Toys: Two Sets of Details

Warning: This is a really boring post. It’s meant more for my future reference than for anything else. Lots of technical garbage in here, and some droning on, and no pretty pictures or attempts at insight. Feel free to read on, but only with duly diminished expectations.

No, I mean really. It’s boring. Very much. Are you sure you want to keep scrolling?

O.K.

You’re on your own from here.

11 October 2007, lens wide open

20 January 2009, 12x optical zoom

(this shows what the 3264 x 2448 frame included)

11 October 2007, 6x optical zoom + 4x digital zoom = 24x zoom
(this shows what the 3264 x 2448 frame included)

20 January 2009, 12x optical zoom + 5x digital zoom = 60x zoom

(this shows what a 1280 x 960 frame included: note resolution drops in digital zoom)

11 October 2007, 6x optical zoom + 4x digital zoom = 24x zoom
(640 x 480 detail: click to expand to actual size, pixel for pixel)

20 January 2009, 12x optical zoom + 5x digital zoom = 60x zoom
(640 x 480 detail: click to expand to actual size, pixel for pixel)

20 January 2009, 12x optical zoom

(this shows what the 3264 x 2448 frame included)

11 October 2007, 6x optical zoom + 4x digital zoom = 24x zoom

(this shows what the 3264 x 2448 frame included)

20 January 2009, 12x optical zoom + 5x digital zoom = 60x zoom

(this shows what the 1280 x 960 frame included: note resolution drops in digital zoom)

11 October 2007, 6x optical zoom + 4x digital zoom = 24x zoom
(640 x 480 detail: click to expand to actual size, pixel for pixel)

20 January 2009, 12x optical zoom + 5x digital zoom = 60x zoom
(640 x 480 detail A: click to expand to actual size, pixel for pixel)

20 January 2009, 12x optical zoom + 5x digital zoom = 60x zoom
(640 x 480 detail B: click to expand to actual size, pixel for pixel)

Some observations:

• Picking up the gleam of light on the tiny hub of the hygrometer hand from across the room is pretty nice.
• The camera with the more powerful lens (12x optical) has a twitchy autofocus mechanism, which makes it more tricky to handle. Still figuring out other controls. Could be better than old camera; could be worse.
• Pictures taken with the old camera were never rebalanced to make up for dim light. Pictures from the new camera have been rebalanced. Don’t blame the old camera for a slightly murkier look. Normally I’d fix that if a picture needed it before doing anything interesting with the shot.
  
• 12x optical zoom + 5x digital is theoretically a 60x zoom, but when you reduce the dimensions to 40% of the pixels in each direction, you really end up with more like a 24x zoom, in terms of the ability to make a large print or crop a tight close-up. Still, the results are dramatically better than the 24x zoom achieved the old way.
  

Actual-size comparison of the maximum zoom on the old camera (6x + 4x = 24x, left) next to the maximum zoom on the new (12x + 5x = 60x, 60x * 40% = 24x, right):

In terms of actual pixels taken up—absolute image size—the digits as captured by the old camera are larger. But the clearly superior image is from the new camera, even if officially it’s not as magnified. The clarity is much better. It has roughly doubled the size of the original 12x image; the older camera has quadrupled the size of an original that was only half as large. As you’d expect, the larger you stretch an image using digital expansion, the more you torture it.

Note that these are both from point-and-shoot style CCD digital cameras, not from digital SLRs with their nicer CMOS digital pickups. 12x magnification captured with a CMOS sensor would probably look even nicer.

Also note that if you really care, you’ll still be thinking in terms of what large-format film (120 film, for example, or larger) would do for you. I’m not bragging on what these cameras can do; I’m just testing to see how far I can push them—what they’re good for, and what’s too much to ask. You can get some neat effects even with the cheap camera in a cell phone, if you pay attention to how to play to how it works.

There’s still no camera that can naturally grab what the eye sees without even paying attention. To get close to what the eye sees, we have to give cameras all kinds of explicit instructions: no, brighter; no, closer; no, more contrast; no, yellower; no, now it’s too bright. Cameras are getting better. But eyes are pretty cool.

(I won’t even get into the whole issue here of whether you want to capture what the eye sees or what the mind sees. All kinds of photography can be exciting.)

