Execution

Execution, originally uploaded by wooac.

This is a child's drawing from a Refugee Camp. It depicts an execution and a boat full of dead bodies. It's from the "Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City" held by Doctors Without Borders in SF. The camp was very educational albeit depressing and there wasn't an overt push for donations. If it comes to your city, it's well worth your time.

Stow Lake: Golden Gate Park

When it's not foggy, Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park has some great views. Unfortunately, it entirely artificial so the water doesn't circulate and is pretty much clogged with algae. The state of the water doesn't seem to bother the birds.

Dahlia Den: Golden Gate Park

At the end of summer, the Dahlias at Golden Gate Park are in bloom. Clearly they have been bred to express wild flowers beyond any natural requirement. Still the flowers are nice to look at even if they aren't very functional.

After sunset on Alcatraz

After sunset, most of Alcatraz Island returns to the birds.

Remains of the Berkeley Fishing Pier

The Berkeley Fishing Pier extends a long distance into the SF Bay. It is so long that there are people living in tents on it. But apparently, at one time it was even longer. This is a photo of some of the remants with Alcatraz in the background. The Bay must not be very deep near Berkeley.

Adventures in GPS Mashups

My recent trip to China was the final push to purchase a GPS datalogger to create mashups maps of my photographs. I bought a QSTARZ Q1000P because it can log a 5Hz and broadcast via bluetooth to an eventual auto or laptop real-time mapping program. It comes with a reasonably capable program "Travel Recorder v4" which does most of what you would like with some glaring exceptions:

1. It is really slow. I'm convinced it reads every image into memory to make it's own thumbnails. It's lack of speed adversely impacted my workflow.

2. If you want to embed location information into multiple sets of images you can't deselect all images, you have to do it one-by-one. I found it was faster to quit the entire program and start over.

3. Travel Recorder can obtain GPS information from your datalogger but it can't import the same information from any of it's export formats, gpx, nmea, kml or plt. Seems like the same information to me.

4. Without an internet connection to Google Maps, it won't display any information about the tracks.

In my early testing, I would shoot less than dozen photos at a time. My workflow was to start "Travel Recorder", load in the GPS data, "Add a Folder" of photos, shift the time stamp on the photos to better align with the GPS data (found that my cameras do not have accurate clocks), and finally write the location information back into the JPEG EXIF metadata. The last two steps were slow. But once I started taking hundreds of photographs per set, this workflow became untenable.

In an attempt to speed things up, I tried JetPhoto and Robogeo. In China, I used an ASUS EEE PC900 which has a 1024x600 screen. JetPhoto is very finicky about it's screen and font setup and won't run at all on this travel laptop. The trial version of Robogeo puts random LARGE errors in the location information. Since after the first few days in China I didn't have Internet connectivity, I basically uninstalled both of them and resigned myself to "Travel Recorder."

Once back in the United States with a decent network connection I decided to look for a perl based solution and work on the Mashups. I picked perl because I'm familiar with the excellent ExifTool modules and I found gpsPhoto.pl which does almost everything I want and a little more. But first I'll describe my experiences with online Mashups.

Online Mashups Which Don't Work

Probably the origin of my interest in location mashups started with Flickr's implementation which I still think is very nice. Flickr produces a map based on 20 photos per strip and if you happen to be taking hundreds of photographs, the resulting area displayed in this map is pretty reasonable. Unfortunately, since Flickr is part of Yahoo, it used Yahoo Maps which are fine for the United States but just awful for China. The resolution of their China Maps are just terrible except for major cities like Beijing. My trip involved several temples in Shandong Province, such as the Confucius Temple and Cemetary in QuFu. The Yahoo Map for QuFu at highest resolution consists of the entire city of QuFu and the surrounding countryside.

I next tried gpsvisualizer which is pretty good for visualizing a track. Unfortunately, none of their automatic photo loading options from Flickr work and I just couldn't see uploading hundreds of MBs of photos to a site which probably wouldn't store them properly.

I tried the My Maps option in Google Maps which has some annoying features. If you upload a long track in kml format, for some reason Google breaks it up into short segments. So if you are trying to show your route from SFO to Beijing by air, you have to flip through 4-5 webpages. It also doesn't automatically put placemarks for your photos. You have to do this manually which is pretty tedious for hundreds of photos and the plugin which is supposed to pull photos from your Picasaweb album doesn't appear to be able to select just your photos, you get everyones.

Finally I tried SmugMaps since I use smugmug as my archival site. All photos displayed on SmugMaps need captions (OK with this), must be world accessible and searchable by Smugmug itself. But SmugMaps will only display the last 150 images uploaded and there are no other options. You can't define sets or create multiple maps. And finally, it updates very, very slowly. If you delete an image which used to be on the map, it loses all the later images until a few hours later when it happens to regenerate the index.

My next post will be about gpsphoto.pl and Google Earth.

