as “Excellent” by the Cruz. I spent a dozen hours field testing the Cruz over a three day period before giving up. During that period of field testing I had reconfigured my router, rebooted the unit and performed hardware resets multiple times, and installed the firmware update, all to no avail.

When I contacted VM yet again to arrange to return the unit, I was informed that there was a 15% restocking fee. I sent an email message to the person I was told was the manager of Cruz Technical Support, an “Ellen”. I asked Ellen to waive the $30 restocking fee (15% of $200) since the Cruz I had received was defective. I received no response, though I had given my telephone number and email address.

Several days later we received an email message from VM, which began with “Congratulations!”. VM had credited back $170 and retained the $30 “restocking fee”.

Two more times into the breach: I phoned VM tech support and asked the tech for “Ellen”. The tech said she would connect me to Ellen’s voice mail. I told her I didn’t want to talk to a machine, that I wanted to talk to a manager who could be responsive. She replied that Ellen wasn’t available at that time. I asked when I could call back and she would be available. The tech replied, “Never”.

That seemed somewhat less than helpful, so I located the email contact information for the President of VM (no phone number was available via the Website). I wrote to the President explaining my experience with the Cruz, and again asked that the “restocking fee” be credited back to us. I received the following message via email the next day.

That email arrived 12 days ago, as of this writing, on 10/12/2010. I have received no response from the President of Velocity Micro.

The Bottom Line: Because we took a chance on the Cruz Reader, and it is apparently the policy of Velocity Micro to “rip off“ customers who receive defective units, we are now out over $50 (the “restocking fee” and shipping two ways). Velocity Micro is incredibly unresponsive. It is quite apparent that it simply does not care about its customers.

But it is not too late. Velocity Micro still has time to return the money we lost and redeem itself for its robber baron business practices.

Mr. or Ms. President of Velocity Micro, I am still waiting…

Freckles

2010-10-17T12:14:00.001-07:00

It may just be my viewpoint (and it wouldn’t be the first time), but doesn’t it seem that current print media has an unfounded prejudice against freckles?

Before I show examples of that prejudice, let me state that the photos in this post are not mine. I made photos of magazine pages for illustration purposes only, and the photo copyrights do not belong to me. Both images are of ads for photo retouching software. Also, these were made very quickly by shooting the magazines on my concrete driveway in diffused light. I believe that they illustrate my point, though someone like Kirk Tuck (http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/) would no doubt have done a better job, producing somewhat clearer images. As usual, click on the photos to see larger versions.

In the first image the “before” photo looks quite good to me. The “after” photo with all of the woman’s freckles removed simply looks wrong to me. It gives the woman an almost alien appearance (as in non-human, possibly non-Terran). The after photo is the result of too much altering of the image. Like an overproduced recording of a rock band, it strips away raw vitality and leaves something unreal.

In the photo below someone in the art department, showing off their skill with the retouching software, has cleverly used a single photo to show both before and after and help the ad fit a single column of the magazine. I think it is an effective ad, and shows exactly what the retouching software can do, but it is based on the idea that there is something wrong with freckles.

I have the opposite viewpoint. I think the freckling on both women’s faces just augments their natural beauty. To my eye, the second photo is the worst offender, because it presents the largest difference; a photo of a woman who is quite beautiful, and a photo of a woman who doesn’t exist.

My viewpoint may well be cultural. I’m a Caucasian, and find Caucasian women to be beautiful and freckling often augments that beauty in my eyes.

Bandits Again

2010-10-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

These photos are from 10/15/2010. These raccoons are a family that began visiting our back yard and patio last year as a mother and pair of offspring. They’d turn up every couple weeks, foraging for bugs in the yard and any food left out for our cat. This appears to be the sister-brother combination of last year and their nearly full-grown offspring. The attraction when these photos were taken was the hard cat food. I poured a bit more on the steps so they’d stay long enough for my granddaughter to see them.

A Missed Setting

2010-10-09T17:58:00.000-07:00

The sky is still generally crappy. By that I mean clear blue dome, no clouds. I'm always looking for some cloud definition, because landscape photos are often boring with clear skies. I rode out to catch the sunrise from the Hidden Valley Wildlife Preserve a few mornings ago. It is about a nine mile ride to the southwest in a group of low hills along the Santa Ana River between Riverside and Norco.

I guessed right about the rain that was coming from the coast. Nothing rain happened until I was back home, and gearing up for the day. I also guessed correctly that we'd have a good sunrise: Plenty of warm colors between and through the clouds to the east beside Box Springs Mountain. I hiked up to the crest of a hill, planted the tripod, and attached the camera. I captured photos for nearly an hour, then rode home, "knowing" that I had some good frames.

