Beauty in the Commonplace (and other things)

Eric's Rules for Successful Travel

2011-09-25T16:39:00.000-04:00

I started traveling at the age of three and haven’t stoppedyet. I’ve been (and worked) onthree continents, all 50 states, and heaven knows how many countries. My first extended trip on my own was asummer spent in France at the age of 17. I had a great time and learned allsorts of things not on the approved list of educational experiences … the mostimportant being I could survive on my own when things got tough. (The next mostimportant was to avoid white wine and stick to red, but that’s another story).

In the past five years I’ve made extended trips through NewEngland, the American west, northern Canada, and Alaska, plus some time inHawaii.

All of this has led me to some rules for successfultraveling. They apply broadly, butESPECIALLY to photographers.

Rule 1. Know your objectives. Whatare you traveling for? The answercan be anything you want – see the Alps, swim in an ocean, photograph aglacier, meet the locals — but it helps to have some objective to shape yourtrip and keep you going.

Rule 2. Researchyour destination. The internet has made this a snap, butit helps in setting your objectives and giving you some clue as to what you’reletting yourself in for.

Rule 3. Don’tover-plan. Nothing kills a trip liketrying to do too much. “If this isTuesday, it must be Belgium” really sucks because you won’t be able to processyour experiences. If you commit totoo many stops, too many locations, you’ll be frazzled and disappointed when itrains, or the road is closed, or the bus is late.

When I travel, I like to make alist of things I want to see — and give myself permission to skip any or all ofthem if something really interesting takes priority. Dwight Eisenhower said “Plans are useless, but planning’sessential.” He was right, because circumstances force plans to change – and themore detailed the plan, the more likely it is to go wrong. Avoid over-planning to buildflexibility into your trip.

Rule 4. Use tours judiciously.

Tourscan help you or louse you up. Ifyou have little time and no knowledge of the place you’re going to, tours arevaluable. Tours can familiarize you withyour destination. They can alsotake you places you simply couldn’t reach (or understand) on your own. In Alaska last summer I took only twotours: one through Denali (youcan’t really do it any other way) and one from Stewart for a wildlife andglacier cruise. Worth absolutelyevery penny!

But for travelers who want toexperience a place, not just see it, tours are only useful for a quickoverview. Use the next day wanderaround or revisit some of the places you craned your neck to see from the bus.The other main drawback to tours is the limited time you spend at a stop. Photographers frequently need far moretime than the tour guide wants to spend.

Hiring a local guide for the daymay be affordable and is a great way to get access and local knowledge withoutjamming yourself onto a tour’s schedule. Worth considering – even if you have to team up with a couple of othertravelers to keep the cost down.

Rule 5. Make sure you can meet local people. Theyare your best resource for finding great places to eat, great places tophotograph, and great places to avoid. But how do you do this?

Sleep in pensions, campsites, hostels, inns, farmhouses, or B&Bs rather than large tourist hotels. The place you wind up in may be splendid or perhaps less than that, but you’re trading off luxury for experience and local knowledge.

Go to the bar and strike up a conversation. Buying a drink or two makes it easy!

Ask at the local tourist bureau or welcome center to suggest good spots to meet locals. I did this in Fort Simpson, Canada and wound up a day later on a free ATV trip back into some mountains, along with a really interesting conversation with some First Nation folks, and the most incredible dog I’ve ever met – but that’s another story.

Ask these two questions. They work every time.

”You’re from around here. What should I photograph (or see) that isn’t on every postcard – maybe some place that’s special for you?”
“Who else should I meet while I’m here?”

These two questions are theabsolutely best ways I know to make sure you have a wonderful trip. (See The Marvelous Act of Asking Your Way).

Rule 6 Don’toverpack. This is a tough one, particularly for photographers, as weNEVER travel really light – the gear weighs us down. But make the effort –every ounce you pack is an ounce you have to schlep, and they all add up! My rule of thumb is pack so that I cancarry it all at one time. Thismeans minimizing separate pieces by doing things like making sure your tripodfits into your rolling duffle, and that your lenses are multi-purpose ratherthan primes.

The truth is you WILL overpack. But truly, it’s worth making the effort to minimize. Really minimize. Just don’t forget the toilet paper ifyou’re going into the wilderness!.

Rule 7 Figure out how to keepyour images safe. I usually travel with alaptop and a portable hard drive. Every night, religiously, I empty my memory cards onto the laptop andduplicate them onto the hard drive. Then I pack the laptop and the hard drive in separate locations. I usuallytravel on my own so I can find time to edit out trash shots while I’m at it,thus saving space.

Rule 8. Take good notes. I usea digital tape recorder for this … I can record locations, impressions, etcvery easily for later use at home. Keeping a geotag log is a great idea. Your smart phone can even do this, and so can manycameras. External geotag units areavailable as well. But there’snothing like being able to pinpoint when and where you took that superb shot ofa golden eagle swooping up a gopher in the setting sun!

Rule 9. Consider your power needs and get whatever you need before you leavehome. You have to make sure youcan recharge or replace batteries, get online if you have to, have enoughmemory cards, etc. Verify whatpower you need (110v or 220v) for instance, and match it (or get a converterrated not to fry your gear) to the power grid where you’ll be traveling. We live and die by electronics thesedays, so make CERTAIN you are covered in this regard.

Rule 10 and one of the best. Never be afraid to askfor help if you need it. Like asking your way, asking for help appeals topeoples’ best sides. The converse is also true – if someone needs help, be thefirst to step up and offer it Youmay make a friend for life, and you will certainly enrich your karma by doingunto others.

Pixels, PPI, and DPI –What They Are and Why They Matter

2011-09-17T16:17:00.003-04:00

Elsewhere I’ve written about resolution, primarily as it applies to sensor design. In this article I’m aiming at a less lofty goal … clarifying the difference between Pixels Per Inch (PPI) and Dots Per Inch (DPI). There are lots of explanations out there, but perhaps one more won’t hurt.

Pixels are the smallest light receiving unit (on a sensor) or light emitting unit (on a monitor). Pixels come in various sizes and density. Camera sensors measure them in the millions, spread like salt (only very carefully arranged) on a sensor measured in millimeters. The pixels themselves may be of different sizes, the common range being 5.5 microns (millionths of a meter) to 9 microns. Since they’re very tiny, you can pack millions of pixels (megapixels of them) onto a sensor.

Pixels on a monitor are different. They are commonly given in pixels-per-linear-inch. Despite what you used to hear about 72 per inch (mac) or 96 per inch (PC), most monitors have between 90 and 105 pixels per inch. If your screen actually has a pixel density of 100 per inch, that means you’ll have 100x100= 10,000 in one square inch of screen. Compare that to the millions per square inch on your sensor.

Obviously pixels on a monitor are far more widely spaced and hundreds of times larger than the pixels on your sensor. The space between pixels on a monitor is called “pitch” and is commonly on the order of .27 or so millimeters between each pixel.

I’ll get to the so-what of all this in a moment; but first let’s look at DPI.

DPI – dots per inch – has nothing to do with sensors or monitors. It has everything to do with print quality. DPI is the number of dots of ink sprayed on the paper by an ink-jet printer. For normal print sizes and magazine use, 300 PPI is the common standard for image files you send to newspapers, magazines, and labs like Bay Printers or WHCC; below that, the image simply won’t print well enough for magazine or book use when converted to DPI; art directors are just persnickety that way.*

So size your print file at 300 PPI and you’re golden, right? Well, maybe not. First, very large prints do not need to be printed from 300 PPI files. I’m talking really large – 20 x 30 inches up to by 20 x 30 FEET. For instance, the graphics on airplanes are printed at 25 dpi.

Why? Two reasons. First, the bigger the print, the bigger the file needed to produce it. If you wanted to print a file for printing 20x30 feet at 300 ppi, you’d need a file measured in terabytes! (7.77 BILLION dots). And you still have to convert image data to printer data; watch out!

The second reason is that human eyes aren’t that good. When you watch a TV across a room, it looks pretty sharp – even though the screen pixels are separated quite widely. That’s because your eyes don’t see well enough to see each screen pixel separately; we merge them together and form the image in our brain the way we think it OUGHT to look.

So billboards and airplane graphics don’t need to be printed at 300 dpi or more to look sharp. If you’re seeing them from 150 feet away (and that’s WAY closer than you want to see the tail of an airplane near you), they’ll still look sharp at far lower density. So what if up close they’re awful? Doesn’t matter, and processing files does matter in terms of both time and equipment. So thank heavens for human limitations!

In fact, the further away an object is, the less clearly we can see it – thanks to atmospherics and some laws of physics and physiology that we don’t need to mess with.

So, for ordinary purposes, you should try to size your image to print at your chosen size at 300 PPI, or no less than 250 (which will still look soft).

Wait a minute. Your camera and computer are seeing images in pixels per inch – but your printer is using dots per inch. How do you get from one to another?

The best explanation I’ve seen comes from Josh Lubbers, head of BlueCubit Software, and an old hand in the color wars.

Customer has a 300 PPI image open in their application that they wish to print. They click Print and send the file to the print control panel for their Epson Printer.

Printer Driver resizes the 300PPI image to 720PPI using nearest neighbor (low quality) or Bi-Liner (low quality) interpolation. This happens in 100% of all print jobs that are printed from Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. Why? An inkjet printer has a native resolution that all images must be set to in order to print. The same is true for canon and hp printer but their native PPI is 600 PPI.

Print Driver applies a microweave process that converts the PPI (pixels per inch) to DPI (Dots Per Inch with options for 720, 1440, or 2880 DPI on an Epson printer- Canon and HP microweave to different sizes). Printers don’t put pixels on paper; they print dots on paper and microweaving is the process of converting pixels to dots. There is no Image quality lost in this part of the process but a higher level of microweaving generally results in a higher quality print but a slower print time.

Why can’t you just resize the image in Photoshop (or whatever) to the DPI of your printer? You can, BUT 1) you won’t see a difference on your screen and 2) file sizes grow exponentially, and 3) the printer driver still has to convert to DPI.

So that’s it. PPI are pixels, and are electronic. DPI are ink droplets, and are physical, not electronic. Your print driver takes your image and converts it to instructions to the printer to produce the appropriate DPI for printing.

I can’t close without saying that Josh Lubbers makes ImageNest, a post-script RIP (raster image processor) for Mac OS only, that nests your images (to save paper) and resizes them. Version 3.5 bypasses the whole Epson or HP printer driver thing and uses a FAR superior method of up-rezzing (enlarging), and it also has a built-in sharpening routine that gets applied AFTER the image is sized for printing. As RIPs go it’s inexpensive, and upgrades are always free. Yowzah!

* See “A lesson in humility."

Eric's Quick Fish Chowdah

2011-09-13T21:13:00.001-04:00

This fish chowder has lovely color, sweet, filling taste, and is very healthy. Great on cool autumn evenings. Enjoy!

1 stalk celery
1 good-size onion
1/2 red bell pepper
1 large baking potato or golden potato
kernels from 2 ears corn (white is best). Use canned or frozen if desperate.
1/2 lb white fish. Catfish is good; others work fine
1 TBS oil
1 TBS butter
4 cups milk
2 cups water
salt
pepper
pinch saffron*

Peel and cube potato
Coarsely chop onion, pepper, celery
Cut fish into chunks
Scrape off kernels

Heat oil in stew pot.
Sautee onion, pepper, celery til tender
Add liquid
Add potatoes
Add fish
Add corn

Add seasonings. Don't over-salt.

Bring gently to a weak boil. You don't want to scald the milk. Simmer 20 minutes or until potato is tender. Add butter near end of cooking. Serve with biscuits and salad.

Serves 4-6

* A word about saffron. Saffron is expensive, particularly when purchased in packets of 4-6 threads. Go ahead, be a sport and spring for an ounce of the stuff. Keep tightly sealed and it will last for at least a decade. Then when you use it you won't be mingy and parsimonious, feeling guilty all the while. Saffron works with lots of stuff, and you don't need to use a ton of it in any one dish, put a small pinch is about right for most purposes. Not 2-3 threads. Yeesh!

What to do when your photos are flooded

2011-09-08T14:20:00.001-04:00

A lot of people in the Northeast are trying to recover from flood damage. One of the most heart-rending losses is when photos get waterlogged, stuck to each other, or stuck to glass. Professional photo restoration experts (like Hatch Photo Fix) can fix a lot of this damage, but there are number of things flood victims can do to help themselves.

The first thing to do is put your wet photos face-up on towels. Separate them; don't let them overlap or be in piles. The idea is to get air circulating around the pictures, so running a fan in the room will help as well. Keeping air moving reduces the amount of mold that forms on the picture. (Mold shows up as small spots, black, white, red, or green).

If you have photos that are stuck together, but only for a day or two, you can try this:

Get a jug of distilled water and a shallow pan (tupperware is fine). Put the stack of pictures in the pan and cover with the water. Wait one hour and try to separate them. Let them soak another hour and try again. Finally, add ONE DROP of liquid dish soap to the pan, and go one more hour and try again.

What's happening is that there's a race between separating the pictures and lifting the actual images off the underlying paper, which is non-recoverable. So keep an eye on things.

The same technique works for pictures stuck to glass, but the soaking time may be longer. What I do when dealing with images stuck to the glass is clean the glass, scan the image through the glass, and THEN try separating. That way you have a back-up to work from.

If your picture has acquired a really nasty curve from drying unevenly, here's a way to flatten it, at least temporarily. I actually did this with an 1898 8" x 48" panorama of a cavalry regiment, rolled to the size of a diploma for over 80 years, and it worked, at least long enough to have a working copy made.

Take your picture, several towels, and a 2 pieces of shelving to the nearest Y or gym with a steam room. In the steam room put one towel on the bench, put the picture curl-up on the towel. Put the second towel on top, and crank up the steam. 15 to 20 minutes is probably enough to start the paper relaxing. At this point add a shelf to the stack, and add some additional weight if you want (sitting on the shelf might work, but those splinters!). Go into the steam room periodically (every 5 minutes is good), and when you judge your paper is as relaxed as it's going to get, turn the stack over and add the second shelf. Use large rubber ands to hold the whole assembly, and go on your way rejoicing -- as far as the nearest frame shop where you can have your image safely dry-mounted.

Creating A Fine Art Landscape

2011-08-13T14:09:00.004-04:00

My friend and fan, Reggie, saw a copy of the Cincinnati twilight image above and asked me to tell him everything that occurred from taking the picture through final processing.

I thought that might be easy, but as I thought about it more I realized that there were far more steps involved than I had thought; while I don’t produce any polished images on autopilot, there are so many routine steps (which can vary in sequence) that I’ve never listed them out. Perhaps it’s time I did.

The photo really began about the middle of May, when a commercial client of mine said that he would really like to have current pictures of the Cincinnati skyline. In the past year or so the skyline has really changed; now it’s dominated by a tall building with the “cage” or “tiara” on top. It’s supposed to be the crown on the Queen City of the West (as Cincinnati was known up til 1875 or so).

Cincinnati looks pretty pedestrian during the day, but at night it takes on a certain magic. Unfortunately, in the middle of summer the weather does not help with landscape photography. The problem is haze. I wanted a picture that would be clear, sharp, and with good sky color behind th buildings. This meant waiting for a clear cool day in the summer time, which in Cincinnati is like waiting for hell to freeze over, or a cold front to come through, which ever happens first!. It also means timing a shot so there isn’t too much moonlight; it tends to wash out the sky.

Finally, on July 14, the magic weather conditions occurred. In the late afternoon sunlight my friend Tina Karle joined me to shoot on the Kentucky riverfront, and then we moved uphill to the Newport Catholic Center. Since I was last there two years ago the view of Cincinnati has been narrowed by new condominiums and by trees which have grown to block some of the field of view. But there was still a very narrow space of lawn available that gave a good view of downtown Cincinnati.

Setting Up

We positioned ourselves carefully to avoid reflected light pollution from lawn-mounted search lights that illuminate the building after dark. The next step was getting the tripod stable and dead level. If you’re thinking of stitching images to make a panorama, getting a level camera is very important. It avoids distortion and gives you the maximum usable pixels to work with.

Once the camera was set up it was really a matter of experimenting with lenses exposures and making sure that the camera would have as little vibration as possible.

Vibration Reduction

Here’s the deal with detail-loaded landscape shots that you expect to print at very large sizes (like 30 x 60 inches). Any form of vibration kills you. You cannot be too careful about this, because it’s the limiting factor between a great shot and a mediocre one. What happens is that even the smallest camera shake – invisible at normal sizes – creates a blur at very large magnifications. Imagine you have a 6 x 4.5 cm sensor (medium format size). That gives you a “negative” that’s 27 square centimeters, or 4.18 sqare inches. I don’t care how many megapixels you’ve got, if you blow your 4.18 in “negative” up to 24 x 30”, you now have an image that is 720 square inches. That’s a little less than 175 times bigger than the original “negative”. If you blow ANYTHING up by a factor that large, the least little thing that’s wrong is going to look monstrous in the final print.

Camera shake isn’t the only variable. The size of the sensor, camera shake, lens sharpness, focus, atmospheric haze, heat “shimmer,” and ground vibration all matter if you are shooting with wall-size prints in mind.

Exposure time increases the risk of camera shake. This shot was a 10 second exposure, during which NOTHING could vibrate.

I took the following steps to minimize vibration:

Good tripod, rated for my 5 pound camera.
Solid footing for tripod.
Pre-focus (manual)
Camera mirror pre-up (so it doesn’t cause vibration when you take the shot)
Self-timer set to 3 seconds to give thing time to settle down.
When you press the shutter, take one or two steps backward (gently) so your lead feed don’t cause camera shake during the exposure
Don’t move til you hear the shutter click shut

Camera and Lens

This time out I was using a Mamiya 645 AFD medium format camera with a Phase One P25 (22 megapixel)back (long since obsolete, but still does a great job). I used 3 lenses: a 35 mm wide-angle (about 20 in SLR speak), a 55-110 f 3.5 (about 30 to 65 in SLF terms), and a 120 mm manual focus lens, one of the sharpest lenses ever made. This particular shot was made with the 120 MF, exposed at ISO 100 for 10 seconds at f8.0.

Exposures

The selected shot was one of a series of 4 exposures shot at varying exposure times with an HDR experiment in mind. This was the best overall exposure, but despite the 9 stop dymamic range of the P25 back, there were some issues to be dealt with later in the computer. specifically, at that exposure length, brightly lighted highlights are going to lose detail, notably the brightly illuminated signs and the flood-lit “tiara.” Note: the light was changing very rapidly at this time, when twilight was turning into night. So you have to keep metering, or at least varying, to adjust to changing conditions.

I used – gasp—a light meter (Seconik 350) to get an overall-reading.

The actual exposure was ISO 100, f8, 10 seconds.

I chose f8 for maximum sharpness. If I’d shot at f5.6 for 6 seconds the image might have been less sharp and would have had more shadow detail, but you have to choose your enemy: highlights or shadows and sharpness.

ISO was set to 100. This particular digital back is an older one and has some serious limitations newer models don’t have. Theoretically you can shoot at ISO 800, but you are dealing with massive noise. I never use this camera at more than ISO 200. The intention is to limit noise, but the price you pay is longer exposure times. If I had another $20,000 to spend, I’d get the update. Hah!

Color balance

I shot in “daylight” mode. This preserved the blues, but needed a minor correction later.

Back in the Dark Room (computer, of course)

I use a combination of post-processing tools. Adobe’s Camera Raw does a truly crappy job interpreting Phase One raw images: Camera Raw thinks you’ve underexposed every shot by at least 2 stops.

Accordingly, I use Capture One Pro, version 6.2. This software is a pain in the butt (for me at least) in downloading and selecting files, but it is an absolute champ at displaying and editing RAW images … including those from Nikon, Canon, etc. The current version gives you all the local editing techniques of Bridge or Lightroom, plus it gives you the ability to store variants and output them to various formats. This isn’t needed by amateur shooters, but remember, my purpose is to produce terrific HUGE prints.