Further note apropos these shots: I almost never shoot using the digital zoom, because I’d usually prefer to use my computer’s tools to enhance the zoom, which give me results I like better than what the camera does on the fly. The computer has much more time and horsepower to devote to getting the expansion right. So the maximum optical+digital zoom is a bit of a moot point. I’m testing it to see what’s there.

What drew me to the new camera was the 12x optical zoom. That by itself is worth some learning curve. And it will occasionally be worth the extra weight to carry, depending on where I’m going. If the new camera can do more than that, or improve in some other ways on the old camera, that’s gravy.

I got the new toy (the one with the 12x lens) for well under $200 (new), not as a replacement for my main camera but as an auxiliary for shots where I want tighter close-ups. From what I had read, and from what I have now experienced, it appears it won’t be as handy for quick, off-the-cuff shots. For a shot from my bike seat, where I keep pedaling but whip out the camera to squeeze one off, I’ll use the old camera, which fires up fast and has a smooth, swift response as I adjust settings. When it’s worth stopping to frame a picture more perfectly, I can try the new camera, which wants more fiddling before things are perfect.

I expect my knack with the new toy to improve over time, which may affect how often it gets taken out. It’s still new, and I haven’t tinkered yet to see how it compares in terms of capturing colors, capturing smooth gradients without grain and digital noise to make them look less rich (think sunsets), how it does in low light, or any number of other situations where your eyes tell you there’s a picture but a camera might not see it without specific instruction. Time and experience will tell.

I would expect the old camera and the new camera to deliver similar results on 80% of the pictures I take, with the old camera remaining more convenient to use. For certain pictures, notably extreme telephotos, it’ll be worth having the new camera around.

Uh, Yeah!

Why It Burns

1874, Castle Creek Valley, South Dakota

Same location, 1973

In nature, as in human life, it’s hard to pin an event on a single cause.

A half-degree change in average annual temperature translates into a winter warm enough to let a particular beetle survive from one year to the next. The beetle, let’s say, is from another continent but was brought to this forest by tourists or free trade.

And just for fun let’s say the dominant tree species in the forest used to be less common, but because of loss of habitat—subdivisions have been popping up all over the hills—the deer that used to eat its seedlings are no longer around. So the trees have grown in thick where they used to be sparse.

The beetle, able to survive the recent milder winters, decimates the dense forest, leaving the trees dead but standing, tinder-dry in fire season. A fire starts. Subdivisions are threatened. What’s the cause of the fire?

Duh. It’s kids playing with matches. It’s always kids playing with matches. That’s the first lesson of wildlife preservation.

In 1874 Bvt. Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer—yeah, that Custer—led an expedition 1,000 strong into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, winding through what today is eastern South Dakota and parts of Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota.

They took a photographer, William H. Illingworth, from St. Paul, Minnesota.

In 1973, American West published a series of Illingworth’s photos in tandem with more recent shots, from the same locations, taken by Donald R. Progulske, head of Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at South Dakota State University, and Richard H. Sowell, a university photographer, as they retraced Custer’s route.

Eventually Progulske published a book with more photos in it. I don’t have that book. But I did run across the American West article lately, and the pictures tell quite a story.

Near Deerfield, South Dakota

1800s European explorers in the heart of Africa were convinced that the natural state of the continent was dense jungle cover.

What they missed was that (watch for gross historical oversimplification) dengue fever epidemics in the 1790s had caused a collapse in widespread farming populations. Without farmers tending fields, the jungles encroached. Does that mean the untouched land would naturally have been all jungle? Probably not.

It means the jungle had been first and fastest to take over formerly tilled land. If Europeans had arrived 100 years before, they might have described the continent differently. A hundred years later, first impressions could have been different again.

Preservation is a funny critter. Do you preserve something in a frozen state, not allowing it to change, like a book or a Victorian house? Do you freeze a process, allowing change but only according to the way it used to be done, like planting and harvesting crops in Colonial Williamsburg or choosing a President in the Electoral College?

When you “preserve” nature, who’s to say what a natural state is? No buildings—O.K. so far. But if a redwood tree takes 2,000 years to grow, how can we watch it for 40 years and assume the environment it’s in is typical of what it’s had for the other 1,960? Nature’s natural state is one of change.

