Switzer falls

Went hiking Sunday near Switzer falls in the Angeles National Forest. Lots of stream crossings, and this one in particular was guarded by this lizard:

As we got closer, he did some push-ups to warn us off. I crossed first, eventually scaring him off, but he came right back. Here he is standing up to SC:

Not sure what he is. Maybe a Western fence lizard? Apparently the way to tell is to look at their underside.

Strawberry Hill, Golden Gate Park

I think this picture came out really well:

Southern California adventures

Lots of adventures over the last two weeks!

Joshua Tree

Yesterday we rented some equipment (tent, sleeping bags, mats, cookstove) from the Caltech Y, packed everything into the car and drove out to Joshua Tree. 

Mono Lake and Bodie

Yosemite

Edit (2011/11/29): Added photos (finally)! Old entry (mostly trip logistics) at the end of the post.

2011 Yosemite

Elephant seals at Ano Nuevo

February 28:

Guided elephant seal walk at Año Nuevo State Preserve!

First of all, the California coastline in general is pretty awesome:

At the time that we went, the females had all left for the sea to eat, abandoning their pups on the shore. This process automatically upgrades them to "weaners". Our docent's talk of weaner this and weaner that was not met without the occasional stifled snicker. Also, I've always imagined weaning to be a more gentle, nurturing process.

We saw some of these weaners lying around looking like warts on the dunes:

They like to come together into groups, called "weaner pods".

Anyways, cute!

We saw a couple big males around, too. Elephant seals are known to be very aggressive and have intense fights for beach dominance. Their blubber is too thick for them to kill each other, but they do mess up each others' skin. After several fights, the skin in their neck area turns into a protective plate of scar tissue.

Today, they were all pretty inactive:

It was a particularly warm day, which contributes to their inactivity. They are very well insulated to withstand the cold open ocean, but this makes heat dissipation a problem while they're on land. Occasionally you'll see them flipping sand over themselves:

DMV FTW

I got a parking ticket for having expired registration stickers on my car (CVC 5204a). $76. What.

I'm further miffed because I, like a good citizen, renewed my registration online when it was due, but never received the stickers from the DMV. Granted, that was 6 months ago, but maybe I have a chance to contest the citation under subdivision c, which grants exemption if the owner has made the proper application for registration but hasn't yet received the new documents.

I go to the DMV today planning to use this argument to weasel my way out of the $76 parking fine and the $18 sticker replacement fee. After waiting half an hour (even with an appointment), the clerk shot down my plan. She says you can only request no-fee replacement material in the window between 30 and 90 days after registration renewal. She was also highly skeptical of my plan to contest the citation.

But after seeing my ticket, she informed me that if a DMV officer verifies that I've installed new tags, then it's considered "corrected" and I don't have to pay the parking fine, just a $25 administrative fee. And then I guess I was particularly charming, because she waived the sticker replacement fee.

At home, I call the Santa Clara parking IVR system (press 7 for correctable violations), but that says $10. I look up the Santa Clara bail schedule to arbitrate. It defers to the California 2010 uniform bail schedule, which says $25. And I get the feeling that I'm not entitled to the lowest advertised price in this case.

So, yeah - I spent just over an hour at the DMV today, but ended up paying $25 instead of $94. I guess it's a form of PD - those willing to pay subsidize those willing to wait in line. But parking fines isn't your typical market, so is that still a good thing?

Film back from Snapfish

These came back from Snapfish Thursday (3 day turnaround, just like York Photo). I think they did a slightly better job with dust and scratches. Like the York scans, the brightness on these were also off (I did some software adjustments):

With the 400 speed film, I tried a shot of the fish tank, which is lit by a single 20W fluorescent tube. I think the shutter speed was 1/8 or 1/10.

I really ought to start writing down the exposure information for each shot. I don't remember anything about the shutter speed or lighting.

 The next few photos are from the Palo Alto Foothills Park.

SC contemplating some lichen (Alectoria sarmentosa, I think)

 A duck thing nibbling aquatic stem plants.

The colors on a lot of these came out really muted...I wonder what I can do about that.