Once I’ve done most of the editing in Capture One, I process the file and save it as a TIFF file, original size, 300 PPI. From there I will open it in Photoshop and make final corrections, including things like removing the streak of crud in the upper left corner of the image–I don’t know if it’s a jet contrail or crud I couldn’t get off the lens.

Editing Workflow in Detail

After setting up my various working folders (select, output) I go to work on the image.

In general, one should tackle color balance first because it affects exposure and other variables down the road.

Here is a screen shot showing the unretouched file, with the original color balance. The next shot shows the color re-balanced; in this case I just went from daylight to P25 product flash – and presto, all warmed up, as in the next screen shot.

Add caption

Fixing Color Balance -- After

You can also see the histogram in these screen shots. This is a fundamentally dark image, with a tiny cluster of pixels all the way to the right side. Reds are actually not very bright colors (see http://hatchphotoartistry.blogspot.com/2010/02/red-and-black-small-look-at-autofocus.html), blues are dark, so even though the image looks bright enough to the eye, the camera doesn’t see most of this scene as much above middle gray. You can’t auto-correct this kind of picture because the software will seek to balance the image – and this one is intentionally NOT balanced. But those tiny bright spots are blown out, making it hard to see detail in the glare of the very bright lights on the Central Trust building and the Tiara.

Exposure Corrections

Moving to the next panel, I’ve made only very minor changes to this picture. I wanted to be careful to get good contrast but not too good, and I moved the black point in the curves window. In the HDR panel I did dial down the very bright areas (the bank tower and the tiara), but more work would be done on those problem spots later.

Verticals Straightened (hard to see at this scale)

The next step was to straighten the verticals. Despite all my care, the camera wasn’t 100% level, so the verticals were out of plumb by about 1/2 a degree. Not much, but I wanted to fix it.

Removing Dust & Crud

The next screen shot shows dust elimination. You can do this in Lightroom or Bridge just as well, but it’s easier in Capture One. In Photoshop, you can just use the spot healing brush.

What I did NOT do in CaptureOne was sharpening. That gets done at the very end of the process, when the image is set to its final size.

I saved this version as a hi-resolution TIFF file, and also saved the other three files in the set.

Over to Bridge / Photoshop

I opened the file in Bridge because I wanted to play a little with the color. Bridge lets you control the luminance (brightness) separately for a number of different colors, including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta, and purple. You can also control hue and saturataion for those same colors. For this image, I wanted to tweak the luminance of the orange, but in the end I left it where I found it in Capture One.

I decided to get cute and do something about the blown-out highlights. So I opened a program called HDR Express and built an HDR composite. Saved this, and opened it in Photoshop.

Next, I opened the master image in Photoshop. It’s as-shot size is 18 x 14 inches ( produced the web image straight from this version). I decided to make a panoramic version 18 x 9 inches. Again, no extra sharpening at this point.

Blown highlights

Fixed Highlights

I made a loose selection around the areas of the HDR shot that had been bothering me, pasted them into the master as a new layer. Cut the opacity to 40%, repositioned each element (I hadn’t straightened the verticals in the HDR composite, so had to tweak the imported materials to get ‘em perfectly aligned. My bad!) BTW, the HDR version of the shot looked lousy (as it too often does in my opinion) But it was kind of a nifty way to handle this particular problem.

Sharpening, Noise Control, and Resizing

I could stop here with this picture. It does not seem to suffer from excessive noise. It’s sharp enough for all normal purposes. So why not quit? I said at the outset that my goal is to produce very large prints at very high quality levels. In this league, 9 bit by 18 is a starter kit! I’m pretty sure I have a client who would love to have this picture at 15 x 30, and to do that requires some extra steps.

I have learned very painfully that if you want to enlarge an image to really big sizes, you absolutely should not sharpen it first! Even using the very good sharpening routines in Capture One and Photoshop, once you go into enlarging the image you affect the sharpening already done, giving a very grainy, over-sharpened texture to the picture. Edges look really hard although they may not have halos, and the overall effect, while painterly, isn’t always appropriate. To avoid this problem I use a program called Perfect Resize. In an earlier life this was known as Perfect Fractals.

Sharpening Off (Perfect Resize) 100% crop

Sharpening On (High pass method). VERY small amount used

Perfect Resize has 3 different sharpening routines built into it. By experimenting, I have found that even if you don’t use it to do its main job of enlarging, it does a very good job of sharpening. The 2 screenshots shown here illustrate that. These shots show a selection from the picture at actual pixel size, that is, 100% magnification. The image, however, has been left at its 9 x 18 size. I will have absolutely no problem getting a superb print at 15 x 30. I know this because I have already pulled the print 25 x 50 from the same series of pictures, and it looks terrific!

There are lots of different ways to control noise. In the days of film noise was the equivalent to graininess in the film, and the faster the speed of the film the more grainy it would be. Nowadays, the higher the iso-value you shoot at, the more noise you have. If I had shot this picture at a higher iso value or for a much longer exposure, it would have had some noise in it.

Once I’ve enlarged the picture to its final size and included sharpening, I take look at the image in Photoshop and see if extra noise crept in. If it has, I run a noise reduction program to take care of it. The one I use is Noise Ninja. I find that it does a good job overall, and if you need to tweak the controls you can do it. This particular image doesn’t seem to me to have significant noise problems even at 15 x 30 so I’m not going to run subsequent routines on it.

There is an argument about when you should reduce noise. Noise reduction works by applying a small amount of blur to grainy areas of the image, then re-sharpening them using unsharp mask to keep them from being too blurry. Some people say you should do this before enlarging and some people say do it after. I tend to do it afterwards. In this case, noise was not an issue so I didn’t bother with noise reduction.

So, as Reggie requested, that’s the soup to nuts account of the creation of this image. I know it will be too detailed for some, but the enthusiastic amateurs out there and some pros may get some pleasure in it and education from it. Here's the finished picture -- definitely not full sized. You can see it here:

Twilight Cincinnati finished

Whatever happened to Comity?

2011-08-08T11:38:00.002-04:00

Last night my wife and I were discussing the egregious failure of the legislature to work collegially towards any kind of solution to any kind of problem. “Whatever happened to comity?” I asked. “What’s comity?” she replied.

“Comity is courtesy and considerate behavior towards one another. It’s also involved with goodwill and reasonableness.” I answered.

Comity is an old-fashioned word and an old-fashioned concept that we sorely could use today.

Everybody’s bemoaning the fact that legislators can’t get along for love nor money. In fact S&P has downgraded the United States credit rating largely because of the fractious behavior during the debt ceiling fracas – it cannot be called a debate. What S&P said they wanted to see was more in the way of cuts and the balance between revenue and expenditure cuts, not unlike the Obama plan. But what they really wanted and are really worried about is the flat-out inability of the United States to govern itself properly.

So thanks to S&P and the Tea Party, I’m approximately 15% poorer than I was two weeks ago. Millions are even worse off.

How did we get into this predicament? Where did such deep levels of rancor and spite come from? The unfortunate fact is that the United States has not had a united sense of purpose nor a united sense of accomplishment since the day Neil Armstrong hopped out of the Eagle onto the surface of the moon, with one brief exception following 9/11. And that brief unity was seized upon by George Bush to throw us into an unfunded unaccounted for war that we haven’t left a decade later. A 2^nd war against Iraq following what could charitably be called lousy intelligence and uncharitably viewed as a lust for war by Bush did nothing to improve cordiality between the houses of Congress.

Following Armstrong’s moon landing we had the thrills of Vietnam, another undeclared and untaxed war. We also enjoyed the Arab oil price hike and the rise of expensive new social programs which, however expensive at the time, were vitally needed. Those same entitlement programs, with the vast increase of users due to the aging of the population, are now disproportionately expensive. They need to be managed, not discarded.

The Congress has preferred to tell the states what to do in a series of mandated but unfunded changes such as No Child Left Behind and, most recently, the new medical care legislation passed with such rancor one year ago.

In the last few years there’s been a perfect storm of bad economy, climate change, energy hassles, and a population now at 7 billion. All of this creates a world that really needs cooperative problem solving. But throw in “culture wars,” massive frustration, and add lunatic legislators who have no clue how to govern. At this point nobody feels listened to, which dials up the contentiousness factor by at least 10.

Now here’s a possible explanation of why the tone is so universally hostile, not the only reason but a strong contributor. I blame TV and talk radio. Here’s why:

Over the last twenty-five or so years, TV news has become more and more “entertainment” centered. That is, TV news now mimics the thousands and thousands of hours of TV drama. News is about stories, and stories are about people in conflict. It’s no wonder that in search of ratings, TV news has increasingly and intentionally tried to increase conflict. As a result, TV “debates” aren’t debates at all. They’re slanging matches full of interruptions, name-calling, and shouting. What a model.

Civilized discussion and debate may be relatively dull, but you have to strip out the hostility before people can actually hear one another – at which point common purposes can emerge and problems be solved, not by slapping the other guy down in mid-sentence but by building on what he has to say.

TV isn’t the only source of contentious behavior. The babbling, ranting, name-calling pundits of Talk Radio have convinced a segment of the populace that hostility is the only way to effect change. This segment is , unfortunately, unsophisticated enough to be unable to grasp the complexities of economics or the interconnections that willy-nilly now exist amongst all nations.

It’s time we all took a step back from our passions. God help us if we can’t manage that. We really need to bring the word “comity” back into everyday conversation.

The Debt Ceiling Fiasco

2011-07-29T13:49:00.000-04:00

Fundamentally, legislators view their job as adversarial, not collegial. This is completely contrary to the assumptions made by the founding fathers about enlightened self-interest and collective wisdom. Personally, I blame the adversarial quality of news broadcasting as one cause, but causes aren't really the point at the moment.

Both sides are savagely defending positions, not pursuing common interests and the collective goal of protecting the nation. If they could read, our legislators would profit from basic negotiation texts like Getting Past No and Getting to Yes.\

Good negotiation requires finding a win-win solution, which is the opposite of adversarial.

At this point I am so angry with these children that I want to swat their collective behinds.

Like the President, I could live with anything EXCEPT doing this all again in six to nine months. I would prefer to see soak-the-rich taxation added into the mix.

What I cannot see is continued tantrums, sulks, and "you can't make me' from the infants we seem to have made our representatives. Yecch.

A Day at the Harrod OH Pork Rind Festival

2011-06-12T07:18:00.000-04:00

Just a small summer town enjoying itself and raising money for things like the high school band. The atmosphere was friendly, the tone low-key, and the pork rinds -- uh -- unforgettable.

You can see this in HD format at Eric's Country Matters gallery

In Defense of Comedy, or, How I Met the Muse and Lived

2011-05-26T14:55:00.002-04:00

I first came across Thalia sobbing her eyes out in a corner of the stacks at the Library of Congress. She looked like any other neurotic graduate student whose grades were slipping because her lover was grazing greener pastures. Bedraggled, red-nosed, and puffy-faced she obviously needed a sympathetic ear.

“I’m dying,” she moaned. “I can’t go on like this. It’s just too hard.” I nodded sagely but said zilch while scanning for the emergency phone. “They just don’t understand, nobody understands any more. Four thousand years, and suddenly I’m an outcast! It’s just not FAIR!” she wailed.

Wait a minute! 4,000 years? What was this? I sat down next to her on the floor. “Tell me about it,” I soothed. “Just take your time and tell me what you mean.”

“Well, “ she gulped, blowing her nose heartily on the only paper I had on me, the latest list of regulations governing public forms of address to avoid offending minority persons. Ma’am, Sir, Miss, and even Ms. had all been cut this time for being sexist or elitist, or both, leaving only “Citizen,” and “Fellow Human” as preferred forms. “Hey, you” had survived, for despite its lack of civility it was found to be sexless, non-culturally diminishing, and consequently politically correct and publicly acceptable. But I digress.

“I’m called Thalia,” said Thalia again, “Do you know what my name means?”

“Not really,” I replied. “Give me a hint, OK?”

“I’m the muse of comedy,” she said. “That’s what Thalia means.”

“You’re named for the muse of comedy,” I said, practicing for my Active Listening seminar later that evening. “No-no-no,” Thalia said. “You don’t get it. I’m not named for the Muse of Comedy, I am the Muse of Comedy. And I’m finally out of a job. I can’t stand it!”

“My job has always been to help people see what’s funny about life and find ways to express it. And now the Thought Police are trying to convince everybody that half the things people have laughed at since Plautus slipped on a banana peel are no longer funny. But they are funny. Politically incorrect, but funny! That’s why I feel so bad. I’m done here. I’m finished. Maybe Outplacement can get me a job as a news anchor,” Thalia sobbed.

I wanted to stem the waterworks before the valves stuck open, but with the new Personal Invasion statutes just taking effect, I could get fired or go to jail if I even patted Thalia’s shoulder. So I tried distraction. “OK, tell me a joke” I challenged her.

“Comedy isn’t just jokes, or even mainly jokes,” she answered. “To understand why I’m so upset, you have to know where comedy comes from and what makes it work. Tell me, how do people deal with stuff they aren’t familiar with or don’t understand?”

“Make jokes about it?”

“Sometimes they do,” said Thalia, “but what they ALWAYS do is compare what they don’t know to things they’re already familiar with. People try to fit the unknown into their model of the known, their paradigm. It’s a survival trait. You don’t want to try to figure out if a small, round object coming at you is dangerous or not. There’s not time to think. You just assign it to the class of “rocks” and duck. It might turn out to be a water balloon or a snowball, but why take chances? Duck first, analyze later.”

“What’s this got to do with comedy? I’m lost,” I admitted.

“It’s like this. People create the same kind of models for SOCIAL stuff that they do for PHYSICAL stuff. And we always assess what we know less well in terms of what we’re more familiar with. Socially and psychologically, we’re most familiar with the people most like ourselves.”

I nodded encouragingly. I figured I was wrong about the grades. This Thalia was pretty smart, even if she was a whacko, uh, acting in non-reality-based modalities.

“So what we do,” she continued, “is classify people. All the time. Instantly. In lots of ways. The first class division is JUST LIKE US and NOT LIKE US. If they’re not like us, we look for ways to understand them, and grab the most obvious characteristics. They might be racial or cultural or educational or religious — whatever. We create classes like Garlic Eaters, or Hindus, or Technicians and assume that every member of the class has ALL the characteristics of the class.”

“That’s pretty unfair,” I said. “It leaves out too many things about people and it makes their culture just a stereotype. I don’t do that. I’m careful to respect everybody.”

“What did you assume about me when you first saw me?” asked Thalia.

“I thought you were a lovelorn grad student,” I confessed.

“See,” she said, “you put me into a class you think of as Lovelorn Graduate Students. You weren’t meaning to be unkind, and really, you’ve been nice as can be. You just did what people ALWAYS do until they know someone pretty well.”

“Once we know someone as a person,” she went on, “we stop thinking of them so much as class members. Until then, we go by what we think are their class attributes. And here’s why we laugh at folks who are different than ourselves: when threatened by the unknown, we protect our sense of US by laughing at the NOT LIKE US.”

“I’m extremely careful to respect the rights of every group,” I rejoined. “Why do you assume all people are bigots and prejudiced against outsiders?”

“Because the sense of territory and tribe are built-in. They seem to be genetically hard-wired,” said Thalia. “That’s not a popular point of view, but more and more evidence suggests it’s correct. Did you know that chimps have over 98% of their DNA in common with us, and they’re the only animals that will seek out and kill members of other bands?”

Thalia was on a roll. “Besides laughing at differences, or people’s social customs, people like to laugh at comic personalities. In Shakespeare’s day this was called Comedy of Humors. It’s based in the idea that one major trait dominates each person’s personality. Take somebody and exaggerate some aspect of personality, and that’s funny. So we get Edith Bunker (the Dingbat) or George of the Jungle (the Schlemiel) or even Mr. Magoo (befuddled old man). It’s amazing how psychological research into personality styles matches up with the old Four Humors popular in the Renaissance.”

Thalia had finally gone too far! “You’ve done it again,” I accused her. “You’ve taken people’s individuality away from them and reduced them to psychological types. And you think it’s funny!”

Thalia shook her head sadly. “That’s the whole point! Comedy doesn’t aim at people as whole individuals... it aims at their traits and blows them out of proportion. It’s the distortion that’s funny! So we can laugh at Mr. Magoo or the Ellie Mae Clampett (the Ingenue) where we wouldn’t laugh at old Mr. Stimmer in the next apartment or your niece Sally. Comedy ALWAYS deals with types more than with individuals.”

“Are you saying it’s a good idea to put people down and slam them for their class characteristics or their individual, ah, differences?”

“No!” she thundered. “Comedy of Humors and Comedy of Manners are based in social paradigms, or stereotypes, and don’t have much to do with individuality. You can’t stop people from stereotyping. It’s fundamental to the way we process information. Individuals are ALWAYS bigger and more complex than the classes they belong to. If you stop at the stereotype, you’re going to be a bigot. But you don’t stop there. You have to consider individuals one at a time, person to person. That’s how to really be fair to everyone. Of course some people have fallen into this trap and PREFER to see themselves as group members rather than as individuals…but good grief! Enough’s enough.”

“Comedy comes from a place that’s immune to political correctness; it’s linked to our basic drives like sex and aggression and tribal identity. Some humor can be intellectual and witty, but pratfalls make ‘em laugh every time. Stuff that’s coming out of our darker levels can’t be legislated out of existence, can’t be permanently shut away like crazy Aunt Jane in the attic. Sooner or later it erupts. And it’s far better for all of us if comedy is around to defuse these drives. It’s far better to laugh at M.A.S.H than to send real soldiers into Iraq, or shoot people coming out of clinics, or blow up peoples’ churches.”

I shook my head. This was getting confusing, and it didn’t seem very funny.

“Look,” said Thalia, “what is definitely NOT funny is to apply negative class terms to individuals. It isn’t funny to call someone a retard, or a bitch, or whatever, especially if your intention in doing it is to hurt the individual. That’s not in Comedy’s job description. But the Thought Police have made everybody afraid of honest laughter. That’s why I’m out of work! Maybe I can try for work with the IRS. They have more need for Comedy there than at the Post Office, even. ”

Thalia got to her feet. And as she wearily shuffled away into the stacks, I looked at the books shelved around us. And it seemed to me that as she left, the bright gilt lettering on their spines faded to murky brown as the spirit of Comedy was drained from them. Volumes of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Johnson, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, Pyncheon, Vonnegut, Shaw, rank on rank, an army of unutterable guffaws.....

As I left the library the overcast streets of Washington looked grayer and more drab than ever. I shrugged, and headed off to my job in the Bureau of Social Sanitation. It was time to go back to work making the world a better place to live.

Highly Dubious Retouching (HDR)

2011-03-19T15:26:00.001-04:00

The old curmudgeon asks, what is all this HDR crap?

He has a number of answers.

1. HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a series of techniques to assist digital photographers to match the dynamic range of the human eye (depends on who you ask, but that's between 9 and 11 f-stops -- a lot, in simple terms). Digital cameras typically have a range of 6 to 7 stops, max.

2. HDR is used to rescue photos which suffer from camera (or most likely operator) limitations. If the scene is flat as a pancake, lacking highlights or shadows, HDR can help you create them where they were not.

3. HDR is yet another means for the talentless to ape the truly creative people who understand light, contrast, and color.

4. HDR provides endless proofs of HL Mencken's jibe that "no one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public."

The old curmudgeon may be tactless, but he's not stupid. Still, his less than temperate remarks merit a little elaboration, lest the unwary simply dismiss him with a shrug.

HDR is in fact a procedure to create a dynamically rich image where the original RAW interpreter saw a very limited image. In short, it's a method of making a silk purse out of nature's occasional sow's ear.