When I uploaded and looked at the photos in the evening, I discovered that every one of them was unacceptably grainy. A quick check of the camera's settings jogged my memory. During the previous morning's hike in Sycamore Canyon I made a few handheld predawn photos and dialed up the ISO to 1600. I never thought to change it back to my preferred ISO 100 or 200. Typically, I will shoot at ISO 200. On the tripod, I'll set it down to ISO 100 unless I'm shooting some kind of action. And I always check my exposure compensation setting, and always format the 8GB memory card. Good habits, both.

But this isn't the first time I've missed the ISO setting when returning everything to normal settings. Fortunately, I never missed such a good landscape before. Maybe this will help me form a better set of habits when preparing for shooting...

Layers

2010-10-08T08:56:00.001-07:00

Like other landscape photographers, one of the things that gets me visually excited is layers. I captured this photo this morning while standing in Anza Narrows Park. There were no interesting cloud formations, the weather condition that is most likely to yield the types of sunrises that I like to photograph. But there was the common low-lying mist in the river bottom, and the succession of ridgelines and the buildings in downtown Riverside in the distance. I only made a few frames, bracketing with exposure compensation to get the desired balance of light/darkness/color.

Statistics: Nikon D200, Nikon VR 18-105mm lens at 80mm, shutter: 1.8 seconds, f/13, -1.0 EV.

Parking Lot

2010-10-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

This is a parking lot at UCR (University of California at Riverside), which is on the route I take most mornings to Sycamore Canyon. For several weeks I kept noticing the repeating pattern of the light fixtures and the orange/red tint of the lamps. Since I had my Manfrotto tripod with me, I stopped to capture this frame on October 1.

September's End

2010-10-01T03:33:00.000-07:00

The photographs in this post were captured between September 19 and 29, 2010.

The photo below was made in Sycamore Canyon on the 19^th. We were in the midst of Indian Summer with a few days of heat over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The photo below, made on the 23^rd, is from the Santa Ana riverbottom. I don’t know what this flower is. If you can identify it, leave a comment to let everyone know what it is.

This photo (below) is from the 26^th. I hiked a 9-mile loop in Sycamore Canyon that morning. I liked the color against the dun-brown sunburned hillsides.

The next photo was captured on the 28^th. The distant ridgeline is Mt. Baldy in the Angelus Mountains.

The snake shown below was across the trail and caused me a few moments of hesitation. I stopped walking toward it until I verified that it was probably a harmless variety. Unmoving, it watched me until I walked around it, then moved into the undergrowth. It has been identified as a gopher snake by my granddaughter whose knowledge of reptiles is more advanced than mine.

I captured the frame below on the evening of the 29^th in Anza Narrows County Park. View west from the southern edge of the park.

DMD: The Decisive Moment Digital

2010-09-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

Hundreds, if not thousands, of articles can be found on the Web about the “perfect” digital camera, articles like “ ’DMD’: The Digital Camera I’d Like to own”, by Mike Johnston at http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/DMD.shtml. The perfect digital camera is a matter of personal opinion.

My DMD would be somewhat different than Mike’s, of course.

But earlier this week on September 19, 2010, information began to trickle onto the Web about a camera that appears to be the DMD of dreams for thousands of photo enthusiasts: The Fujifilm FinePix X100. For more information, see http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n100920.html and http://www.dpreview.com/news/1009/10091910fujifilmx100.asp. Or do a search on this camera to turn up a week’s worth of reading.

Photos of the FujiFilm FinePix X100 are shown below. The photos are from the FujiFilm site.

I have to admit that the X100 is damn close to my DMD. There are only minor things I would change about it. I’d like a wider lens, a 28mm equivalent and/or interchangeable lens capability. I would also be happy to see Fuji drop the video capability in order to lower the price of the camera. I don’t think that video is something that should be crammed into a machine made for still photography. Particularly when it raises the price of said still photo machine. People who are serious about shooting video buy video cams, so there’s no need to burden the rest of us with that capability and the attendant price.

I often check Ken Rockwell’s site at http://www.kenrockwell.com for information about photo equipment, both new and old. Oddly, there’s nothing of value in his comments on the X100. To quote: “Do I care? Not really. If everything tries to imitate the greatness of the LEICA M3, then why not just shoot the real thing? You can buy a real LEICA M3 for the same price as a D90, and you have no idea how nice is the real thing until you've shot with it. The M3 is much nicer than today’s LEICA M9.” And that’s all you’ll get from his site, which is the “odd” part.

I believe that Ken is comparing apples to plums. The Leica M3 is a 35mm Rangefinder, a film camera. The Fuji X100 is a Digital camera.

But I understand that Ken is being a snob about this, and that is fine with me, given the deep pile of other useful information on his site. After all, I have friends who are wine snobs, motorcycle snobs, computer brand snobs, and rock and roll snobs, and I don’t have to agree with their every pronouncement to appreciate what they bring to the table in general.

