Ted Marcus’ Virtual Light Table has been on the Web for nine years. It’s exciting to look through the log summaries each week and see so many people from all over the world visiting my site, along with the astonishing variety of search queries that lead them to its pages. It’s even more exciting when some of those visitors order prints or image licenses!
I have added a new high-resolution edition of Maluaka Beach, Maui to the collection of images available for free download as wallpaper. This version— the ninth image in the collection, appropriately enough— is formatted for wide-screen LCD monitors in 1440x900 and 1680x1050 sizes. There is also an improved “wallpaper” version of A Spring Morning in Vauvenargues.
I have also overhauled the article on digital cameras, and made numerous smaller updates to other commentaries and to several links and reviews.
Happy Leap Day! I do hope you’ve made suitably productive and/or joyful use of this intercalary gift.
My latest Los Angeles and Vicinity Travel Photo Essay is about the municipal piers in the South Bay “beach cities” of Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Manhattan Beach. Along with ten new pictures, eight pictures formerly on the Fine Art pages now have a proper home (the ones I shot on film are new scans). I have also added four new pictures to the Fine Art pages.
This Travel Photo Essay also demonstrates that travel photography doesn’t always have to involve flying or a long journey to an “exotic” destination. Interesting and colorful places can be found just down the street if you look for them. I live just down the street from the Redondo Beach Pier, so over the years it has been one of my favorite places for testing cameras, lenses, and films.
I have rewritten my reviews of the enhanced command interpreter Take Command and the disk image backup tool Terabyte Unlimited Image for Windows to reflect the major changes in their new versions. I have also removed the review of the discontinued camera raw file converter Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials; but I’ve left behind a “stub” explaining what this was, and listing some of the current cameras it does not support, for the benefit of visitors looking for information about it. I have moved the general discussion of the reasons for using third-party raw converters to a new section of the article on digital cameras.
Happy Groundhog Day, Candlemas, or Imbolc! My latest Travel Photo Essay about Los Angeles and Vicinity concerns the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, with 15 new pictures. The Getty Villa is a museum dedicated to the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities that billionaire oil magnate J. Paul Getty and his subsequent well-endowed trust have collected. That collection is housed in an authentic reconstruction of the Villa of the Papyri, an opulent house in Herculaneum buried in the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 CE. Exploring the grounds of the Getty Villa is like stepping directly into early Imperial Rome, in full (and often garish) color— an experience you probably won’t get from visiting real Roman ruins in Europe.
To start off the new year, I have a new Travel Photo Essay (with 11 new pictures) about another one of Southern California’s hidden gems, Rancho Los Alamitos Historic Ranch and Gardens in Long Beach. The ranch is practically a “core sample” of California history, a remnant of the Spanish colonial era that was most recently the home of a “gentleman cowboy” whose family was an influential part of the local oil and real estate industries. It’s also a very pleasant place for just walking around— and for photographing the many interesting details.
I’ve also added to the Los Angeles and Vicinity section some travel notes for visitors to Los Angeles, with advice that you might not find in guidebooks.
A new Travel Photo Essay on Venice and Naples (California). At the beginning of the 20th century, two unrelated real estate developers transformed two pieces of swampland into their versions of Venice, Italy. The “canal district” of Venice, south of Santa Monica, is really most notable for its colorful history (and its colorful founder). It’s charming and quaint, but what’s left of the canals is merely decorative. Naples Island in Long Beach is much more “Venetian,” with European-style narrow alleyways and a functional circular canal that leads to a boat harbor. While neither is anything like an authentic reproduction of La Serenissima, they’re both hidden gems of the Los Angeles area and are well worth visiting. There are 16 new pictures, one of which is the 900th image on this Web site.
With the once-mighty dollar swirling down the toilet and air travel a more frustrating ordeal than ever, discovering places you’ve overlooked in your own home town is a very attractive travel option. For my autumn vacation this year, I took day trips from home to some places in “Los Angeles and Vicinity” that I had never visited— or hadn’t visited in decades— despite living here my entire life.
From a photographic perspective, this was surely as satisfying and exciting as any “trip” I’ve made. And I barely scratched the surface. But it wasn’t an enjoyable vacation. “Los Angeles” is a far-flung collection of places scattered in all directions. Exploring it means long drives on the nation’s most congested roads, which seem to be clogged at all hours; and there’s no practical alternative to driving. For future local vacations, I’ll reduce the nerve-racking commute by choosing specific areas to visit and staying in hotels there.
Last month’s Travel Photo Essay on San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, was the first installment of my recent adventures. The current installment is about Griffith Park, featuring the renowned Observatory that reopened a year ago after a six-year overhaul. In addition to the 18 new pictures, four pictures I took in 1997 at Griffith Park’s Travel Town Museum (formerly on the Fine Art 2 page) have a new home. I have moved six other Photo Travel Essays from the California page to a new Los Angeles and Vicinity page. And on the Fine Art page there’s also a new “artsy” picture I took on the island of Naples in Long Beach.
To avoid offending the Guardians Of America’s Religious Values with a generic “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings,” I’ll wish you (in chronological order): Happy Hanukkah, Io Saturnalia, Blessed Winter Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and/or Happy New Year. And remember that prints of my pictures make excellent gifts!
In honor of Halloween, Samhain, and autumn in general, here’s a pumpkin still life. I saw this appealing array yesterday while walking along the Rivo Alto Canal on the island of Naples in Long Beach, California. An upcoming Travel Photo Essay will feature Naples along with Venice, the other little bit of Italy in Los Angeles.