Here's that hill I took a picture of in HDR mode on my iPhone. Colors look a lot better here, and I guess the fact that this came out means the film's dynamic range is wider than the iPhone's.

This came out very sharp. Maybe this means my other photos are out of focus...

I keep finding myself distracted by the hard edges on the out-of-focus twigs in the background.

The film definitely renders color differently than digital. I haven't figured out yet under what circumstances that's a good thing...

First round of photos back

This is the roll I sent to York Photo for developing. Photos first, technical details later:

A challenger appears! This was taken during a particularly cooperative time at the feeder. At one point there were up to 5 birds more or less getting along and sharing the feeder. Now there's just two birds battling over who owns it.

This one is using the perch. In between sips, he kept peering over the side of the feeder, probably wondering what the hell I'm doing. I think this guy is the one currently winning the turf war.

I can't really tell which bird this is. I liked the sense of depth of focus from this photo, though.

I wanted to capture how the curtains glow in the direct sunlight in the morning, but taking a picture of the curtains directly doesn't really convey that. I think including the window frame would give more contrast, but at the time I wanted to crop out the ugly stains on the lower part of the curtain (left by the last tenant).

One morning I got up particularly early and, due to the shortening days, I actually caught the trailing end of the sunrise. I liked the warm glow on these leaves just starting to change color. I swear, though, in the 30 seconds it took me to put on pants and get the camera, the light had changed. I took a picture anyways.

Our pumpkin! Which got turned into pie! And then mold!

Gah, this picture needs to be straightened. But look! Colors! Only some of the trees change color here, but there are a couple of them near our apartment. It's nice, but I miss the brilliant displays and the associated smells and sounds. The first time I went home for Thanksgiving was my junior year. Riding home at night, I was confused by all the debris blowing around the highway: it'd been 3 years since I'd experienced autumn and I'd forgotten about that whole thing with the trees and the leaves.

This and the next few photos are from a walk through the Dish. This a ... red berry tree. Juniper? Anyways, I was drawn to the red bits, but I think the leaves are the most interesting part of this photograph. What an odd shade of green! I wonder if they looked that way when I took the picture. It reminds me of the color of Fuji film boxes.

The green part is Stanford campus (faculty housing, I think) and the yellow part is the Dish. There's something about water management here...

 A tree! SC likes this photo best, and I agree.

Technical Notes

These were shot on Fujicolor 100 with a Nikon 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens and processed and scanned by York Photo. They did a real quick turnaround (3 business days from mailing out the film) and have the best prices, but I have some complaints about their work.

This is what the tree photo looked like when I downloaded it from their site. Way overexposed! Did I do that? But I've been using the automatic exposure modes, and I didn't have this problem with the roll I had processed at Keeble and Shuchat.

Did they scan it poorly? It's weird that I was able to extract so much detail from what appears to be pure white. It's like there's some kind of dynamic range compression going on, which is more typical of film overexposure rather than digital overexposure. Maybe Keeble & Shuchat did some exposure compensation for me?

The second complaint is more concrete: dust and scratches on the scans. First of all, they processed the film, so there's really no excuse for that. Second, isn't ICE pretty standard nowadays?

Finally, I had some shots that gave me some technical feedback I'll keep in mind for the future:

I wanted to take a picture of the lichen growing in this branch, but the auto exposure overexposed the branch in order to balance the dark background. In this case, I think I'd have to use the spot meter in M mode.

I wanted a silhouette of this weird looking trunk holding up a cloud. I stopped the aperture down pretty far to get both in focus. There's a lot of glare from the sun, though, which is not too surprising, but I wonder what I could do to mitigate that. Maybe a lens hood? Does the small aperture make it worse? More importantly, can I get the lens flare artifacts without that haze?

Palo Alto Foothills Park

We went to Palo Alto Foothills Park yesterday afternoon. We were actually trying to go to the Pearson-Arastradero preserve, but ended up here instead. It was fortunate SC still has a Palo Alto address on her driver's license, otherwise they wouldn't have let us in.