Gridiron

2010-09-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

I don’t have much interest in watching American football. I played in High School, but it makes me a bit crazed when I to try to watch it on television or in a stadium. I always get a near-overwhelming urge to get in the game myself. In a number of ways, that would not be a good thing, so I avoid being a spectator. But making photos of a game is an interesting way to spend a couple hours.

The photos in this post are from a High School game in California. My son-in-law is the coach of one of the teams (blue uniforms) and the 1,400+ stills I shot of this game will be used for a season’s end slide show.

My “old” digital camera is limited to 5 frames per second. I captured .jpeg files only, which allowed me to shoot multiple frames without filling up the camera’s buffer before the play was over.

Moto

2010-09-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

These photos are a couple of the frames I captured of my grandson racing his KTM motorcycle.

Both photos are of the same jump in the track. He likes to see photos of himself airborne. Because of the speed of the subject, the autofocus of my camera tends to get “confused” and hunts for the subject until the motorcyclist is gone, and I miss the shot.

I have found that it is much easier to get photos of this type using manual focus. I typically prefocus on a particular place on the track, than wait for him to come into the frame.

Grasshopper

2010-09-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

After returning from my usual hike this morning (9/17/2010), I got the coffee machine running, then opened my email program. As I began to select the usual pile of messages for deletion, my granddaughter ran into my office saying, “You have to get your camera and bring it outside. There’s a grasshopper eating one of the flowers.” I followed her to the flowerbed and took a few photos of the bug she pointed out, using the Nikon 18-105mm VR lens that I usually have mounted when I’m hiking. It is definitely not a Macro lens, a specialized lens for close-up work, but I like using it for landscapes at the wide end, which is equivalent to 28mm on a 35mm film camera (or full frame digital), and the widest lens I have for the DSLR.

Ken Rockwell calls this a “boring” lens. I’m not sure why the Nikon 18-105mm VR lens bores him, though it is possible that it doesn’t cover a long enough range, but it works fine for me as my default walking around lens, and is also well suited for photographing my grandson’s motocross racing.

What I don’t like about the Nikon DSLR is the occasional times when the Nikon autofocus system, purportedly the “best”, makes choices that I wouldn’t, and the photos I captured of the grasshopper illustrated that.

The photos above were made after I reviewed the first batch of photos, then returned to the flowerbed with the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 prime lens. The 28mm isn’t a Macro lens, either. But I like the results better.

Return of the Sky

2010-09-09T11:06:00.001-07:00

The title of this post is false, since the sky hasn’t been missing, so it can’t really return. But today appeared to be the end of the months-long foggy/hazy skies we endure every summer in the Riverside, California area.

Since I was lazy this morning, I didn’t wake up early enough to really catch the sunrise at the best time. I was busy dreaming about motorcycle rides, looking for a specific part in a repair shop, and talking to a girl I knew in high school (she was a girl then, anyway) and didn’t get out of bed early enough to catch the best light. The photo above is not a great one, but it shows a pale hint of the color and cloud definition I’ll see through the next three seasons. As far as I’m concerned, it is cause enough for a minor celebration…

Haze

2010-08-31T17:04:00.000-07:00

The photos in this post were made in Sycamore Canyon (in Riverside, California) on the morning of August 31, 2010. The summer haze is easy to see in the middle distance.

That’s what we like to call it: haze. It is really a mixture of smog and low-lying mist.

Haze. We would prefer not to think about it. But the smog has become considerably thinner and generally less harmful than when I arrived on these shores in 1971. At that time I worked a graveyard shift for the Press-Enterprise. It was possible then to stand on top of Mt. Rubidoux before sunrise and watch the smog, a dark brown cloud, rolling slowly into Riverside's long valley.

One Million Monkeys

2010-08-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

Warning: This blog post is a concert review. It is not the usual kind of post for my blog. My opinion about one of the performers is likely to anger some people. To those people I can only express this heartfelt sentiment: Too bad...

Some months ago, Lisa asked me if I wanted to see Don McLean at the Fox Theatre in downtown Riverside. I said no.

She went on to explain that Al Stewart would open up for McLean. I said yes.

I explained that I would suffer through McLean to hear Stewart. She shook her head, and said that she wanted to hear Vincent and American Pie. I'm fairly neutral about both studio recordings, though I've heard Pie about 80,000 times too many.

She reminded me of the McLean concert a few times in the 48 hours before the event last night (8-27-2010), and became progressively more annoyed with me when I said "Damn!" (or something +/- equivalent) in response, so the last time I followed the expletive with a statement that at least we'd get to see Stewart, so the entire night wouldn't be a waste.