Miwok Hun ge

Miwok Hun ge, originally uploaded by wooac.

From our excursion to the Gold Country. This Miwok Hun Ge is a Indian Grinding Rock State Park. It's pretty dark inside the Hun Ge but the Rangers had a fire going which smoked up the place. There wasn't much of a breeze but the smoke rose from the fire pit to the hole in the timber roof. A single shaft of light illuminated the ceremonial room.

It doesn't look like much from the outside but the Hun Ge was pretty impressive inside.

Bubbles in a Coffee Cup 4-15-2008 11-33-04 AM

Bubbles in a Coffee Cup 4-15-2008 11-33-04 AM, originally uploaded by wooac.

Macros while eating lunch. This is a cup of instant coffee with soy. I couldn't shoot before the soy milk because the steam kept fogging up the lens.

Some of the macros have a tinge of red. Not sure of the origin of the red color but I suspect that something nearby must have been red and colored the light.

Some Observations on the Male Peacock

Male Peacock, originally uploaded by wooac.

I observed a male peacock near the Puffer Steam Train at the SF Zoo (where Tatiana the tiger mauled three boys). One male and five females within about 10 feet. The male shakes all his feather and turns around and shakes his tail. The females walk around and generally don't pay that much attention. The male peacock does push his head back and forth, like the Di Peacock dance but I'm not convinced this isn't just a natural consequence of being so far out of balance with his plumage and tail up in the air.

Evolution driven by sex played a mean joke of the male peacock. I watched a female peacock take a shot flight when the train passed nearby. The male is exerting incredible energy just to keep his feathers off the ground. When he is shimmering and shaking, he must be burning as enormous number of calories. Since his mobility is severely limited by all the stuff he carries to attract the other sex, there must be abundant food for the male peacock to survive.

Clearly all this plumage and ritualized dancing does work. But why? Why would a female peacock prefer some bizarre male who would have a hard time feeding himself or help feed the young. What is the evolutionary advantage? The male peacock is an amazing animal and makes me wonder what happens to a species without survival pressure and decisions are made based on plumage. How many generations did it take for the male peacock to take this form?

So what does this say about homo sapiens? When did modern medicine remove most of the selective pressure? Antibiotics? C-sections? No wonder steroids are so popular.

Surfer near Fort Point

IMG_3575, originally uploaded by wooac.

I was out testing a Canon 100-400mm IS L Lens and spotted some surfers. This is just a crop from the full frame. It's been sharpened because at 400mm, this lens is a bit soft.

Like my previous attempts at shooting surfers, most of the time surfers paddle around on their boards and yak. About every fifth wave someone might ride one of these little ditties. But the other thing is how old some of these guys are. A lot of bald heads and hanging paunches.

The 100-400mm is definitely an outside only lens. It's just too slow and the push-pull zoom is very annoying. It's also big and heavy and white.

Easter Lily

Easter Lily, originally uploaded by wooac.

Easter Lily from Petals, A Flower Shop. Large, fairly simple flower.

Tulip

Tulip, originally uploaded by wooac.

Planted a bag of Costco tulips and only a half dozen came up. This is one of them. Seems strange for a tulip.

Mission Gift Shop

Mission Gift Shop, originally uploaded by wooac.

The Mission Gift Shop had some really strange wooden carvings for sale and they weren't cheap. These aren't your usual Made in China knock-offs. I wonder why the Chinese haven't made it into this market yet.

Staircase - Old Chapel

Staircase - Old Chapel, originally uploaded by wooac.

Looking up from one of the stairs to the circular staircase in the Old Chapel at Mission Dolores. The ceiling was painted this way by the original Indians in the 1700's. Of course it has been restored a few times.

According to the Docent, the priests would use this rough wood staircase to ascend to a small balcony and watch the congregation below. Early big brother, except by the Jesuit Brothers.

California Poppy

California Poppy, originally uploaded by wooac.

Unless you look very closely on a California Poppy, you might not notice the ridges on the petals. The ridges are the reason the water droplets are arranged in neat rows. The distribution of droplet sizes is a little more difficult to understand. One expects the less vertical surfaces to hold larger droplets but it also appears that the edges of the petals can hold larger droplets than the interior. Perhaps the ridges are more pronounced at the edges.

poppy blossom emerging from case

poppy, originally uploaded by wooac.

This is a traditional poppy, unlike the California poppies which are also blooming now. This flower case is incredibly hairy and hydrophilic. My guess is that sprinkler ran earlier in the morning because there wasn't that much fog last night. The water caught in the case magnifies the petals inside.

Lemon Bottlebrush

The common bottlebrush is another flower with more structure than one would see at first look. The pollen sticks on little bulbs at the ends of the red tubes and the stamen are buried deep inside. Since gravity and wind must play a role in the pollination, most of the successful pollen must drop from a pollinator on the top side of the flower or from an entirely different flower above. It's a curious struction because the basic brush shape seems to be an extremely ineffective design for collecting pollen.