Today there are a ton of gimmick-laden HDR applications. You don’t need them to achieve a good result –especially if you shoot in RAW. If you shoot in JPG mode, you're cooked, so fuggedaboudit. (You may THINK you're OK, but then look at your image at 100% size, that is, 1 image pixel = 1 screen pixel, and you'll soon see how bad things look). All you really need is one more or less correct raw exposure. Make three copies of this exposure, set the exposure control to -1, 0, and +1 stops (or more, depending on what you want to accomplish). Open all three images in photoshop, copy them as layers to a master image, then erase as needed to get the enriched image you wanted.

This is oversimplified, but not by much. What this basic technique allows you to do is to put details into shadows and bright areas where there were none before, as well as make the darks darker and the brights brighter.

You get better results if you take multiple bracketed exposures of the same scene, knowing you’ll be using HDR techniques back home. If you use three or more registered images (registered means they overlap exactly, which means you use a GOOD tripod. use mirror pre-up, and use time delay so your heavy footsteps and clumsy hands don't cause vibration), you can stack these up the same way as you stacked the light-normal-dark version of just one image in the last example. You'll get even better results than using a single image. No gee-whiz app needed.

Doing it yourself is the hard way. Gee, it requires forethought, judgment, patience, and an understanding of what current light conditions and your camera can accomplish. God help you, you actually have to know something about photography to make the most of this technique. Arrrrgggghhh! Why go to the trouble when you could let the software do it automatically?

If you take the trouble to do things manually, you can get a rich image that really does go beyond the interpretive software's limitations (RAW images, remember, are 1-0 and that's it. You cannot open and view a RAW image -- someone's software must do the interpreting of what the 1-0 stuff represents visually). What you DON'T get is super-saturated colors, ethereal glows (Photoshop's built-in HDR routine actually has a setting for "surreal"), or butt-ugly, unconsidered color and lighting shifts.

OK, let's assume you are a rank and tasteless amateur who thinks HDR is the greatest thing since cranberry juice and kahlua cocktails. If you're one of that class, you are enamored of the super-duper effects HDR apps can create. And if you're really good, you can produce images that look like 1960s-era sci-fi magazine covers -- over-colored, air-brushy, with very hard edges. Yowzah! Of course if you're not that good, and keep tweaking the controls, you get things that look like a radioactive turtle emerging from a neon-colored mudbank -- only it's a picture of your infant niece, or, worse, your pregnant niece! Double araaarrrrrgjh!

This is a vital point. To use HDR, or any image-manipulation tool, effectively, you HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE. I don't mean you have to put it in words -- but you have to have a vision of what will be the right treatment for THIS image, what will best express the vision and feelings you had in your mind when you took it in the first place.

I'm not trying to discourage folks from trying HDR. By all means, tinker to your heart's content, learn the plusses and minuses, the ins-and-outs of this technology. But please, please, DO NOT thrust your baby steps on an unwilling audience, and then expect praise. At the very least, have an idea in your noggin of what you want to achieve, and how you want people to respond to it BEFORE you play with the buttons, and ABSOLUTELY before you post an over-colored dish of M&Ms and try to persuade us it's an orange souffle.

HDR apps invite the most wretched excesses and encourage people to rely on technology when their inner eye has no clue as to what they want to achieve. But -- and this is important -- the problem is not in the apps. Yes, they invite pictures that make the old curmudgeon run for a barf-bag. But they don't have to be used that way. Like guns, or helicopters, or motorcycles, they can be used for good or ill. Like any tool, they depend on the judgment and skill of the user to be effective. To be blunt, James Cameron achieved HDR / CGI miracles in Avatar, but very few of us are James Camerons!

Properly used, HDR can salvage deficient photos, enrich good ones, or bring a spot of magic to an otherwise humdrum shot. But improperly used, HDR is yet another reason why modern photography is so often held in contempt – and so little purchased.

The old curmudgeon says, "take good photographs first, based on your eyes and your heart and your skills. Feel free to see what technology can do for you. But DO NOT thrust your infant failures and bad taste on the rest of us as if you have accomplished something great. You haven’t, and if you just rely on automated HDR programs you never will." Amen.

The marvelous act of asking your way

2011-03-14T12:43:00.002-04:00

“Why does it take 20,000,000 sperms to fertilize a single human egg?”

— Because not one of them will stop to ask directions!

Yesterday I was on a waterfall hunting expedition with three friends, Tina, Tom, and Mark. Tom was driving. We were trying to find Deadman’s Falls near Georgetown, OH. We cruised up and down route 132 hunting for what we thought was the right road that would lead to the field we’d have to cross. Finally, we turned into a road with a sign for a winery. We needed to ask for directions – yet even when we saw a fellow standing out by his mailbox, Tom had to be bludgeoned into turning around and asking him the way.

The fellow turned out to be a very nice and friendly farmer, and he gave us good directions. Definitely a twinkle in his eye!

This small incident prompted a conversation and some reflection about the difficulty so many of us – especially men – seem to have in asking for directions. The little joke at the top of the page wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t a truth universally acknowledge among women that a man – whether or not possessed of a fortune – really hates to ask directions. But it isn’t just men, though there may be a bias towards men.

Somewhere out there must be a PhD dissertation on this topic, but I haven’t seen it. So I’ll wonder. Are men more reluctant to ask other men for directions? Do women cozy up to other women but shun the gents when it comes to asking the way? Or is the other way round? Is this reluctance to ask cultural, geographical, age-related, or genetic? Or is it simply a reluctance to admit one’s vulnerability in seeking help from strangers?

My guess is that the last explanation is most at play and applies more to men than to women but doesn’t exclude either gender. When we stop someone to ask them the way, we may tell ourselves lots of stories:

— There’s something wrong with me that I can’t find the way, and I’ll look bad if is ask

— It’s bad manners to invade someone else’s space, and I don’t want to be rude

— what if this guy is hostile? He could get mad at me for bothering him!

— What if this guy’s hostile, and shines me on with WRONG directions, just to be mean?

— What if he thinks I’m trying to sell him something?

— Maybe there are dogs in the back yard!

— This place is run down. What if there’s a meth lab in the back yard? (Not unheard of in rural Southwest Ohio!)

Of course, if it’s New York City, New Jersey, Khabul or Cartagena, any of these stories might be true — even all of them at the same time! But most likely, even in those places, none of them is true, or only rarely true.

If you stop to examine your feelings (not a very guy thing to do), you’ll probably see you have some connection to these stories. Or perhaps you have one all your own that blocks you from asking for directions.

In fact – and here’s a secret for travel – most places, people are DELIGHTED to be asked for help, and will offer it gladly when you do. I’ve had incredible offers of help in France, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Nova Scotia, Arkansas, and – yes – Manhattan (New York, not Kansas). And I STILL don’t like asking directions, but I do it – and am usually rewarded for it.

You see, when you ask for directions (or other help), you are making yourself vulnerable, opening yourself wide open as a flawed human being who doesn’t know absolutely everything. When you do that, you instantly cease to be a threat or challenge to the person you’ve approached. Instead, you awake feelings of generosity that can run to amazing lengths – such as the person who not only gave me directions to an out-of the-way site, but led me there. Or the old man in France who actually took a traveler’s check from my 17-year old self so that I could get something to eat – it was a religious holiday and no banks or stores in the village were open.

Put yourself in the position of being the one asked for help. What feelings race through you? And if you provide the help, how does that make you feel? (The answer, just in case you’ve never actually helped a stranger, is YOU FEEL TERRIFIC.)

Sometimes an act as simple as asking (or giving) directions can lead to genuine friendships that can last for years and years. You may wind up meeting new people and learning lots that you didn’t know about the place you’re in, the things you might never have known.

On my two month trip to Alaska, I made a conscious decision to talk to strangers. Now up there, that’s not so hard to do, because eye contact is not a forgotten art as it is in more densely packed urban centers. An in these random conversations, I’d always ask one question – “You’ve been a terrific help. Now on my travels, who else should I talk to?” Amazing! That simple question connected me (or at least gave me entrée) over hundreds of miles and wound up providing riches untold.

Asking directions is a conscious decision. You have to actually choose to do it.

The trick in freeing yourself up to ask directions is being aware of how silly are most of the things that hold you back. It’s easier if you actually ask yourself, “how true are these stories I’ve been telling myself? What’s the worst thing that could happen, and how likely is it to occur?”

We may not like asking strangers for help, even just asking for directions. But in the act of asking for help, we are actually doing the stranger a great service – we are validating them for their possible kindness, their knowledge, and their experience. What a gift to offer to anyone – and how rarely will it be turned down.

That is the great secret and marvelous blessing of asking your way – it’s really a two-way street. So, stop the car, get out of it, and approach that guy leaning on the mailbox. It’s an act of kindness and a true adventure!

Resolution Basics --Why and When Megapixels Matter

2011-02-27T15:28:00.005-05:00

Megapixels are a mug’s game – most of the time. If you’re producing close-ups of your new-born which will be distributed via cell-phone or web, you don’t need a ton of megapixels. For such photos, 3 megapixels would be plenty, even if you wanted to print the occasional 5x7 or 8x10. You don’t need a $5,000 rifle to shoot woodchucks (and yes, you can buy such a varmint rifle).

So what’s the big deal about 6, 8, 12, 22 more megapixels? It depends on what you’re trying to do and how the images are intended to be used.

Super resolution only matters when you’re super fussy and are planning on making super-large prints, OR when you’re planning on cropping to just a small part of your frame and then blowing it up to even normal sizes like 5x7 or 8x10.

Notice, I said the P-word, as in PRINTS. There isn’t a monitor made that can portray the full dynamic range and intricate detail of a finely-crafted print. That’s not an opinion – it’s a simple matter of fact. The technology of monitor display spaces color dots too widely and too imprecisely to really capture silk-smooth texture or subtle tonal shifts. You need a high-quality print to do that.

There are a number of components affecting resolution. The most important are glass, cleanliness, pixel count, pixel size, and the camera’s internal data-capturing algorhythms.

For now, let’s leave the camera’s picture-taking logic out of it and assume you have a competent camera – today, most digital cameras are better than competent, they’re really rather good at finding exposures, autofocus, and the like – all of which affect the final resolution (clarity) of the image.

Glass

Lenses get very expensive very quickly. That is because one piece of curved glass is never going to do the whole job. So lenses are made of many clusters of glass (elements), each with its own coatings, curvature, placement in the barrel, transmisivity (ability to transmit light) and color characteristics. The greater the transmisivity (read ability to shoot in low light), the greater the cost of the lens. That’s why a 300 millimiter f2.8 lens costs about 4 times as much as a 300 millimeter f5.6 lens.

The quality of your glass (lenses) really matters. Imagine that you smeared Vaseline all over the front of your lens – no way would a picture shot through than lens ever be sharp. Ugh – yet in fact, smearing Vaseline on a lens was an early way to achieve soft-focus and vignetting ON PURPOSE.

Dirt

Even a thin film of smoke, chemical deposits (as from cheapo lens cleaning sprays) will interfere with the lens’s ability to do it’s two main jobs: transmit light and focus light without reflection, fringing (chromatic aberration), color distortion, etc. Dust is your enemy – and I know this to my cost from extended shooting in Canada Alaska, which are permanently and inescapably dusty.

You can do things to reduce dust, but you can’t eliminate it permanently. It WILL build up and haunt you. You have to go after it carefully, frequently, and thoroughly. And that includes cleaning your sensor, not just your lenses.

So if you need really high resolution, get the best glass for the job you want to do. And keep it clean, but don’t scratch it while cleaning it! And by the way – don’t apply a cloth to the mirror in your camera – it’s not coated and scratches very easily.

Megapixels -- How Many?

Now, at last, we get to those megapixels. Here’s the deal. Let’s imagine you are a landscape, architectural, or product photographer. Let’s further say you have a 6 megapixel camera. You take a picture of a distant tree with an eagle sitting on top of it. The tree is standing in a rocky field. The tree and eagle take up about 20% of your shot – the rest is field and sky. So only 1/5 of your pixels are available for the important part of your subject! In this example, that means you have at most 1.2 megapixels out of 6 dedicated to tree and eagle. If you wanted to crop the image to show just the branch and the eagle sitting on it, you’re down to about 5% of your pixels, of about 300,000 pixels.

You’re not going to get any kind of sharpness and detail from that number of pixels.

Let me make this simpler. The more of your pixels are devoted to your subject, the better your print will look. If you have only 20 pixels devoted to your eagle, you’re doomed. 20 million pixels – now you can make a 30x40 and it fly jump out of the tree at you.

That’s why resolution matters much less for close-ups than it does for landscape shots. You don’t crop close-ups much, so you don’t give away pixels to useless parts of the image.. On the other hand, if you want every detail in a landscape to be clear and sharp, you need great glass, correct exposure, and all the pixels you can get. Here are some examples:

This picture of a mamma bear is uncropped. It was shot with a 70-300mm zoom on a 12-megapixel camera from a distance of about 12 feet. The subject takes up most of the frame, so there’s no problem with resolution – and the picture is helped by having a good flash to help on a murky, rainy, almost-dark lighting situation.

The two shots above show the same scene shot with two different cameras, a Nikon D700 and a medium-format Mamiya AFD with a PhaseOne P25 back (22 megapixels). The Nikon had an f2.8 28-70 Sigma lens, and the Mamiya sported a similarly sized (though slower) lens. (an 80 millimeter Mamiya lens is equivalent to a 50mm Nikon lens in breadth of field). Both cameras were mounted on the same tripod and the shots were taken within a minte or two of each other.

The images differ some in color, but that’s not the point here. The Mamiya camera / lens combo is FAR sharper than the Nikon because 1. The glass is better and 2. There are more pixels devoted to the same portion of the subject.

Here's another example of where you need pixels to capture fine detail in a landscape. This picture of Yellowstone Falls was taken from more than 1/2 mile away. The actual-pixel-size insert shows just how fine the detail can be when you have enough pixels. Pity there's just a hint of motion blur, or this would be even better!

Pixels -- How Big?

Sorry, folks, size does count. Bigger pixels do a better job of capturing light than small ones. Imagine you are playing a carnival game in which you’re tossing dimes at a tray crammed with red, green, and blue shot-glasses. Some will go into the shot glass and win you a stuffed bear. But many will bounce off and either miss the shot glasses altogether, or land in the wrong one. This is called "scatter."

The pixels on your sensor are exactly like the shot glasses – only the photons striking the bottom of the glass are captured. Bounce-offs don't count at all! If the pixels are small and very tightly packed, many will scatter instead of going to the active part of the sensor and being recorded.

Now imagine that you’re still tossing dimes, but this time the shot glasses have been replaced with coffee cups (no handles, so they’re still tightly packed). This time most of the nickels will find a home (and the correct home at that). You win the teddy bear!

When you have a DX sensor (smaller than 35mm), and give it 10 megapixels, those pixels are mighty small and very tightly packed. That means that there’s more light scatter, and the effect of that is less dynamic range. Bad. But if you take the same number of pixels and put them on an FX sensor, and if they’re still tightly-packed, each pixel will be bigger and your dynamic range goes up.

On the Phase One P25 sensor (now obsolete) the pixels are 9 microns across. And there are 22 million of them spread over a sensor the size of a 645 film negative (that's much bigger than a 35mm). On a Nikon D300 the pixels are 5.45 microns across. On the D700, they’re 8.45 microns across and there are 12.8 million of them on a 35 mm (FX) size sensor. Pretty good, but as the Grand Teton picture above illustrates, not AS good for landscapes -- but terrific for portraits and macros.

So go back to the dime-tossing analogy. Bigger sensor+bigger pixels = more light captured.

Pixels -- Bit Depth

One more factor affects dynamic range, and with it, effective resolution (the amount of detail in shadow areas, for instance). This is bit depth. Bit depth is defined as the number of bits (binary digits) used to record the illumination level of a pixel. More is better. The D700 carries up to 14 bits of color information about each photon of light striking the sensor, while the P25 carries 16. This may not sound like much of a difference, but it’s a very big deal. RAW image files from the Nikon are about 12 megabytes, from the P25 about 24. megs. Better have plenty of memory cards! Big files take more processing horsepower, and hence allow fewer shots-per-second. The P25 is dead slow (0.7 frames per second), while the D700 shoots up to 7 comfortably. Frames-per-second is irrelevant for landscape work, but vital for shooting sports or birds. Buy for what you need to shoot!

Here's one more full-image / detail example (Mamiya / P25). In this case the bit depth is important; without it you wouldn't see the red in the boat, small as it is. Believe it or not, that little touch of color is what sold an 18" wide print of this scene.

Summary

The point of this article is not to compare specific cameras. It’s to clarify when you need lots of pixels for maximum resolution and when you don’t.

You need lots of pixels when you want to make razor-sharp wall-size pictures of landscapes OR when you want to make large prints of deeply-cropped subjects.

You don’t need lots of pixels to shoot close-ups, or when you don’t plan on printing large, or when you don’t need to crop then print.

Most of us carry cameras with more megapixels than we need. But as it usually is in life, we make choices because some marketer tells us simplistic stuff like “More pixels is BETTER.”

More may be better – but it depends on the jobs you want to do. Define what you’re trying to do, then match the megapixels to the task – or contentedly waste your money for something you don’t need and will probably never take full advantage of.

Crop your way to better photos

2011-02-08T19:23:00.004-05:00

Cropping a photo is often the best way to improve it. But cropping, useful as it is, also presents some problems. This update deals with both sides of the cropping issue.

First, in case you’ve forgotten, cropping a photo is the art of removing parts of the image, leaving a residue which is necessarily smaller than the original. “Smaller” here refers to file size – the fact is that when you crop you toss out data, and that can can come back to bite you if you don’t follow a good workflow. More on that later.

Even if there’s a potential penalty to pay in cropping, there are plenty of benefits. Here’s what cropping can do for you and your pictures:

Exclude unwanted material that adds no value to the shot
Focus on the essential elements of the picture
Improve composition by putting the center of interest in the “right” spot
Eliminate distractions
Alter the story your picture is telling (and every picture tells, or should tell, a story)
Fit your image to an appropriate size for framing, yearbook use, etc
Save work “fixing” portions of the picture by removing the bad areas altogether

Cropping and composition are tightly linked. It’s often said that the best place to crop is in your viewfinder, prior to clicking the shutter. That’s usually true, but there’s a downside: if your picture is perfectly framed and perfectly composed in the camera, you cannot later reformat from, say, 3:2 to 5:4 aspect ratio without doing grievous bodily harm to your art. You’ll save work (and definitely become a better photographer by perfectly composing your work in camera) but you do create some limitations by framing your picture so that there’s no room to crop!

Most of us don’t have that problem. Our pictures are rarely shot with perfect composition, and most of us waste much or most of the frame space with stuff that doesn’t help the picture. Zoom lenses help a bit here, but primes are pretty well guaranteed to need cropping because you can’t always move to the right spot to get the picture perfectly composed. Landscape shooters may have no way to get a shrub out of frame, for instance (though I always carry a pocket saw to help with that problem).

Let’s talk about excluding unwanted material, the first reason for cropping a photo.

In this cave picture used by permission of the maker, Dave Braughler, the shooter had a terrible problem – pitch dark location, bright rocks in the foreground, nasty hard-to-light shadows in the center obscuring the central figures.

The image was cropped so as to eliminate most of the distracting bright rocks. The crop was moved to place the central subjects in the best position. Then the remaining bright rocks were burned down and the central area dodged (lightened) to increase the visual importance of the cavers.

So in this case the crop achieved three of the main reasons for cropping: removing needless material, eliminating distractions, and improving the picture’s story-telling. Three for one, this shot only!

Here’s another example:

The first shot shows t entire uncropped frame. It concentrates more on the bunny in its environment. The second is cropped much more tightly. This shot still shows the grasses and dirt for context, but concentrates on the bunny. Cropping the shot increases the importance of the center-of-interest and enhances the story-telling.

You have to make sure the material you’re cropping out is genuinely distracting, wasteful, or technically bad (like the cave rocks above). You can overdo spotlighting the central subject, as in this portrait of a girl and her cello.

In this example, the overall shot is out of balance and full of distractions. The second version eliminates the cello, and we’re left with an inexplicable expression on the girl’s face. If there’s a story in this version, it’s very dark and obscure. The last version concentrates on the girl and her cello; it’s a story-telling shot showing how she and the instrument are emotionally connected.