	Al Stewart walked onto the stage with guitarist Dave Nachmanoff, and armed with two acoustic-electrics, they played one of the best 45 minute sets I've ever heard. I won't say they "rocked" because rock ‘n roll does not apply. Stewart's songwriting still holds up from my viewpoint.
His music is very intellectual, accessible, and clearly of Scots Irish folk derivation, though extended well beyond the limits of the form. I very much enjoy his songs about things like the French Revolution, Airplanes, Basque Separatists, and Bogart Movies. It’s quite a rich tapestry of material. Nachmanoff is an amazing guitarist: physically as small as John Oates, he was playing an EC model Martin with what appeared to be a 3/4 length neck. Though it wasn't the same type of music, there was something about the way he was playing, or the sound, or something.....that reminded me of Django Reinhardt (!!!).
	.
After the break, McLean took the stage with a four-piece ensemble to back him up. He opened his set by committing murder on a three-song Buddy Holley medley. It was simply stunning. That's right. I was stunned by how bad it was. One by one, the songs were throat-slashed, bled white, then drawn and quartered. They fell into heaps of body parts that resembled exceptionally badly-executed paintings by Goya wannabees. He did finally, finally, finally finish the medley. To be polite, I brought my hands together three times in a vague pantomime of clapping. The band was composed of apparently proficient individual musicians, but forced into a group together they sounded bad. No unit chemistry. It was like listening to the first gig of a sub-standard bar band. It couldn't get much worse, I thought. But it did. McLean's smug self-satisfaction was amusing for a few minutes. It reminded me of the idiot George W. in that it was entertaining for a moment, then pain-inducing for a near-interminable period of time. It ground on and on, like an unmanned tractor, as he played incredibly mediocre covers of sub-mediocre songs mixed with his own sub-mediocre songs that were constructed primarily of rhymes that could have easily been written by a committee of 5-year-olds. The only saving grace was the probability that the tractor would eventually run out of gasoline and lurch to a stop, presumably after the playing of the two songs I knew Lisa wanted to hear. And speaking of Lisa, something novel was happening with her. I couldn't bring myself to clap after the first medley, then I noticed that she wasn't clapping. We've attended many concerts together since 1981. That was the only time I've seen her refrain from clapping. She is more polite than I am. After the torture was over, I discovered that she had been ready to stand up and walk out, but was too polite to inconvenience the people seated at the end of the row of seats we were in. I wouldn't have been that polite, if I had known she was ready to go... To be fair, in the realm of pop songs, both Vincent and American Pie are at least average lyrical constructions. I am reminded, though, of a possible explanation of how McLean composed them: Give each of one million monkeys one typewriter and unlimited paper, typewriter ribbons, and time. Eventually one of them will write the Bhagavad Gita...

Donner Pass

2010-08-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

The first photograph below isn’t necessarily a great photograph. I simply like it. I shot it with my Lumix DMC-FX01 on September 29, 2007 in Donner Pass. Yep, that place. Four of us from my riding group were on a four-day tour of Northern California. We had hit the road early on the 28^th, riding from Riverside, through the Mojave Desert, then north on Route 395 along the east flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After a scenic detour through the Mammoth Lakes area, we stopped for the night at an inexpensive motel in Carson City, Nevada.

After dinner and a few beers, we went to sleep thinking about the road ahead: We’d ride further north on 395, then cut west across the Sierras, the northern end of the Central Valley, and the Coastal Range to the California Redwoods. After visiting the Redwoods, we’d turn back south along routes 101 and 1 through San Francisco and Big Sur on our way home. It didn’t quite go the way we planned, but what road trip ever does?

In the darkness of that first night in Carson City there was a short but heavy rain shower, then the temperature pushed down toward the low side of zero.

I happened to be the first one to walk outside in the morning, anxious to pack my luggage onto the bike and get rolling, but that idea stopped dead in it’s tracks when I saw our bikes. I called the others out of the motel rooms. “Hey. Come look at the bikes.”

We gathered on the sidewalk in front of the parking lot and stared at the line of four bikes. The rain and sudden freeze had encased them all in a thin sheet of ice.

We stood rooted to the concrete and stared for a half-minute, muttering in stacatto bursts of swearing, then stared for another half-minute punctuated by muted expletives while we collectively and silently wondered which bike would be the one that wouldn’t start.

The hypnotic threat of bikes not starting finally lifted and we broke the ice off our machines. We started the engines one by one, listening while each bike turned over as slowly as a hundred-year-old man standing up out of a chair.

We let the bikes idle for several minutes while we packed saddlebags and strapped luggage down. The ice melted off the cylinders and dripped onto the ground, and steamed up off the exhaust pipes.

When we finally got on the road to Reno, it was cold. Damn cold. We watched the snow-coated fields along the highway, and pulled over to warm up three times in the 32 mile stretch. A photo of a snow-coated field beside Route 395 is shown below. It isn’t necessarily a great photo, either, but it illustrates the cold weather on the morning of September 29, 2007.

