Julian Bond In Anchorage

When I heard the news about the death of Julian Bond who'd started the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and been a Georgia state representative among many other things, I thought about the time I got to talk to him when he was here at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  I don't even remember what we chatted about, but it was an honor to have the chance to just be with him.  But then, given my recent experience at my Peace Corps reunion, I began to question my memory - did this really happen? 

Boxes

So I went on line to look up "Julian Bond at UAA."  And there it was - in the UAA Archives.  So I biked over to UAA to see what they actually had.  The first box had a stock pr photo that Bond must have sent in advance.  The second box had negatives of the event in one folder, and negatives with a proof sheet in the second folder. 

So here are some pictures from when he was here.  You can read the mainline obituaries and notices elsewhere - as in this New York Times article.  

   

 

click to enlarge and focus

 For this one I used Photoshop's inverse (under image) function to change it from negative to positive.

All these images are from:

UAA University Relations photographs, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage

There was no more information than than the date 1984 and Julian Bond written on the negative sleeve. 

There were lots and lots of other old photos in the same folders.  You can wander through the collection electronically at http://consortiumlibrary.org/archives/Collections.html

I was experimenting a bit trying to get decent images from the proofs.  I vaguely remembered there was a way to change pictures from negatives to positives in Photoshop and it was pretty easy.  As I mentioned above - just go to Images, then to Inverse. 

 

Ballona Creek, Birds, Curves

Ballona Creek today is a body of water in a concrete embankment in Los Angeles that flows into Santa Monica Bay.  Wikipedia gives us these choice bits of history:

 Ballona Creek and Lagoon are named for the Ballona or Paseo de las Carretas land grant, dated November 27, 1839. The Machado and Talamantes families, co-grantees of the rancho, heralded from Baiona in northern Spain.^[5][6

...At the time of Spanish settlement, the Los Angeles River turned to the west just south of present-day Bunker Hill, joining Ballona Creek just to the west of its current channel. However, during a major flood in 1825, the Los Angeles River's course changed to its present channel, and Ballona Creek became a completely distinct waterway. Much of the above-ground section of the creek was lined with concrete as part of the flood-control project undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers following the Los Angeles Flood of 1938.^[7]

Birds, well you know what birds are.

Curves is a tool in photo software like photoshop that does strange things to light and dark and colors.  I don't understand quite what it does and I tend to experiment.  I figure if I do this enough, I'll start to see patterns for how the images change.  You can see, if you check the link, that what people write is interesting, and I've done some minor adjustments like they talk about, but the color freak in me is much more interested in the extremes, as you'll see in a couple pictures below.

I'd note I've saved the most interesting pictures for the end on the grounds that my readers will be rewarded for at least scrolling through the pictures, even if they don't read any of the text.

Part of this experimenting results from leaving my bigger camera in Anchorage and having to do bird shots with the little one that doesn't do distance well.

This first one was not altered in photoshop or anywhere else.  This snowy egret was standing near the Lincoln Blvd. bridge and the sun on the green and yellow of the bridge just rippled in the water like this.  I did crop the picture, but that's not altering.  How you frame the picture in the camera is cropping.

There was a sun cracked and warped bird sign where I got off the creek (at Centinela) that listed some of the common birds at the creek.  You can see the sort of baked look of the sign and when I enlarged the row of birds I shot, they were getting fuzzy in a similar way.  I didn't do anything to these pictures except resize them and put them together.



Below starts the curves experiments, first with the brown pelican.  (This is my least favorite of the group.)   I cut out the pelican in a circle and then I applied the curves to the whole picture and put the pelican cut out on top.  In this series I've include some of the original picture in with the curved portions of the photo.

Here's what the curves chart looks like.  The grey, as I understand it. . . actually, I don't understand it, and I'll just let you look it up yourself.  You know that's not like me, but I've decided that I'm just going to have to learn this non-verbally, by experimenting.

The curves box starts with a line going diagonally from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. As you move that line around (this one is probably a bad example because most of the ones I've done are curved) you get different effects - changes in light and dark and in color.  It's good to use if part of the picture is too dark or too bright for the rest of the picture.  You can change the one part to work better with the other part.  In this case I made it more horizontal and vertical than curvy.

Next is the great blue heron.  (The bird sign only listed the great blue and when I checked on line, it matched pretty closely.)   In this shot, I first split it diagonally and the applied curves to the top part.