Cropping for impact

Here’s a shot I loved in its uncropped version. When it showed up as a screensaver, my computer had automatically cropped the excess area, and I really like it much better! There’s enough of the old mine building showing to provide context, but not enough to overpower the flowers. The effect doesn't show so much at small sizes, but at full-screen size it's striking.

Telling the right story, or telling your story right?

Sometimes you crop to enhance or exaggerate some element of your shot. Here I cropped to make this a L-O-N-G story, even though I actually made it one horse shorter! I wanted to change the feel of the shot. Not coincidentally this shot can be used across a double-page magazine spread with room for an article underneath.

Here's another example of changing your story. The original version of this family playing on the banks of New Hampshire's Merrimack River one blistering July day really had three stories going on, and they were competing for each other. Look how the various crops change the story completely!

Original

The girl's story

The guys' story

The family story This is not quite the same as the first version, because the crop helps us connect the two subjects by an implied diagonal (top left to bottom right) that you don't see in the original -- too much distraction from the river bank, shrubbery, and the white towel.

Cropping can improve composition by finding the portion of the shot that most closely corresponds to one of the basic organizing strategies for photos. In the case of the cave shot shown above, cropping improved the composition by emphasizing the diagonals in the picture. Composing to emphasize diagonals automatically increases the sense of motion and energy in any photograph. Second, the crop made certain to place the cavers on or right next to the “thirds line,” as in the Rule of Thirds. (To be honest, the original picture was pretty good on this score, but a tweak never hurts).

Workflow and cropping

As I said earlier, the best way to get a picture right is to take it right. But sometimes you simply can’t get rid of a shrub, or get to the perfect position to shoot from. Other times you may want to intentionally leave plenty of room to crop the image down to a different proportion, say, to a 1.9 :1 ratio (panorama) from a 3:2 (standard 35mm format). (On cheap cameras with a “panoramic” setting, all they’re doing is discarding the pixels above and below certain pre-set “crop marks.”)

Assuming you’re going to crop your picture, when should you do it?

There are two schools of thought here. One says crop immediately, and then you only have to edit and correct the part of the image you actually wanted.

The downside of this practice, especially if you shoot in JPEG mode, is that you will find it difficult to go back uphill and recover lost material if you want it later. If you crop, then save the image, the original pixels are gone forever. Of course if you’re shooting RAW, you won’t lose the original pixels, but if you crop then edit, then decide to re-crop the original, you’ll have to re-edit that copy as well. Tedious.

The other approach says do all your editing, then make your crops. Save each crop AS A COPY, then undo the crop you just made on your master file, re-crop, save as copy and undo, etc. You don’t have to re-edit, but you do run the risk of forgetting to undo your most recent crop before re-cropping, in which case you will lose precious pixels forever.

The best practice is to shoot in RAW (your data is never touched, so you can’t lose it). Do as much of your editing as possible in your general photo editing program, such as Lightroom, Aperture, or CaptureOne. Make your crops from within this program. Then, if you really want to get picky, open the file you want to work on in Photoshop and have at it.

When not to crop?

Not every file can or should be cropped. There are both technical and artistic reasons for leaving well enough alone. The artistic reason is if you’ve done the shot perfectly, don’t mess with it – and don’t compromise your great picture by forcing it into some other format. Use borders or vignettes if you must, but DON’T MESS UP A PERFECT IMAGE for the sake of a size rule.

The technical issues mainly have to do with prints. Sorry, but no screen image yet made can carry the detail of a fine-quality print. And printing is where you have to pay the piper for your crops.

The technical reasons boil down to “no free lunch.” The penalty for cropping small files, or for making VERY tight crops in larger ones, is lousy enlargements, at least with most cameras. Here’s what happens. Let’s say your “native” file size yields a 5x7@ 300 dpi. Let’s further say your crop takes out about 67% of those pixels, as in the bunny shot above; your 6 megapixel original image is now a 2 megapixel image (before making a JPEG, which is much smaller, say 300K). If you try to get an 8x10 out of that, you will not be a happy camper. In the case of the bunny picture, the original was 14 megapixels, and the cropped version is about 4.7, so it will print perfectly at 7x9 and can be rezzed-up to larger sizes if needed. The moral of the story: if you want to crop tight and then make large prints, you need all the megapixel horsepower you can get.

At large print sizes, pixels do matter, as does lens quality. Quite simply, a 16 x 20 print from a 6 megapixel camera does not look nearly as good as the same subject shot with a 22 mpx camera. I use three cameras, 12, 14, and 22 megapixels. Sparing you the technical details I can instantly tell which camera was used for any given picture in my files simply by looking at it. The original file of this 57 Chevy is 24 megapixels (RAW). The headlamp detail shot is a 100% crop from the original, unsharpened. Guess which camera was used!

This is an extreme example, but the bottom line is: if you want to make big prints from small crops, you can expect trouble. The only cure is razor-sharp glass and huge numbers of pixels.

The logic of this is simple. An 8x10 has 80 square inches of image. A 4x5 has 20 square inches. A 3x5 has 15 square inches. If you try to crop a 4x5 chunk from an 8x10 file, then blow it back up to 8x10, you’ll have to expand your pixels by a factor of four! That’s when things get ugly. So, the more pixels you have in your 4x5 crop, the bigger they will print without problems. C’est logique, ça!

To sum up, cropping is one of the best and simplest ways to improve your images. Just don’t over do it, and respect the technical issues you may have to deal with. Be careful not to lose your original data; sooner or later it may come in handy!

Modest Proposals to Improve Congressional Behavior

2011-01-23T12:08:00.001-05:00

We live in a contentious time. It’s obvious that civility just doesn’t get exposure on TV, while rudeness, name calling, and associated nastiness get plenty of airtime.

So where’s the juice in behaving civilly, and actually working towards solving problems together, instead of beating up on the other guys? There isn’t any, not in today’s adversarial atmosphere.

So here are some truly radical ideas to level the playing field and reduce the amount of dishonesty, self-serving, name-calling, and distortion that characterize today’s congressional activities. Just ask yourself, how would things be if such proposals were actually to be enacted?

Eliminate sound bites in covering political candidates. How? Insist that the news media – all of them – air no quotation shorter than two minutes, with no editing. Dead boring TV and radio, but perhaps more honest reporting and more thoughtful remarks by candidates.

Prohibit paid political advertising. I know the Supreme Court seems to prefer that elections be bought by the richest via unlimited advertising, but hey, a guy can dream of judicial fairness. Alternatively, restrict paid advertising by any candidate for federal office to a maximum of $1,000,000 per campaign. That’s more than enough to make us all sick to our stomachs.

All claims made in political advertising must be submitted PRIOR TO PUBLICATION for verification to a neutral authentication board or service, such as factcheck.org.

Require each Federal-level candidate to produce a 300-word (no more than 300) document stating the basic things he/she hopes to accomplish during his/her term in office. This becomes the basis for a factual assessment of the candidate’s perfomance if elected.

Abolish earmarks altogether. ANY money appropriated must be sent through the appropriate committee, with the sponsoring legislator clearly identified.

Change the filibuster rules so that a senator must in fact perform the threatened filibuster IN PERSON, and that the Senate shall not be adjourned until cloture is voted or the speaker yields the floor (or passes out), whichever comes first. Alternatively, reduce the cloture vote requirements to 55% of those present.

Eliminate the practice of gerrymandering. One way to do this is to define congressional districts as consisting of an entire county or group of counties. That should stop the practice of “locking in” whichever party is on top at the time of redistricting. The result is a much more fairly balanced congressional election process.

Require that the senate hold a floor vote on any federal judgeship, ambassadorial appointment, or cabinet appointment within 90 days of submitting the candidate’s name. In the event such a vote is not held, the nominee shall immediately be placed in the position for which he or she is nominated. This will prevent the chronic stalling both parties use in hindering the other party's appointments.

Customer Service Done Right

2010-11-17T11:39:00.004-05:00

This summer I committed a murder. It was an execution long overdue, and when it was over I felt more satisfied than the Duke contemplating his last duchess. Like the Duke, I gave commands ... and all smiles ceased. (If you don't get this, scroll to the bottom).

The murder in question was killing off Jill, the American female voice that came with my GPS. Her coy, psuedo-sexy smirk when she said "arriving at destination" reminded me of David Sedaris doing Crumpet the Elf in his "Santaland Diaries." I replaced the smarmy bitch with a British male named Daniel, whom I promptly renamed Miles. Miles isn't coy ... he's direct, sure of himself (even when dead-ass wrong) and altogether easier on the nerves.

Miles's certainty and authoritative tone were welcome ... but didn't solve the real problem with the GPS. During last summer's trip to Alaska, I found my Garmin Nuvi 660 increasingly unreliable. The further away from the lower 48, the worse it got. The Nuvi was so wrong regarding database information that it couldn't find the Post Office in Seward Alaska, couldn't find a gas station within 150 miles while I was looking at one. So wrong that relying on it was plain dangerous.

I think part of the problem was inaccurate mapping and POI (Points of Interest) data, and part was positioning problems .... but I would consistently get accuracy readings of under 12 feet, with umpteen birds in view ... while giving me a position miles from my actual location.

That sounds like no big deal, but when you're talking truly isolated places, where missing a turn is not a good idea, and where it can be 250 miles of more to the next gas station (which doesn't look like one, just a big white tank and a scruffy cafe), you really do need to know where you are and what your resources are going to be.

So when my Nuvi finally stopped speaking altogether two weeks ago, I called Garmin. After 3 tries (getting disconncted while on hold is most annoying), I got through to someone and they sent a replacement. It arrived defective. I'm still waiting for the next one.

Compare that with Navteq. Nav who? Navteq is the firm that supplies POI data and maps to Garmin and other GPS makers. Garmin told me this when they were trying to say it wasn't their fault that their instrument was physically unreliable and data-base challenged.

Navteq had no direct phone number listed on the web, but I got through to them by the simple expedient of sending Navteq's PR firm an Mp3 file in which Miles is going around in circles while I was driving a straight line. My note asked if I could speak to someone there BEFORE I posted this file.

Now comes the good part, and it really is a good part. 24 hours later I received a call from Cory Hos, who is product manager for Navteq's map reporter, global product management division. Cory not only listened, he wanted all the data I could send him. Luckily, I had pretty complete tracking every step of the way and could give him what he needed. Cory is eager to get his "driving teams" out to the field to upgrade their maps' accuracy and POI data base.

Obviously, I'd have preferred more accuracy in the first place. But Navteq's "let's get on this and make it right" attitude is refreshing. They're not letting the grass grow while committees hem and haw. They're ON it. Like now. And most important, I feel really, truly listened to, not blown off as a crank.

Garmin's people are very nice to deal with, once you get through to a human in the right department. But their product quality isn't up to snuff (not the first Garmin GPS I've had problems with), and the maps are, by their own admission "a little behind." They don't take ownership the way Navteq has.

Customer service isn't about being perfect. Customer service is about making things right, not just the immediate problem, but the root cause. And it is totally about listening to the customer. This is what Navteq is making every effort to do. I salute them.

-------

Browning's dramatic monologue "My Last Duchess" is wonderful read-aloud stuff. Try it yourself, and see.

Incredibly Busy, and finally something to show for it

2010-10-19T22:57:00.000-04:00

I've been home for almost a month, and haven't updated this blog because I've been working! In that month, I've done the following:

1. Generated a book proposal and begun the search for an agent
2. Created a calendar celebrating Gravel Roads. Now off press, finally ... and coming to Cincinnati area shops and Amazon in the near future. Major hassle, but it's a beautiful gift. More on that later.
3. Sorted out 10,000 images, picking 350 for submission to The Milepost, Alaska's premier travel guide.
4. Started sifting through the interviews and "real time" adventures gathered on the Alaska trip. Out of that has come

-- A "fish story" to end all fish stories. Edited from 20 minutes to 1 minute ... and definitely X-rated, so it may or may not get posted here.

-- A 22-minute "real time adventure" slide show, too big for Youtube so I'll have to find a server to handle it before you can see it. It will be shown Saturday, November 13, at an Ohio Valley Camera Club meetup at Fernald. This was hard to do; had to boil 80 minutes down to about 20, buy and learn new editing software for sound and images, and put them to use.

-- A 6-minute Alaska Panoramas movie, embedded below and available on my webpage and on Youtube.

You can also see 25 wonderful photos from the trip, and more stuff will be added soon.

5. The weekend after I got back I traveled to Sandusky for 4 days on an assignment for AAA. Shot like mad than wrote a 1400 word article and sent it off to the editor two days ago.

I haven't even gotten the car completely unpacked and all the grit removed. Camera and two lenses are at KEH for repair; the dust killed 'em.

So, here's the Alaska Panoramas video, in HD. Let me know what you think. And if you want a Gravel Roads calendar, contact me directly at info@ekhphoto.com Click on it to expand into a separate window, then you can choose to see it in HD if you like.

Whew!

What's the problem with Yellowstone Park?

2010-09-16T21:44:00.000-04:00

I spent most of last week in Yellowstone National Park. I wandered, wondered, and was amazed … but also disappointed. The place is so damn organized that it’s more like making stops on a pilgrimage than exploring the incredible aspects of nature surrounding you. That’s because the Park is a victim of its own success and is cursed by the long-ago decision making it automobile-dependent.

Yellowstone is laid out for an automobile-based visit. This year I’m told that a record 8 million people visited the Park … that’s about 2 million cars. And it looks as though at least half of them are hulking RVs. Way too many! Even now, in mid September, 8,000 people a day are visiting the Park, far more than in years past. When I asked a Ranger what had happened to boost attendance, he snarled “Ken Burns” at me and changed the subject.

This volume of traffic provides huge challenges for camping and lodging spaces, for safety, for service stations, and for plumbing. It puts great pressure on the ecology and wildlife of the region.

The Park’s approach has been to turn the Park into a sort of nanny-state. Virtually every feature has a name, a wooden walkway, railings, signs telling you it’s dangerous, don’t step off the path, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t feed the bears, don’t approach bison or elk (they’re dangerous), don’t, don’t, don’t … and DO do exactly what everyone else does, in the same order.

You can, of course, hike anywhere you want to. But don’t even think of bringing your dog (even leashed) on any trail, or even onthe boardwalked sites. You can’t leave them tied to anything, can’t leave them alone at a campsite, can’t take them on a trail or path. You can lock them in your car, or stay with them in a parking lot or campsite. But that’s it. It’s a gulag for Lassie, no kidding.

Lots of people do take hikes. But the huge majority of folks drive around from one “village” (cluster of lodging, gas, food, shops, and info center) to the next seeing the requisite sights along the way. .

There are a few drives where rvs and trailers aren’t permitted – too narrow and dangerous. Thank God. But the park will spend lots of money upgrading roads, but won’t remove a single branch that blocks visual access to the sight you’re on this road to see!

Another real oddity concerns how people interact with wildlife in the Park. If you’re driving along and see a cluster of cars crowding the turnouts (the only place you can stop) and spilling onto the road, you can be 100% certain that they’re seeing bison, bear, elk, or (very unlikely) wolves.

It’s amazing. But word of animal sightings passes telepathically or by some sort of tribal instinct, and like vultures heading for the carrion, the tourists flock to any animal sighting. It’s both scary and amazing to see how this operates … and on their heels a ranger wagon is likely to appear, telling them by loud speaker to “stay away from the wildlife, back up, stay in your car” or something similar. People get excited and act crazily when wildlife sightings occur, especially if the confrontation is at close quarters.

There’s an almost scary avidity to see these animals in their environment. I have given real thought to this, and can’t decide if people are feeling so cut off from nature that they are desparate to see other large life forms operating within the natural order (we, of course consider ourselves above nature, not of it, but that’s a topic for a later essay). Or perhaps it’s a vestigial hunting instinct. For most folks, point-and-shoot cameras have replaced point-and-shoot guns. But there are quite a number of Canon-toting hunters who will do anything to get the shot.

Here’s an example. As I was leaving the Park, bison were massing along the Lamar River. Would have done a movie producer proud. About two miles past the Soda Butte a herd of 30 plus animals started down the hillside, obviously intent on crossing the road. I stopped to let them. The car coming towards me also stopped, leaving a corridor about 100 feet wide for the herd to pass through. Not terribly wide, but as wide as could be under the circumstances. Here's what it looked like at the start of the migration:

Three bison had crossed the road when ZOOM … two identical SUVs (identical cars, though the plated were from 2 different states) roared past me, blocking my view and narrowing the herd’s corridor even further. Then Canon-toting middle aged men poured form both cars, for all the world like mobsters taking down a squealer, and started blasting away.

Here's what it looked like when they did their thing:

This wasn’t merely unconscionably rude, it was really dangerous for them, for me, and for the bison.

You see, they forced 3 of the bison to choose between ramming my car, changing course to the rear, or charging into them.

Bison are unpredictable and erratic, and have been known to trample a vehicle until nothing in it moved (fact, not folklore). You’re supposed to stay 100 yards from them if possible, and to stay in your car if you are closer than that.

So for these jerks to have barged out of traffic, blocking me, and exposing all of us to danger …. That says something about the aggressive hunting behavior some folks exhibit.

I’m a pro photographer, with a car plainly marked on all 4 sides, and these guys were amateurs on a tour (as suggested by their age, apparent wealth, and identical vehicles, whose drivers were NOT dressed like the passengers). For them to have intentionally blocked my view AND have put us all in danger is not excusable. It was both unbelievably rude and stupid.

Ignorant assholes is too kind a phrase, and their drivers/guides should NEVER have done it. They had to have known better.

As it happened, when the beasts were coming straight at me, I got some amazing shots (the bull was grunting, saliva dripping, and eyes rolling, NOT a good sign, and I saw it way too close for safety!). But it shouldn’t have happened.

In fact, this episode represents the reason Yellowstone is so nanny-fied. People let their lust for the shot over-ride common sense, especially where wildlife is concerned. When there are that many people, packed so tightly into an exciting and unfamiliar (to most of them) environment, where they don’t know how to behave, you DO have to regulate pretty heavily.

I get that. I just hate it. Other parks, with less congestion and just as many ways to get in trouble (notably the Badlands, where terrain will get you even quicker than the bison) are less regulation-bound. Fewer rules, sensible rules, and they expect you to follow them.

But Yellowstone is on the verge of being ruined by its very success.

I talked with one Ranger about the problem of so many cars, and opined that the Denali solution (no cars, just interminable schoolbus rides of up to 11 hours in length) sucks too. He replied that the Denali solution can’t work in Yellowstone because the lodging is INSIDE the park, whereas at Denali, almost all of it is OUTSIDE the park.

I have two suggestions to help with the problem.

Limit the number of visitors per week by having a lottery system. In March you put in your bid for a given week, and if you don’t get it, you get a priority for the following year.

Go for a monorail system which makes stops for all the major venues and villages. From there you either walk or rent a bike or moped to get around… or walk, of course.

Neither of these ideas is trouble-free or likely to be popular, but the current approach just isn’t able to carry the load.

And as for those guys in the SUVs …. Their drivers / firm should be banned for 2 years for criminally dangerous behavior. And the Canon-wielding passengers should be condemned to Panasonic point-and shoots for the next 2 years as well.

Now as for the hordes of oversized RVs ….. well, that’s another story.

On Leaving Alaska

2010-09-04T18:28:00.003-04:00

On Leaving Alaska

I’ve been in Alaska since July 29. Today is September 3. and I’ve turned to the South and eventually to home.

I came to Alaska partly out of curiosity, partly seeking adventure, partly out of a sense that I was SUPPOSED to make this trip (religious folk call this a “leading”) and partly out of a need to take a look at myself and ask some questions. My theme song, from the musical Paint Your Wagon, goes “where am I goin, I don’t know. When will I get there, I ain’t certain. What will I get I ain’t equipped to say. But who gives a damn, we’re on our way.”

That about cov ers it.