In Reno we took another break in the parking lot of a fast food joint. Once our fingers regained some feeling, we checked a road map and started plotting our next move. Rather than continue north on 395 where it was sure to only continue being cold, we’d go over the mountains through Donner Pass on I-80 and get to the Central Valley quicker. The Central Valley is always warmer than along the coast or in the mountains. It took us quite some time to get over the eighty miles of mountains, since we could only go six to eight miles before pulling over to warm up. At the stop where the Donner Pass photo was taken, we discovered that it was cold enough to take off our gloves and grab our exhaust pipes to warm up our hands. Normally, that action would have resulted in third degree burns.

From the time we rode into the Central Valley to the end of the road trip the weather seemed warm to us, though it wasn’t.

But it is the negative times that make the good seem so much better by comparison. And every ride since has been warmer than “the time we rode through Donner Pass”.

Camera Obscura

2010-08-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

The photograph below is of the Wells Fargo building in downtown Riverside. I captured the photo from the third story balcony of the California Museum of Photography (CMP). The balcony provides a short walkway to the museum’s camera obscura. The lens of the camera obscura is pointed toward the Wells Fargo building.

The museum exhibits contain photographs by the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, exhibitions, and a camera collection numbering over 10,000, among other attractions. For me those things are the cake. The icing is the camera obscura. I don’t know why, but it is what prompts me to return to the museum, again and again.

A camera obscura is a simple apparatus. It is basically a box with a lens mounted in one wall. Light streaming through the lens creates an image on the far wall of the box. It is a passive system. Once the device is built, it simply works. Nothing has to be done to “make” it create an image. In early versions, a pinhole was used rather than a lens.

The image created by the CMP device, correctly oriented in software, is shown below. When I look at the image, I have to remind myself that this device was used to project images for many hundreds of years before the development of chemical photography, and the idea that razor-sharp focus is a desirable state developed in tandem with modern photography.

It would have been a mind-blowing experience to see a similar image during the time before modern photography, particularly depending on how the camera was oriented. The CMP camera image includes the downtown mall in front of the Wells Fargo building, so the image reflects the movement of trees and people on foot, bicycles, skateboards, etc. The CMP image can easily be considered a motion picture camera – without the ability to record the images.

Though it is a relatively low-maintenance exhibition, the camera obscura does require some maintenance. What appears to be a decades-old staining is on the lens. I can see the dirt on the lens itself, and in the digital image, though it is quite minor. It makes me question a few things, though;

1. How is the lens cleaned? Is it restored with a soft rag, soap, water, and stepladder, or can the lens be removed from its mount?

2. How much difference will a lens cleaning make on the image? Will the image be noticeably brighter?

3. How often is cleaning scheduled? Is maintenance much more frequent than I assume?

A Red Rectangle

2010-08-10T09:33:00.001-07:00

The red rectangle shown below is above the double-door entrance of the California Tower, a building in downtown Riverside.

My eye was drawn to the rectangle when I looked at the facade of the building (shown below).

Spanish Broom

2010-07-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

A native of the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands, Spanish Broom is an invasive shrub in the Americas. It was imported in San Francisco as a decorative shrub in the mid-1900s. In the early twentieth century, it was planted along roadways throughout California to help stabilize the soil and prevent erosion.

The photos in this post are from the San Bernardino Mountains. I assume this is Spanish Broom, rather than the native California Broom, which is the smaller of the two.

It’s very subjective, of course, but it seems that there are twice as many of the yellow shrouded plants than during previous years.

The broom’s thick perfume is reminiscent of honeysuckle, but there are distinct undercurrents of other scents. It isn’t an unpleasant smell. It’s long history of use in perfumery is understandable.

The photo above was taken two days later than the first two. The mist shrouding the peak in the background is a mix of smog and low-lying cloud.

Santa Rosa Blooming

2010-07-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

The photos in this post are from April, 2010. Though I prepared them for the blog, I didn’t post them (and don’t remember why). The forecast for wildflowers this year seemed very good, but the bumper crop never materialized. For a related post, see A Quick Scout.

The scenes are beside a gravel pullout on Sage Road between Hemet and Aguanga, California.

My riding group uses the pullout for a rest stop whenever we ride Sage Road.

A few years ago, the wildflower blooming was quite thick in the Santa Rosas, and particularly strong at this spot. The photos above are what I could see of the relatively thin blooming this year.

A Head Shot

2010-07-06T17:52:00.000-07:00

“He turned his head to stare at me and kept chewing that green stick…”

This one is from the Living Desert in Palm Desert, California.

A Look Back

2010-07-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

After thirteen months, I'm taking a look back at this blog. Post titles are in bold type. Here are the highlights. Or at least the photos from the posts I picked...
To view a post, click on the title.

