This is a guest post from Gregg Stevens. His story resonates with me in particular because he is in the same business as I am, running campgrounds. The story begins with the proverbial tree falling in the forest.
I used to think there wasn’t much a hole in the ground could do. The hole could get bigger, or it could get smaller. And that’s about it. But I’ve recently learned that a hole in the ground can not only suck an enormous amount of money, time and energy from a fellow, it can drive him to the edge of madness as well.
I run a small campground on a river in northern California, and one winter day a big old fir tree blew over into the water. It’s fairly common for trees to fall here on the heavily wooded, storm-battered Mendocino Coast. But this particular tree was a bit different than most. For it fell under the benevolent gaze of the California Coastal Commission.
I had always assumed the cover for the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper album was just a photo mosaic, a cut and paste of photos that was then re-photographed into the final image. But it appears to have been shot life-size all at once. More here. Apparently Hitler and Jesus just missed the cut. Can you imagine anyone even bothering with this in the age of Photoshop?
I found this picture, c. 1961, in some old photos my parents took. From the photos around it, it looks to have been taken on a driving tour of ante-bellum mansions in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Update: Readers identified it as Longwood, an old mansion in Mississippi, which appears to have been fixed up since this was take.n
I had never seen Ansel Adams series of photos from a US internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII. I had mixed feelings about them. Adams said that he wanted to portray the resiliency of those imprisoned, showing how they made the best of a bad situation. And certainly I have great respect for that, and the cultural strengths we see at work are a prelude to how Japan itself was rebuilt after the devastation of WWII.
But at another level I find these photos incredibly creepy. They look too much like the fake photos staged by Germans and Russians of various eras to airbrush the horrors of their concentration camps. I am willing to believe we Americans were better jailers, but none-the-less I was disturbed that these looked a lot like propaganda photos.
What do all the people pictured in these photos have in common? The are all innocent -- by definition, since they have not plead in any court or gone to trial.
Sorry, I know he has added the reminder that these folks are innocent on that page, but this kind of public shaming and ridicule for un-convicted arrestees (part and parcel with other favorites like the perp walk) are absolutely inappropriate for the police to engage in. It is absurd to see our Sheriff running his only little TMZ.
(Yes, I know there are private sites that engage in this, as the photos are public information. I have always wondered why arrest records are not confidential, but that is another post. There is a big difference between a private entity engaging in such a behavior and a law enforcement officer doing so.)
Joe Arpaio, I suppose seeing how Ben Quayle rode his writing gig for the Dirty into Congress, has decided he wants to compete with all manner of bottom-fishing web sites. He has created a special web feature in a what he states is an attempt to drive more people to his web site -- the goofy booking photo of the day.
Several local lawyers, including some mental health advocates, are asking if it is appropriate for a sheriff to run online contests to vote for the inmate with the worst booking photos. This is a great example of a situation (like video surveillance) where public officials have less, rather than more rights and privileges than ordinary citizens. Kudos to Scott Ambrose for making a point that is seldom made, and we should remind politicians of all the time:
Arpaio says that booking photos are aired in the news media every day. A local alternative weekly even took a page from Arpaio's playbook earlier this year and let readers have fun with some of the sheriff's mug shots.
"Sheriff Joe will argue that 'I can do this because New Times can,' " Ambrose said. "There's lots of things the government can't do that you and I can."
I have another question - for what possible public purpose is Arpaio spending taxpayer money to drive people to his web site? This is so incredibly self-serving its hard to believe, but fits right in with Arpaio's whole history of taxpayer-funded self-promotion.
PS- I have always argued that booking photos should not be public information, as they amount to an improper punishment. The legal system has a technical term for someone who has been arrested but has not gone to trial: Innocent.
I am still trying to figure out how traditional film photographers got great outdoor photos. I struggle with haze and a loss of vibrancy in distant photos, as if the images were photographed through dirty glass. Maybe filters? More vibrancy in the film (I know that drove a lot of Kodak users to Fuji)?
Anyway, I don't have to rely on film, and can fiddle around with Photoshop until I get things right. I used it in this image to lighten some dark areas and then eliminated the haze effects by painting the whole image with a low-opacity color burn (I used to use a neutral gray for this but I have had better luck using a color with much of the blue taken out (using the RGB sliders in the color selection)). I gave a second helping of the color burn to the buildings only, to make them pop a bit. I try to stay far away from the contrast controls - every photo I have ever ruined started downhill with the contrast control. Instead, I went into each of the R-G-B channels in the "levels" section and fiddled with the distributions a bit, in effect widening the distributions (only a little) to get a tad more contrast.