I set some ground rules for the trip:

Have a list of things to see and do, but give yourself permission to drop any or all of them. This is not about following an agenda or ticking items off on a list. At all costs, avoid “if this is Tuesday it must be Belgium” syndrome.

Be adventurous, but pay some heed to physical safety.

Be open to the people and situations you meet.

Don’t worry about having a “product” come out at the end of the trip. (As it happens, that’s looking out for itself and will occur in due course).

Watch the budget, but if you have to spend money, spend it.

Make sure Ginger (my dog) doesn’t get ignored, endangered, or emprisoned.

What actually happened was that I talked to people – lots and lots of people. I listened to their stories, found about about their lives, and then asked two questions.

1. What’s something around here that you think I’d like to photograph, not necessarily tourust stuff, but some spot that’s special to you?

2. Who’s someone else I should talk to?

These questions opened amazing doors both photographically and adventure-wise. Because I was free to follow up, and usually did, I made friends and saw sights that NEVER would have come my way. Examples run from Devere in his isolated no-road village to the Russian village you can only reach by treating a tidal flat as a road. And don’t forget the Dall sheep on the Atigun pass, the guy who builds yacht-quality motor homes for himself out of wood on truck chassis, the hard-talking breezy lass who pulls espresso in McCarthy, and the bush pilot who zipped me over the glaciers across from Homer.

The list is well over 35 people by now, and it’s still growing.

So what I’m feeling on departure is a mix. I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish, and what was unclear at the start is solidifying into a book about all the people I’ve met and their environment. I’ve certainly had adventures, including 4 flats (and a half, but that’s another story), catching salmon, catching a cold, going into lots of places where I had no idea if I’d ever get out. I have put myself at some risk, but have avoided most of the ranker stupidities I would have committed as a younger man.

I enjoy Alaskans. They make eye contact, they say hello, they will help you if you’re in trouble. They are self-sufficient to an incredible degree. Very few Alaskans will blink at taking on a very large and difficult task, such as building a home from wood they’ve felled themselves, just because they haven’t done it before. They value privacy above everything except the late Ted Stevenson and Glenn Beck. Politically they’re way too far right for me, but it hasn’t altogether curdled them. In short, they’re craggy individualists, don’t always play well with others, and are a lot of fun to be with.

I will miss them. I will miss the bracing climate, but not the summer heat and forest fire smoke of the Interior. I won’t miss the nightly rains that have made camping a problem. I will miss plenty of individuals, but I will NOT miss Alaska’s lousy and limited diet and worse cooking. Hail to the exceptions, but the rule is abysmal.

I have tried to share this trip, warts and all, with a wide network. I don’t think very many have stayed the course, but I appreciate everyone who has tuned in from tine to time.

I especially appreciate my Cincinnati-based cheering section and support net. Bless you all!

My adventures are not over. There’s the Cassiar highway, many gravel roads, and Yellowstone Park sans tourists, kids, and comforts, but just about 10 days away fron now.

After that, it’s home to wife and life as normal in an asphalt-covered , urbanized environment. But I’ll pine for the gravel roads, coursing streams, and incredible air of Alaska. I’ll miss it every day of my life.

How to Get Rich in Alaska

2010-08-29T00:23:00.000-04:00

As I write this, I'm staring at the Valdez harbor. Silvers are jumping everywhere, excited to death about their sex lives. You'd think the place a paradise for seafood. But read on.

I have now spent a month in Alaska. I have been in most parts of the state from the Atigun Pass to Valdez. And I can authoritatively state that if one wished to become rich gold is not the way to go. No, all you need to strike it rich is to open a coronary care facility anywhere in the state.

That’s because not only is the cooking in Alaska almost universally bad, it is universally bad for you.

Breakfast: biscuits in gravy, pancakes, bacon, reindeer sausage, or regular sausage, and eggs any style so long as they’re greasy. That’s it. OJ is sometimes available. Cereal is rare, milk even more rare.

Lunch: Any kind of burger you want.

Dinner. See lunch, plus overcooked salmon and overcooked halibut. Oh, yes, clam chowder and pie may also be available.

Not available: any vegetable other than lettuce or cabbage. Tomatoes are scarce and cardboard when you get them.

Breakfast costs $10 to $14. Lunch runs $15 to $20. Dinner runs $20 to $35 for the entrée.

There is one shining exception to this, and that’s the Turkey Red restaurant in Palmer, of which I’ve written glowingly elsewhere.

I can also recommend the Snow City Café in Anchorage. It’s not any healthier than other places, but the food is better prepared (really good in fact) and the ambience is lively and upbeat. Lots of theatrical and creative types frequent the place.

A third restaurant in Homer has thrived by fighting for healthy, largely organic and locally grown food. The owners have been at it 30 years, and despite being honored as small biz of the year, are ready to get out. Don’t blame them.

The standard excuse is “we have to truck everything in.” This is only partly true. Halibut and salmon abound …. But if caught commercially, the fish goes to a cannery and is frozen, then trucked. Sport fishermen can’t sell their catch to the local restaurants, as a rule, so it’s rare to find really fresh fish or other seafood at its point of origin.

One outrageous example is the Copper Center Fish Company (not its real name, but close). This boutique fish processor is thriving, with annual sales in excess of $16 million, by having premium quality fish delivered to its Alaska docks. There the fish is rough prepped (tails and head and guts removed). It is then sent to China on dead-heading flights (flights which have brought a cargo to Alaska, but don’t have anything for the return trip) for about $1.25 a pound, where it is further prepped, packaged, and shipped back to the states to places like Costco.

I am not kidding. Alaskan wild caught fish is shipped to China then shipped back to the US for retail distribution through big-box retail outlets. Carbon footprint? Who cares? Fresh off the boat fish in Alaska? Fuggedaboutit.

Back to veggies. The standard mantra is “we don’t have them because it’s too expensive to truck them.” Well, after the Copper Center Fish story, I don’t buy this fish story either.

Veggies are trucked everywhere in the lower 48, and they are not outrageously priced. In Alaska, veggies are grown in cold frames, and they thrive in Palmer (all that daylight and a reasonably long growing season). And I’ve got news, Alaska – canned veggies can be trucked, and frozen ones (something Alaskans should have no problem with at all) can likewise be shipped easily enough. Yes, I’d expect a premium because the trucking distances are long and the roads less than wonderful. But to be non-existent most places? Nope, it’s not the need to truck which is to blame. Look elsewhere.

I think it’s a cultural thing. Lumberjacks, sourdough miners, rough-and-ready fishermen … veggies are for wimps. And make no mistake, Alaska is a male-dominated macho place if ever there was one.

But I for one am fed up with the lousy diet, scant variety, high prices, and wretched level of cooking skill. Alaska is a wonderful state in many regards, but I’m ready to fall back on my meals ready to eat (great for 20-something soldiers, but not great for 60-something photographers) rather that force down yet another hamburger.

Alaskan cuisine is a disaster, healthwise, tastewise, and ecologically. There’s no other way to put it. Yuk!

John Kenney, Bachelor and Individualist

2010-08-14T02:52:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was heading up a one-lane road from Crow Creek in the Chugach State Forest, when I came upon a white pickup truck headed the other way. Since we were of necessity fairly intimate, we got to talking. The driver's name was Mike McLeod, and he was in the vicinity drilling and blasting bedrock so that Girdwood might have sewers. I told him what I was doing, and he said I should talk to John Kenney, who'd been here forever and had stories to match, and here's his phone number.

So I went to Palmer, through a very rainy day in the mountains, and next morning invited Mr. Kenney to breakfast.

I got an earful ... gold mining, snowshoeing with 300 pounds of moose on one's back, dam fools who were more interested in smoking pot than working, and who headed off in a kayak without so much as down jackets ... and unfortunately lived to tell the tale and then to lecture on how to survive!

John told me about his years of drinking, and his subsequent decades of non-drinking. His eyes are clear, his complexion healthy, his posture upright ... and the guy is 78.

He still has to work, he said, so he's cutting, splitting, and selling firewood this year.

And he's lonely. He was married, briefly, 50 years ago, but still lives in hope the "right one" will come along.

He invited me to his home and showed me around. It's about 2400 square feet, built entirely of wood he cut, sawed, and assembled by himself. It's cluttered with about 10,000 tools, pantries of provisions, and miscellaneous bachelor mess.... but not to excess. There's a regulation pool table upstairs, and that, he said, took a little doing.

Nice guy. Lively, funny, opinionated, self-reliant, and ready for anything. My kind of fellow, and I'm glad we met.

FINALLY, good and healthy food in Alaska: Turkey Red

2010-08-13T20:57:00.000-04:00

Turkey Red is not a term describing a drunkard’s complexion. Nope, it’s the name of the variety of wheat that first became commercially successful in the early US, and it’s the name of a restaurant in Palmer, Alaska.

Turkey Red is the creation of Alex Papasavas, who in 1998 realized that there was a need for at least one restaurant in the area specializing in nourishing food. The realization may not have been a blinding insight, but doing something about it was an act of heroism. Making it work is a testimony to Alex’s hard work and good cooking.

You see, Alaska (and northern Canada, too) is a land of meat and potatoes. Literally. And usually in the form of hamburgers and French fries. The fries are assumed; you can hardly order a meal without them. Or sometimes hash browns.

In theory, this has to do with a short growing season and the high cost of imports. I don’t buy it; I say it’s preference, pure and simple. These folks LIKE to live like lumberjacks, and of course, die like them too.

I have had exactly 2.5 edible meals since I set out from Cincinnati. One of them was in Fairbanks, where they made an effort but fell somewhat short (that’s the half). The other two were in Anchorage, population about 300,000, in a tourist hotel’s prestige restaurant, where I was the guest of a college friend.

The second success was at Turkey Red this evening. I had a Mediterranean salad, and almost all the ingredients, even the garbanzos, were grown or prepared locally. The greens were varied, crisp, and colorful. There were nice little mini-roma tomatoes (hot house grown nearby), tangy greek olives, crisp and crumbly feta cheese, and a very light dressing.

This was followed by a bowl of steamer clams, beautifully colorful, uniformly sized, and perfectly cooked in a broth to die for.

A variety of home-baked breads accompanied this meal (Turkey Red provides loaves according to a weekly schedule). Sourdough with various seeds in it, nut bread, and a cheese-topped loaf of solid white all appeared, accompanied by a generous dish of extra virgin oil and balsamic with herbs floating on it.

I had a passable Spanish red to go with this simple feast, and a cup of excellent coffee to end with.

Nice presentation, casual but civilized surroundings, nice busy bustle even on a Thursday evening. All for $26.25 (very low for Alaska) plus tip.

Keep it up, Alex, and may the world be spared one heart attack a day from your efforts!

The Lawyer and the Judge

2010-08-11T23:37:00.000-04:00

I spent the first part of the day today in Anchorage. First I met with Jack Stedman, a Federal judge and classmate of mine at Dartmouth. He looks slim, fit, and energetic ... and is all of those things! He's going to slow down a bit, not retire. His demeanor is, well, judicial. But he had a number of good suggestions on places to go and people to talk to.

One of these was another Dartmouth classmate, Peter Ginder, a criminal lawyer in Anchorage. He sprung for lunch at a very classy place, Fletcher's in the Captain Cook hotel, and was chock full of stories, places to go, people to see. Peter was a photographer for the Army newsmagazine during Vietnam. Impassioned and friendly, you bet. Judicious, no. So I'm writing this at the foot of the Alyeska highway. It took hours to get here, though it's less than 50 miles from Anchorage, due to stops for photography.

We went up the Crow Creek road and took a hike down to a hand-powered tram crossing the Creek Gorge ... and the creek is a roaring stream indeed!

The mountains hereabouts have plenty of snow on their upper slopes, even during August when this is written.

They said the tram was inoperable, due to a problem with a door, but it's a lie ... unless you intended to commit suicide in mid-stream, no one's falling out of the contraption on their own. And it worked just fine.

Ginger and I enjoyed the hike. Now all we need to do is find a place to pitch the tent for the night, and we're in business. Pix to be posted later.

eric

Thumbs up, thumbs down for Denali

2010-08-10T01:21:00.000-04:00

The thumbs up are for the geology, topography, color, critters, climate (despite the rain, which tends to be generated by the mountains themselves), bus drivers (who mainly know their stuff and are happy to share it).

Overall, an exceptional place.

Thumbs down:

1. Slobs who can't bother to walk 100 feet to deposit their household trash in bear-proof recycling bins, but dump it in the washroom can instead.

2. Ditto the deaf, dumb, blind, insensible, and usually doddering people who think a bus ride through Denali is watching some kind of TV screen with critters occasionally appearing. These are the people who fail to realize that folks on the opposite side of the bus might just want to shoot the caribou, and don't bother to open their bus window so it's possible....

I rode on 3 busses through Denali for a total of about 16 hours. One of those busses was peopled by live, interested, collaborative folks whom it was fun to get to know. The other two were stocked with 40 plastic dummies and about 4 live people who gave a damn about what was passing outside their windows.

3. The Salmon Bake across from Canyon Drive in the Denali commercial district. These folks were asked to prepare a plain piece of halibut, no asiago cheese crust, no nonsense ... and the chef's answer was he was too busy with the standard assembly line food to bother with an individual request (despite it's being simpler and faster to prepare). My response: walk out. If they're too busy for a customer request, they don't want my business.

4. $4.00 for a shower at the Mercantile Center next to the Riley Creek campground. Overpriced. Aramark and Doyon co-venture to provide services to the Park. They get rich doing so, and screw the consumer. Phooey on them! Streaky windows on busses, overpriced goods, and pay outrageous fees for bus passage .... about $1.00 per mile per passenger. Rip off in Spades!

Undeniable Denali

2010-08-09T01:19:00.008-04:00

I'm a photographer. You know that, of course. But right now I'm on overload. Too many pictures, and too many good ones. Denali National Park is the home of some of the planet's most spectacular scenery and most accessible wildlife.

The downside is it's only accessible by cramped school bus with smeary windows and (frequently) tuned-out passengers. Or by shank's mare (walking!).

I've done some of both. The results are at my gallery Here's a teaser:

Quite frankly, I'm too exhausted to cross-post here ... I've done a full day's hiking and shooting, followed by 4 hours of downloading, sorting, and rough editing ... followed up temperamental uploading, so there's no energy left for my blog.

Suffice it to say, Denali is MUST DO for any photographer.

Many stories .... not just of Denali, but of my travels, the people I've met, etc. Time permitting I'll write some here, but right now time is not permitting. Good thing I've taped virtually all of this.

Bless you all.

2010-08-09T01:19:00.005-04:00

2010-08-09T01:19:00.003-04:00

2010-08-09T01:19:00.001-04:00

Chena Hot Springs and the Dalton Highway

2010-08-05T03:36:00.000-04:00

Superficially, these two are not related. But I went to both in 3 jam-packed days. I'm whipped, so this is going to be very short:

Chena Hot Springs is reached via a road that runs through Pleasant Valley, home of multiple Iditarod and Yukon Challenge dog races. Along the road the Chena river serpentines its many-branched way, and the State of Alaska has created a large-scale scenic recreation area out of the bogs, ponds, and rivers.

At the end of the road Chena Hot Springs has been turned into a profitable private resort. Mixed reviews on the accommodations (I was in a tent, so I didn't care) and food. Raves for the outdoor Rock Pool, into which the source actually does bubble up. Tranquil, soothing, and warm-to-hot depending on your proximity to the back left corner which is HOT.

The Dalton Highway is otherwise known as the Haul Road. It was build for one purpose: to supply those who serve the oil fields and the pipeline.

It is a bear. Rough, dusty, very bumpy, huge trucks blasting their way past you, or even huger ones barrelling straight towards you, leaving you blinded by dust in their wake.

The first 25 miles are the worst. After that, the road is merely bad. With my overloaded suspension, bad means scary.

So what? I drove 250 miles up it and back without incident. And boy, did I hit scenery, especially in the Brooks Mountains and Atigun pass.

Many, many on my Smugmug Page: in the meanwhile, here are just two.

The Dust rules the North

2010-07-31T22:11:00.002-04:00

One more flat today, so that's four all told. If there's two things I'm sick of on this trip, it's flats and dust. The dust is everywhere, coats every surface, even makes your teeth feel gritty The dust creeps in through tiny cracks; for instance, I had a fish hook caught in the lid of the Expedition Box. Just that much gap allowed dust to film everything inside the Box.

Dust on the Top of the World Highway stretches up to 1/2 mile

When it's not dusty, the air up here is clean, pure, and occasionally smells of balsam. When it's dusty (which is 100 percent of the time on gravel roads and in towns or parking lots), the air develops an acrid tang which you taste at the back of your tongue.

The dust causes damage. It's frozen the autofocus mechanism of my workday 28-70 lens. It's coated the viewfinder, and played hell with the sensor on the Mamiya (not so much on the Nikon, which is sealed better and has anti-dust, sensor-cleaning technology).

The dust coats everything. Nothing really stops if for long.

I hate the goddam dust. And they sure don't mention it in travel books about Alaska or Canada!

One final point about the dust: when it rains, the dust rurns into a kind of muck superglue that no car finish can long withstand. Two hours of that and you couldn't even see that there WERE signs on the car, let alone read them!

Down with Dust! I want a bath for me, car, cameras and dog. It's Saturday night, so let's go soak off the dust.

There's Gold in Chicken (Alaska)

2010-07-31T11:13:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, more or less by accident, I wound up in Chicken, AK, when I wanted to be in Eagle. Turns out to be a good thing.

You see, Chicken is about gold. Tourist gold, yes, but actual, moil for it in the ground, muck and shovel and sluice gold. Gold, boys, gold.

It was my treat to photograph, interview, and enjoy a variety of gold miners as they went about their passionate pursuit of the yellow stuff.

I can't post pictures til tomorrow (limited bandwidth here, and I'd shut the whole thing down trying to upload). But I can tell you that Ginger and I bounced through a stream, hitched a ride on a 4-passenger ATV, and started checking out the proceedings on Myers Fork.

The mining (high-banking, panning, and power-sluicing) was all being done on a claim once worked very profitably by the owner of "The Orginal Chicken Gold Camp."Mike still does some mining but finds it more profitable overall to mine tourists. So he leases them rights to mine on his claim for $15.00 per day. Some come home with nothing, some with flakes, and a few (very few) with sizable nuggets.

Take Francis Profitt, for instance (great name for a miner). He has mined gold, garnets, jade all over the world.... he's from New Zealand. He's been to Chicken before, this time with his wife on a work-some-mine-some contract with Mike.

Francis is a machine. In his 60s, he shovels relentlessly for 50 minutes, then cleans his sluice for 10. Today he's digging under an overhanging bank, and luckily happens to be out at the sluice when a section of it caves in, right where he's been digging. "It's OK," he grins. "I can hear it before it really gives way and can leave in time if I have to."

Downstream, an elderly couple are panning with a very simple sluice box. They are taking it slow, finding some flakes, and are utterly enjoying each other and their passionate pursuit of cold yellow metal.

A ways down the canyon, Larry, a colorful chap in a handlebar mustache and a fetching garbage-bag poncho, and a very experienced miner, has been coaching Chickie, a Texan who has been planning his couple of months as a miner for several years.

Eventually, Chickie and Larry laughingly show me how to pan for gold, and I come up with three small pieces after 30 arthritis-pursing minutes.

Ginger and I hike back to the car, visit again at the Chicken post office and figured out with Robyn how to get the package that didn't make it today to where I might be in a couple of weeks.

Then off to Tok, a see-saw ride that scared the bejeepers out of me for fear my heavily-laden rear suspension would just give up. But it didn't, and so ends a day in the gold fields of Chicken, Alaska.

Made it to Alaska! But the Eagle has not landed

2010-07-30T01:30:00.000-04:00

Well, I made it. I'm in Alaska, one day behind schedule and MANY dollars short! Have some kudos to hand out, some thank-yous, and a few actual trip updates.

Kudos to Cal Tire everywhere, but especially in Whitehorse.

