Stray Shots

Everybody Likes a Boat Party

Liberty in Long Beach

Center span, Gerald Desmond Bridge

Sunset over Palos Verdes Peninsula

The birthday boy gets to wear a pirate hat.

Queen Mary, Long Beach skyline. The dome in front was built to hold the Spruce Goose before it moved to Oregon. Now it’s used partly for a cruise ship terminal and partly for a sound stage. A lot of Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed there.

Taken from a moving vessel with a 1/2 second shutter speed. Image stabilization is good for something.

Window Decorations

More Comparisons

Above is a picture taken with the old camera. Below is the same tree, with the new camera. Note that the picture taken with the older camera is a better picture than the one taken with the technically better hardware.

This picture has a 2x digital zoom on it. It also starts by being a tighter optical zoom. (New camera took picture at 34.8mm focal length; old camera maxed out at 23.2mm.) And the image stabilization has to be helping.

But image stabilization can be iffy. Sometimes (as above) it works great. Compare the two details below, at full size, from the new camera and the old camera. They are from almost the identical angle, same tree. Both are blurry (both were taken while moving). The new camera zooms in closer to the tree, sure. But that doesn’t necessarily mean more clarity.

Also compare the picture above to the pictures below. Above you see image stabilization working quite nicely. Below you see it not helping much. Same camera, same time, same lighting, same tree, same highway speed. Part of talent is luck.


(This is not a commentary on which picture is a better picture. This only makes a point about one technical aspect of a camera.)


All kinds of things go into how bright a picture is, how clear it is, how much contrast it shows, how true the colors are. Camera settings make a difference. Bugs on the windshield make a difference. A picture taken on a bright day will show a different range of light (darks vs. brights, intense colors vs. nuance) from a picture taken under overcast skies. A picture taken at sundown shows warmer ranges of yellows and reds. A clean lens can have a big effect. Air quality matters: Hazy air on a warm day affects eyes and cameras, particularly when you’re looking at anything off in the distance. Is a bright light in front of you or behind you? Either one can make a strong picture better or ruin a good picture.

Below is a picture from the old camera and the new camera. The comparison may be unfair (because the pictures were taken on different days under different conditions), but it shows some of the haziness I started to see in pictures with the old camera that made me think I might want to look at something new. I also had a couple of persistent spots on the CCD (the image collector inside the camera) that always left ghosts in the same spots in images, and some of the mechanics on the old camera were getting roadworn. I could have probably had the old camera cleaned and refurbished and improved things somewhat.


1/250, f/5.5


1/500, f/4.8

Hepachopper

A test of any camera is how well it freezes motion. Here’s a helicopter in broad daylight. The shutter clicked at 1/400 second.

Same helicopter, taken at 1/500 second. (I can’t swear that it was at exactly the same distance. It was moving.) But this picture was taken with digital zoom. I have reduced it to approximately the size it would have been (1/3) without the digital zoom.


Here is the first picture, “zoomed” up to 300% of its original size in Photoshop. (Nothing else fancy: I just changed the size.)


Here is the second picture, at full size instead of reduced. This lets me (or you) compare the in-camera digital zoom to the results I’d get if I switched off that feature and just relied on manually “zooming” the pictures later on with Photoshop.

Scooping It Up

Last time we spent Thanksgiving in Yosemite, I had a digital camera. It was brand new, a month old. The time before that, I had a 35mm camera, with a few lenses, one of which went to 300mm. Mom and I spent time after that trip poring over the pictures I got back. “Boy, your lens sure does scoop this right up,” she said, looking at how tight I could zoom in on the top of a waterfall from the valley floor below.


I wasn’t sure why I felt such a compulsion the other night to pick up a new digital camera. Was it a little delirium left over as I sailed out from under the cloud of a nasty head cold? Was it only because I’d been reading about digital cameras online? My existing camera had been dropped on its head a few times and was starting to show the effects: a little fuzzy on the details, not always sure which way was up.


It all made more sense when I got home with the new camera and started thinking about the first pictures I had taken with the old camera. I checked. Sure enough, I got the new camera exactly one day short of two years after the first.

And boy, the new camera can sure scoop it up!


I never turned on the digital zoom on my old camera. People frown on digital zooms. They don’t always make perfect pictures. Then again, Monet was always a little fuzzy on the details when it came to water lilies.



The digital zoom on the new camera was turned on by default when I got it, so I decided to play with it. I have to say, I’m pretty impressed at how it lets the camera get right into the details of the scene. All the above pictures (except the Ferris wheel) are taken from the same spot. The only difference is the zoom. Effectively, this becomes a tool I could use to read a book from across the room.

