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As I said I would do before my road trip, I have completed the redesign of my website. This is a much more minimalist look than people expect from me, but I like it. The main thing I feel pleased with myself about, as far as the actual design goes, is my triangular thumbnails. I enjoy doing stuff like that. Computers like squares and rectangles, so I always want to break that in my designs. I’ve been going with round corners and that big sweeping arc in the last two designs. Triangles are a different challenge, and they actually turned out to be a lot easier than circles. That’s all secondary to restructuring the galleries. It feels more focused now.

Over the course of testing this, I discovered that Firefox for Mac has some issues with font sizing, while Safari has issues with the address bar icon. I have yet to figure out how to solve either problem.

Old front page:

New front page:

Well, there will be no more KML files until I get home. When I tried to open Google Earth last night, it crashed, and it won’t open on the laptop no matter how many times I uninstall and reinstall it. So, I’ll make the last three files on the desktop on Saturday.

Today, we went from Missoula, Montana, to Ely, Nevada. Just a fairly straight drive down US-93, except for taking ID-75 through the Sun Valley area. The drive was pleasant, but there wasn’t much sightseeing. I didn’t take any pictures until we got within 30 miles or so of Ely. My dad had a headache and decided to pull over to get some fresh air, and this little guy decided to get within 15 feet of the car to eat the weeds. This is the best of the many shots I took:

The next occurence of dumb luck happened when we stopped to get gas at the south end of town on US-6:

I noticed a sign on the side of the road that described US-6 as the “Grand Army of the Republic Highway.” I’ve seen similar signs on the southbound side of CA-14 at the top of the hill just south of Palmdale. While I don’t think the 14 was a freeway when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, it was during his administration that just about every US highway in California, with the exceptions of 101 and 395, became a state highway instead. US-6 used to run all the way from the end of Cape Cod, Massachussetts, to Long Beach, California, through Lancaster and Palmdale. Now it ends in Bishop, at the junction with 395. However, in the last year or so, “Historic US-6″ signs have been put up along Sierra Highway. If I had not been in such a hurry to get home when I left Boston last October, I would have driven down to Providence, Rhode Island, and taken US-6 to US-395.

Anyway, we’re staying in a hotel that my dad stayed in some 50 or so years ago during one of his parents’ road trips. I found the bathroom an interesting subject:

Dinner was at the Historic Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall. This is what I think of when I think of Nevada. Not Las Vegas. Las Vegas has become a Disneyland-for-adults version of itself, and that’s fine, but… sometimes you want something a little more authentic, for lack of a better term. That’s where places like Ely shine. Anyway, I walked off with a couple of bumperstickers for this place. My ‘78 Chevy truck needs one.

Tonight, it’s Missoula, Montana. Only a place like this could a person like David Lynch be from.

We had a pleasant drive from Bozeman to Glacier National Park. I did a little bit of noodling with the infrared filter on the digital camera. Here’s something a lot of people don’t know. If you put an infrared film filter, like an 87 or 87C, on any digital camera with a CCD capture sensor, you can overpower the infrared suppression filter on the chip itself. CCD’s are inherently more sensitive to infrared than visible light. That’s why they have a suppression filter. CMOS capture sensors, however, are not. To my knowledge, only Canon uses CMOS sensors (at least among the small format manufacturers). Of course, since you have to overpower the suppression filter, I have found that I need to open up about 10 stops from a normal exposure with my Olympus E-300.

So, I’m going to nerd out a little bit here and give a brief technical description of what color is. Color is our brains’ interpretation of certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. The band of the EM spectrum human eyes are sensitive to is generally around 400 nanometer wavelengths to 700 nanometers. What we perceive as blue is down around 450 nanometers, green is around 550 nanometers, and red is up around 650-700 nanometers. Wavelengths shorter than 400 nanometers fall into the ultraviolet range, and then x-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays. From 700 to 900 nanometers is the infrared range. Above that, you have microwaves and eventually radio waves. But all we can really see is 400-700 nanometers. Thermal imaging, UV imaging, infrared imaging… all of that is false color. What they’re doing is taking wavelengths outside the range of visible light, and reassigning it a value inside the range of visible light so that we can see it.

