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A few weeks ago a staff member invited me to go diving at a quarry north of camp and I thought this would be a splendid opportunity to take pictures so I took the invite and invited Sam Lodise to join as well.  The drive there was uneventful and every time I accidentally violated some rule of the road the response was a magical “It’s OK, neighbor” wave from the person I had wronged.  For lunch I tried Taskykake’s pineapple and cheese pie which would have made the day worthwhile, but there were more wonders in store.

Walking to the site was hot and where my companions were in swim trunks and t-shirts I donned my short sleeve button down shirt and failed to bring a hat, note for next time, but our efforts were well rewarded:

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Free framing

That wasn’t the actual jump site but I thought that it conveyed the feeling Sam and I experienced having never been there before of suddenly coming upon a diamond in the rough.

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Panorama of the Main Standing Area

The main jump point was a rock bluff some 40 feet above the water’s surface.  This is about the highest I’d ever jumped from but the restrictions of the site prevented me from joining.  Each jump involved climbing a 8 foot fence to return to the jump point, something that is simply beyond my physical abilities.

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X marks the spot

Sam was the last of the three jumpers to go and he hit the water with what sounded like an excited scream followed by a painful thud.  For reasons beyond my understanding, this would prove to be his only high jump that day, instead spending the rest of the time jumping from a height of about 10 feet off of a lower jump point where the others jumped from the high point four or five times each.

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He also took pictures of this thing... a lot.

They jumped and swam there for close to two and half hours and we began the walk back.  Again continuing the theme of smothering courtesy, passing vehicles would near completely enter the opposing lane to give us space despite the road having a reasonable shoulder.  I assume people to this to show that they know we’re there rather than for any actual fear of striking us.

About 20 minutes into our drive back I blurted out “I want ice cream” and everyone politely agreed and rolled their eyes.  At the ice cream store we purchased our snacks, sat down in the 93°F heat and demolished them.  Each person in turn at different times looked at me and said “this was a good idea”.  Sometimes it’s good to have a fat friend.

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My first trial of the day was the operation of a foreign shower setup.  The water was the appropriate temperature and the flow was fine, but I couldn’t actually get the water to come out of the shower head.  I thought I had torsioned everything to just before it would break but the “on” mechanism was to turn the tap nozzle down and clockwise, mechanism I had never seen before.  This tap combined with a door that was locked by pulling and rotating the handle a certain way to create the most confusing bathroom I’d ever used which admittedly isn’t a terribly high bar.  I walked out to great the cast assembled on the porch and felt a tinge of jealousy.

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A fine view from one's deck

The construction equipment in the corner is part of a project whereby James is going to add an impressive pond structure to the area in front of the deck.

We had breakfast in Invermere and for the first part of it I watched a dog and a girl of about 6 to 8 run back and forth in front of the shops across the way.  The shops were generic small-townesque versions of what’d normally be a big box store combined with specialty shops with no visible support next to a seasonally closed theater.  This was all down the block from a solar powered public garbage compactor.  We dawdled away the afternoon making the kind of delightful palaver that comes from a clutch of people just familiar enough with what the other people do to ask interesting questions to people just noviced enough to only have tentative answers that bear factual accuracy but rarely the weight of experience.

Following this was dinner at a local restaurant where I had a chance to dive into the world of Canadian condiments.  Canadian Heinz ketchup is flavored with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup and seems to have more salt in it.  The rest of the table politely continued conversation as I tried successively larger blobs of the stuff on knife until I had enough to grasp the mouth feel a determine what I thought of the level of sweetness.  The next condiment to go under lingual microscope was HP sauce, a brown beef sauce that crowds out A1 and Worcestershire sauce.  While being slightly thicker than A1 it lacked both the body that comes from tomato puree as the main ingredient and a general lack of spiciness.  HP is probably the one best described as steak sauce whereas I’d call A1 more of a steak dressing.  The final cultural difference came over tipping when I insisted that 20% was standard in America and my imperial clout worked better after I reminded the table that we did insist the server return with condoms, handcuffs, and whipped cream of which he provided one.

That evening we went to a local bird sanctuary which was nicer looking than many of the national parks I visited.

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Reflective water is reflective

While walking around the water’s edge Morgan found a stump he’d though go great in the hardscape that Beers was making.  He decided to carry it back to the car and while trying to fit the unruly stump into his hatchback a police truck rushed by, stopped, and hastily reversed back to where we were.  There were two cars present and I, as the odd American out, made my way to the vehicle that didn’t have someone shoving a stolen stump into it.