Two more (above and below) taken from the same spot, using digital zoom.

This is the kind of stuff James Bond wished he had in the 1950s. Not only does it scoop the details right up, but it also has image stabilization, which means that on its highest zoom setting, the little shakiness in my hand as I hold it doesn’t get translated to the image. Remarkably, in today’s world of technology, this camera isn’t even anything special: It’s one bump up from the bottom of the line. A guy who wants to spend real money would get a much better unit.

Below is the regular (“optical”) zoom at maximum setting.

And below is the digital zoom, full on. Not bad when you consider what a tiny speck this sign is in the original picture!

Of course, no matter how “good” a camera is, the picture’s only as good as what’s in front of the lens.

(And even that is counterbalanced by the deficiencies of what’s on the other side of the camera as the button gets pressed.)

Hardly Strictly

I had to be in the Bay Area for something else anyhow. I happen to like a song by James McMurtry enough that I was looking around to see if he had any upcoming concert dates near me, and I ran across a music festival I’d never heard of before: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, in Golden Gate Park. The guy who puts it on, an amateur banjo player named Warren Hellman, loves bluegrass and Emmylou Harris and hosts it for the public every year, with no charge at all for admission.



So I headed up and spent three or four days looking for parking near (ironically) the park. That’s an exaggeration. I started looking for parking during McMurtry’s set, which started at 1 p.m., and I was parked by 3 p.m., with only about a half-mile walk to the stages.

Whaddya want for nothing?

Even though I’d missed McMurtry, there were only about a thousand other people there I wanted to see. Boz Scaggs, Michelle Shocked, Allison Moorer, Bruce Hornsby . . . and on and on. Did I mention the show was free? Can you imagine why 500,000 other people were also circling the block looking for parking? (That’s not an exaggeration.)

With several stages set up at different spots in the park, it was easy to wander around from one to the next, sampling the music and finding the friends who had found parking before me. Eventually we all connected.



The weather was outstanding, and the crowd was relaxed and cheerful. I’d estimate about the front third of any given crowd was paying a lot of attention to the music, and then a lot of people toward the back (us included, for at least part of the time) were spending more time hanging out with each other, catching up, shooting the breeze, playing with dogs and sticks and balls. Good excuse for a day in the park.

Oh, and did I mention they hired the Blue Angels to do flybys during set changes?


I wandered past Boz Scaggs on my way in, playing a killer “Honky Tonkin’,” and I knew I was going to have fun here. Friend #1 was watching Bruce Hornsby and Ricky Scaggs (no relation) when I found him. They were stirring up a bluegrass version of “The Way It Is,” complete with fiddles and banjos. It was pretty good, but my cellphone camera can only do so much with its microphone. You can thank me now for not posting video.

Then we wandered over and found Friend #2 and child sitting way in the back of the Michelle Shocked crowd, goofing off on the lawn.


The end of the day was Steve Earle. As he fired up a mostly solo show, the sun was setting. By the time he finished, it was dark.

He kicked off with “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” a Dylan cover, which he sold with a very entertaining story about how he’d learned it from a Dylan album even though at one point he lived in Mexico across the street from the guy who’d allegedly written it. We got “Billy Austin,” and the new “Oxycontin Blues,” and he sang the stirring post-9/11 “Jerusalem,” about his dream that one day people would stop fighting each other all over the world. “I decided to keep singing this until it came true,” he said by way of introduction.

Steve has a new album out, and our set sounded like a shortened version of the set he’s touring with. He brought out a guy with a drum-and-sample machine and dove into some newer stuff, including a cover of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole,” which is a funny fit for Steve Earle, but oddly appropriate.



I’d been sorry I had missed Allison Moorer earlier in the day (I heard she sang a whole set of parking songs), but I was in luck: She came onstage with him, about midway through the set.

They have a couple of duets on his new album, plus they’re married, so I guess I really shouldn’t have been too surprised.

I think even if she sang in another language, I’d still love her voice.

She sang harmonies with him on “City of Immigrants,” and they sang “Days Aren’t Long Enough” from the new album.


Before finishing the set, he brought Cindy Sheehan out on stage, and she reminded the crowd that she was running for Congress, trying to unseat Nancy Pelosi.

That should be an interesting race. I’m sure a lot of conservatives would love to lose Nancy Pelosi too, but I’m not sure the old enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend arithmetic will compute here.

We were blessed with outstanding fall weather in a city where the elements are notoriously temperamental, and a good time was enjoyed by all. Except maybe the guys in the planes. I’m not sure they got to hear any of the show, unless they had it piped in through their headphones.

Blow It Up

Auden had it right: The stinging gnats are in the details. Most of us just see the sun and the trees.