Monthly Archives: February 2006

I Have a Pass!

One of my favorite things in life is to have a pass.

I don’t buy a Golden Eagle pass strictly for the financial benefits if you visit a lot of parks, but more because I just love being able to drive up to one of those gated entrances at a National Park and state proudly “I have a pass!” There’s usually a tense moment before the guard realizes I’m not dangerous, just a little special, and he relaxes his grip on his Taser. Then the gate raises and I can drive on through.

Friday brought both cold weather and high winds to the Portland area. While on the way to work, the MAX train I was on lost power. A strong gust of wind had apparently caused problems with the lines that supply power to the trains.

The TriMet driver had us all disembark and walk back towards the Sunset Transit Center where we could board buses to our final destination. On the way back, there’s a short tunnel you have to walk through. As our group started into the tunnel, it triggered an alarm and a recorded voice boomed out “Halt! You are entering an unauthorized area! The authorities have been notified and are on the way.” While I didn’t have a pass, the TriMet folks were with us, so I knew there wasn’t any danger.

Or at least not much danger, part of me couldn’t shake the thought that Vice President Cheney was going to pop out of a dark corner shouting “Terrorists! Terrorists!” BlAM! BLAM! BLAM! and the bullets start flying.

I got to work almost an hour later than normal, and the ride home at the end of the day was also a long one, but at least I did have the small satisfaction of having permission to go where I wasn’t supposed to go.

Confessions of a Pixel Peeper

American alligator eating a crab near sunrise at Huntington Beach State Park

The world of photography is full of long running and tiresome debates — I think some people get into photography strictly for the debates. The problem is, like most debates in life, people tend to gravitate towards the extremes and the valid points on both sides are lost in a sea of hyperbole.

One of the oldest is this old chestnut: “Which is more important, the photographer or the equipment?” The purists trot out the same tired cliche, “Give Ansel Adams a disposable camera and he’ll take better pictures than the average photographer with the best equipment available.” Which is both true and beside the point. Obviously the photographer is the most important element of the artistic side, but just because equipment isn’t the most important, doesn’t mean that it isn’t important.

An artist will understand the limitations of his tools and work within their limits to create the best result possible, so the purists are on the right track with their Ansel analogy. But a better question to ask is why didn’t Ansel shoot with a disposable camera? It’s the job of the artist to choose the appropriate tools, because your tools will define the limitations you have to work with.

The advent of digital photography has introduced new tiresome debates. One of which is: “Which is more important, the picture that you print or the quality of the picture viewed onscreen at 100%?”

The purists proudly stick out their chests and announce “The print!” They derisively label anyone who wants to view their pictures at 100% pixel detail on their monitors as pixel peepers or measurebators. People who can’t see the forest for the trees.

I have a confession to make: I’m a pixel peeper.

Now I don’t photograph rulers or brick walls and examine them in excruciating detail, looking for the slightest problem. I don’t stay up at night worrying about vignetting in the corners at wide apertures on wide angle lenses. I don’t think sharpness is the end-all be-all characteristic of a picture. I don’t photograph color charts and worry about slight differences. I don’t obsess over noise charts. I don’t buy the top of the line of everything because I need to have the best of the best.

But here’s the thing – I almost never print out my pictures. How my images look as an 8″x10″ print isn’t how I judge quality because it’s not the main way I view my images. What matters is how it looks at on my monitor. I want to see the forest and the trees.

For family snapshots, it’s true, I don’t pixel peep. I don’t need to study the pores of my skin in a self-portrait. But for my wildlife photography, I love being able to zoom in and see fine details I’d never get to see otherwise. I love being able to take an environmental portrait where the animal is seen in the context of its world, but still be able to zoom in and study detail of the animal itself.

Medium format photographers have always understood this, it’s why they shoot in a format with a larger negative. They want to print a large landscape and have the scene rendered with fine detail, so that you can stand back and view the entire scene, step closer and revel in the fine detail, then step back again and view the entire scene.

As I hinted at above, you can take this to an extreme and become too obsessed over the details. Scan any Internet forum when a new model is introduced and you’ll see this in abundance, from the smallest digicams to the largest SLR’s. But that doesn’t mean pixels don’t matter, for those of us who want the forest and the trees.

Take the picture linked at the top of the post of an alligator at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina. I love being able to zoom in and see the crab that’s in the gator’s mouth, look at the details of the gator’s teeth. Even with a spotting scope you won’t see that kind of detail, it happens too quickly. But with the digital image, I can zoom out to view the entire scene and then zoom in to view the details.

