Posting A Comment

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...

A Walk Downtown

The photos in this post are from downtown Riverside, taken around midday on April 18, 2010. I woke that morning with the idea that I should take a camera on a trip to the large Central Library. It wouldn’t hurt to have some different books to read and I could shoot the Mission Inn across the street from the Library.

By the time I put the camera in the backpack a few hours later, the idea had evolved from a trip to the library to a photo hunt with a stop at the Library at the end. I parked beside the library and walked through its grounds. The trees in the first photo were scattering cotton-like seeds in the wind when I walked around the building’s corner toward the courtyard. That’s what the airborne “snow” in the photo is.

I’ve grown to like and use the 28mm manual focus lens a great deal on the digital camera. This has had a couple of effects. I’m frequently swapping the lens between the film and digital cameras, so I’m getting more dust on the low pass filter over the sensor. I’ve grown used to cleaning the sensor using a bulb blower. I picked up some dust in the middle of the frame a week ago and used the blower. What was unexpected was that a piece of dust that had hung stubbornly on the edge of the sensor area for months was finally dislodged. I had the idea that I’d never get it off and would be editing it out of photos for the duration of the camera’s life. 

The pagoda on the library grounds was built to honor the contributions of Chinese immigrants who helped build Riverside. I like the way the trees behind the structure largely mask the Mission Inn and other signs of the city across the street. It creates an almost separate space in the city.

Below is the east side of the Mission Inn, which faces the Library. I lived on this side of the Inn, which takes up more than a block, in 1971-1972. It was handy at the time, having the library across the street, since I had a typewriter, and a record player, but no TV.

The photos below are of the shaded walkway lining the southern flank of the inn. When I crossed the street after shooting the east face of the Mission Inn, I saw this couple walking toward me. It looked like an ad photo to me. I didn’t have time to change any settings. I looked through the viewfinder, pulled the focus back, and shot quickly.

After shooting two more frames I noticed that the guy was quite aware that I was shooting them. I looked up from the viewfinder and said, “You two look good.” The following two frames caught their reactions to the statement.

The next photo is of the south side of the Mission Inn.

The two following photos were taken at Fox Theatre on the corner of Market Street and Mission Inn Avenue. The Fox was the site of the sneak premier of Gone With The Wind eight decades ago. It was one of three operating movie theatres within walking distance of my studio apartment at the inn in 1971. Long neglected, the Fox Theatre reopened after a long restoration in January with pair of concerts by Sheryl Crow.

I had to zoom in with my feet for the next photo, since I was using a fixed focus lens.

The Obligatory Fire Hydrant Photograph

Sometimes a fire hydrant is just a fire hydrant. This is one of those times.

The fire hydrant depicted below is on my street. I watched this photo unfold itself yesterday, periodically noting how the light and tree shadows fell on the scene at different times, then walked up with the camera at 5:23pm today for the Photo.

At that time, the shadows cast on the scene were from the treetops, rather than the elongated shadows of palm and ash trunks. The long shadows nearer to sundown were likely to arrive in golden light, but I couldn't shoot because my shadow would be in the frame.

Here are the gearhead statistics: Nikon D200 body, Nikon 18-105mm VR DX 3.5-5.6 G ED lens. Aperture priority at f/9, shutter speed 1/80s, ISO 100, 58mm focal length, multi-pattern metering.

I chose f/9 to keep the twin palms behind the hydrant in focus, rather than blurring them out with the lens wide open. I rarely shoot at higher than ISO 200. If it's dark enough to think about increasing the ISO speed, 99 percent of the time I prefer the results of the longer exposure using a tripod or with the camera braced on a stable object like a boulder, etc.

A 100 percent crop of the photo is shown below. The blue tape on the top of the hydrant is what was left after a yard sale sign was posted on it a few months ago.

(There. I just achieved my lifelong goal of reasonably using the word "hydrant" five times in under 250 words. Since I began to write 54 years ago, this has been no small undertaking. Now, what's next?)

An Odd One

The strange flower shown here is an onion blossom. I find it rather odd looking. Last year Lisa brought home a pot with onions growing in it. I watered it along with everything else, but we never harvested the onions. It being the plants' second year, they've sent up long stalks to bud like this.

Bridge Art

The photos in this post are of the graffiti art around the bases of the columns supporting the Anza Narrows railroad bridge in Riverside, California.

All photos were shot with a 28mm manual focus lens on a Nikon digital SLR. The photo below is as good a place to start as any, and better than some…

The piece above reminds me of the artwork of R. Crumb.
The art below sports the 3D drop shadow effect. It seems out of place with the other graffiti art around it. It is too industrial and unimaginative for my taste, but the up side of it is that it can easily be painted over by someone with more talent. Relap? So What?

I had a hard time focusing on the piece below. Until I realized that the piece itself was “out of focus”. Fuzzy. I picked a spot that was relatively sharp, focused, and pressed the shutter button.

When I saw the piece below my interest increased. The three photos below are of the same piece of art. I kept moving closer to frame photos. My favorite is the last one, the extreme close-up. It reminds me of paintings, and I’m partial to the black/white/red scheme anyway.

Anza Narrows Bridge

On a previous visit to Anza Narrows, I walked down to the railroad bridge and shot a few frames of film. I only had a film camera with me at the time, but I made a note to go back with the digital and shoot for this blog.