(In a city, preservation gets even more complicated. How do you preserve a neighborhood? How do you keep the open-air greengrocers from closing and changing the way the streets feel? Preserve it the way it was 40 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 200 years ago? Does a tenement have historic value? Do you preserve the cockroaches? The Saturday-night knife fights? What does it mean to preserve Tin Pan Alley? Difficult questions.)

Whatever you’re trying to preserve, in someone else’s eyes it was probably ruined already when you first set eyes on it.

In these pictures the landscape has changed vividly. Is the burgeoning forest cover part of a natural cycle—one that starts with bare meadow and builds up to a climax level, then gets wiped out by fire and restored to bare meadow?

Or do we preserve the number of trees that were there when Custer first saw it?

Or do we preserve the grasses and cut down the trees? The grasses fed the elk; the elk fed the grizzlies. When trees choke the meadows, the elk leave, and then the bear. What should we be preserving?

Near Custer, South Dakota

And if a single cycle of alternation between pine forest and grassland takes 200 years, how long do we have to watch—how many cycles—before we’re comfortable that we have seen all the major variants in that cycle? Who judges what’s abnormal? Who has time to wait?

The U.S. Forest Service is committed to “many uses” for the resources it manages. The 1973 American West article notes that, perversely, a thicker forest tends to yield less lumber, since the “trees do not reach saw-log size and proper thinning becomes costly.” But nearby property owners tend to get sniffy about unchecked wildfires. The extent of Yellowstone National Park’s 1988 fires raised a lot of media eyebrows. When smoke rises on the horizon, politicians need something to thump their chests about.

But it’s easy to see in the pictures above that a fire in the 1870s would have moved through the more widely spaced trees with a whole different force from the firestorm that could devour the thick stands of the 1970s.

“Only you,” says Smokey Bear, “can prevent forest fires.” Maybe it’s also fair to say that only a human would try to.

A Few from Yesterday

Kinda a nothing shot, except for one tiny white mark just left of center.

Yup, it’s the sign, as seen from Palos Verdes. Not as clear yesterday as it was last weekend, but obviously not bad. The plane flying in right over the sign was a stroke of dumb luck. (Standard LAX flight path.) That would be, uh, about 25 or 30 miles from the road I’m riding.

The sign shows up offhandedly in shots taken all over the L.A. basin, sort of the same way the Empire State Building crops up incidentally in a lot of New York shots. Remember how it was visible out of every window in Liquid Sky, a running gag?

No Yolk.

An egg by its very existence implies a spiritual question. But reaching beyond that, this morning’s breakfast, passively finding transformation against the pan, spontaneously took a yin-yang form, embracing a void, inviting the hungry to contemplate the distinction between egg and no-egg, the possibility of simultaneous alternate truths.

Or, read as a two-panel cartoon, maybe it dares the artist to create in negative space.

Tour Up Over

Update: New pictures added from cell phone feed, with comments as posted live during the ride.

800 ft climb so far. Clear. Warm. Light breeze.

Palos Verdes Peninsula offers some fun climbs.

Roadside flowers depend on season and time of day.

Santa Barbara Island, about 45 miles off the coast. When you see it, you know it’s an unusually clear day. I have seen it before from this ride, but usually I don’t.

The western tip of Catalina Island. From this angle, you can see over the tip and into the ocean beyond. On a less clear day the horizon might not be visible so far behind the island.

Catalina Isthmus. Again, those who know the geography will notice the far horizon over the thin strip that links the island’s ends. Not a tall isthmus at all.

The whole Catalina. Great day for sightseeing.

Other parts of the country enjoy different weather.

Legs happy lungs workn.

Looking west along the south fringe of Palos Verdes.

After some huffing and puffing (and before some more), this is looking east along the same stretch of coast we saw before—looking back at where I’ve been. In the near distance is Orange County.

More distant, the land you see sticking furthest out into the water is probably La Jolla’s Mount Soledad, about 100 miles away (nearly to San Diego). Normally the furthest you see is about 50 miles south: Dana Point.

This bit involves work.

45 is no limit. Pleased to be over that hill.

This was kinda fun to see. Forgive the rushed splice job. If you click on it, you can see the panorama of the L.A. basin in fair detail. In the far distance (right of center) are white-topped Mount San Gorgonio and Mount San Jacinto, most of the way from here to Palm Springs: again, about 100 miles of clear visibility.