So, now that I’ve explained that, I can show what I’ve done. This first image is of a scene on US-89 in Montana showing visible light:

Next is the same scene with an infrared transmission filter over the lens, which filters out all visible light:

Okay, pretty cool, but we’ve probably all seen black-and-white infrared by now. So, something I’ve been thinking about for a little while is how to get the contrast qualities of black-and-white infrared in a color image. The first experiment involved simply placing the infrared image on a new layer above the regular color image in Photoshop and setting the blend mode to “Luminosity.” I left the opacity at 100% as a starting point. I may decide to season to taste:

And finally, because I felt like it, I decided to create some false color. The challenge was essentially how to compress 4 channels into 3. In an ordinary digital image in RGB color mode, you have three channels–red, green, and blue. I wanted to add a fourth channel–infrared. At first I thought I’d just add the infrared exposure as an alpha channel in Photoshop and play with the channel mixer. Unfortunately, the channel mixer will not use alpha channels as source channels. So, I ended up playing with the Apply Image function and reassigned some values to the channels. The blue channel is now 75% of the original blue channel and 25% of the green. The green channel is now 50% of the original green channel and 50% of the red. And the red channel is now 25% of the original red channel and 75% of the infrared image. The blend mode was always set to normal, and an alpha channel was used as a temporary holding space while I juggled the values around. I’ll see if I can find a less clunky way to do this in the future. In the meantime, here’s the false color:

Anyway, after that little experiment, we went on to Glacier National Park, where I shot mostly video. I don’t have the conversion software on my laptop, so video will have to wait until I get home. Glacier National Park is pretty spectacular though. I think what I enjoyed the most was the large number of small waterfalls dumping snowmelt almost directly onto the road. It was like something they would fake at Disneyland.

After Glacier, it was on to Missoula, where we are now. This is a weird place. I’m not sure how to describe it. I would have to say that of all of David Lynch’s movies, Blue Velvet is the one that seems most Missoula-like.

Anyway, no KML file tonight because it’s after midnight and I’m tired.

The morning in Ogden was one of the ugliest I’ve seen outside of L.A. It was smoggy, and already pretty hot by 8 AM. There have been wildfires in various parts of Utah the last week, so that’s probably where the smog came from. We missed a turn in Logan, causing us to detour through Idaho Falls to get to Jackson, Wyoming, instead of coming up the road where the obnoxious cop pulled me over 8 years ago. He was obnoxious because he had to work it into every sentence that I was from California and in Wyoming. As if I didn’t know. But, he did just give me a warning instead of a ticket, so I could only complain so much.

Once into Wyoming, it remained unpleasantly crowded, starting in Jackson Hole. The Grand Tetons were also somewhat smoggy. I took some pretty decent pictures when we drove through 8 years ago, but I didn’t take many today because I knew that the weather conditions alone would prevent me from getting anything better. Yellowstone was clearer, and we had good light for most of the drive through the park. But still… unpleasantly crowded.

I shot mostly film today. I did shoot a digital shot of something that I shot on color infrared with the Canon, and on Fuji Astia with the Hasselblad. The first time I ever went through Yellowstone was during the fire of 1988, and that consumed a lot of the forest all over the park. It actually got up to Old Faithful the day after we went through. This is some of the burn area between Lewis Lake and Grant Village today:

I didn’t take as many pictures in Yellowstone as one would expect, mostly because, when I shoot scenery or objects, I like to shoot with wide-angle lenses and get up close to whatever I’m shooting, and you can’t really get close to things in Yellowstone. At least, not close enough.

Leaving Yellowstone, we planned to stay in Gardiner, Montana. There were no vacancies. There were few vacancies in Livingston, the next major town, and what vacancies there were were expensive. Same story in Bozeman, where we ended up staying at the Lewis & Clark Motel because it was 10 o’clock. But, let me tell you, this motel is swanky time, from the sliding glass door to the phone over the toilet to the light fixture in the bathroom that looks like the Lincoln logo. Definitely built in the 50’s. Looks like it should’ve been blown up in Vegas 10 years ago.

“Here it is, your moment of zen:” 20070710.kml.

Today we drove from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Ogden, Utah. The only particular bit of sightseeing we did was at the Glen Canyon Dam. Most of the pictures I took with a cheap point-and-shoot, with little consideration for good photography.

I’ll start with the KML file of our trip for Google Earth: 20070709.kml.

Our day began with breakfast at the Galaxy Diner in Flagstaff. It’s one of our favorite places to eat when we head out that way.

Our next stop was the aforementioned Glen Canyon Dam Visitor’s Center, just outside of Page, AZ. We opted not to go in, due to the airport-like security.

Next was a late lunch/early dinner at Mom’s Cafe in Salina, UT. This is another one of our favorite places to eat. I recommend the Broasted Chicken, but I got the chicken strips instead this time. The dinner bread is interesting. I think it’s probably more commonly known as Indian Frybread or Indian Flatbread. They call them scones in Utah, and every non-chain restaurant I’ve been in in the state serves them, so I call them Mormon Scones.

Finally, the sights of I-15, north of Salt Lake City.