Thanks to Doug in Ross River for fixing a flat.

Thanks to Norman at the Klondike River Lodge.

Thanks to Robyn, postmistress in Chicken, AK.

And to all the strangers fast becoming friends on the trip so far.

I lucked out on Dawson and made friends with the innkeeper at the Klondike Lodge ... which is in fact on the Klondike and sits at Mile Zero of the Dempster Highway. He gave me some great photo suggestions and traded out some pix for a second night's stay ... I had to wait til the Taylor Highway in AK was re-opened after being washed out in flash floods earlier this week. That's more credible when you realize the Taylor Highway, like the Dempster Highway, the Campbell Highway, the Mackenzie Highway, and the Canol Road are all gravel roads.

The photo suggestions involved the Tombstone National Park about 70 kilometers up the Dempster Highway. The scenery was simply spectacular. Check it out here .

Also checked out Dredge #4, a gold dredge that for 45 years played hell with the creeks near Dawson. You wouldn't believe the mess it made!

Also spent some time in Dawson city.

Today made tracks on the Top of the World Highway. It really is way up there, and spectacular.

My destination was Eagle, AK, but Eagle is closed due to flooding, so I settled for a lesser bird and fetched up in Chicken, AK, where I'm hoping a couple of packages show up in tomorrow's twice-weekly mail delivery.

Scots wa hae -- and their highways suck but the scenery was great

2010-07-29T10:41:00.000-04:00

I'm talking about the Campbell and Mackenzie highways, both of which offer marvelous photo ops and even more marvelous opportunities to change and repair flat tires.

From Watson Lake I took the Campbel to Ross River (another scottish name), and had a flat. Luckily a guy in Ross River was able to repair it for me. Next day I took the Canol Road south. Canol comes from "Canadian Oil" and the road was built in 1942. It has hardly been touched since. It was 3 hours into it before I saw my first car. The scenery was spectacular. So was the second flat I got.

Finally arrived in Whitehorse, and spent the next morning getting tires replaced. The miracle was that it didn't cost anything.... I'll write about that later, no time now.

Arrived late to discover the Top of the World highway was washed out on the AK side of the border. So I spent yesterday shooting in Tombstone Park, for which the genuine word is "awesome," in the literal sense. I felt as if I were standing in a part of the world God built for himself, then kept it from the rest of us ... that magnificent, that empty.

Then I scurried around Dawson city trying to find a good sensor cleaning rig (mine has vanished somewhere), then on to Dredge #4, a leviathan that prowled the rivers and lakes hereabouts sucking up rock and spitting it back after extracting the gold. Here's a pic:

The ejecta from this machine looks like enormous worm casts.

I'm using a primitive uploading and link system here, so can't go on. But go to the gallery and check out the pictures of this and Tombstone and Dawson city. I am so glad I was held up, so i could see these wonders.

Alcan to Watson lake, with side trips

2010-07-25T01:49:00.001-04:00

Today I traveled form Fort Nelson, home of grit and dust, to Watson Lake, home of extortionate gas dealers.

The route was spectacularly beautiful, even given low cloud cover and flat lighting. Still, some rays of sunshine broke through, giving me shots like this one:

On the way I took two side trips. One was following an itty- bitty sign that said "smith river falls, 2k". Those of you who follow me know I'm a sucker for waterfalls, and this one was worth it. The only problem was that about a kilometer in, the road was blocked by a fallen tree. Then it dawned on me, I had brought a saw for just such contingencies. Five minutes later, I was on my way in and found the falls. Enjoy:

The second side trip was where the Hyland River meets the Alcan. An unmarked road peels off to the right, then forks. I took the left fork, through puddles, ruts, large gravel dumps, trying to get to the river.

Saw sights like these as I went:

Also, saw some critters today.

Baby Bison:

Sheep or goats? (There's an argument, but I say goats)

There's much, much more, but I'm beat and tired of working this hard for no response. If you like this stuff, it would be nice to know about it.

How it works in the NORTH

2010-07-24T00:41:00.001-04:00

How it works in the north is .... connections. The entire province of Northwest Territories, which is substantially larger than Texas, operates on a who-do-you-know and how-are-they-related basis. Here's a for instance.

On Wednesday, 7/21, I drove from Fort Providence (which was NOT providential) to Fort Simpson, a full tank of gas away. In fact, gas-wise, it was a squeaker.

The route to Ft. Simpson encompasses the Samma Deh waterfalls.

It also requires one to cross the Liard river on the Lafferty, a ferry built in riverless Edmonton.

One of the Lafferty's deckhands was this lass:

When I reached Ft. Simpson, I met and chatted with Bert Tsetso, local cop, retired Mounty.

I asked Bert where to eat and meet people, and he suggested the SubArctic. I enjoyed the evening meeting folks, and got along so well that one of then said, hey, when you get to Fort Liard, look up John Gonet, buy some fuel for his jet boat, and he'll show you the river.

So I did locate John Gonet, and I interviewed him for a couple of hours, and he suggested he knew the place to go. All we had to do was ferry an extra ATV across the river on his jet boat, then off we would go.

So this man

Handed me an ATV (which I'd never ridden in all my ancient years), and said: the throttle's under yer thumb, and the right brake don't work, but the left one does. The tranny's automatic, so have fun! I'll lead the way.

And off we went via 9 miles of mud, roots, gravel slopes, rocks, and muck and 2000 feet of climb to this place:

Where I met this man, who turns out to be an artist to rival early Whistler (when he was doing engineering drawings!)

and saw this view:

I forgot to mention, Ginger sulked back at John's house, while his dog Candy RAN the whole way up, and the whole way down, and managed a 25 mph sprint for the last mile of it. All under gesture command, not a word spoken between John and Candy. Ginger is officially a second-class dog after that performance!

So this morning I was having breakfast with John, when I showed him the picture of the lass on the Lafferty. "Oh," he said, "That's Grayson. She's the ex-girlfriend of my nephew."

Fort Simpson and Fort Liard are several hundred miles apart. But everybody knows everybody, and that's the way it works in the North

On to the Northwest Territories of Canada

2010-07-23T21:36:00.000-04:00

Overdue Update – too much too fast to cover.

Highlights –Have driven 4,000 miles in 9 days and still had time to live (barely).

The great plains are great – but they are plain!

Safflower (canola) plants help. In Britain, they’re “rapeseed”. Brilliant yellow.

Flax, it turns out, is bright blue. Stopped to shoot a field of it and the farmer showed up to check me out and answer questions.

Canadians are friendly, polite, and have marvelous bullshit detectors. If you’re authentic, you’re in – phony, you’re out. Period. You don’t have to be a special something, just yourself. I’ve seen this before in Canada and some other parts of the world, but it’s especially true in the less-settled areas.

Mosquitoes don’t rule. They take second place to “bulldogs” which are 3/4” long flies of the “horse fly” type. Those bastards will swarm into an open car window at the rate of 2 to 3 per second. And they bite, when they get organized enough to do so. Then they don’t just bite, they excavate.

After the bulldogs, mosquitoes rule. DEET stinks, tastes awful, leaves a nasty texture to your skin and hair, and is vital. No DEET, no civilization, period. My goal in coming to Ft. Nelson instead of pushing on, was to update the blog and have ONE, just one, DEET-free day. So far so good.

Since I’ve updated the blog, I’ve traveled from Whitecourt to High Level, including an interesting overnight at Twin Lakes campground. Spend the evening schmoozing with and photographing the locals who were all First Nation members of the Dene band. Lovely hospitable folks.

Thence to Enterprise, hook a right to Hay River. Superb photo op at Alexandra and Louise falls. Good Samaritan turn to a woman whose 13 year old had managed to lock all 7 of ‘em out of their vehicle; fate rolled round and gave me a path to better photography of the falls.

Dirt roading off the asphalt isn’t safe, but can be rewarding. This is a lousy shot, but look at the size of this monster beaver, doing it’s thing!

Hay River is a thriving community at least 12 times bigger than its actual 3,500 souls. This is a place that is literally frozen in for 8 months of the year. Yet it has a thriving commercial fishery, at least one serious restaurant, and a score of wonderful local characters – plus one of the world’s half dozen serially-connected ship lifts. Not a drydock, this puppy will life major ships out of the water using monster slings, allowing them to be repaired. Still, many ships go by the board.

On to Fort Providence, in search of a missing connector for my EasyTagger GPS locator. I’d been told by ernest but ill informed souls in Hay River that the guy who founded SIS net had been located in Providence. Turns out he’s split 5 years ago for the big city of Yellowknife, and who can blame him. Ft. Providence is a tribal town with zero intrinsic energy and a minor fishing tourist base, period. Plus a club sandwich costs $10.00, and is greasy to boot.

Did meet some lovely people at the territory campsite who were generous spirited, informed, and helpful…. In fact most Canadians know far more about their country’s history, geography, topology, zoology, and economics than US citizens do about their own nation. No kidding, Canadians are politely opinionated, but their opinions seem to be formed from information, not just prejudice.

From Providence, I traveled to Ft. Simpson. Met a local cop,

met local folks at the local watering hole, and had a lovely evening …. Leading to an introduction to John Godet in Ft. Liard. See next update.

New friends, new adventures,new photos

2010-07-20T13:23:00.001-04:00

Have been traveling great long stretches of unspectacular road. Hundreds of miles of it. But along the way I've had some adventures, such as seeing an enormous beaver, magnificent waterfalls, a friendly Metis (indian tribe) family at Twin Lakes Rec Area (alberta, and not near anything).

The Northwest Territory is much more interesting ... if you get off the highway! Bulldogs (enormous horseflies) are thriving, so are mosquitos, but the people are terrific, friendly and often knowledgeable.

I'm writing this in the chamber of Commerce tourism booth of Hay River, NWT. Hay River is located where the river empties into the Great Slave Lake. The growing season here is 97 days long -- short by US standards, long by standards in the North. Commercial fishing is big here, and so are the fish!

Yesterday I helped out a woman who was vacationing with her 7 kids ... one of whom had managed to lock all of them out of the car! I managed to contact the relevant authorities, via a campsite manager a ways up the road (at Louise Falls) in time to avoid the smash-in which was imminent.

Hay River is about 3,600 people, all of them friendly! More later, but I'm surely enjoying my visit here.

Prices in this part of Canada (in fact in all of Canada) are outrageous, with gas pushing $4.50 a gallon.

Don't have time to write much, just to let followers know things are going well, and that NEW PICTURES ARE POSTED

New Pix and new Adventures

2010-07-18T10:16:00.000-04:00

Alas, I haven't time to write up the adventures, but you can see pix of Banff, the Icefields Parkway (glaciers), and lakes and hikes around Jasper, Alberta. Not to mention a critter or two.

Here's the link

Weyburn to bassano

2010-07-14T20:59:00.000-04:00

On the road again. This is written from perhaps the dumpiest motel I've ever stayed in, but it was time to upload some pix.

Last night I (or rather Ginger) made the acquaintance of Barrie and Janice, campers who reported to me that there was a very odd fabric kennel propelling itself down the road. Hysteria ensued.

Turns out that they lived in Alberta, and she had been raised in Weyburn where we were encamped.
They were also kindly and knowledgeable people who not only gave me a detailed history of Weyburn and it's hospital for the insane, but also provided some hinds on the "scenic route."

Pix may be seen here .

This morning the weather turned bad, but it made for very interesting play of light and shadow and color. Good thing, because the drive itself is straight, 70 mph over 2-lane road, and nerve wracking ... particularly with a 30 mph side wind / head wind urging you to kiss the semi coming at you ....

I've uploaded a handful of pix covering ND and Alberta. These are rough-edits only, as my laptop is not calibrated and appears to be very contrasty. So I can NEVER produce even semi-finished work on this machine. But enjoy the pix. Here's just one to get you going:

I've driven 1900 miles in 3 days and am beat. Tomorrow I'm off to Jasper, where I'll spend 2 days photographing wildlife and glaciers and bears, oh my.

Keep on checking; I'll update as often as possible.

So far, so good

2010-07-13T22:46:00.001-04:00

I'm writing this from a campground in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Made it here after 1400 miles in 2 days of driving. Car is loaded to the gills, but still legal. Got about 27 miles per gallon yesterday, 24 today (more start-stop).

Scenery has been very interesting ... play of light on fields of brilliant yellow canola seed against vivid green hillsides, isolated farms, etc. Tomorrow it's on to Calgary, then to Jasper.

Campground is owned by the city, and the folks who manage it are very nice indeed.

No pix downloaded yet. Maybe tomorrow. Watch this space.

Who gives a damn, we're on our way

2010-07-11T08:26:00.000-04:00

Just about ready for Monday departure. Yesterday signed both general and durable powers of attorney over to my wife, reworked the platform holding the Expedition Box, and worked on loading. Since putting a restraining bar in to keep crates from sliding onto Ginger, eliminated 6 of space, had to re-think the whole loading plan.

Not ideal, but it will work -- most likely. Today is a massive picnic for the Ohio Valley Camera Club, then sort out the camera gear ... wouldn't want to forget some crucial bit, and it's been known to happen.

Here's the route for the first week of the trip: Cinci to Minneapolis, on to Calgary, Alberta, NW to Banff (beautiful and costly) and Jasper (less so, but spectacular scenery), and north to Enterprise, Northwest Territories.

Why Enterprise? The road from Jasper to Enterprise presents great wildlife and waterfall viewing opportunities. But mainly, Enterprise is where I hang a left onto the Mackenzie Highway for the REALLY backwoods route leading to Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, and the Klondike Route. But more about that later. Meanwhile, here's a link that tells you what to expect from the point you enter the Northwest Territories (NWT).

For the pitiful handful of followers who actually track this blog, you should know that I'll try to provide updates on my trip as access to the internet provides opportunity .... and that will be limited. But at least you'll get to see where I am via the satellite-driven map at the top of the page. It can load slowly, so be patient.

Ginger and the IRS

2010-07-07T22:41:00.000-04:00

This is a quick post to present, but not explain, a wondrous thing.

A couple of days ago I faced an IRS audit. They were examining my tax return for 2008. Because I have lost a lot of money at my business, there was a real risk that my business would be declared a hobby, thus costing me many thousands of dollars in disallowed deductions, or many thousands in tax court, take your pick. My business has lost money, but it is a real business ... and that point was made with the help of my dog.

I do deduct some of the expenses for my dog, Ginger. Ginger works 40-50 hours a week. She is a marketing tool, a model, a prop, and a security system, she's always on the job, and she works for kibble. Of course, I offered proof of all of this, including 3rd party witnesses, etc.

The interview with the IRS had been proceeding properly and professionally, and without overt hostility. But when I brought up Ginger, and showed her picture, the entire atmosphere of the interview changed. The agent went "oooh, she's beautiful." From that point it was problem solving, not "gotcha."

The specific moment the mood changed was when I showed Ginger's picture. Later, I asked my CPA what the turning point had been. He replied, "When you were talking about the dog."

We haven't gotten the formal audit report, but it was quite clear that the only problems were technical ones.

Meanwhile, Ginger gets a porterhouse, on me!

Expedition Box update

2010-07-06T16:34:00.000-04:00

Platform that supports box is now at the welder's, being generally strengthened and reinforced, as well as having some half-round eyes welded on to facilitate "hanging" the platform from the tailgate door hinges, per Joe Fuller's suggestion, which should further reduce oscillation. The welder didn't think so much of the way the platform had been done, and I suspect he'll reinforce the hell out of it without adding much weight.

All I can do. You do your best and live with the results....

Advice about the Expedition Box, Guaranteed to Raise Stress Levels

2010-07-02T19:43:00.000-04:00

Got a lengthy call from my cousin Tom Passin in New Mexico. Tom is an engineer and a nuclear physicist (ret). He had a few comments (and more than a few concerns) about the Expedition Box. He also had advice. I share these with you to prove 1) that I can still listen and 2) there's a lot to be said for engineering PLUS intuition.

Major concerns:

1. Weld weakness where the platform cradles into the drawbar/hitch. Prescription -- get the bugger magnafluxed and rewelded if needed. Reason: if that fails, all fails, and when they build these things they're thinking bags of mulch in suburbia, not 800 miles of corduroy road in the boonies. I can barely make time for this, but I think it's worth it.

2. Have the trailer hitch itself (where the hitch is mounted to the car) checked for any signs of corrosion.

3. Do not park with the car tilted left or right. The cumulative racking loads can distort a unibody construction vehicle... which my Forester definitely is. Tom cited a friend with a Jeep who found that when he parked on a tilt, his doors wouldn't open or close properly. Jeesh!

4. Watch for oscillations due to corduroy roads (washboards, to those of you from the east coast). He liked the fact that the spare tire dampens such oscillations, but gave me a big heads up to pay way more attention than usual. His rule of thumb for washboards was 5-or-40 (slow down til the oscillation disappears, or speed up til you're "skimming" over the washboards and evening out the oscillation).

5. Windshields are part of the structure of today's cars. Seriously crack yours, given your structural loads, and you have problems. Deal with it ASAP. And keep far enough back to allow the speeding logging trucks to do their thing without cracking iour glass.

6. Make sure your Expedition Box load isn't shifting left to right (duh). I say "duh" but it's important.

7. Tom likes the damping effect the spare tire has on the whole assembly. What he doesn't like is that, ironically, in certain conditions related to washboards, the tire could actually amplify oscillation and pitch problems.

8. Get a set of feeler gauges, and see just what the clearance at the crucial pivot point where the platform is secured to the drawbar might be. Get some shim stock. glue it on, and reassemble. Might reduce sway and racking motions. Worth a try.

Tom SAID his call was to reduce my stress level. But bless him, his advice is well worth listening to and comes from the genuine engineering article.

Thanks, Tom.

Alaska Prep Update -- Swamped

2010-07-01T22:08:00.005-04:00

I am swamped. The house is full of boxes, I'm surrounded by tech stuff I don't understand (rarely accompanied by manuals, and when there are manuals, they are confusing and illiterate).

New stuff -- SPOT, a GPS messenger that uses satellites to yell for help, provide tracking data, and sends "all OK" messages. Accompanied by a service to organize your rescue and an insurance policy to cover the cost of sending choppers to the North Slope, should the need arise. No cell phone, most of the time, so no wifi, etc.

Also, HD camcorder, for doing the maybe tv series for public TV. Ditto, helmet cam (admittedly a toy, but what fun) that shows the open jaws of the bear about to eat you.

All that's missing now is the spring stiffeners for the subaru... trying to manage the ol' swing and sway.

The real issues are that I'm in danger of swamping the purpose of the trip in the stuff necessary to realize it, and in doing that, invalidating the whole thing. Dumb. Tempting. It's the geek in me rearing up again.

Down Geek, down!

More immediately, I've been clearing out my former studio (nearly done), finishing off 5 restoration projects (nearly done), fulfilling a last minute editorial assignment from AAA's Journeys magazine (done, not nearly but actually), prepping for an IRS audit (my cpa thinks they're going to say anybody who's lost so much is only a hobbyist, and going to disallow my expenses... if that happens, who here is willing to stand up and say how hard I've worked to build a business?)

Another cycle of stuff going on is medical checks. General physical ... OK. Orthopedic review ... thank god for the very expensive hydraulic fluid (synvisc) they've pumped into my knees, because without that I couldn't do the 12,000 miles of driving coming right up. Cardiologist ... we'll see. Few of you know that I had a quad bypass 12 years ago, and those grafts are beyond their normal span. Prelims OK, but there's a stress/echo on July 9, just before I leave. I'm going anyway, and ***k 'em.

Oh, yeah, Ginger the wonder dog (going on 11) has her physical, rabies update, and health certificate on Saturday the 10th. One more item to get done.

Finally, there's arranging for, and prepaying, all the things that are normally my responsibility and that Nan (the candidate for sainthood to whom I'm married) has no experience with. This includes managing the B&B-style apartment over the studio. It's high season, and I'm waltzing out. Last week a guest dehydrated herself and collapsed, crashing through the drywall in the second bedroom. I've been getting that dealt with ... along with the awning on our home that caught the wind and ripped out the lag bolts holding it together.