Seascapes, May 2009. Big Sur. I took this one on a group ride through the Sierra Nevadas, the California Redwoods, and along the Pacific Coast.

Caribbean Sunrise Sequence, May 2009. Atlantic Ocean/Caribbean Sea.

Hot Air Balloons, June 2009. A balloon and wine festival in southern Riverside County.

Red Dragonfly, August 2009. This dragonfly was rather fond of the antenna of Lisa's car.

Eastern Sierra Nevadas Ride, August 2009. This lake was just outside the town of Mammoth Lakes.

Hermosa Beach, October 2009. A tour of Hermosa beach, Lisa's home town.

Riverside Views, November 2009. This is a view of the city from the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Preserve.

Early 2010 Photos, January 2010. This is a view from Mt. Rubidoux.

Vegas, February 2010. I took this with the D200 held out the window of our twentieth floor room at Harrah's.

Chasing Light, March 2010. This group of photos is from the Salton Sea at sunrise.

Bridge Art, April 2010. This one is about shape and color. Photos from the Anza Narrows Railroad Bridge, Riverside, CA.

A Walk Downtown, April 2010. This one is from the Fox Theatre in downtown Riverside. When I arrived in the city in 1971 and lived in the Mission Inn, this was one of three movie houses within easy walking distance.

Grand Teton - Yellowstone Trip, June 2010. This is from a road trip that Lisa and I took in May through Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho.

Constant Gardener, June 2010. My flower gardens went mutant this year. Who knows what this may mean?...

FX01, A Retrospective Look

2010-06-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

It’s really too bad that there is no way to know how a camera or other electronic device will work out until you’ve long since bought it. But now and then one gets lucky. The subject of this post, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01, is a case in point.

The FX01 was given to me by my wife Lisa, as I was preparing to ride my motorcycle across the continent and back in August 2006.

In the photo above is the Kodak DC 3400 on the right, and the camera that replaced it, the FX01. Note the size difference between the two cameras.

The Kodak was a 2MP digital camera, and built like a brick to take abuse. It also handled like a brick. And there was no way to consider it a “pocket” camera. But it fit in the glove compartment of the truck and in the saddlebag.

The FX01 was truly a pocket camera. It easily fit into a jacket pocket, and weighed nearly nothing, so it was rarely out of my reach. I have captured over 26,000 frames with it without major problems of any kind. I recently found “ghosts” on the photos and thought the sensor might be going south. It turned out to be a dirty lens – the first time I’ve had to clean it in four years.

The Menu system (shown above) is simple. My two grandchildren mastered the menus (and all other controls) on this camera between the ages of 2 and 4 years. The secret to that was simple. I let them take photos with it, and only showed them features when asked. This is not a testament to the beating it took at the hands of toddlers, since both children were oddly careful with the camera. But it did take a beating in my pockets, in my backback, and in the motorcycle's saddlebags.

There was little control with this 6MP consumer point-and-shoot camera, but a tripod helped. Also helpful was the exposure compensation control shown in the photo above.

In all, the FX01 I have is still running strong (and with a cleaner lens) after several succeeding generations of digital pocket cameras have passed it by technologically. And it can still capture a good image. Now that’s something.

My experience with the longevity of digital cameras has been good, so far. It is quite unlike my experience with CD/DVD players, which seem to need to be replaced as often as boxes of Kleenex...

Out West

2010-06-26T17:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, Steve Vaughn commented about living "out west". I know what he meant (it doesn't hurt that I met Steve when I was 4 years old and entering the public school system). He and his wife Darryl moved to Richland, WA from the East Coast last year. He is an avid fly fisherman, and in a good location to explore the many rivers in Washington and Oregon. While he is here, working in Richland, and living out west there is so much to see.

I like to keep track of the Vaughn's near-epic move to Washington and how they are settling in, etc., on Steve's blog, Nomads at http://nomadslvaughn.blogspot.com/.

"Out West" is the way I thought of it when I was young, since I lived in the northeast. It was towns like Durango, Cortez, Cheyenne, Sundance, Tucson, and Santa Fe. It was Conestoga wagons and Apaches, Winchester rifles and Lakotas, cattle drives and Dodge City, gold rushes and railroad booms.

My vision of the world is centered in the West, now. "Back East" is where I grew up. I first realized that when I rode my Road Star to Long Island and back in 2006. On the ride home when I crossed over the border between Kansas and Colorado, I suddenly thought, "I'm home, I'm back in the West".

But though I've been here since 1971, I have an idea similar to Steve's about being here in the West: There simply isn't enough time to see everything...

The photo below was captured on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01 in August 2006. The view is east from Ghost Rocks in Utah, just off Interstate 70. There is no mistaking this for anything other than a view of the West.