I added a new Travel Photo Essay page on San Pedro, the Port of Los Angeles. The brightly painted shipping containers, ships, and associated port machinery provide many interesting photographic opportunities. These are the first subjects I’ve run across that consistently exceed not only the sRGB gamut but Adobe RGB as well. In plain English, that means psychedelic colors so intense that monitors can’t reproduce them correctly. My favorite of the sixteen new pictures is an “artsy” close-up of an oil tanker that looks like one of Mark Rothko’s abstract expressionist paintings.
A very rare early autumn storm last weekend scrubbed away the usual smog and haze from the skies of Southern California. I took advantage of the clear sky and paid a late-afternoon visit to Point Vicente Park, which reopened in July 2006. The resulting update to the Palos Verdes Peninsula 2 page includes six new pictures. I also added two new pictures to the Palos Verdes Peninsula 1 page.
Ever since they acquired the Paint Shop Pro image editing program, Corel has released a new version every September. This year’s model is called X2. My review of Paint Shop Pro gets quite a lot of visitors, so I’ve updated it to discuss the new version. As with Corel’s previous September releases, this is unfinished “beta” software. The release notes list 35 “known issues” (i.e., new bugs), along with 70 “product improvements” that look suspiciously like fixes for bugs in the previous version (none of which are related to the unfinished color management system and incomplete plug-in support that made me drop Paint Shop Pro in favor of Adobe Photoshop). The “finished” software should get released as a large patch in a few months. Also consistent with previous Corel releases, the new features in this one are rather unimpressive. But I do have to mention one that represents some marketeer’s truly brilliant inspiration: Thinify™, a tool that’s supposed to make people look thinner. Never mind the “known issues”; Thinify™ should guarantee record sales! Will the next version perhaps add a specialized version of the tool just for women, Thin-a-Thigh™?
I have also updated Avoid Flying Whenever Possible. Just in time for the 6th “anniversary” of 9/11, the Homeland Security Department Inspector General has issued a report about the latest serious flaw in the Transportation Security Administration’s airport “security” system. The TSA makes long lines of passengers stand shoeless at screening checkpoints, confiscates contraband sunscreen and water bottles according to screeners’ capricious interpretations of ridiculous rules, and requires checked bags to be unlocked because their million-dollar high-tech scanners can’t distinguish books from bombs. But after passengers go through all those hassles and restrictions, cargo loaded beneath their feet receives cursory screening at best. The Inspector General concluded that the TSA’s utterly inadequate system for screening cargo “increases the opportunities to put explosives, incendiaries, and other dangerous devices on passenger aircraft.” Combine that with flight delays, lost baggage, and utter meltdown of “customer service” the airlines inflicted on miserable travelers this past summer, and “wretched” seems an inadequate description of the air transportation system in the United States.
Finally, a small cosmetic enhancement throughout this Web site: “typographer’s” quotes and apostrophes. While it’s not a revolutionary breakthrough in a league with Corel’s Thinify™, the “curly quotes” should make the text look just a little better than the old "straight" quotation marks.
An update devoted mainly to reviews and commentaries. I completely rewrote the review of iCorrect EditLab Pro, the color-correction plug-in I’ve been using since 2002. I made various minor updates to other reviews, mainly to keep the prices and links current and describe some improvements in new software versions. I’ve brought the section on ISO 400 color negative film up to date, updated Avoid Flying Whenever Possible to include the latest improvements the airlines and the TSA have made to air travel, and made a few revisions to Ted Tries a Cruise and The Joy of Solo Travel? in response to comments I’ve received. And I’ve updated the Scanning 110-Format Film (and Kodachrome) article with new information from correspondence with readers who have used the Nikon Coolscan 9000 scanner and the GEPE “13 x 17 Pocket-Instamatic Anti-Newton” slide mounts.
Nearly all the pictures on the Scenery page are new and improved scans. I’ve added one new picture, Afternoon Surf, to the first Fine Art page.
After years of resisting my parents’ suggestions that I try a cruise, the time was finally right to test the waters. In May I took a four-day cruise from Los Angeles to Ensenada, Mexico (by way of San Diego and Catalina Island) on Royal Caribbean’s Monarch of the Seas. It didn’t require flying, and the price was reasonable despite a “single supplement” that doubled the cost. That hefty “supplement” is the standard penalty cruise lines impose on solo travelers. It’s a major reason why I’ve avoided cruises.
I had a reasonably good time, although certain things weren’t quite what I expected. I’ve written an illustrated article about my experience as a first-time solo cruiser: Ted Tries a Cruise. But anyone contemplating their first cruise— or anyone considering this very popular Southern California “sun and shopping” vacation— should find it informative even if they’re a couple or family. And for those of you who have told me that they would enjoy my Travel Photo Essays more if I wrote first-person accounts of my experiences and feelings, I’ve finally written one.
Besides the illustrations in the article, I added some new pictures to the San Diego and Catalina Island pages, as well some “artsy” images on the Fine Art pages (my two favorites are Monarch and Countess and Prow).
I have updated my review of the Pantone huey colorimeter to discuss the hueyPRO, an enhanced version for “advanced” users. The hardware for both monitor calibration tools is apparently identical, so Pantone sells a software upgrade that converts the original huey to a “PRO.” I bought the upgrade, so I can provide a detailed comparison along with some information about the upgrade process that Pantone neglected to document.
So what does the upgrade get you? The short answer is “the ability to profile, calibrate, and install color correction for two monitors.” I think the other features really are more cosmetic than substantial. My review has recently received many “hits” from search engine queries about the hueyPRO, so I hope this update is a helpful resource for the digital photography community.