I need lag bolts. Or something.

End of Sermon. Tomorrow's another day.

Boy, am I over weight (Alaska Trip wise, that is)

2010-06-26T22:05:00.000-04:00

Personally, about I need to shed 30 pounds. In terms of the trip, I've got a real problem. At least 75 pounds worth.

The problem is that the Expedition Box, loaded, is too heavy. Its width (48")multiplies the potential weight problems.

American Subaru sets a tongue weight limit of 200 pounds. Tongue weight is the weight pressing down on a trailer hitch (read Expedition Box in this case). It's better in Australia .... they allow 300 pounds, probably because they know the Aussies aren't wusses and aren't likely to sue when the vehicle can't take it.

Yesterday I had to dismount the Expedition Box and hook up a utility trailer, so I took the opportunity to weigh the load --- ACK! 325 pounds, including platform, box, and contents.

Too much. Much too much. I'd noticed some pitching tendency and some wag-the-dog tendency, not major, but definitely present. Wag-the-dog comes from leverage exerted by the load on the pivot point. The box is 4' wide. If there's 160 pounds on the right side of the box, and you go around a corner, that's exerting about 300 pounds twisting motion on the relatively skinny piece that supports the load. It's like someone trying to lift a rock from the garden soil. Pulling on it won't work, but prying it up with a shovel by leaning on the handle works fine. In this case, the rock is the mounting point for the Expedition Box, and the shovel handle is the length of the box itself -- 2' outboard of the pivot point. As the car turns left or right, or gets upset by bumps, the twisting force gets applied to the trailer hitch and from there to the axle. Too much of this is a bad thing. If there's slop in the system, it's worse.

In the case of the Expedition Box things are helped somewhat by the spare tire stuck between the box and the bumper of the car. It acts as a damper, reducing the twisting forces and preventing a destructive rhythm from building up.

Even so, I've got to go on a diet. I can cut out 48 pounds of MREs (meals ready to eat), which I've already paid for, and replace them with MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE food Ill have to buy. I figure I can reduce the number of tools I'm carrying, and eliminate one or two other things.

If all this sudden diet comes to 75 pounds, that cuts the tongue weight to 250 (plus the spare, which I didn't weigh, but it's mounted so close to the axle that it's not a weight issue, and it's too useful to skip). With the tire acting as a stabilizer, I figure that will cut the risk of oscillation and significant car damage to a manageable level.

So here's a question, Gentle Readers: which tools would you eliminate?

1/2 inch drive sockets
3/8 inch drive sockets
heavy duty come-along
power drill
geologists' hammer
crowbar
torque extender (length of pipe fitting over wrench handles, giving the user MUCH more leverage)
hydraulic jack (heavy, but will lift the car better than the toy that came with it)

Over to you.

Alaska Prep Update

2010-06-19T22:55:00.001-04:00

As followers of this blog know, I'm prepping for a lengthy back-of-beyond road trip through Canada and Alaska. Because I'm going to be WAY off the beaten path for extended periods, I've planned to be self-sufficient for much of the time. So I built a "bustle" for my Subaru Forester to hold the camping and repair equipment for the car.

We're getting there. My loading plan turned out to be full of reality-induced errors. Dwight Eisenhower profoundly said, "plans are useless, planning's essential."

Anyway, have now fully loaded the expedition box and test-driven it. The car is definitely a little light forward, but shows no signs of gross misbehavior, and the box / mount seem to be steady. I have no real idea what the current load weighs, but I'm guessing 350 pounds including platform, box, and contents.

Here's what's included:

Camping Gear

Tent

Ground Cloth

Tent pegs

Rubber hammer

Air mattress

Air mattress pump

Pillow

Folding Chair

Sleeping bag

Storage bag for sleeping bag

Lantern

Two boxes (24 servings) MRE (meals ready to eat), about 50 pounds worth

Fishing pole,

Tackle box 12 pound test line, updated lures and misc. tackle

Fileting knife, skinning knife

Hydraulic Jack plus handle

Heavy duty come-along

Socket and box wrenches

Set screwdrivers

Hammer

Cordless drill (heavy duty), power bits, drill set.

100 feet misc Rope 50 ' dacron 1/2 inch dockline

30 foot towing strap

JUMPING BATTERY & 12 VOLT CHARGER FOR IT

Cooking Gear

Frying pan / dutch oven (covered pan)

2 burner stove plus 9 ne-pound propane bottles

Kettle

Propane Long match

Tripod & Monopod == mount inside box lid, along with fishing rod

There's a ton more stuff INSIDE the car, including large dog, 70 days dog food, clothes, cameras, computer, etc etc.

The hell with traveling light!

The Risky Business of Eliminating Risk

2010-06-15T11:35:00.001-04:00

As I was pounding the treadmill uphill to nowhere yesterday morning, CNN was covering the flash floods in Arkansas that swept away scores of campers, with 20 reported dead. The anchorwoman asked in all seriousness "how can we prevent a repetition of such things in the future?" She really believed that government has to DO SOMETHING when random events occur and people are in the way. Worse, she appeared to believe government COULD do something to make camping safer in the event of other freaks of nature.

God may be able to prevent floods, forest fires, and earthquakes, but government cannot. So why expect it of them?

There is a growing tendency to believe we must be protected from everything that goes wrong in life. We seem to think that from flu to flood to food poisoning, we must be 100% safe. Worse, the government is responsible for keeping us that way.

This is flat-out idiocy.

Believing you can sanitize the risk out of life is arrogant. Shit does happen, and you can't always protect against it or predict it. If you think it's possible to achieve 100% safety, you are 100% wrong, and you will eventually be 100% dead. That's the way it goes.

Risk cannot be eliminated. But risk can be managed. There are a few key questions to ask that can help put risk into perspective. These originated with Kepner-Trego in their work The New Rational Manager.

1. What can go wrong?

2. What are the consequences if it does go wrong, and how serious are they?

3. How likely is it to go wrong?

4. Is it worth the risk?

5. What can I do to reduce the risk?

If this sounds like common sense, that's because "common sense" consists of considering one's actions in the light of these questions, whether consciously or unconsciously. Failing to consider them at all is foolhardy.

In the case of the campground in Arkansas, clearly flash floods are on the "what can go wrong" list. The severity of the consequences are hard to imagine BECAUSE the frequency / likelihood of flash floods is so low. You can reduce the risk by camping elsewhere or by tethering yourself to a tree, or by finding higher ground BEFORE pitching your tent. But if you're going to camp there, it's a risk, however small, that you agree to take.

It seems to me, and I'll admit to being a tad contentious here, that as a culture we are increasingly relying on government to ask these questions for us, and to hand us the answers ready-made. If this trend continues, we'll wind up like the ship's passengers in Wall-E, cosseted to a point where all we can do is lie in our lounge chairs.

I think that the mass media's insistence on covering every bit of bad news has gradually scared the hell out of us. We feel powerless in the face of so much disaster, so we magically expect the government to save us -- or else we simply pretend there IS no risk, or that we are some how personally immune to all the random bacteria swarming in our social body.

Here are this morning's headlines from the CNN home page:

Absolutely typical. At least there are no beheadings or new volcanic eruptions or sinkholes in Florida this day. My point is that the constant bombardment of such news stories, carried on for years and years, must be wearing a hole in our heads somewhere, somehow.

Where does this notion come from, that complete safety is both possible and a personal right? That risk, any risk at all, is some moral villainy to be hated and feared?

The pioneers who arrived in Virginia and Massachusetts ran risks that are unthinkable today. And as western culture spread across the continent, the grit it took to face enormous risks travelled with us. Avalanche, starvation, disease, hostile natives, just plain breaking a leg and eventually dying either of gangrene or of thirst because you can't get to a water supply -- risks like these were the normal fabric of life from 1620 til well into this century.

These huge risks killed off lots of people, but they didn't deter the pioneers from moving west to farm new lands, or prospectors from flooding into the Klondike around 1900.

We thought nothing of taking risks -- and we didn't blame government every time we lost our bet with fate, or when we did something truly stupid and suffered the consequences. Our forebears had true grit. They couldn't have done what they did without it. We don't have it.

Flash forward. Today every mountain path is supposed to have stairs and handrails, right? Every campground needs a central alarm, and someone to monitor it 24/7 (as was proposed in the aftermath of the Arkansas flash flood) or individual squawk boxes you carry with you to your campsite. We want to see bears, but we expect them to be tame and predictable and cute.

Bah!

We are the generals of our own lives. To expect that we can fight the battle of living without taking casualties is naive beyond belief. Blaming the government when an avalanche buries a village and expecting them to erect giant snow fences to keep it from happening again is incredibly costly and only leads to failure. It's up to us as individuals to look around and realize an avalanche might bury us, so perhaps we shouldn't live in this particular spot.

As as tribe, Americans have trouble understanding and accepting the inevitability of risk. When something breaks, and people get hurt, we want to 1. find out who to blame; 2. Convene an oversight committee or pass a law to make sure it never happens again. Neither action can do anything about what is called "special cause variation" by business operations managers. All you can do about special cause stuff is clean up the mess, as BP is now struggling to do in the Gulf of Mexico.

Life is a process, and like all processes it can never run without variation. When you're talking about common cause variation, the kind of thing that is going to happen just because life bumps along, blame is useless, but investigation may help you reduce problems in your process. When a meteorite strikes the earth, pointing fingers at the radar operators is just a reflection of fear and frustration that the universe is not in our control. But predicting that cars kill 50,000 people a year and then insisting on strong efforts to reduce drunk driving -- that's good risk management. Government can and should help with that -- but only after realizing you can't eliminate risk, and that trying too hard to do so is not only wasteful, but bad for the soul of the nation.

I say, go ahead and take a few risks -- but try to remember those 5 questions. Thinking beats the hell out of dying, and certainly beats the blame game we seem to play every day in Washington and in the courts.

Quick update on the Expedition Box

2010-06-11T17:51:00.001-04:00

Some friends have expressed concern about how this whole rig would handle. I've been testing, and here are the results:

A few early performance tests -- I've got about 80-90 pounds of stuff int he box right now. The car is definitely not stern-heavy at that weight. If I really horse it around tight corners, the rig deflects perhaps 2" at the upper outside corner of the box, which is about 1/16" at the pivot point (the pin with the cap on it in the picture); there has to be some give there, or the platform wouldn't pivot up and down.

Every once in a while there's a little squeak from the spare, which I think is good-- it's buffering motion a bit. So far, the handling and motion characteristics of the loaded box seem to be pretty good -- B+/A-. Straight A on the highway, straight A on bumps.

I also timed my first trial at removing the tire, removing the pin, and jacking down the box til the tail gate could be opened. It took 3:36, including a brief detour to find a hammer to give the hinge pin a little encouragement. Going the other direction -- closing tailgate, jacking up box, inserting pin, re-mounting tire, and securing same -- took 2:26. That may get somewhat better with practice, but who cares? The point is that the system does allow tailgate access with only a moderate pain-in-the-ass quotient. I'm happy!

Alaska Prep -- The Fabulous Expedition Box

2010-06-09T21:12:00.007-04:00

I've had some questions about the Expedition Box, and as it was finished today, I can provide some answers.

The Expedition Box started out as a simple box to fit on the back of my Subaru Forester. For good or ill, I talked a really nutso cabinet maker into doing the job for me. God bless Scott Lang, former big-time professional chef, expert carpenter, and stay-at-home dad for a severely handicapped child.

So the box grew, added functionality, detail, and shape. Not to mention class. Now Scott comes from Brooklyn or some such place, and I come from a lifetime of sailboats. We don't necessarily talk the same language, though beer helps. He speaks shipping crate, I speak yacht, and somehow the twain managed to meet.

The basic problem, as those who follow this blog know, is that a Subaru Forester is a great little SUV. Little being the operative term. Just not enough room at the inn for a three-month trip to Alaska with dog and cameras. So the need for a caboose, aka, the Expedition Box.

When I bought the car 15 months ago, I was too broke (read cheap) to get the next trim level up, which would have included a roof-rack. Sigh. So if you can't build up, you build out:

So I bought a platform which plugs into a receiver hitch I'd installed when I bought the Forester. Mostly, such platforms are used to lug bags of mulch around suburbia. This kind of platform is hinged to tilt up (and down a tad, which is a really useful feature as you'll see). It is rated for 400 pounds load.

For Alaska roads (and Canadian roads, eh), dinky toy spare tires won't do. This shot shows a full-sized spare balanced on the shaft of the hitch arrangement shown above. If it hadn't fitted bwstween the paltform / box and the bumper, we'd have had to re-drill the receiver hitch .... but the gods smiled.

With the box installed, to open the tailgate to the car, you have to remove the spare (easy; just see below), then pivot the trailer jack shown in lower foreground. Pull the pin from the platform shank, which allows the whole platform to swing down a couple of inches, and crank the jack to lower away. This permits the tailgate of the car to clear the top of the box, giving access to the cavernous depths revealed thereby. Sounds more complicated than it is, but without the jack, and some weight in the box, you'd need to be Hercules to get into the trunk if the car were without an arrangement like this one.

Here's a close-up showing the pin which ordinarily allows the empty platform to be raised to vertical, but fortunately has a few degrees of swing the other way, providing clearance for the tailgate with the box in place.

This shot, with the box in place, shows how the tire is secured. The blue line (one on each side) cleats off to the structural posts of the box. The tire can't go down, won't go up, and is secured laterally by the cleated lines. That puppy ain't goin' nowhere!

The other feature in the photo above is a drop-down shelf, designed to carry a small supplemental gas tank. There's one on each side. Take that, Alaska!

Note the handle above the shelf. This is the end-handle from a casket, provided by Mueller-Parker Funeral home, of Mason, Ohio. There is one handle on each side. The original hardware has been replaced; the handles ordinarily only need to be used once, while in this use they must stand up for years! These handles allow two people to lift the box clear of the platform, once the securing pins have been removed (see below).

We ran into a problem with the "wings" (shelves). Much of this box was made from scrounged / found materials, including the piano hinges that support the wings. The round-headed screws mean that the wings won't rise to a true vertical. The shot below shows a wing, raised as high as it goes, the snap shackle (not marine grade) securing it, and the blue line and cleat securing the spare. Scott gets "cheap and handy," I get "marine grade." We differ. Let's let it go at that.

The problem is that when the box was assembled, the gap between top of wing and handle was too tight; you'ld have to be an anorexic midget ballet dancer to grip the handle, and then you wouldn't have enough oomph to lift the box!

The solution was to change all the hardware, or slice 1/2 inch or so off the wings. That's why the end of the wing in the photo above is unfinished; it's literally been cut-down, and though it's been primed, it needs real paint tomorrow.

OK, we have a platform, a box that has features and sits on the platform, and a full-size spare that fits between box and rear bumper of the car. You can still get into the trunk of the car with a little effort. What's missing?

GRAPHICS of course.

Maxx Graphics of Mason, Ohio, printed the wonderful stick-on of the graphic I'd prepared. Unfortunately, I'm lousy at applying these things, so there are some wrinkles, but I'm going to have live with it. Here's the box with graphic in place:

Note the gas can (unsecured) resting on the right wing. I may even splurge and buy an extra for the left wing. Note the two bolts left and right of the jack; these are 22" bolts that go right through the bottom of the box and secure it to the platform, Ain't no one gonna steal my box!

Here's the whole rig sitting in my drive way, ready to load containerized supplies, dog, and moi!

Prepping for Alaska Trip

2010-06-05T22:44:00.002-04:00

As some of you may know, I'm heading out on a major trek. Starting about the middle of July, and returning at the end of September, I'll have driven 2,500 miles within the state of Alaska -- and an additional 5,000 miles each way getting there and returning. There will be minimal overlap on the outbound and return routes, so I'll be covering a great deal of ground.

You can get an overview of the trip in this slide show: Alaska Bound . It talks about the trip, how it's different, what the goals are, and why I'm doing it. The presentation is derived from a pitch I recently made to the public TV and Radio stations in Cincinnati. Think of the whole thing as Charles Kuralt with scenery.

Preparing a trip of this sort, particularly on the shoestring budget I have available, is a pretty substantial task. I've divided it into route planning, car safety and modifications, packing (and where to pack it), what to see, and what to do.

My strategy for the trip is to take less traveled paths, meet people, and let them lead me to what I should see, photograph, and write about. This approach has worked fabulously for me on other trips, and I'm confident doing it this way will enrich the experience for me and for others.

Part of the talking to people approach involves my traveling companion, Ginger.

I've written about traveling with her in an earlier post, but the bottom line is she can open doors I never could. But on a trip of this magnitude, where do I put her? How do I pack enough food for her? Insurance? Vet care? Where can I NOT go because she's along? (Answer: Denali National Park; she'll have to be kenneled while I'm in Denali).

So here's a brief rundown on what's happened so far.

1. Car. I drive a 2009 Subaru Forester. I should have bought an upraded model with a roof rack, but didn't, so now what? Certain mods have been necessary. For safety, I've had to locate, purchase, and figure out accessible storage for a full-size spare. The dinky toy it came with won't handle dirt roads dotted with emerging railroad spikes (such as the road from Chitina to McCarthy). I've bought splash guards and a complete front-end bra to reduce gravel damage. I've also laid in a supply of you-don't-move-without-these spare parts, a supplemental gas can, and a spare 12 volt battery (it will jump the car and inflate my air mattress).

For storage, I had to do a detailed map of the car's interior, then find sturdy containers which would fit -- a task made harder by the engineers' dedication to abolishing straight lines. EVERYTHING in the back of a Forester is curved! Major jig-saw puzzle time. The pictures below show the undressed interior, then the various containers (and Ginger) sandwiched in. It is barely possible for me to sleep on top of the containers in an absolute emergency. Let's hope there aren't any.

Still needed more storage. Options were roof rack (prohibitively expensive as an aftermarket add-on), atrailer (kills your gas mileage), and EUREKA! A hitch-mounted platform upon which rests a custom storage box, elegantly made by my cabinet-making neighbor. This box is 45 x 20 x 22 inches, and I found by test that it will neatly hold my body if something nasty happens, ready for sending home via UPS. I'll post a photo of this work of art as soon as it's painted and the installation is tested.

In the event it's not needed as a coffin, the Expedition Box will hold automotive spares (including hydraulic jack, tools, and spare fuel), all the camping gear, fishing gear, and miscellaneous other stuff. It will NOT be used to store food, clothes, or camera gear except for tripods. No food, to dissuade bears. No camera gear to dissuade thieves. The spare tire fits EXACTLY between box and car bumper, resting on the hitch and secured from lurching off to one side or the other by lateral lines cleated off on The Box. The box itself is secured to the platform underlying it and WILL NOT come off without knowing exactly how to do it.

2. Camera equipment. 3 still cameras, and possibly 2 HD camcorders. One of them is a helmet cam, a truly nifty gadget. The other HD camcorder is still in negotiation, but if I really do get a shot at a TV production, it's essential. Plus batteries, filters, lenses, chargers, sensor cleaners, card readers, computer, and external optical drives. These are big files, baby. Have also had to change cell phone carrier and equipment. Sat phones will work but are way out of my league. My wife and I are fighting over this one. I'll also be taking audio and perhaps video recording equipment, plus lights. Space is getting tight again!

Horse-traded for a 300mm f2.8 lens, plus a 1.4 teleconverter. I want to shoot wildlife, not be devoured by it.

Camera support includes power inverters allowing my batteries to be recharged while driving. Essential.

3. Clothing. I can expect temperatures from 90 degrees to 20 degrees or a little lower. I've had to purchase various grades of base layer stuff, plus really good breathable rain gear. $$$, but inevitable. Oh, and don't forget the merino wool socks. They are worth their weight in blister ointment.

