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I don’t know what they’re calling it, or why it is here, but for the last few days I’ve been hearing an awful lot of music and screaming coming from the mall down the hill. The traveling carnival that came through last year is back again. Simi Valley mall-goers can now finish their hard day of shopping by throwing darts at balloons and being flung upside down through the air in the parking lot! Coming home from work during the golden hour before sunset I saw it as a fun chance for photography. So I dropped my work backpack, grabbed my camera, and walked down to the mall. I walked around, took a few daylight shots, then got a coffee to kill 30 minutes and let the sun go down; I figured that a lot of well-lit spinning things might make interesting subjects.

Strangely enough, to this day, every time I see one of those “Zipper” rides I can’t help but remember riding one a ridiculous number of times one  year at the VA State Fair with this girl I really liked; we’re talking like 15 years ago or something.  It is strange how well some associations get lodged in my brain while other more important and more recent ones are forgotten.

I wonder how many people travel around from city to city with carnivals like this all year? They have quite a fleet of RVs traveling with them, which I assume is to house the people staffing it.

I had to drop Mary off at LAX early yesterday morning. As I drove out of LAX I decided to explore the neighborhood a bit since I was already up, drove all the way down there, and the sun had just come up over the horizon. Considering how long I’ve been here, I really have not seen very much of LA. I drove around the airport first, looking for an interesting vantage point for planes coming and going, but failing to find one shortly found myself next to the beach headed south. I ended up stopping in Manhattan Beach to walk around and get some breakfast. I can recommend The Local Yolk, and in particular the chorizo omelet.

The first few blocks from the beach appeared full of expensive houses with very modern architecture. I’m guessing the real estate is not cheap. It did seem like a nice place for a morning bicycle ride.

Eons ago (err…Mar 5th), an intrepid group of camera toting wilderness explorers converged on Wildrose campground in Death Valley National Park. Arriving just in time to set camp before dark, they put up their tents, lit a fire, lit their propane stoves, and began cooking lots of tasty food and tapping their mini-keg of tasty beer.

The next morning, we began our epic ascent up the snow covered mountains to Telescope peak. The road to the charcoal kilns was closed, so we hiked up the treacherous gravel road towards the kilns.

As we got higher and higher, we faced the challenging terrain of scattered snow remains…sometimes in the middle of the road. Finally we reached the kilns, making it through the bitter cold and challenging terrain. We were now only 10 miles from the peak. However, climbing the mountain is not worth your life, and we had other things to do that day, so, we resisted our summit fever and decided to head back down the treacherous gravel road, get into our suburban and drive elsewhere. However, the descent proved to be just too difficult, so we found a generous old man who would take us to the bottom in the bed of his pickup.

Once we made it back to the relative safety of the suburban, we headed out to neabry Aguereberry Point, on the recommendation of the campground hosts. Along the way, we stopped to explore the abandoned Eureka Mine, set into a hill.

Looking down from the hill that is Eureka mine, we saw a compound. This compound turned out to be Pete Aguereberry’s former home, which he occupied until 1945.  Things are surprisingly well maintained out there.

It is a bit of a fixer-upper. But it comes with appliances!

And don’t miss the lovely shed area in the back, complete with cleaning supplies by the barrel:

I guess ole’ pete left his car out in the desert as well. It was sitting 100 feet from the house, and it has seen better days.

Finally, after taking a combined total of approximately 3 million photographs of a rusty car, somebody looked over and saw a gaping hole in the side of the mountain, and said, “What’s in there?”

We poked our heads in to see what we could see, and in the entrance room we found more old rusty stuff! Incredible!

We went in as far as the light would allow, and the tunnel seemed endless. The most daring among us simply had to see where it went. So, one quick trip back to the ‘burban for some lights and in we go! It was anticlimactic, to say the least. About 20 feet in, probably 6 inches beyond what we could see without the lights, the tunnel ends uneventfully with some boxes.

Telescope Peak, 11,043′ above sea level, looking out over bad water at 282 below it. This is from November, when I got the idea one Friday evening that I would drive up to Death Valley and climb it. I camped Saturday night in a chilly 22F, and headed up the trail first thing in the morning. Had to camp at Thorndike Campground, since the Prius was not quite able to make it up the last couple miles to Mahagony Flats; at least not comfortably.

*I’ve discovered a significant flaw in my javascript pano viewer: You cannot run the same script on two different images in one page. Just click through to the post to see/pan the image.
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I am frequently amazed at how much better photos can come out when I process the RAW sensor capture myself instead of letting the camera do it. Usually, it is just the extra bit depth that allows me to gain up an image after the fact. I hate overexposure. Highlights drive me nuts; that’s information you’re never getting back. Fortunately though, when you have 12-bits of dynamic range (which I do with a raw, as long as the ISO is relatively low), you can afford to gain the image up quite a bit after the fact. End result: I tend to underexpose and fix it later. It’s safer.