There was a pond full of fuzzy stem plants (and 3 canoefuls of Boy Scouts). And ducks.

SC thought I had a particularly awkward shooting pose. I'm planning on sending the film to Snapfish for processing, so it'll probably be a few weeks before we find out how those pictures turn out.

I thought this hill was pretty interesting - trees and brush on the left, yellowed grass on the right. Is it the sun? This photo was also taken in HDR mode on the iPhone - the colors became muted and there's a halo around the hill, but neither the bright sky nor the dark leaves got washed out.

It was pretty awesome how colorful these were. 

I used Windows Live Photo Gallery (what a mouthful!) to stitch together four photos for this panoramic. The software's not bad; I think the problem here was the auto-exposure settings on the camera.

And as we were heading out, we saw this deer carcass in a clearing by the road. I hope it was mountain lions.

No pumpkins for us

We were planning to go to the Half Moon Bay pumpkin festival today, but the traffic on highway 92 was ludicrous. The iPhone confirmed that it was stop-and-go all the way to Half Moon Bay. We sat on the onramp for 30 minutes and took the first opportunity we had to make an illegal U-turn and come back home. I'm so glad I don't have to sit in traffic as part of my usual commute...

Monterey aquarium members

Went to Monterey aquarium today. Buying the student membership breaks even after two visits, so we decided to get the membership. Now we can go whenever we want! Well, we'll still have the 160 mi / 7 gal / $21 transportation cost, but that's not too bad.

We spent a lot of time looking at the cuttlefish. They're much bigger than the last time we saw them, and they're much more mature now. When they were young, there was a couple fish in the tank with them and they were pretty intimidated by the fish. When startled, they'd jet backwards, and if this trajectory intersected the wall, the bump would startle them into jetting backwards again, right into the same wall. We also got to see them get fed, which was very cool to see.

Anyways, they're big now. They have the tank all to themselves and are now fighting amongst each other. It looks like they're getting pickier about their food, too, because there was lots of food lying around the tank being slowly scavenged by hermit crabs and worm things.

We dropped in on the octopi a few times, but both were inactive. One was pretending (very successfully) to be a rock, and the other was sucked up against the top corner of the glass.

The new flamingo exhibit was nice, but I miss the planted tanks in the old river otter exhibit. We saw a spoonbill standing on a mangrove eating things off its leaves, which was rather odd. The terrariums seemed a little small for birds, though. The exhibit was accompanied by after-school-special anti-carbon messages, which is starting to feel a little heavy-handed, but I think the target there is right. Also apparently the Seafood Watch pamphlets are working, at least according to the aquarium organizers, so that's pretty cool.

Hopping fishes!

We saw them feeding the big kelp tank. A diver went in and all the fishes (including the rockfishes who look dead when they drift along in strange orientations) swam up to her to get the food (restaurant-quality squid, apparently) she was handing out.

Afterwards we talked to the dude narrating the feeding. Learned some pretty cool things. The kelp reproduces in the tank (and grows up, which he calls "recruitment") and grows pretty fast (couple inches a day) in the peak season. The tank water comes from the bay; filtered during the day for clarity, but raw water at night for the nutrients.

Lots of active predation in the tank. Scavengers keep it clear of dead fishes. The fishes reproduce, but other fishes eat the eggs, so there isn't recruitment. Other fishes eat sea urchins, which could pose a problem for the kelp.

Fishes school by size, so you'll have mixed species in a single school. When other species sneak into the tank, they can have trouble when the outgrow the species they sneaked in as...their larger size marks them for predation.

The first set of tuna in the big tank had unnaturally short life spans, and their autopsy showed it was due to cholesterol from the rich diet they were being fed. Oh noes! So they started feeding them healthier food (squid), and life span increased.

Baby jellyfish in a tube

Whelks, with feeding tubes

We also bought some strawberries and artichokes at a farmers' market on the drive down. The strawberries were meh and rotting quite rapidly (a day in a hot car didn't help). The small artichokes (10 for $1, which was what drew us in) are okay; not much of a heart but also not much of a choke. The big artichokes have a tasty heart, but what a strange vegetable to eat!