Whenever I update the What’s New? page, I delete entries that are no longer new (i.e., more than a year old) and move them to this archive. That keeps the What’s New? page to a reasonable size, while maintaining a complete history of this Web site for anyone who might be interested. I can’t imagine why anyone would actually be interested in such a thing, but here it is.
Since this archive goes back to 1999, some links and other things mentioned in old entries may have changed, moved, or disappeared. I’ve removed outdated links and annotated some entries to indicate where things have moved, but I’ve otherwise left the original text unchanged. I add the annotations when I archive the entries, so in time the annotations may themselves become outdated.
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. [These moved to the San Francisco section when I finished it in April 2009.] 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. [These all moved to the San Francisco section when I finished it in April 2009.]
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.
Last month I visited the coastal scenery and redwoods of Mendocino and Humboldt Counties in Northern California, my first trip in years that wasn’t a solo vacation. It was enjoyable as well as productive: I brought back some eight gigabytes of pictures. I’ve since been busily sorting through them, and doing the appropriate Photoshop work in preparation for the forthcoming Travel Photo Essays. But for now I have four new pictures in the “odds and ends” category. On the Scenery page is a view of the Trinity River from the Trinity Scenic Byway. And I have three new Fine Art pictures I took in Eureka: A detail of the bow of the Lady Washington, an authentic reproduction of an 18th century merchant ship; and logging camp shacks and some rusty machinery with flowers, both at the Blue Ox Millworks.
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.