I think it came out pretty well -- I was at an art show with a guy selling almost this exact same photo from the exact same spot and I think mine compared favorably with his art shot. The only thing I think might have improved it was to get morning light, but I was not going to camp out for 18 hours to do so.
Anyway, this is Vernazza, one of the five towns of Cinqueterre on the Italian Riviera, taken from the fabulous walking trail the connects the five towns. As usual click for enlargement.
On the monitor screen, the colors are perhaps a bit over-saturated but by trial and error it looks great on paper (at least with my printer -- the color variation among printers and papers is really astonishing once you start paying attention to it).
Below, by the way, is the original digital image. If someone can tell me what I am doing wrong (filters, camera selection, etc) to get such crappy original images, I would be appreciative. It looks like I haven't cleaned the lens or something. All I am using is a pretty good quality UV filter (mostly just to protect the lens) on a Nikon D50 with the stock Nikon lens.
I am a terrible photographer and seem to struggle getting any good pictures. But with a little patience and some study, my yield has gone up, though it still is well under 20%. Just for self-motivation, rather than any sense anyone out there is interested, here are a few of my recent photos that I thought came out pretty well. A couple are experiments with HDR photography. As usual click for enlargement:
Cinque Terre. The HDR process in the first one really brings out the details, but like a sharpness filter turned up too high, the image falls apart when zoomed too much.
The next one could have been awesome if I had waited, say, 12 hours for the sun to be in the right place
This is the town of Portovenere
And at night, which was beautiful but I tried a zillion exposures and could never get quite what I wanted
I loved all the little winding staircases. I struggled to capture the romantic element that attracted me to them. This one came out the best, but still failed to get what I wanted
A couple of views from the roof of the Milan Duomo. I really loved walking among the flying buttresses and thought these made interesting subjects. These are probably my favorite shots from the whole batch. They are both HDR shots.
And here are the spires on the same roof:
The Grand Canyon and Sedona
Haze seems to be my never-ending enemy of good landscape photos. I have tried filters of various sorts. In the shot below, I tried HDR which really cut the haze but left the tree in the foreground as a blur (due to its movement between the photos that were combined to make the picture).
One of the perils of being a small school is that sports requires a lot of travel. In Arizona (unlike Texas where I grew up) the private schools do not have their own prep league for athletics, but play with the public schools based on their size (e.g. 1A to 5A). Ours is a 1A school that generally plays 2A because we get more teams to play that way. In soccer we play 3A, which can be a tough road when a school that has barely 120 boys in the high school play schools with 900+ kids. But we made it to the state finals last year, so we hold our own.
Anyway, last week we actually played a school within the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park, just a stones throw from the south rim visitors center and the El Tovar lodge. That was awesome - nothing like post-game parent cocktails on a deck looking at the sunset over the rim of the canyon. (I am on the road but will post a few photos next week).
The Grand Canyon is spectacular, but there is something about looking down into it that reduces its beauty. You only really see its real drama hiking down into it (e.g. the Bright Angel or the harder but more beautiful Kaibab trail from the South Rim). If you want to talk about really spectacular scenery, I think Sedona beats the Grand Canyon, at least from the rim.
This week my son's team played a small school in Sedona, a pretty old boarding school called Verde Valley HS. Its got an IB program and a lot of horses and a drop-dead location, and has been getting some popularity in this area and in SoCal. Anyway, I have seen some nice kids fields, but this one was pretty spectacular. Unfortunately I only had my crappy cell phone camera but here is a sample:
I had wanted to make more progress this weekend, but we had an astoundingly rare tragedy at one of our campgrounds (family got hit by lightening) so handling that had to take priority. But before that came awful bit of news, I did make some layout progress. Mostly I was tearing my hair out trying to weather a grain elevator, which turn out to be a pain to duplicate, unless one wants to paint it brand new and all white and that is never the look I go for. They tend to be chipped, with horizontal weathered streaks as well as vertical staining. This is where I am so far. It looks better in person, but for just that reason photos are a great way to exaggerate modeling problems. In this case, I have too much of a cross-hatched effect on the tower and need to work on that. Push comes to shove I will repaint the tower white and start over.
On the positive side, I finished my first pair of handbuilt switches using N-scale schedule 40 rail. This was a ton of work for something they sell in the store, but the results are worth it, I think. The switches are #8, built from Fast Track jigs, soldering the rail to PC board ties every 3-5 ties and using stained wood ties glued to the rail with Pliobond for the rest. Rail is painted Floquil rail brown with hand-painted rust streaks.