4. Food. Food is very expensive in Alaska. And I don't like campfire cooking very much, except for fresh fish which should be abundant. The solution is 48 MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), purchased for about $6.00 each via e-bay. They're tasty (I'm told), nourishing, and very durable. They're also bulky, challenging the storage allotment even further. Ginger gets 72 cans of dogfood, plus 1 cup per day of kibble (about 50 pounds). Other than that, it's a small 12 volt cooler of sandwich stuff, water, and certain other precious fluids.

5. Lodging. I'll be spending about 2-3 nights camping (which I'm not nuts for) per 1 night in a motel or private home. So the camping gear includes tent, air mattress, REALLY GOOD sleeping bag, air pump, small lights, etc. Can't do any trail hiking because I'm already carrying a lot of glass on my back.

6. Routes. This has been a major challenge, but huge fun to work. My goal is to avoid the roads everyone else takes, because that's where you see the most and learn the most and meet the most interesting people. I also wanted to avoid duplicating roads as much as possible.

Luckily my friend Virginia Wilson introduced me to The Milepost, a thick annual volume that describes 4 different approaches to Alaska, along with mile-by-mile comments on views, fishing, lodging, rough road stretches, etc. It then describes every officially extant road inside the state, excluding only national forest service, lumber company, and mining roads. I'm delighted to learn that THEY WILL BUY PHOTOGRAPHS if you hit the jackpot. See the slideshow for an overview of the routes selected.

Within Alaska, I'm going to some pretty far-out places, literally and metaphorically. The thing is that you can't plan circle routes very well, especially in the interior of the state. So you do have to go someplace, then retrace your steps. Annoying, but there it is.

Also, I don't like to take a "if this is Tuesday it must be Belgium" approach. So while I've got certain destinations, I don't have them scheduled, and will feel free to drop or add at whim. The only fixed point is that I have to be in Whittier to take a ferry to Valdez on 8/28. Otherwise, I'm a dandelion seed until I hit the trail for home.

7. Health and personal safety. Medications renewed and up to date. Prescriptions to be filled in Canada where they're far less expensive than here. Decided against a gun; I won't carry a rifle / slug-firing shotgun, because I already have too much weight aboard. And a .50 caliber pistol, which will stop a bear, ways a lot and would probably break my wrist. Instead, it's a couple of large cans of stuff with names like Vengeance and Whoop-Ass to deal with bears, and high-concentration DEET spray for their winged little cousins. Stress echo cardiogram next week. Dental work checked. And the list goes on.

This has been a lot of jellybeans to keep circling overhead, but quite suddenly everything is starting to come together. I'm sure there will be further changes and frustrations before actually setting out, but I'm equally sure that I'm going to have a ball.

American Impressionism

2010-06-01T15:37:00.000-04:00

Just got back from my annual see the family in New England trip. This time we also visited an old classmate of mine, a musician named Jan Warner, and his lovely wife Dianne. They live in Old Lyme, CT, and as part of our visit they took us round to the Florence Griswold Museum.

The deal on Florence was that she had a huge home, but when her hubby died after a series of bad investments, she was left hard up. So she founded a boarding house for American Impressionists to spend time painting in the area. As well they might! The light is fabulous, the scenery bucolic and varied.

Ms. Griswold sold tons of her guests' paintings, but when they gave something to her as a gift, she never sold it. The result is a building furnished with a collection of masterpieces that quite literally made me cry. I can't show them to you; they prohibit photography. I CAN show you one of the small artists' studios she rented out for $5.00 per month.

I could of course take pictures in the grounds and in the countryside nearby. You can see a collection here:

American Impressionist Scenes

Here's the house / museum:

My favorites "impressionist" shots are these:

And this, taken BEFORE I visited the museum

Geotagging with the EasyTag

2010-04-29T15:35:00.007-04:00

I’ve been experimenting with Geotagging. Geotagging is labeling your photographs with the GPS location at which they were taken, expressed (usually) in latitude and longitude. Altitude and direction you were facing when you took the picture are additional features.

Why would you want to geotag your images? One reason is to make absolutely sure you can find the same spot again, on or off road. Another is to be able to document your photo trip; if your images are geotagged, it saves an awful lot of note--taking. All you have to do is apply your geotagged images to google maps or google earth or via Flickr, Locr, or Smugmug.

Of course, as with most things in life, there are concerns with geotagging and posting the geotagged images. First is security. You might want to think twice about identifying your house on Google (though it’s probably there already!). You might also want to protect some of your special places for bird photography or a hidden waterfall you don’t want the whole world to know about.

I started looking at this technology because I’ve had various assignments lately when I needed to be sure of where a given barn or other structure was located. And this summer I’m taking a 2-month trip to Alaska via the Yukon and NW Territories of Canada. Definitely a time for geotagging!

A number of point-and-shoots come with a GPS receiver built into them, and some of these can record directly to your picture’s EXIF data. More expensive cameras usually don’t have built in GPS units, though some, such as Nikon’s more recent cameras, are equipped to receive GPS data from a Nikon-compatible GPS unit.

If you don’t have a built-in GPS, there are two ways to go. One is to use an external GPStracking device, of which there are many, to record your location at intervals from 5 seconds to 10 minutes (depending on the model). At the start of your trip, make sure that your camera’s clock exactly matches the GPS unit’s time. Then, when you get back and have downloaded your pictures to your computer, you download from the GPS and use any of a variety of apps to tag your photos with the matching time from the GPS. If the times don’t match, you’ll either get no tag or an incorrect one – which could conceivably be fatal under some exotic circumstances.

The other way, if your camera will let you take GPS data into it’s files, is to get a GPS tracking unit that writes straight to your EXIF data, eliminating the need for a post-processing workflow to tag your images.

For the Nikon, there are three such devices. One is the GP-1 from Nikon. This unit fits on your flash shoe and plugs into the 10-pin socket on your D200, D700, D300, D3, or other recent Nikon. It costs $195.00, and while it works well (by repute) it also interferes with your on-camera flash. Another unit is the Wolverine, available form Adorama or Amazon, which is $129. This unit, like the GP-1, draws power from your camera.

A third unit is the EasyTag. This unit costs $169, complete with software, gps tracking unit, USB cable, and 2-gig microSD memory card – enough for a decade of normal use!

The EasyTag has an internal battery with a 10 hour life (and a 4 hour recharge time). If internal power gets too low, the unit will draw from your camera.

The EasyTag will function as an ordinary GPS recorder, allowing you to download stored tracks to your computer, so you can use it with any camera, but its ability to put data into EXIF files was the real draw for me.

I obtained an EasyTag and offer some comments on its use and operation.

Inside the box:

EasyTag unit with pre-installed , appropriate cable for your camera, USB cable, remote shutter trigger with USB connector to EasyTracker unit, mini CD with software and directions on PDF, a USB card reader to read your data from the unit and send it to your computer, plus a simplified sheet of printed directions.

Setting up

Make sure the memory card is installed in the appropriate slot on the EasyTracker. Install the unit into the hot shoe of your camera. Then connect the cable to the port on your camera and to the unit.

Next, calibrate the unit so it knows which way is North. You do this by pressing a button on the front of the unit, then, while holding a level horizon, make two slow clockwise circles. This gives the unit’s magnetic compass its orientation.

Turn the unit off, then back on, and wait for the green signal lamp to light steadily. When the unit is feeding data to your camera, the small GPS indicator in the camera’s data window turns solidly on.

At this point, the EasyTracker is going to feed data to the camera every few seconds and store that data with each photo you take. You can see the results when reviewing images.

Note: the D700 has a default setting that turns puts the camera into standby in a few seconds while the EasyTag is sending data. This is to save the camera battery. You can over-ride it if you want by following these steps:

Default

Disabled

Pros and Cons

The unit works well, but it can take a very long time to acquire a solid fix from the satellites. The best way to get a fix is to put the camera on a tripod or fence post away from buildings, then just wait for up to 10 minutes (though that’s rare; 2-3 minutes is more common). Once the unit has the fix, it will keep it, even if you put the camera down on the seat of your car and drive around.

Physical construction quality. The unit is very light, which is good, but it doesn’t seem robust. The little rubber flaps that cover the various ports on the unit are definitely not very sturdy. If you’re tough on gear, you might have a problem, but if you are careful with your camera, the EasyTag should hold up OK. I’ll let you know after a couple of months on the road in Canada and Alaska this summer. The little green led that tells you if the unit has a fix is dim and hard to see in bright light, but the indicator on my D700 takes care of the problem.

Software

EasyTag comes with a mini-CD full of software.

Most of this applies to PC-users, and I can’t comment on it other than to say there are many such programs available, some for free, on sites such as Flickr. The only included piece of Mac software is JetPhoto Studio. You can use this to create albums of geotagged images, but if you want to upload them directly to Google, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version of the program at a cost of $25.00

I store my travel pictures on Smugmug, which can directly read Exif files with GPS data, and will display your pictures on a Google map if you select “map this” while looking at a picture which has the geotag attached.

Frankly, I haven’t needed to buy the upgrade for JetPhoto Studio, so haven’t really explored the software in depth. I will update this report if I do get more into it.

Summary

If you want to geotag and like the convenience of not having to coordinate your gps and your camera, then tag images by time taken, the EasyTag may be for you – especially if you have a Nikon! The EasyTag site at http://www.easytagger.ca tell you whether your Nikon is compatible.

While I’d like the unit to be more robust and have a thumbscrew attachment to the hot shoe, this is more than made up for by the capacious memory card, self-powering ability, and the remote shutter. If you are serious about panos, macro photography, and long exposures, the remote shutter is well worth having. By themselves these shutters are costly, and to have one included with the EasyTag is a bonus that makes the value proposition unbeatable.

Expeditions with Your Dog

2010-04-07T10:55:00.004-04:00

Traveling with your pooch is an adventure. Whether it’s a great adventure or not depends on lots of things – where you’re going, your dog’s personality and needs, and on what you’re trying to do on the trip.

My trips are photo expeditions to isolated places. I load the car with camping gear, food, 3 cameras, tripod, clothes, miscellaneous supplies – and my 65 pound Golden-Chow cross, Ginger. We alternate camping with cheap motels.

So here’s the Letterman list of the top 10 reasons I travel with my dog.

10. When your wife, your photographer buddies, and even your daughter can’t go and argue against the trip, all you have to say to your dog is “Let’s get in the car.” ZOOM. Tail wags, eyes light up, and you’re NEVER going to get an argument.

9. You don’t have to pack any extra cosmetics, sports outfits, or coats. You DO have to pack dog food, a dish, and a leash. Dog food does take up space, but the good news is that you can always eat it if things get tough enough.

8. Depending on your dog, you have a built-in conversation-starter. Ginger has an aura that I absolutely lack – she can raise the warmth of an atmosphere faster than Santa Claus at an orphans’ feast.

Ginger really does evoke the coo-and-cuddle response among both men and women (more women, though). If your dog is a Chinese Crested Hairless crossed with a mastiff, you might not get the same reaction. But Ginger makes an ideal door-opener – sometimes literally.

Ginger’s ability to open doors was proved one night in Red Lodge Montana, when we arrived late, tired, and having had a hard time finding lodging. Eventually we did find a room. We found a parking space, and Ginger surged into what she figured was our room. OOPS! There was a Harley parked in front of her choice, an open screen door, and in she went.

I followed quickly, apologizing all the way. What I saw was a blonde in the bed, and a middle-aged guy with a ponytail and a 3-day beard watching the TV. Uh-oh!

That’s when the blonde pulled up the sheet, looked at Ginger, and cried out “Ooooh, what a sweetie-pie. What a good girl!” Well, there are door-openers and door-openers!

7. While conversation with your dog is apt to be limited, she won’t argue politics, won’t accuse you of hating her mother, and will always listen to you. In fact, if you’re traveling without a human companion, your dog can just plain be good company. Good reason to take it along.

6. Your dog can help you get out of trouble. Ginger is very good at following trails that aren’t marked well or are over rocky terrain. Mostly, I don’t need help, but there was a day in Maine last summer where her nose really did make getting back faster and safer. Of course, she could have been following a squirrel, but you just have to take your chances.

5. Your dog makes a great car alarm and burglar deterrent. The bad guy doesn’t know how loveable your mutt is. He just sees all those teeth and thinks twice.

4. Your dog probably hates kennels, and good ones cost more than motel rooms these days. Save the money and take your dog with you!

3. My dog makes a terrific prop, scale-gauge, and perspective-generator. Put her in the frame and there’s suddenly a sense of place, an energy, that wasn’t there without her.

2. Dogs like other dogs (mostly). This leads to some fun socializing. Your dog will make the introduction for you! I’d never have met this extremely attractive young French woman in Framingham, Mass without Ginger to enable the conversation. Ooo-la-la.

1. Maybe the best reason of all – your dog will love being with you, sharing your adventure, and maybe even carrying a spare water bottle or your sandwiches in a back pack of his own. There’s just nothing like it.

Now the negatives:

10. (With thanks to EOS John for this one, which I'd forgotten). Dogs are furry, with rare and unmentionable exceptions. Your dog's fur is electrostatic, which means it will grab on to almost any surface and will then cling tenaciously. Unfortunately, one of the favorite resting places of dog fur is your camera's digital sensor, your camera's lenses, mirror, and everything else. It gets in the camera bags, gets in your sleeping bag, and clings tighter than a climber on a rockface to any bit of upholstery or carpet. Take your vacuum, your sensor cleaner, and your patience!

9. You have to allow for your dog in your planning and arrangements. If you’re staying in motels, you need to find ones which permit pets – or learn how to sneak yours in and out. And in. And out.

8. Your dog can tie you down and limit your freedom of movement (just as you may have to do for him). In National Parks, dogs must be leashed and kept on trails. In Denali, they must be left in campsites. If you’re a photographer like me, that can make a difference, This restriction is a nuisance, but it actually makes sense, protecting endangered species, such as the delicious Western Marmot, or the toothsome Kansas Prairie Bunny. It may also keep your dog from being munchies for larger, meaner critters with less genteel manners than your dog has. Ever seen an eagle lofting away a papillon? It happens.

7. In France, dogs are welcome in taxis and in restaurants. Not in this country (with rare and miraculous exceptions). That means when you go inside to chow down, Fang is left somewhere else. But where? Broiling in the sun? Howling his poor deserted lungs out while you’re gone? So again, we’re back to extra planning.

6. Your dog can genuinely get in trouble. If your dog gets lost a thousand miles from home and a million miles from nowhere, you’re got a real problem (hunters can now equip their dogs with GPS trackers, but that’s a pretty drastic approach). If she swallows a forbidden chicken bone, as Ginger did in Custer, South Dakota, you have to find a vet and pay the freight – or not. I now carry pet medical insurance to cover this kind of thing. Not cheap, but the vet bill in Hot Springs SD (where I finally found a vet) turned out to be $400 WITHOUT surgery.

5. Dogs have to be walked. Where we live in the country, this is a matter of opening the door and saying “Out, Dog.” But you can’t do that on the road. So if your dog is nervous, and announces at 3:00 AM that she HAS to go out, shuffle into your clothes, put on the leash, and open the door into the soaking rain. And keep hiking until Spikette finally relaxes enough to let you go back inside. NOT the best way to get a good night’s sleep. Oh, and don’t forget the plastic poop gloves.

4. Your dog can distract you from the business at hand. It’s really hard to concentrate on the photos you’ve driven all this way to take if you have to keep an eye out for your wandering pal. When Ginger had only been with me for a few months (she’s a pound rescue), I was working outdoors with a model in a steeply gullied area. The model wasn’t wearing much of anything, and the lighting conditions were difficult. So quite obviously I was NOT watching Ginger. When we finished the shot, we discovered that Ginger had vanished.

My model and her boyfriend and I hiked the gullies for a good two hours. God bless ‘em, they wouldn’t drive back to their digs in Cleveland til they knew Ginger was safe! (See, that’s the ole doggy magic thing).

She had found her way into a housing subdivision and been instantly adopted by a family with four other dogs. (Doggie magic one more time). They eventually called me, and we were reunited. But since that time I’ve always had to keep from full immersion into the photo at hand. Out comes the leash and the complaints that go with it! In her favor, Ginger has since learned not to wander while she’s with me. But still, if you’re dogwatching, your mind can’t be wholly on the job.

3. Busybodies can make your life hell. If you stop at a rest area and trot inside for a quick stop, you will come back out to find a cop staring into your car, or someone from the local SPCA is phoning your plate in for animal abuse. Doesn’t matter if windows are open, the dog’s just been watered, and the outside temp is only 70, SOMEBODY out there is convinced you’re the Simon Legree of dog owners. Just expect itl

2. Your dog’s sense of smell differs from yours. Stuff they don’t mind, or even seem to like, can cause major problems when there’s no handy dogwash and you’re in a tight space like a car. I've had to stop Ginger from eating bear scat more than once!

I mentioned that Ginger had once eaten a chicken bone. The vet got it out by a combination of depth-charging and power-flushing her, to put it kindly. It was that or major abdominal surgery.

Two days later, when I picked her up, they’d cured her but hadn’t washed her! I couldn't stand to have her in the car. AAAGGGGHH! I drove around Hot Springs, SD with the windows wide open til a competing vet took pity on me (the town’s only dog groomer was gone someplace) and agreed to hose her off.

Skunks are another hazard. Likewise road-kill. Why do dogs like to roll in 3-day old deer guts? I remember fondly the night Ginger climbed into the tent with the foreleg of a deer – and crunched it all night long.

1. It’s 10:00 clock at night. It’s cold. You’ve walked the dog, who now smells like a wet blanket coated in fermented anchovies. You’re no longer hungry. It’s been raining all day, and you just don’t want to pitch that tent. You scramble into your sleeping bag in the back of the SUV. You are just falling asleep, when OMG! Your dog has just cut loose with a Black Stealth, somewhere around 9.0 Fart Richter Scale. Don’t you live traveling with Rover?

Beauty in the Commonplace (and other things)

Eric's Rules for Successful Travel

Pixels, PPI, and DPI –What They Are and Why They Matter

Eric's Quick Fish Chowdah

What to do when your photos are flooded

Creating A Fine Art Landscape

Setting Up

Vibration Reduction

Camera and Lens

Exposures

Color balance

Editing Workflow in Detail

Over to Bridge / Photoshop

Sharpening, Noise Control, and Resizing

Whatever happened to Comity?

The Debt Ceiling Fiasco

A Day at the Harrod OH Pork Rind Festival

In Defense of Comedy, or, How I Met the Muse and Lived

Highly Dubious Retouching (HDR)

The marvelous act of asking your way

Resolution Basics --Why and When Megapixels Matter

Glass

Megapixels -- How Many?

Pixels -- How Big?

Pixels -- Bit Depth

Summary

Crop your way to better photos

Modest Proposals to Improve Congressional Behavior

Customer Service Done Right

Incredibly Busy, and finally something to show for it

What's the problem with Yellowstone Park?

On Leaving Alaska

How to Get Rich in Alaska

John Kenney, Bachelor and Individualist

FINALLY, good and healthy food in Alaska: Turkey Red

The Lawyer and the Judge

Thumbs up, thumbs down for Denali

Undeniable Denali

Chena Hot Springs and the Dalton Highway

The Dust rules the North

There's Gold in Chicken (Alaska)

Made it to Alaska! But the Eagle has not landed

Scots wa hae -- and their highways suck but the scenery was great

Alcan to Watson lake, with side trips

How it works in the NORTH

On to the Northwest Territories of Canada

New friends, new adventures,new photos

New Pix and new Adventures

Weyburn to bassano

So far, so good

Who gives a damn, we're on our way

Ginger and the IRS

Expedition Box update

More problems with the Expedition Box ... and some solutions

Advice about the Expedition Box, Guaranteed to Raise Stress Levels

Alaska Prep Update -- Swamped

Boy, am I over weight (Alaska Trip wise, that is)

Alaska Prep Update

The Risky Business of Eliminating Risk

Quick update on the Expedition Box

Alaska Prep -- The Fabulous Expedition Box

Prepping for Alaska Trip

American Impressionism

Geotagging with the EasyTag

Setting up

Pros and Cons

Software

Summary

Expeditions with Your Dog