Policeman: Hey you!
Several of us: Yes?
Policeman: …Did you see a brown truck drive by?
Us: *Universal sigh of relief* No.
Morgan: Wait!  Yes.
Policeman: Thank you! *zooms off*

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The stump that launched a thousand sweat beads.

Throughout the day, I’d been trying to get Beers picture.  Victory came I had my 70-200 f/2.8 lens on my camera shooting across a ravine to get the sun on the trees.  I dropped the camera slightly, got his picture at a reasonable distance, and recorded in slow motion his visage go from “it’s nice out here” to “he got me”.

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GG, Mr. Weir

The evening ended watching the ruby-throated hummingbirds feed.  I did a rare thing and set my camera to full manual and was rewarded for my rapid knob-spinning.

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Gotcha

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Dave saw me off after allowing me to exhaust his supply of Diet Cherry Cokes and Pop Tarts and I drove onward to Yosemite National Park with the intention of trying to get a campsite there as the signs at the entrance to the park in no way indicated any capacity issues.  The drive to the park was gorgeous, I’d seen many farm areas on my trip so far as well as what I’d seen of PA and NJ but both paled in comparison to the massive fruit, nut, and vegetable production operations of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.  Passing rows of grape vines at high speed with their layout of geometric perfection was almost dizzying which was amplified by the view from some of the surrounding mountains.

Yosemite seemed unremarkable but I think this was partly my response to the fact that the park receives almost 4 million visitors a year and seemingly everyone of them was in the park today.  Every clear waterfall and every rapid was swarmed with people taking pictures of their family in front of the spectacle.  I never understood the attraction of the “family on front of neat thing” picture as they are generally crappy group portraits on top of a crappy site picture.  In some cases, the families were large enough to completely obfuscate the item in question.  I’d much rather separate the two and having no traveling companion nor an inclination to have myself pictured I simply used selective framing to avoid the legions of people (of which I was one) milling around sites fashioned over geological time.  One can do this by avoiding human-scale stuff.

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One tactic is to make sure everyone's out of the frame simply by scale. Â Here, the people are too small and obscured. Â Bridal Falls.

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Another tactic is to get in close enough to have people avoid you. Rocks at bottom of Bridal Falls.

The final straw with the Yosemite Valley was that I actually got phone reception in the park.  The camping areas had enough coverage that I could have reasonably used my data connection card but I realized that if I could, others could as well.  I didn’t want to experience that, so went out to the perimeter trail that marked off the area that’d been reset due to a fire.  I found the view much more interesting than El Capitan.

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Nature declaring a mulligan

I should have stopped at another location with a better sense of breadth but noticed that I didn’t want to.  Photography fatigue is a new phenomenon for me, I wonder if it’ll pass or if it’s something I’ll have to take into account later.  Leaving the park I searched for a motel with a rate under $40 and drove 150 miles to it.  Tomorrow will be long.

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There was a bit more snow in the camping area than I anticipated, but I’m glad I had the requisite gear anyway.  This is what the parking spot for the adjoining slip was like.

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... which is sufficient for RVs.

I wasn’t sure that there was anything to photograph in King’s Canyon after watching more tourists miss the stupidly wide General Grant tree but I was very much happy to find that I was wrong.  The King river has carved an amazing canyon and the Depart of the Interior has done a wonderful job slapping a road into it.

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Roadside View

I stopped three or four times for these photo ops and started to notice that after I’d pull into a turn-out other cars would start to do the same.  I wonder if anyone can start these touriswarms or if the dusty Matrix plus guy with a long lens on a tripod has some sort of secondary ability to attract people.  The mountain views were wonderful but nature kept intruding by growing over in areas that’d probably been cleared a decade ago to create nice views.  Now many of these photo spots had second generation growth that were taking full advantage of the clear growing spot and access to mountain runoff to greet the sun.

After finding the showers closed for cleaning after driving 40 minutes to get to them, I stopped for lunch at a waterfall surrounded by adventurous teens and people shielding their cameras from the wash of water.  My tactic was to hold the camera like a football until I found one of the nodal points where no water hit and then tried to take a burst of shots before the variance in the supplying water or the wind decided to drench me.  I think the method worked as the camera still functions and I got this.

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This shot is a composite at 17mm, I was less than 10 feet from the main fall and well within the spray region.