I'm calling this one Ballona Creek Bore Tide.  I don't know if that's what they call it here, but these waves came in all of a sudden and reminded me of the bore tide on Turnagain Arm.  Here, I curved the middle - and in this case it really had a functional purpose:  it emphasized the waves and ripples I was trying to show.  I left a bit of the original as a frame.  

Now we get freaky.   The sun was on the cement legs of a bridge.  I came close to what it really looked like by adjusting the hue and.  So then I went crazy with curves.  

In this one, the center is the slightly hue and saturation enhanced original and the outside is the rest of the original picture, curved hard.

In this one, the center, horizontally, is the original picture, and the top and bottom are curved.  Even the original looks a bit unreal.

I'm not sure what this all means, but I think it fits in with the blog's basic theme - how do you know what you know?  The altered colors forces me to see things in the landscape that I never saw before.  And I'm still trying to absorb the combination of the original and the altered state.

And, it's a reminder that photos no longer represent reality.  Seeing is not believing.  I still think that photographers should distinguish between pictures that are unaltered from the camera and pictures that were tweaked, even slightly.  But I'm afraid that so many photographers are tweaking hard after they take the picture, that it's a lost battle.  I suspect some photographers assume that the viewer must know they picture was tweaked.  But I think many don't realize how much.  

Climbing Prohibited or Aqua Pura MCMVI or Playing With Photoshop

How many buildings have climbing prohibited signs?


Here's the water tower in Seattle's Volunteer Park where climbing is verboten.

Actually, this appears to have been a favorite rock climbing site.    Mountain Project, a rock climbers website, has a "Rock Climbing Guide to 122,093 Routes", including a post dated in 2009 for the water tower.  They have pictures too.

"Description 
Three fun expanses of brick wall, separated by cement ledges. Brick is uneven with lots of little holds and pockets. Route will depend on which side of the tower you choose to climb. Watch out for the cement ledges, from underneath they look positive, but they are slopers!
You can also spend an enjoyable afternoon traversing around the base of the tower. 

Location 
The tower was built as a water reservoir in 1906, but is now empty. It is located in the middle of Volunteer Park in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Address: 1247 15th Ave. E
From the inside of the tower, choose your window & anchor spot & that will decide which side of the tower you'll climb.
We climbed the east facing side, just to the right of a tall, very leafy tree. 

Protection 
Climb the inside of the tower and rig an anchor to one of the fixed metal banisters. Feed the rope through the window grating onto the ledge & then use a stick to drop the rope over the edge. Belay from the top, inside the tower. Once the climber reaches the top they will need to be lowered down, as all the windows have grating."

Here's a post card of the water tower from 1909 that was part of the displays once you 'climb' the stairs to the top inside.   

And here's a June 4, 2010 report of an encounter with the police from a Cascade Climber forum:

"Ah, so the sun came out finally in Seattle. No time to make it to the mountains to climb, so thought I would go for a quick session on the water tower at Volunteer park. The tried and true training ground for the broke Seattle climber.  
I get a few laps in, when I hear "Sir! sir! Get down off of there!". I hop down (from a whopping 2ft) and am approached by a Seattle police officer (along with a parks employee hiding in his truck). The cop tells me that the tower is "private" (!!) property and that it is only to be used for its intended purpose. I tell him that I'm pretty sure its public property and that people have been traversing it for DECADES without incident. At which point he says, "Are you arguing with me? I am a POLICE officer, do you want to go to jail?". I say, "No.. I'm just trying to understand this. Why not put a sign up then? To notify people of the rules, because this is the first I've heard of this" To which he replies, "it wouldn't do any good, people will climb on it anyways" (um, OK!?). I head back to my car, while he sticks around waiting for me to leave.
I considered being arrested, just to see if any of this would hold up. Anyone have insight in to this? Are they justified at all? At any given day there is someone traversing the tower, are they for real?!
Anyone want to plan a water tower climb-off-protest in the near future...?"

Well, now they have a sign.  (Was the cop celebrating the anniversary of Tiananmen Square by harassing the climber?)