Nice day for a bike ride.

Boils

* * *

Color-adjusted photo (the original is pretty much rusty orange) of the inside end wall of one of our boilers. This is inside the water tank of the boiler.

The key question here is how much scale buildup (the hard crusty crud) is on the inside of the tank. Scale deposits are mostly calcium from the water, plus iron that has eroded off the insides of our steam pipes and equipment.

Scale is a great insulator. So more scale means you have to burn a lot more gas to get the heat through to the water to boil it.

You see what looks like a lot of scale here. The good news is that we’re making headway. There used to be more.

Tubes, inside the same tank, coated in scale. This shows the true color of the scale: very rusty. That tells us we have a lot of iron in our water system, which means too much free oxygen in the steam, which means we need to treat the water we feed into our boilers with more oxygen scavengers. (Aren’t you glad you asked?)

The oxygen essentially causes the insides of all our steam pipes and steam-heated equipment to rust at a faster rate. So we end up with rusty scale inside the boiler (where it collects) and leaks and holes in pipes and throughout the steam system (which are annoying to repair and cause production delays).

We check and photograph these tubes every time we have a reason to open the boiler, typically about once a year. Previous measurements indicate about 1/8 inch of scale on the outsides of these tubes. I didn’t measure it this time, but it hadn’t changed much.

Normally you might expect the scale to be more white in color, which would suggest more calcium in it, less iron. You use different solutions to knock back scale with a lot of calcium in it. So it’s good to have a look from time to time to visually judge what you’re trying to fix.

The heat in this boiler comes from inside the tubes. A huge gas flame feeds all the tubes at once. Again, the more scale on these tubes, the hotter that flame has to burn in order to boil the water that normally fills this tank.

Because in this boiler the flame goes through the tubes, it is called a fire-tube boiler.

Knew you’d want to know that.

This, on the other hand, is a water-tube boiler. In this boiler, the tubes (three sets of curving tubes in this picture) are filled with water. The fire comes from underneath the tubes. (You can see the burners—long, flat rectangles under the tubes.) These tubes are much smaller than in the fire-tube boiler, but that maximizes the surface area being heated by the fire at any given time, so this boiler tends to respond faster when you turn it on.

As the water boils, it makes its way up into the big tank at the top of the picture, behind the manifolds at the top of each tube set.

Both of these boilers were modified a couple of years ago to meet more stringent California rules on emissions from natural-gas burners.

The problem in the water-tube boiler is the same as in the fire-tube boiler, but in reverse: The scale builds up on the water side of the process, which in this case is inside the tubes instead of on the outside. Same scale, same source, same end result: You have to put a lot more flame to these tubes to bring the water up to a boil.

The tube set on the right in the picture above this one has been cooked hotter and longer than the other tube sets; you can see the difference in the metal color. Ultimately that’s not good for the metal. (Also notice that the tube set on the left has had a nasty leakage problem down the front of it. The white deposits are what’s left behind as the water evaporated in the fire.)

Overall, I would say we had less scale inside the tubes this time than when I’ve checked them in the past. The boiler inspector who came around today was satisfied with what he saw.

Old and new, showing progress.

The new tubes in this picture (we’re back in the fire-tube boiler) are nice and clean. We put brand-new tubes into this part of the boiler several months ago. You can see there’s no scale on the outside of the tubes.

The big tube next to them wasn’t replaced. See the gray patches of metal that show through the red scale on this tube? Pictures from two years ago show solid scale covering this tube. So our water-treatment plan is making a difference.

Now you know all there is to know about boilers. Next week’s lesson: adhesive systems and the carriers that go with them.

Photo Forensics: 13.5 Years Ago, a Detour

Long time ago I took a trip with a friend through Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia.

My brother was working at Glacier National Park at the time, and we stopped in for a visit and some hiking. Mom was in the area. I believe she and I intersected in Spokane (?) and then went our several ways. She was headed off in one direction and I in another, but we were covering some of the same ground. I believe Glacier National Park was on her to-do list too.

This was June 1995. At the time I had just one sister living in Washington State. She was getting heavier that summer. Sometime around August she suddenly got much lighter. I came out for that episode too.