These photos were shot with a Nikon 28mm f/2.8 E series manual focus lens on my digital camera. The 1.5 crop factor makes it equivalent to a 42mm lens on a 35mm camera. This is the second E series 28mm lens, the improved version first manufactured in 1981.

I bought the 28mm for use with the film camera, but have been using it as much on the digital. It helps make up an easy-to-deal-with hiking kit; a camera body, a small, lightweight lens, a couple of filters, and a lens cloth.

Off the bike trail, the base of every supporting column on the bridge is wrapped in street art of various quality. The columns near the bike trail have been repainted with vaguely matching paint to cover the grafitti, as shown in the photo above.

To see more of the bridge art at Anza Narrows, see the post titled Bridge Art. 

Anza Narrows

Its nearly always a good thing to uncover a new viewpoint. I've been driving and riding by the entrance to a Riverside County Park for decades, but never stopped to see it until a couple weeks ago, though it is within a mile of my house.

It suddenly occurred to me that the Martha McLean/Anza Narrows Park might have a good view to the north, so I went to the park. The guard at the entrance let me ride in and take a look around.  A short putt to the parking and picnic areas convinced me that I had to go back for the viewpoints near the first parking area. Repeatedly. Anza Narrows is an area of the Santa Ana River basin where the river meanders generally westward and flows under a multiple-arched railroad bridge. The railroad bridge is a concrete construction, but the arches look good despite the mundane building material. I walked down to the bridge once. But I only shot film, so it will be a while before those photos appear. If ever.

These digital photos were largely “test” shots for the 35mm SLR. Though engineered more than a decade apart, the N90s’ area metering and the D200’s matrix metering kept matching each other spot-on. The view above is of Mt. Rubidoux and the buildings of downtown Riverside in the far distance. The bike trail in the foreground runs from the Inland Empire along the river through a long canyon bordering the mountains of the Cleveland National Forest to Orange County on the coastal plain.

Is that Hawaii? No, but it does look quite tropical. Its another view of the Santa Ana River bottom.

The photo above is another long view of Mt. Rubidoux and downtown Riverside. Note that you can’t see the concrete trails, because I walked back to the crest of the slope, which blocked them from my line-of-sight.

The above photo is yet another reason to visit Anza Narrows frequently. The park, like all Riverside County Parks has a per-vehicle entrance fee. $5 for an automobile. $2 for a bicycle or motorcycle. I paid the $2.00 entrance fee a couple times then bought a one year pass to all County parks for $25. I’ll be going to the narrows frequently, since it is so close by, but the pass also covers an additional thirteen regional parks and a number of recreation centers.

Rainscape

Something very rain happened last night. When I walked out to the driveway this morning, Lisa's car's hood looked like this. This is the result of a couple layers of carnuba wax. 

To see some detail, click on the photo below, a crop of the photo above.

Archiving Film and Digital

I was recently reading an article on the archival difference between film and digital photographs. The story slant was why it is better to shoot film rather than digital.

The author made the point that " Flash memory cards and hard drives may lose data after ten or twenty years of use, and everyone knows they are susceptible to failures and other problems. Data recovery systems have vastly improved, but when you risk losing the original digital negative, it can be frightening".

This statement is partially true, since everyone does know that hard drives and flash memory cards are susceptible to failures and other problems. But no one is likely to use a hard drive for twenty or even ten years. In addition, it is extremely unlikely that anyone will need to recover data from a hard drive that has been sitting in the garage for fifteen years.

Why is this so unlikely? Because computer users, as a general rule, tend to periodically upgrade their computer systems and those new systems come with bigger, faster, and supposedly more reliable than before hard drives. Oddly, no one asks for smaller hard drives with a new computer, regardless of what year it is. The repeating upgrades are part of a vicious cycle.

When a user upgrades, all the important files are transferred to the new, bigger hard drive. In short order they start using programs that take advantage of the new technology platform to create bigger files. They back up on whatever media makes sense at the time, a progression of events that brought them from 5.25" floppy drives to one and two terrabyte drives, so far. None of the important data is left behind. If you forgot to bring along that 1 megapixel photo of aunt Margaret's shoe when you upgraded to a machine running Windows XP, it probably wasn't important.

Of course the downcurve of the cycle is when the computer no longer measures up to the current operating system, and can't take advantage of the new whiz-bang applications that run only on the new operating system/hardware. Then its time to upgrade again. And transfer your files to the new system with the huge new storage capacity.

So the files aren't lost. You just won't have your "original digital negative". So what? By definition, a copy of a digital file is the same as the "original". It doesn't matter if it is originally stored on a machine running Windows 3.0, then transferred through a succession of years, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs, and eight hard drives to end up stored on the current Windows 7 machine. You still have the original. Barring a general collapse of world civilization, your great grandchildren will be able to look at your images in a hundred years, just like properly archived film.

Film Versus Digital is a "controversy" that breeds Web stories, print magazine articles, and blog posts like this one. But there is no controversy. Its made up. Film and digital are two very different processes. There is no winner or loser, just two different avenues of approach to photography.

It's like comparing hammers to lasers. Both will eventually reduce a boulder to a pile of pea gravel, but are used in different ways which result in the same end product, thousands of pieces of pea gravel.