I have total sympathy with those who distrust corporations. Distrust and skepticism are fine things, and are critical foundations to individual responsibility. History proves that market mechanisms tend to weed out bad behaviors, but sometimes these corrections can take time, and in the mean time its good to watch out for oneself.
However, I can't understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government. The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work.
Here is a great example of behavior that is inconcieveable in the private sector, or, if found at a private company, would quickly result in its extinction.
The system that Lower Merion school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district.
More than once, the motion asserts, the camera on Robbins' school-issued laptop took photos of Robbins as he slept in his bed. Each time, it fired the images off to network servers at the school district.
Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into "a little LMSD soap opera," a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program.
"I know, I love it," she is quoted as having replied.
Anyone want to be how many of the guilty in this case will be around in 5 years. The over / under from Vegas is "all."
We associate photos like this one with the devastation of post-war Europe.
In fact, this is a post-war photo, but it is of Charleston, South Carolina after the Civil War. We seldom think of such scenes as being relevent to the US, but the South was at least as destroyed after the Civil War as Germany was after WWII. Sherman's march to the sea in Georgia was famous for its devastation, but in their letters, many of Sherman's soldiers say they were particularly ferocious in South Carolina, the state that they most associated with the war and its start (though much of the devastation in Charleston was self-inflicted, as a fire to burn the remaining cotton and keep it out of Yankee hands spread to the rest of the city).
I am a little late to the game on this stuff -- apparently hobbyists have been using it for crafting. For example, who wouldn't want a Tron outfit?
To date, I have mostly sheltered readers from the geekiest of my hobbies: model railroading (Yeah, I know what you are saying -- how can anyone who spends hours a day at a computer writing on arcane bits of business and economics issues possibly be anything but cool?) This may soon change, as I am starting a new N-scale layout and I will probably inflict some in-progress photos on you folks. To get an idea just how crazy I am, I build my own track from wood strips and bundles of rail and tiny, tiny spikes -- so we are not just talking about putting the old Lionel out on a green table cloth.
Anyway, for some time I have wanted to build a layout that is primarily meant to be run in the dark as a night scene. So I am experimenting with a lot of technologies, from florescent paint to tiny LED's to small bulbs to get ideas for various scenes. The EL wire turns out to be a dead ringer for scaled down neon, so I expect to use a lot in the city part of the layout.
I will leave you with a photo of the layout that probably inspired more people (including myself) into the hobby than any other - by the master, John Allen:
If you get intrigued with his work, more photos are here.
I wish I had more pictures of my old work, but they seem to have been lost in a move. All I have left is a few poor-quality, poorly-scanned under-construction photos of my first layout from years and years ago.
Postscript: Can a hobby be geeky if Rod Stewart shares it? He has built an absolutely stunning layout - one photo below and more here.
And yes, the work really is his own, he didn't just pay someone to build it for him.
At first I thought the picture here was pretty lame - big deal. Composition, not great. Detail, blah. But then I started zooming in. And in. All the way to the point I could almost play the music from the sheet music of the band in the lower center of the picture.
"Wall Street bomb." Aftermath of the explosion that killed dozens of people in New York's financial district on September 16, 1920, when a horse wagon loaded with dynamite and iron sash weights blew up in front of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street. The attack, which was attributed to Italian anarchists, was never solved. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.
This is from Shorpy.com, a blog that has daily posts with really nice photography from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The photo above is actually just a thumbnail - go to the original post and click on the full size image. All of their photos are posted in huge, high-resolution scans.
This is a pretty cool collection of photos from the ISS of the world's cities from space, sent to me by a friend. These are an order of magnitude more detailed than you are used to seeing in other earth-lights photos.
Unfortunately, despite several appeals, I have not taken any photos around the hotel. One reader asked if I have seen anyone famous. The answer is, I don't know. Let me explain.
Some years ago (maybe 8-10) my wife and I were driving through Malibu on vacation, when we stopped at a little coffee shop for breakfast. After we were done eating, my wife went to the bathroom while I sat outside on a bench to wait for her. Sitting there was another husband who was clearly also waiting for his wife to come out. We chatted for about 5 minutes, with this British gent telling me he had just gotten back from London on business.
Well, my wife came out and I met her at the car. The first thing she said to me was "Oh my god, you were talking to Pierce Brosnan." I said "??" Sure enough, on reflection, it did seem to be he, particularly since my wife also recognized his wife from People magazine. In my defense, one does not expect to encounter James Bond in a psuedo-Denny's wearing sweats and a week-old beard. But since then, I have not really trusted by celebrity-identification skills.