Constant Gardener

2010-06-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

California Poppies

I'm not sure what happened. I bought several varieties of flower seeds last fall; California Poppies, Vinca, Phlox, and Cosmos. Thought I'd get a jump on the spring and planted a large seed bed. The poppies did well, though they've now generally died back. But they grew nearly twice their average height. The Cosmos are now over four feet tall.

Cosmo

Lisa brought home 3 miniature Mums last fall. I planted them in the front flowerbed, along with the Vinca, Phlox, and Geraniums, figuring they wouldn't grow much taller than their neighbors. But they are quite large plants now, each with at least 50 blooms.

There must be something in the soil. Something that doubles plant size. Even the Phlox and Vinca are twice their usual size. The mutations have ruined my landscaping plan, though - I had everything laid out according to relative maximum heights...

Zinnia

The Constant Gardener part:

Everything is way too overgrown now. I spent six hours today thinning out, weeding, potting the mutant "miniature" Mums, and replacing thinned plants with new Vinca and Zinnias. The Vinca does well in this climate. Maybe this planting will last through to Fall...

About The Photographs

The digital photos in this post were made with a Nikon D200. Photos were resized for Web display. The other particulars are listed below.

California Poppies - Nikon manual Series E 28mm 1:2.8, 1/200, f/8, ISO 200.

Cosmo - Nikon AF VR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 G,

1/640, f/5.6, ISO 400.

Zinnia - Nikon AF VR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 G,

1/100, f/14, ISO 400.

Mill Creek Canyon

2010-06-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

The photos in this post were made in Mill Creek Canyon at the edge of the San Bernardino Mountains near Mountain Home Village in Southern California.

Mill Creek is fed by numerous creeks flowing from the mountains through the village of Forest Falls. The water rolls through Mill Creek Canyon and onto the floodplain north of Mentone, where it joins the Santa Ana River.

Aero

2010-06-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Photos from a classic automobile show in Riverside, CA. Nikon D200, Nikon AF VR 18-105mm f3.5-5.6.

Olympus Trip

2010-06-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

I don’t recall when this camera showed up. Really. One day many vaguely recalled years ago, it suddenly appeared in my office. I thought it was something Lisa had brought home (she didn't), so I let it rest on my desk for a short time, moved it to a drawer, then transferred it to yet another drawer years later.
A couple weeks ago I pulled it out of the drawer and set it on the corner of the desk. I looked at it occasionally every day. Though it obviously wouldn’t replace the Nikon N90s, it had to have some function, I thought. Otherwise, why did I have it?

The Olympus Trip XB40 AF is a decade-old point-and-shoot camera. It has a 27mm lens and an Autofocus capability of sorts. To engage the autofocus, press the shutter button down halfway. Press the shutter button all the way down to take the photo.

It was a somewhat interesting design. For a brick. Well, a plastic brick with a sliding lens cover. But in operation it is quite like so many millions of other point-and-shoot cameras.

I finally loaded the camera with two AA batteries and a roll of Kodak Gold 200. The film loaded easily. After pulling the leader out to the take-up spool, shut the rear camera door, turn on the camera, press the shutter button once, then the camera loads the film.
The camera back is equipped with a programmable date/time stamp function.

These artifacts must be everywhere… And I’ll bet that this particular camera has a real value of about $3.00, just a bit less than the film I loaded in it.

The camera is about as simple as these types of cameras got – until the disposable cameras came along.

I put the camera in Lisa’s car – in the same place where she keeps a disposable camera. I’m wondering how the camera works in its intended role of cheap snapshot camera. After all, that’s what it was designed for.

I’ll update this story when I know if the camera worked and how the film looks in general.

This could be the jump-off point to write in favor of not using the disposable cameras. Put less plastic in waste bins and trash cans by using old point-and-shoot cameras like the Olympus Trip. You know the dance. Fortunately, this post is not about that. I'm just interested to see if the camera has a function, and if it performs it adequately...Stay tuned.

For a different viewpoint (and better photo) of this camera, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/artysmokes/4326527484/

The Green Desert

2010-06-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

Making use of our yearlong National Parks Pass, I was through the southern gate at Joshua Tree around 6:40 this morning. I haven't been to Joshua Tree since winter, and though there was plenty of rainfall in the past few months, I didn't expect as much green in the arid landscape this late in the year. Usually by mid-June the shrubbery is dry and brown.

The shrubbery was so green that it looked much like farmland in the distance.

Smoke Tree Wash. Smoke trees are found in desert washes. The washes have deep moisture reserves, but more importantly, flash floods spread the tree's seeds.

Some plants are still blooming.

The ocotillo in bloom above, adds a peppering of red blooms against the blue sky.

