I just returned from my first significant solo road trip since I went to Death Valley in 1992. I spent a week driving 1,225 kilometers, around the beautiful wine-growing region and the foggy coast near San Luis Obispo (roughly midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco). This was the first opportunity in the six months I’ve had my car to drive it for something other than “stop-and-creep” commuting and errands.
A few observations: Satellite radio and an iPod make a solo road trip much more enjoyable than it was in 1992, when AM radio and cassette tapes were often my only company. (They also make the daily “stop-and-creep” less unpleasant.) Although a four-hour solo drive isn’t my favorite way to spend a morning, it’s definitely better than the ordeal air travel has unfortunately become.
And while I normally object to the abuse of traffic law enforcement for generating revenue, I am now convinced that California could solve all its budget problems by ordering the Highway Patrol to enforce the speed limit on freeways. The revenue from all those tickets, along with the income tax on insurance companies’ profits from the resulting premium increases, should be enough to end the deficit.
The prevailing speed on Route 101 was often more than 80mph (130 km/h), as impatient drivers— mostly in SUVs— were still passing me when I (briefly) accelerated to that speed. The old 55mph (90 km/h) limit was correctly despised (and usually ignored) as too slow. But isn’t 65 or 70 fast enough? Even at that “inefficient” speed— using air conditioning, and with some Los Angeles “stop-and-creep” thrown in— my Corolla still got 39mpg (6 L/100 km). So I feel only a little guilty about driving rather than, say, riding Amtrak and a bicycle.
On the way to San Luis Obispo I stopped at La Purisima Mission in Lompoc. My previous visit there in 2001 resulted in a short Travel Photo Essay that gets a lot of visits, most likely from parents in California looking to help their fourth graders with school assignments about the mission. I have reworked that page and added eight new pictures.
On 18 April 1999, I uploaded the first version of Ted Marcus’ Virtual Light Table to the “personal Web space” of my dial-up Internet account. It had four Travel Photo Essays: Grand Teton (which also included a few pictures of Yellowstone), California Deserts (which after later additions and rewriting became Joshua Tree and Death Valley), Mono Lake and Bodie, and Indian Country. Including the grab-bag gallery that became the Scenery and Fine Art sections, it had 97 pictures. There were also a few incomplete commentary articles.
This site has grown since then. With the latest additions, it now has 63 Travel Photo Essays and 1,108 pictures. I’ve also improved my digital imaging techniques. And througout the past decade, it has always been exciting to look through the log summaries each week and see so many visitors from all over the world, 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!
Those “latest additions” are five new Travel Photo Essays on San Francisco. They include 77 new pictures, plus the eleven I moved from their temporary homes on the Fine Art pages.
I have also added a special version of Cows and Coast to the collection of higher-resolution images available for free download as wallpaper. Appropriately, it’s the tenth image in the collection. It’s formatted for wide-screen LCD monitors in 1440x900 and 1680x1050 sizes. And there are updates and tweaks to numerous pages.
With that work done, it’s time to make some travel plans and take some new pictures.
Yes, I am still around. I’ve merely been suffering from writer’s block in attempting to finish the Travel Photo Essays from last October’s trip to San Francisco. I wasn’t at all satisfied with my initial efforts, although I’m quite pleased with the pictures. So I put it aside for a while. And I’ve had various distractions, notably the purchase of a new car— a Toyota Corolla XLE— at the end of last year. Buying a car is a less than pleasant process that I avoid doing more often than once a decade. But with that now behind me, I’m very happy with the car.
I also joined Facebook. That has provided an opportunity to reconnect with more long-lost friends from the distant past than I expected, but it can be quite a “time suck.” I have updated the obligatory picture of the Web site owner with the version I made for Facebook. It’s the same picture as before, but cropped and processed differently.