A decent sized newspaper is doing a story on one of our campgrounds for their paper, which is great news. However, they want some photos. I directed them to our web site with links to Flickr, where they could view the photos and actually download full resolution versions of the images. However, after some back and forth, it seems that no one at the paper is able to accomplish this. So I am now downloading the images they want off the Flickr page they are looking at and sending the images to them via CD / snail mail. Sigh.
A decent sized newspaper is doing a story on one of our campgrounds for their paper, which is great news. However, they want some photos. I directed them to our web site with links to Flickr, where they could view the photos and actually download full resolution versions of the images. However, after some back and forth, it seems that no one at the paper is able to accomplish this. So I am now downloading the images they want off the Flickr page they are looking at and sending the images to them via CD / snail mail. Sigh.
I am working on a longer post on Sheriff Joe Arpaio's sweeps through Hispanic neighborhoods to round up the usual suspects (Mayor Phil Gordon has asked the feds to investigate these practices, which I hope they will do).
But this one is just weird. Apparently Phoenix tax money is being used by Arpaio to train Honduran police, in a program that makes sense (from a Phoenix point of view) to no one. Sheriff Joe watchers will enjoy his numerous nonsensical explanations, though the last one probably is the correct one. For those outside of Phoenix, sit back and enjoy the weirdness -- its the only consolation we here in Arizona get for having the worst and most abusive sheriff in the country.
Explanation One: Arpaio looks to small Latin American countries as models for his police force
Sheriff's officials told the county Board of Supervisors that the
Honduran National Police possess the "intelligence data, knowledge and
cultural experiences to benefit the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office."
Explanation Two: We can't tell you, because it would endanger Sheriffs' lives (this is an Arpaio oldie but goodie):
discussing efforts in Honduras could endanger the lives of law-enforcement officers in both countries....revealing details could put lives at risk
Explanation Three: Honduras supplied millions of photos for Arpaio's facial recognition software (yeah, I know non-Phoenicians, this is weird)
The sheriff's facial-recognition software program is supposed to be among the biggest beneficiaries of the Honduras engagement....When Arpaio was first confronted about the department's trips to
Honduras, he said the agency had received "millions" of photos from
Honduran officials.
Explanation Four: Its a RICO thing, so we can't tell you (at least, it uses RICO funds)
The agency has spent more than $120,000 on Sheriff's Office employee
salaries in Honduras, and an additional $30,000 in RICO funds seized
from criminals. And some of the trips occurred during a time period
where the Sheriff's Office overspent its overtime budget by nearly $1
million.
Explanation Five: We can't talk about it, because that would open up public officials to scrutiny for their actions:
The Sheriff's Office will not grant interviews to explain how and why
the program was started and what the benefits are to Maricopa County,
because officials say discussing the program fuels criticism
L.A. councilman Dennis Zine is urging a proposal in the wake of the
pop star's latest psychiatric emergency that would implement a 20-yard
"personal safety zone" around celebrities after Spears' ambulance had
to be surrounded by police cars and helicopters late last month to
prevent the paparazzi from snapping photos of the singer en route to
the hospital. ...
The tentatively termed "Britney Law" would
have the right to confiscate all profits from any photograph taken
without signed consent within the bubble of safety around any celebrity.
The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions
as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes,
researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to
biofuels as a response to global warming.
The researchers said that past studies showing the benefits of ethanol in combating climate change
have not taken into account almost certain changes in land use
worldwide if ethanol from corn "” and in the future from other
feedstocks such as switchgrass "” become a prized commodity.
"Using good cropland to expand biofuels will probably exacerbate
global warming," concludes the study published in Science magazine.
Promoters of biofuels often hold up Brazil as an example of a model ethanol mandate. Forget for a moment that in fact ethanol still makes up only a small percentage of the transportation fuel market in Brazil. Think of all those satellite photos we used to see of farmers burning the Amazon to expand cropland:
I know that correlation is not equal to causation, but the fact is that this land clearing, which has always one on, really accelerated after the Brazilian ethanol mandates and subsidies. My prediction is that careful academic work in the coming years will pin the blame for a lot of the destruction of the Amazon on ethanol.
The study's findings aren't likely to change government policy, since
ethanol mandates are a political boondoggle that only dupes expect to
have any effect on the climate. If the first caucuses were held in
Hawaii, they'd be forcing us to run our cars on macadamia nuts instead
of corn.