Closer view of an ocotillo. The leaves sprout on the trunk and the plant blooms only after adequate rainfall. Blooming is not seasonal.

Honeybees were noisily engaged with these flowers.

More color.

Grand Teton - Yellowstone Trip

2010-06-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

It was a very loose plan.

We’d pack up the Subaru Forester at the end of May and head toward the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks in northwestern Wyoming. There were a number of parks, monuments, preserves and wilderness areas that we could pass through, particularly in Utah. I’d do the majority of the driving while Lisa handled the maps and we’d stop for the night when we wanted. Loose plans are the best plans on a road trip.

Digital photos of the trip are shown below.

Zion National Park, Utah

Hoodoos in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

Capitol Reef National Park

Irrigation equipment near Torrey, Utah

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

California Poppies

2010-06-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

The photograph below is really of orange shapes with a semi-blurred background. The orange shapes are California Poppies, which grow wild across the state. On a whim, I planted the wildflower from Burpee seeds in January. The poppies have done well so far in our flowerbeds, though the coming summer heat may change that.

The semi-blurred background was intentional. I wanted focus on all five blossoms, so I stopped down to f/8 and focused where I judged the near 1/3rd point of the grouping to be. This smaller aperture doesn't produce the bokeh of f/2.8, but there is a mild blur that draws the eye back to the blossoms. Shutter speed was 1/250. 28mm Nikon manual focus lens.

Grand Teton - Yellowstone Film

2010-06-08T17:55:00.001-07:00

I shot eight rolls of film on the Grand Teton-Yellowstone road trip. It was largely a matter of the way it feels to shoot analog. Good, that is. The N90s feels good in my hands, and looks right through the 28mm lens. It is particularly well balanced when the stock battery cartridge is used with the relatively lightweight fixed focal legnth lens.

Seven days of shooting film was a relief of sorts, since I wasn't putting any particular pressure on the photos. It was experimental. A way of spending time with the camera. I have to say that after a few hundred frames, I like the film camera as well as the digital.

The big surprise was getting the film developed. I shot Fuji Superia 400 print film, then took it to Costco for development, prints and digital files. The online reviews of Costco are generally good when development and printing are analyzed. I was very happy with the quality of negatives and prints. The digital files are poor from the Costco I used (the large amount of heavy grain in the digital example shown below does not exist in the neg or print). But with the masters (negatives) and prints in good shape, it doesn't matter much to me.

The May 2010 Post

2010-05-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry. I guess this is it for this month. I've been preoccupied with various things gone sideways and Lisa and I are gearing up for a road trip to Yellowstone Nat. Park during the last week of the month (and I'm counting).

The photo below is a digital scan of a black and white print made last week at a wedding for friends Julie and Brandon. I picked up two rolls of Kodak Pro BW400CN before the wedding after reading reviews online, but mostly because I found it at a local pharmacy. It was that film or the El Cheapo variation.

I heard that they had a wedding photographer, so I assumed he or she would be shooting posed traditional color photos. I thought that the black and white would be something different, and I'd shoot candids.

The BW400CN develops in C-41 chemicals, which are for developing color film negatives. After developing one roll after the wedding I had a dozen frames left on the second roll, and waited three days to shoot the end of the roll. The Nikon N90s got 25 frames from each 24-frame roll.

I don't like this film much. It tends to underexpose by about 1/3 Stop for my taste. There's something off about the look of the prints, too. I expected more pronounced grades of mid tones. It was probably an operator problem, of course...

Posting A Comment

2010-04-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

Someone recently asked how to leave a comment on this blog, and I answered in an indirectly routed email. I don't get a lot of comments on this blog. That worries me, at times. Who know what that may mean? Seems like there should be more, because like me, everyone has a boatload of opinions.
But maybe it is the comment process itself that is the problem. My instructions on posting a comment on this blog can be found below.

Posting A Comment
1. Click on the Comment link at the bottom of the page. The Comment link is cleverly disguised among other text, as shown below.

2. The Comments text box will open. To enter your comment, remark, or rumination, click in the text box, then type. It'll help if you stay on topic, though. I know very little about many things, including aerospace engineering, French cooking, and Pre-Columbian American pottery, but topics I've written about are probably safe...

3. When you're done typing, "Select a Profile" from the Comment as drop-down list, as shown below. "Anonymous" works if you don't have one of the accounts listed.

You can sign the comment in the text box, of course (or not).

4. When you're ready, you can post the comment by clicking on the Post Comment button.

The comment will be routed via email through me. It may take a few hours (or a day or two, if I'm off shooting) for me to see the email, so there may be some time lag before it is public.

You can also Preview your comment before posting it by clicking on the Preview button. The preview dialog box will open (below). You can post from this dialog box, in addition to the one above.

So,comment away. If you like something, hate something, or both, let everyone know about it...