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. Read the rest of this entry »
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:
In January, I went to India for two weeks with a couple of friends. Vivek is from Lucknow, and was visiting his family; Htay and I came along. The first place we went when we arrived in India was to Bangalore where we met Vivek’s girlfriend, Pallavi (who, incidentally, became Vivek’s fiance shortly after we got there). We had a few fun days in Bangalore, hanging out with Pallavi and some of her friends, and then we had to leave to Lucknow. This gallery is dedicated to Vivek, Pallavi, and Pallavi’s electronic incarnation which traveled with us everywhere, always attached to Vivek’s ear.
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Full screen version is here, or right-click to open a particular image in the show..
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
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.
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.
Sam Harris has a Newsweek article up about Sarah Palin, and America’s apparent penchant for mediocrity in politicians. When McCain was nominated, I had decided that this was an election I could live with either way. There are some things to like about McCain. His choice of Palin changed that real fast. John McCain is 72 years old, can’t dress himself without help, and Sarah Palin as POTUS is a very scary prospect. Please, please, please, please America, do not elect her vice president. Any policy differences between McCain and Obama are completely mute points next to the possibility of Sarah Palin as president.
What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world’s only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
“Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child’s brain?”
“Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I’m an avid hunter.”
“But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind.”
“That’s just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink.”
If the US presidential election was being held worldwide, it looks like Obama would be on course for an easy victory. At least according to a Pew Research Survey, in June. Perhaps republicans have good reason to resist immigration. Courtesty of Alex at The Daily Transcript, who discussed it as part of his “Let’s talk about facts this election” series.