Sometimes though, there is more too it than that. In tonight’s example, frankly, I have no idea what the camera is doing to screw up this image so badly. Sometimes the color processing is right-on; tonight it was way out in left field. I had the camera set on the “Vivid” mode, and I have a feeling that just didn’t work out well with such a saturated image. In any case, I’ve taken to shooting RAW+JPEG all the time. JPEGs give you a quick preview, and a quick upload, on any computer. The RAW is there if I want to post-process, which I almost always do with the good ones. It certainly slows down the capture speed and eats up storage though.

JPEG from the D90:

JPEG from the RAW:

Now if only I can get the shot framed right. It looks like that MIGHT have been a nice crown in the splash, but it is awkwardly cropped out.

This was a royal pain in my ass to get working, and frankly, it’s not that interesting. I’ve been scouring the net for a way to display large panoramas recently. I was looking for a flash app, initially, but I couldn’t find anything I didn’t have to pay for. I finally decided to try out a javascript approach from here.

Getting it running in a stand-alone HTML file was not too bad. But I just killed a good chunk of my evening getting the stupid thing to display correctly in the post. Eventually it got to the point where it was actually working, except that I somehow triggered chrome’s cross-site scripting detection. I still have on idea why. But, it seems it only happens in the preview, sooooo….here you are. Aguereberry Point, in Death Valley:

Higher-res version of the shot is on flickr.

This weekend Mary and I packed up the car before dawn and headed north for Sonora, CA.  We got lunch in Sonora, then saw “Christmas, My Way” — a Frank Sinatra Christmas tribute show — at the Fallon House Theatre in Columbia State Park. Afterwards, we headed off to Yosemite valley to spend the night camping in the snow.  I’ve been to Yosemite twice now. The first time, we camped in Toulumne Meadows, and that area was awesome. But, when we went into the Valley it pretty much sucked. The roads were a traffic jam, and there were people EVERYWHERE. This weekend was so much calmer, and the snow was nice. When we first left camp around sunrise, the valley was nearly deserted. People started emerging from the lodges a bit later, but it was still a pretty quiet place.

Inscriptions on the wall at the Hong Kong Garden Restaurant in Sonora, CA. We figured these to be cattle brands for local ranchers(either past or present). We're not really sure though. FYI, if you are in Sonora and thinking of eating at this restaurant, I definitely do not recommend it, despite the interesting decor.

Just some blocked off stairs on the end of a bridge that caught my eye

Yosemite Creek

More is in this set on Flickr (or view slideshow).

Hello wandering reader. You are, no doubt, here because you are looking for something desperately enough to make it all the way to page 10 of your search results, where you found me. I know it is you, because I’m quite sure that my three regular readers from long ago have long since stopped checking for any new posts. However, I am not dead. Just quiet. I don’t actually have anything to say, but I have been taking a lot of photos recently (Mostly using my wonderful girlfriend’s Nikon D50), so I thought I’d share a few here.

I saw this lucky bamboo at Ikea today for $3. I thought it looked cool, and they had the perfect vase for it for only $0.79. I got to wondering how you make bamboo curl like that, so I went and looked it up.  So, someone, somewhere, has been patiently and slowly rotating my bamboo around for at least a year, until it was shipped to Burbank so I could buy it for $3. I’m often amazed at just how cheap some things are. Then again, perhaps they fed it some kind of bamboo super-grow fertilizer and it grows a couple of inches in a month instead of a couple per year.

Paraglider at Torrey Pines Glider Port

The pier at Paradise Cove in Malibu. Went for breakfast here last week. Was a pretty nice place, ate breakfast at a table on the sand, then walked on the beach for a bit.

More on my Flickr page. Just click any of the photos.

Photoshop is pretty cool. Gimp is nice…but photoshop…its just better.

This is a combination of shots taken while walking out into some sand dunes at Death Valley a couple months ago.

Mary and I spent the 4th of July weekend in San Francisco, where we saw a fireworks show unlike any I’d ever seen: Fireworks through fog. Actually, we couldn’t even see most of the good stuff. But when it got really loud and the clouds got really bright, you knew it was a good part. The crowd didn’t seem too put off. Neither were we. San Francisco is an awesome city! We rented bikes on Saturday and went on a nice long ride around the city, going over the Golden Gate Bridge, and riding through Golden Gate Park.

On the way out Sunday, we stopped by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in the camera, but this place was cool. And free! We got to see a working demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine #2 which was built a few years ago by a guy from the London Science Museum. I saw an older version of the Babbage difference engine in London when I was there, but it was in a glass case and I didn’t really understand how it worked. In mountain view they give demonstrations regularly where they go through how it works and actually crank out the first 30 values of a polynomial. In the demo we saw, the machine got jammed and the terms after that ended wrong. I think I’ll stick to my silicon-based computing. But it was cool to see none-the-less. They also had all kinds of old computer hardware, including a 2ft diameter hard disk platter (it stored 10MB, I believe it was)! They have a video about the museum on youtube.

A few more pictures after the jump…

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