Now, More Pictures Of The Tower With Some Photoshop Help

Of all the updated programs I'm dealing with now that I have a new computer, Photoshop (CS6) is the one that's giving me the fewest challenges.  I'm not sure what exciting new things I can do with it, but what I do like is that all the basic functions I use all the time, work they way they did in the CS3 version I was using before.  In all the others - from Safari, to iMovie, to, well everything - the basic moves are all frustratingly different.  Photoshop is, so to speak, still in English.  

So here are some experiments I did with my water tower photo.  First the original.  

This is the original.   It's pretty boring, especially since the sunny parts are overexposed and the parts in the shade are underexposed.


In the picture of the tower way up above, I just did simple adjustments so the parts in the sun got a lower exposure and the parts in the shade got a higher exposure.  Oh, yeah, I added the spider.  I took a photo of a  spider I had, but because it was so small a photo, I touched it up to make it bigger.


But then I started to have some fun.







I did this one using curves under image adjustments.

This one used the 'glowing edges' filter.

I got this one with the gradient map  (in Image Adjustment) - using Yellow, Violet, Orange, Blue.


















My favorite is this one using the water color filter

Click here for help with Roman Numerals.

Fixing Leeks

And onions.

White Geranium

When we got back the other day, this geranium out on the deck was in full bloom.  Here are a few views.  Getting close and using filters at Photoshop causes me to rethink what and how I see things.

Mirrors meeting in a corner offer a great spot to put flowers.

This poster filtered version using Photo Shop focuses on the shape in a different way. 

Everything Has A Price

These beautiful ficus trees that bring visual grace and welcome shade to this Santa Monica residential street aren't without a cost.

There's the water they need, the sidewalks and streets their roots buckle, and then there's the gunky fruit they drop.

Fortunately, I don't to clean the roof of this car.  Though, while I was in LA, I did manage to wash my mom's car with less than a gallon or water.  The car wasn't nearly this bad.  I found an old fuzzy mitt with which to give the car a wet rubdown and some old rags with which to dry when it was reasonably clean.  And the dirty water was gulped up by her thirsty garden.  Drought requires some modifications.  And lowering one's standards of a clean vehicle.   

Photoshop means seeing is no longer believing.  There are lots of good reasons to use PS, such as to join two pictures - as with the top one - or to make a picture more interesting, playful, and/or to make the background less distracting - as in the roof shot.  I always want readers to know whether pictures are straight from the card or doctored.  I never intend to deceive readers with PS.  I try not to assume they will all realize that I've played with the image a bit.  So, except for minor touchups - changing the exposure level a bit or cropping - I'll try somehow to alert readers.  It's also an attempt to raise the awareness of people who don't tend to notice these things, so they'll be more watchful at less forthright sites.

I've got a bunch of backed up blog posts - thoughts, photos, people that require a little (like this post) or a lot of time to get back up info and think through. (Actually, just before hitting the publish button I did double check to make sure this was a ficus and I found someone who took a bit more effort on her ficus report.)  I'll try to put up some more short ones like this while I work through the others.  And some will just fall off the list and vanish.

The first version of this post didn't get pinged to blogrolls on other blogs.  This happens now and then.  Sometimes I can manually ping it and it goes.  A few times it had to do with the coding in the html and I cleaned it up and it worked.  Sometimes I have to copy the post and post it again and it works.  And sometimes nothing seems to work and that feedburner is just slow in getting it out.  That seems to be the case now. 

Random Shots From Prospect Heights Trail

The bridge at the creek not too far along the trail from the Prospect Heights parking lot.  I think this is the south fork of Campbell Creek, but I'm not certain.

 A close up of lichen on a dead tree branch.

A view from the trail.  I'm pretty sure that peak on the left is Near Point.

There was a little (really little, maybe two feet wide) creek that dropped a bit and had lots of bubbles.  This picture is a bit surreal, but I like it.  The bubbles are toward the left on top. 



It was a spectacular day, and this time of year there were no mosquitoes.

Leaving LAX - Light Games

These are all straight from the camera, no photoshop and in chronological order from taxiing to take off.  I like the latter ones best. 

The red comes from the decorative light tubes where the airport road connects with Sepulveda.

I have no idea why the blue lights in the foreground look stable while the background lights reflect the slow shutter speed and the planes movement.  

These shots remind me that what we see is that tiny part of the world that our eyes are wired to capture and our brain is wired to interpret.  With different eyes, we'd see different things and know different things.  For example, what if we didn't see skin pigment, just whether people were benevolent or threatening.