I dawdled my way back to Visitor’s Center to see if they had a shower facility and spied a sign for “Panoramic Point”.  This kind of indication is a bit like crack to me and I took the sign “Caution: Road Icy” as a personal challenge.  I drove to the top and started walking up the snow-covered concrete trail towards the point but was confused by a fence that has foot prints on both sides of it.  I took the downhill route and was soon greeted with the crevasses generated by the heat of trees and noted the broken spots where it looked like people had slipped.  I cleared these by a solid foot but I suppose due to my size this was insufficient clearance as the ground gave way as I tried to move around a tree and I quickly found myself doing a split with my right leg dangled into a snow pit and my left looking like it was ready to do a high kick, also my pants were blown out such that it look like an M-80 exploded around my taint.  Stand would be out of the question so I decided to slide to more a stable area, meaning I’d have to avoid trees down hill as well as guard my camera and now blooded arm.   I shifted my weight and slid my right left over the edge of the hole creating new rents in my pants which were poorly designed to accommodate a large man doing a full split and began sliding down the hill.  I picked up more speed than I wanted so I reached out to gab a tree branch which broke off and took off a piece of my middle finger with it.  Stopping consisted of digging in my heels as I rounded another tree and using my left arm as a bumper.  I stood up, gauged the sartorial destruction, saw that despite being bloodied, nothing really hurt, and made my way to the top.  Not quite worth it when one considers the haze and junk damage.

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Meh.

I wandered down the hill and felt a throbbing in my arm and fingers.  The wet snow had quickly numbed my appendages when I fell and I was now experiencing the pain of my stumble.  The park first aid areas were closed and none of the public places had public running water to even wash myself.  I placed a call to a friend in San Francisco and he offered to take me in the for the evening and at 10 PM or so I arrived in San Francisco after trying to avoid flashing anyone at my fuel and food stops.  I now had 7 of every other article of clothing and only 6 pairs of shorts.  Hm…

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I had come to terms with the fact that I somehow managed to lose my MiFi despite having only covered open road and staying at a single person’s house since its loss.  I was prepared to drive to Irvine, California to get a cheap replacement but found out the store in question didn’t actually exist, instead only shipping stuff.  I cried at having to pay $40 for overnight shipping on a $130 device but swallowed my pride and hit “buy it now”.  On a lark I checked Craiglist… who had the item for $100 from a local person not 2 miles from host’s house.  I was able to get a refund for the purchased one with my sob story of internet withdrawal on my cross country journey.

My next task was to get an oil change which is normally done at the Robinson Compound Garage.  I went to Jiffy lube which the previous owner had also used and the attendant seemed to be under the impression that the car hadn’t an oil change since 2006 and 55 thousand miles ago regardless of the number of times I told him it’d switched owners.  After a stop at Wal-Mart for a lung-saving rechargeable air pump I left for Joshua Tree National Park.

Joshua Tree is a rather new national park having only been opened in 1994.  Getting there involves yet more travel westward on I-10 and despite being a national park there is a mere 1 sign indicating its location.  When I turned off the main road towards the park, at first it appeared that nothing had changed, but as I got deeper and deeper into the park everything got bigger.  The yuccas, agave, and other brush species grew to well above human height and in areas began encroaching on the road like their habitat had been rudely interrupted with road while they were sleeping.  Rather than the mountains being a perpetually “over there” thing their bases were now feet from the road.  The campsites looked like desert sound stages with almost too fine sand, well placed sitting rocks, a place for a fire and almost natural paths that resulted from the poison put out by creosote bushes to prevent encroachment.

The night was much clearer than I’d encountered yet and ring of mountains around the camping area was enough to crowd out enough light to see actual stars.  Acadia and Great Smoky Mountains had more spectacular views but it was nice to have my optical pallette cleansed after so much time in Tucson. For instance, the two pictures below were illuminated at night by two different sources:

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Illuminated by car headlights

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Illuminated BY THE MOON! (long exposure)

You’d never be able to get the second shot without the sky being white or ringed because of waste light from cities.

Driving up to the 4000 feet elevation of the campsite cut through the 84 degree heat of the surrounding area and settled to a comfortable 56 degrees allowing me to practice some basic photography on the moon.  Ages ago I heard a podcast with advice on taking pictures of the moon but I could never remember what the recommendations were and got this:

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Moon, normal exposure

After some messing around I came to the conclusion that to get the moon one had to underexpose for the moon by four or more stops.

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All my kingdom for a longer lens.

I had no interest in staying on the sandy waste of the actual site and setup my tent on the asphalt.  I hope death valley is as nice.