Lately that sister unearthed a roll of film from Mom’s camera, so old that a lot of the colors aren’t quite right anymore. Still, you can see what was in the pictures. I’m pretty sure this roll dates back to that trip.

Here’s a picture I took, also on film, of Swiftcurrent Lake at Glacier. This would have been from somewhere around Many Glacier lodge. Sorry about the size and lack of detail: I’m just grabbing the shot from my Website, not going back and finding the original negative or the original scans.


Now here’s one of the pictures from Mom’s roll of film:

Check out that distinctive white diagonal stripe of snow on the left. Notice how it matches a stripe in the center of my shot. Then look at the contour of the hills and snow above that. Clouds hide some ridgeline in my shot, but see the little triangular white patch in Mom’s picture, around the center of her picture, and check how it matches a tiny bright dot in my picture.

So I suspect the scene is the same, and because the snow is sitting in such a similar way all over, I would bet that Mom’s picture was taken around the same time as mine.

Another picture I took, from a slightly different point, shows the ridgeline clearly matching Mom’s. Notice that in my pictures there’s still snow up by the ridge. In Mom’s, that snow has melted. But it’s the same place:


This shot of mine includes the same diagonal white line of snow, plus some more detail that matches Mom’s shot:


Next it looks as if Mom headed south through Montana and into Idaho, stopping at Bear Lake on the Utah border for a strawberry shake at the Home Town Drive-In, which apparently has expanded some since she was there (looks as if the windows she saw are still intact on the right side of the building):

I don't know why anyone travels anymore. You can see all the same things in Google’s Street View.

From there, heading south along the lake, Mom stopped to at least take pictures of two more drive-ins with raspberry shakes, within a two-block radius. (A banner proclaimed “Raspberry Days.”) One of the diners, sadly, appears to have gone under. But its big raspberry tank (?) in the parking lot is still there, as it was in Mom’s picture:


From there, other than a few more landscape shots showing Bear Lake, there’s nothing until Mom gets to Salt Lake City, where she takes a picture of the state capitol from a northeast-facing window in the Family History Library:


I’m left puzzling over why Mom didn’t take more pictures on this roll. Did she have another camera with her? (Quite possible.) Between Glacier and Salt Lake, she could have taken Interstate 15, but Bear Lake is off that beaten path. Knowing Mom, and looking at the map, it seems more likely she came south from Glacier via Yellowstone in Wyoming, then cut over to 15 by way of Bear Lake.

She had time to stop for raspberry shakes in Bear Lake. Why not a single picture all the way through Yellowstone?

One way or another, it’s a nice set of memories to share these many years later.

* * *

Update: My sister clarified where the film came from.


After Mom died, my sister found this disposable camera under a pile of other miscellany in Mom’s bathroom. It had been buried, probably when Mom unpacked the car after her 1995 trip, and it wasn’t unearthed until 11 years later. (My sister told me this last month when she handed me the pictures. The memory stick in my brain that held that conversation got full between then and now, and I swapped it out for a new one.)

That explains why this roll had so few pictures, and why they were so grainy. While Mom worked her way through the disposable camera, trying it out, she probably shot a dozen rolls on good film, in perfect focus, on her sophisticated 35mm workhorse. She saved this camera for some test landscape shots. All the pictures of family members and geysers and glaciers and wildlife were preserved for posterity in her fancier camera.

I’m sure there’s still some story behind why Mom was shooting with a disposable camera on this trip. I know for a fact that on my parallel trip I also shot some pictures with a disposable camera, as well as my regular Minox 35mm camera. Kodak was marketing the disposables at the time. Some of them had custom purposes. The one I had was designed to shoot panoramas, and it did. I experimented and was happy with some of the results. But Kodak didn’t put its best film into these cameras, and I never got hooked. Why Mom had one (a telephoto, if I understand my sister right), I don’t know. I might even have given it to Mom to take on her trip, at the same time as I got my own. Or she got hers independently, or someone else gave it to her. Who knows?

Four years later, in Wyoming, we had great fun, and got great results, by buying disposable cameras for a bunch of grandkids and letting them take pictures of everything they saw while we grownups took pictures of what we saw. It was a great chance to see what each child thought was worth documenting.