So go ahead and pixel peep, revel in the details, just don’t forget to enjoy the forest as well as the trees.

I’m A Little Slow

Rough-skinned newt

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s little known trilogy The Lord of the Rings, there’s a passage where the wizard Gandalf is forced to take the fellowship through the Mines of Moria. It is a passage they take only as a last resort, as the dwarves who once mined Moria have abandoned it. The dwarves dug and dug into the earth, creating spectacular rooms in the rock. But one day they dug too deep and unleashed a great evil into the world.

It’s a passage I’ve been thinking about lately as somehow, sometime during the past couple of years, I dug too deep. The world can rest easy, I’ve unleashed no flaming demons from the depths of hell. But something has awakened. I don’t know why, but it has, and the question now is what to do about it.

What has awakened is the desire to create. I’ve had an outlet for this in some sense for the past decade through my photography. But to be honest, I’m not much of a photographer. It’s the wildlife that I love and photography for me is a means to an end. The desire to create obviously isn’t evil or even bad, in fact it’s a good thing. But there is a very real danger, especially if you can’t find the proper outlet. The desires may fade with time, but if not, you either need to find a way to express them or find a way to kill them (and risk that a part of you dies as well).

When we moved to Portland a few years ago, I traded a long commute in the car to a long commute on the light rail. The beauty of the light rail was that I could read or work on my laptop. For the first time in years, my web site finally started getting regular updates. I started reading through my backlog of magazines.

Then one night in late 2003 I was flipping through the channels and came across Ophah on Larry King Live. She was explaining that she had stopped her book club because she had set it up so that she was only covering books of living authors, but she wanted to cover both current literature as well as the classics. She brought up John Steinbeck and spoke about him for a while, and it dawned on me that I’d never read anything by Steinbeck.

My wife picked up Travels with Charlie and I was hooked. Next up was The Grapes of Wrath, then Lonesome Dove, then Harper Lee’s gorgeous little book To Kill A Mockingbird. The rest of the year brought a flood of novels (for me it was a flood anyway), from classics like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury to modern authors like Gregory Maguire.

At some point during the year, a story started forming in my head. I hadn’t done any creative writing since high school. That was twenty years ago, and I only wrote then because I had to for my classes. I’ve always enjoyed writing, I’ve just never done any creative writing. But this story started to form, slowly coalescing and shifting direction in my head. Then another story started to form.

I kept reading and when I got to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, I started thinking about writing my stories down. During Ursula Hegi’s Stones From the River, I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped in the middle of Ursula’s book and read Stephen King’s On Writing, an excellent book about writing a novel. I then finished Stones From the River and continued reading other novels.

In November of 2005 I participated in NaNoWriMo, a contest to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Our friend Heather had done it in previous years and I decided to give it a shot. I decided to start writing the second story that had been swirling around in my head and I reached the 50,000 word target before the end of the month.

I haven’t written any more the past couple of months, I’ve been pretty tired and not mentally up to it. Pat Robertson says its because I once voted in support of medical marijuana, but it’s actually just because work has been pretty busy. A lot of fun, but busy.

But things should be slowing down soon and the desire to work on my novel is getting stronger. I’d like to start organizing my thoughts in an outliner (The Omni Group’s excellent OmniOutliner) and a graphics package (OmniGraffle, also from the Omni Group), since I have some plot points I haven’t figured out and some themes I want to make sure get carried through the story.

And I hope to get out and do some more hiking, nothing gets my conscious and subconscious mind going like a good romp in the woods. And that’s all well and good. It’s all well and good as long as I can find the time (and more importantly, the mental energy) to do it. I’ve been writing a lot more on my web site and obviously a little bit here in the blog, so that’s helped as well.

Digging too deep. The real danger I suppose is not that I won’t be able to work a bit on the book, or take some pictures, or update my web site. The real danger is that I don’t know where all this will lead. It might not lead anywhere, just that I’ll add a few more creative outlets to my hobbies. I don’t think there’s much danger to be honest, because while I have a desire to create, I don’t have a desire to publish. Which seems to be a little unusual, but there it is. And that alone should be enough to keep my creative outlets a joy and not a job.

It’s kind of exciting, in some ways it feels like a rebirth. Maybe it just took me forty years to find myself, something most people do when they’re twenty. So I’m a little slow.

And what does the newt picture at the top have to do with any of this? It doesn’t really, although one does play a small role in the book. I just love newts and I love that picture.