Another distraction was an upgrade to my computer’s main hard drive. The original 160GB Seagate 7200.7 was nearing the end of its five-year warranty, and amazon.com was (very briefly) selling a high-performance 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black drive for $70. I used Terabyte Image, the drive image backup tool, to transfer the data from the the three partitions on the old drive to the new drive. So I’ve rewritten my review of Image to discuss the intricacies of this process, as an example of how the software works. I also added a brief discussion of the potential pitfalls and workarounds when upgrading a Serial ATA drive on an older motherboard. I couldn’t find specific information about the Promise controller on my Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard, so I’m hoping to fill that gap for anyone else who might find it useful.
And now I can get back to working on the Photo Travel Essays. I don’t have a specific deadline in mind, but I am definitely making progress.
I have temporarily added three more “artsy” pictures from San Francisco to the Buildings and Architecture section of the Fine Art pages. I’m planning to take advantage of the upcoming holiday weekend to finish up the “digital darkroom” work on the San Francisco pictures, and perhaps even get started on the Travel Photo Essays.
I have also made some minor updates to the Bestiary of File Formats and DNG: Archival Solution or (Compact) Flash in the Pan? articles to reflect Adobe’s latest CS4 version of Photoshop.
And finally, to avoid offending anyone with a generic “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings,” I’ll specifically wish you (in chronological order): Io Saturnalia, Blessed Winter Solstice, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and/or Happy New Year. And remember that prints of my pictures make excellent gifts!
I spent a very enjoyable week in San Francisco last month. One week was barely enough time to visit the “top ten” attractions. But it was sufficient to gain an appreciation of why those songwriters (along with so many other people) left their hearts in the City by the Bay. San Francisco is renowned for its foggy and chilly climate, but the weather was completely anomalous when I was there: in the mid to upper 20s (Celsius), and not a cloud in the sky except for one “partly cloudy” day. But I chose to visit in October because that’s when this sort of anomaly is most likely.
I returned with some eight gigabytes of raw camera sensor data, which I’ve been spending my evenings sorting through, winnowing, and turning into pictures. It’s going to take me a while to finish that work, and then to write the Travel Photo Essays (right now I’m planning three of those, but that could change). In the interim, I have temporarily put eight appropriately “artsy” images on the Fine Art pages. There are five pictures of ships and boats at the Hyde Street Pier (part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park) and Fisherman’s Wharf; and three pictures of interesting buildings.
Andrew Hudson’s PhotoSecrets San Francisco and Northern California guidebook proved a valuable resource for making the most of my limited time (his companion guide to San Diego was similarly helpful four years ago). But travel should always include discoveries that aren’t in the guidebooks. First, as a Southern California native I found it an amazing revelation to visit a city— in California, no less!— that’s designed for humans rather than for automobiles, where you can conveniently get anywhere you need to go using public transportation. (I have experienced this in London and Paris, but that was too many years ago.)
There was also a strangely chilling visit to Alcatraz— the former maximum-security federal prison that is now a very popular national park— a few weeks before the election to replace a President associated with prisons. The crowd of visitors there included groups of Germans and Israelis. The mingled sound of German and Hebrew echoing from the cell block walls added an extra note of surrealism.
And there was a visit to the ornate City Hall, where I saw two women getting married under the rotunda. Behind them was an overflow queue of same-sex couples waiting for the marriage license department. This was an urgent matter for them, as the ballot for the imminent election included Proposition 8, an ultimately successful measure to ban the same-sex marriages that the state Supreme Court had legalized five months earlier.
I don’t care much about same-sex marriage itself. But I found the tactics of Proposition 8’s backers quite disturbing. A coalition of Catholics, Evangelicals, and Mormons collected and spent nearly $40 million. Half of those donations came from well-meaning Mormon families all over the country, who faithfully heeded their leaders’ call— proclaimed from every church pulpit— to donate whatever they could to the Cause of Saving Marriage. The righteous people who ran the campaign apparently decided that merely appealing to tradition and faith would not persuade non-Believers. So they instead spent the money on fear and deception. Their commercials raised the specter of corrupting children, based on the utterly fallacious assertion that schools would be forced to teach and promote homosexuality if Proposition 8 failed. They also made the spurious claim that churches refusing to perform same-sex marriages would be subject to legal penalties. (In contrast, opponents spent just as much on a diffident campaign that focused on abstract notions of equality.)