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“Hot Breakfast” apparently means the motel possesses an anemic waffle maker, I missed nothing.

Getting to Great Smoky Mountains National Park is far more difficult than I thought.  Why?  The sign into the park is in Cherokee if you enter from the east and my “Languages of Indigenous Peoples” is still squarely tucked in my antilibrary.  Before finding it, I found a sign for a “Ghost Town”, which got me excited as I always wanted ghost town pictures.  I followed the signs and the ghost town was “closed” (?).  I braved through and found out that Ghost Town is apparently the name of an Old West-themed park… which is now shut down, making it ipso facto a ghost town.

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If only it were a ghost town-themed park.

The park itself was impressive but with the distinct feeling of “it was once nicer”.  The roadway through the park went through all the nicest views which I attempted to capture.

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HDR Pano? No way!

I have a few really large panos that I won’t be able to process until after I get to a more powerful computer.  Something tells me the laptop will choke if I thrown 137 pictures at it (its limit seems to be about 45).  I got somewhat angry at the route as it became clear that the nicest pictures to be had were along this road.  Late in the evening I took one of the hiking trails which absolutely paled to what one could get gawking from the car.

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It's no Ricketts Glen

After three hours of pictures I picked a camping slip, set up my tent, and started editing pictures powered by the ungodly huge battery pack I had brought which provided enough juice to pixel push for four more hours while comfortably inside a dome tent.  The great outdoors.

Other Pictures:

[flickr album=72157624029470292 num=10 size=Thumbnail]

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I departed after Earle crushed a gallon of milk and headed past the parade of “Choose Life” billboards and advertisements for various life-changing church experiences.  I felt like a stranger but was set at ease by learning the globality of some local stores:

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More than great coats. It'd have to be to make it in Florida.

But a bit of Southern uniqueness was that every interstate gas station also sold bag-your-own fruit while at the same time charging extra to use a credit card.  In most cases, this fee was smaller than the cash-back amount I receive so I bravely overpaid in the short-term.  I met up with a Magic buddy after navigating successive waves of 50, 75, and 40 cent tolls moving east across the state.  We talked for 20 minutes waiting for his car to get towed and reminisced about 5-Color games past. Then, north.

Georgia had much duller and less vitriolic billboards which I was glad to be rid of in the Carolinas which had the old stalwarts of J&R and South of the Border.  After a few hundred more miles I called it quits for the day the and settled down after trying to take pictures of myself without looking.

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Take 25

With the exception of an ill-fated trip to Hardee’s I’ve been lucky in avoiding accents I’m not used to.  I’m absolutely terrible with them and in this case I was saved by the fact that I’ve grown accustom to desk clerks named “Jaya Viswanathan” elsewhere.  And again,  I missed the hot breakfast served between 6 and 9.

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I had gone more than 10 days without taking any pictures.  This morning had a fine fog to it that I thought would look nice over Springfield Lake; the reservoir at the Churchville Nature Center.  I struck out and this is the majestic view of the lake I got:

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Some may find a certain romance to it, but I don’t.  Much more fruitful were the garden shots.

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A few of the shots take advantage of the modification to functional depth of field caused by the fog.  This is one of them.

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This is another, as if Silent Hill took place in an arboretum.

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This was done by zooming between 70 and 200mm focal length during a 2 second exposure.  The thick depth of field makes it appear less blurry than would have happened otherwise.

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I made almost no adjustment to color here.  The azaleas were that saturated.

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I thought this a good candidate for tonemapping.  It took me about six tries to make it look neither flat nor drugged out.  I was sure to save that setup this time.

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I finished reposting my pictures that formerly graced my cube walls on the second floor of my house and the burst of color has solicited positive responses.  The guest of one of my housemates issued the deadliest compliment I’ve ever received with “your camera takes good pictures”.  I’ve received this comment twice before and to the first my response was “yes it does” and to the second my response was “I’d like to think I sometimes get lucky”.  This time, I had a twinge of indignation.   In all likelihood the comment is probably accurate.  Had the commenter stood where I stood with the equipment I had he or she probably would have gotten a nearly identical frame.  I consider the level of personal indignation to be me appraising how good I think I am (not to say that’s accurate).  I expect to receive this comment many more times and am going to make a reasonable effort to track my personal response.  Alternatively, the incidence of the comment may decrease for one of two reasons: I’ve gotten good enough that people will willingly attribute success to me, or I’ve gotten so bad that “good picture” won’t be applied to anything I do.