Magnolia Flower

For years I've viewed Magnolia flowers are large cup-like petals with tinged edges but if you look inside one carefully, they are very bizarre. The pistols and the stamens are separated with different colors. I suppose the way it works is that the pollinator rubs off pollen while gathering on the top and the distance reduces the amount of self-pollination. Because the flower is so large, these sex organs are also pretty large. I wonder if this favors pollinators of a particular type. I didn't see any bees or hummingbirds when I photographed this tree so it's hard to know for sure.

Chinese Lantern Flower

Chinese Lantern Flower, originally uploaded by wooac.

I bought these flowers for valentine's day but it was so crowded in "Just Flowers" that I couldn't get the proprietor's attention. The bouquet wasn't very full and we throw in these Chinese Lantern Flowers at the last minute. But they turned out nicer than the Pincushion flower, Protea, or Leucadendrum.

Unfortunately, this Chinese Lantern Flower turned brown very quickly.

Oxalis Flower

Oxalis Flower, originally uploaded by wooac.

This is a lowly oxalis. There are fields of them blooming now. And to think, I spent hundreds of dollars buying special chemicals in Nevada to kill this plant in my lawn. I'd rather have a yard of these than Kentucky blue grass (or Bermuda grass).

Broccoli Flowers

Broccoli Flowers, originally uploaded by wooac.

We were away for three weeks and we let the winter vegetables go to seed. This is the last of the broccoli. It's probably still edible but I don't know what it tastes like.

St Joseph's Coat Rose

St Joseph's Coat Rose, originally uploaded by wooac.

I was trying to achieve the "Georgia O'Keefe" look with this rose but it was difficult to focus in the bright sun. Also the rose wasn't as accessible as it could be. Probably the next time I should setup a ladder and a tripod or monopod. Also shot earlier in the day when it is less windy and the sun isn't as bright.

Feed Me Seymour

DSCN1484, originally uploaded by wooac.

Not sure what this was. It is really only a bud but it struck me as the plant from the Little Shop of Horrors. Feed Me Seymour....

Face in a Flower

DSCN1538, originally uploaded by wooac.

This flower was photographed at the Presidio Native Plant Nursery, way in the back where the plants are probably not native. So the question is why would a flower mimic a face or do we just see a face in this? I suspect the flower is really mimicking a face, not to attract bees but to dissuade potential eaters, like birds, to stay away.

Ice Plant Flower

These are closeup macros shot with a reversed 50mm lens on a Point and Shoot camera of a single ice plant flower in Lincoln Park. Ice plants are known for their brilliant color and their ability to attract bees. But I would not have guessed that the pistols were so wild inside it. Also, the octopus like inner structure is quite amazing. Of course, on a spring day there are bits of pollen littered everywhere either from the wind or an errant bee.

Dandelion

Dandelion, originally uploaded by wooac.

This is a closeup of a dandelion seed head before they've blown away. It was taken with a Point and Shoot Nikon P5000 with a reversed 50mm lens outside the 3x zoom lens off the fairway on one of the holes in the Lincoln Park golf course.

Some interesting things come out of this photo. The feathery spokes which loft the seed are not uniformly distributed. It's close but not quite. They do have bilateral symmetry however. I wonder if gravity is reasonable for this deviance from uniform or the closest packing (hexagonal) of the seeds themselves which forces this arrangement.

Davies Symphony Hall

Davies Symphony Hall is an acoustically engineered room. It is optimized for the sound from the Orchestra to reach the audience as clean, clear music. I think it has been mostly optimized for the Orchestra floor level and we have box seats. It's particularly bad in the far back on Tier 1 and higher. Also, the reflectors actually make the organ sound worse and the cement structure and floor create a very cold hard sound.

One of the features I don't understand is this array of slots and protrusions. My guess is that is supposed to act as a slot array for extremely low frequencies because the size and distances are so large. But I can't think of any instrument, except for the organ, which produces such low notes. My other guess is that there is motor noise from something, perhaps in the ceiling itself or above like the HVAC unit and this array alleviates that problem.

If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Merced River Macro

Merced River Macro, originally uploaded by wooac.

As part of the Ansel Adams Gallery Photo-walk the group walked along the Merced River from the Stone Bridge to a steel one. These macros were taken just to the west of the steel bridge. What surprised me was the amount of oil on the water along the banks. I was told that propane replaced heating oil in the Valley so I suspect that this is crankcase oil washed into the river from the roads.

Evaporation After An Overnight Snowfall

Evaporation After An Overnight Snowfall, originally uploaded by wooac.

Taken from the North Bank of the Merced River of the gap to the east of Sentinel Rock. The rain turned to snow overnight. Scattered showers this day with occasional breaks of bright sunshine. This was one of those breaks with the sun directly over this gap, causing the flare. I particularly like the wave pattern in the sky above the condensation. It's not something I see that often.