What bothered me most was that the pious backers of Proposition 8 apparently decided that their Cause justified violating the biblical Commandment against bearing false witness. And also that the zealous Latter-Day Saints seem to have forgotten their own history of persecution for “non-traditional” marriage practices; they abandoned polygamy only after it became a political barrier to Utah statehood. Meanwhile, opponents are holding counterproductive protests at Mormon temples. They have also filed lawsuits to challenge the measure’s constitutionality, and to determine the status of those same-sex couples who married while it was legal. My prediction, for what it’s worth: The United States Supreme Court will ultimately decide the same-sex marriage issue in a 5-4 ruling consistent with the ideology the Court’s “conservative majority” were appointed to uphold.
After that digression, I think it’s time to get back to Photoshop!
It’s time for the annual update to my review of Paint Shop Pro (PSP), the image editing software I used until 2005. I no longer use PSP (for the reasons I discuss in some detail), but I try to keep the review up to date because it gets quite a lot of visitors. This year, instead of the expected new version that fixes some of the old bugs while adding new ones, Corel split last year’s X2 into two editions. That’s possibly because Corel is putting itself up for sale. We’ll just have to see whether the new owner does a better job of maintaining and improving PSP. I’ve also made a few small tweaks, updates, and corrections to assorted Commentaries.
I have written a new commentary in praise of the “staycation”. Staycation is the ditzy new term for vacationing close to home. Though it’s a concept that goes back to when trilobites ruled the Earth, pundits have officially anointed it a “trend” in reaction to the high price of airfare and gasoline. I originally had a few paragraphs about this in Avoid Flying Whenever Possible; but I have now expanded it in response to a recent post on travel guru Arthur Frommer’s blog that unfairly disparages people who take “staycations.”
There’s also a new picture, Beach Footprints, and an improved version of Garden Maiden. I took these— along with The Brig Pilgrim that I added last week and the pictures in the Travel Photo Essay on San Juan Capistrano— during a 2005 “staycation” in Orange County, California, about an hour and a half drive south of where I live.
I’ve made some small updates to the Scanning 110-Format Film (and Kodachrome) article, and to the discussion of raw converters. I rewrote the brief discussion of the unfortunately-defunct RawShooter Essentials raw converter to make it more useful for people who are looking for information about it. I’ve also added one new picture (The Brig Pilgrim) to the “Ships and Boats” section of the Fine Art page.
Whenever I update this “What’s New?” page, I delete any entries that are more than a year old. I have now added What’s Old?, archives of those deleted entries going back to this site’s debut on 18 April 1999. The entries are annotated where appropriate to account for things that have moved, changed, or disappeared. I’ll admit that the the audience for a complete history of this site is inherently limited. But some of the entries include information I never incorporated into the permanent part of the site, so that could prove of interest. The linked archives might also provide an alternative way to browse the site, supplementing the home page, the site map, and the alphabetical index of pictures.
My trip to the Northern California coast in April yielded four new Travel Photo Essays: the Mendocino Coast, Fort Bragg, the Redwood Coast (also called the “Redwood Empire”) in Humboldt County, and Victorian buildings in Ferndale and Eureka. Including the two new pictures on the Scenery page, there are 65 new pictures. One of them marks a milestone: the 1000th image on this Web site.
Another update is a new obligatory picture of the Web site owner. Because my photo travel adventures are almost always solo trips, the previous “obligatory picture” was taken nearly eight years ago. I don’t have enough desire for “record shots” of myself to bother with a self-timer on a tripod, or to either hand my camera to strangers or carry a disposable camera for that purpose (I recommend the latter for solo travelers who do want pictures of themselves). Since I shared my Northern California trip with a good friend who has his own decent camera, I finally have a new picture.
I’ve also updated the section of the article on digital cameras about raw converters. A “problem” picture of the Carson Mansion (a much-photographed Victorian house in Eureka) illustrates the value of a diverse collection of raw-file conversion software.
Ted Marcus’ Virtual Light Table made its Web debut on 18 April 1999.