I just returned from a pho­tog­ra­phy trip to the East­ern Sier­ras (above Bishop) with a side-trip to the Ancient Bristle­cone Pine For­est nearby in the White Moun­tains. This was some­thing of an exper­i­ment, as I had no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence in nature pho­tog­ra­phy. I had rented a tri­pod and a 20mm/f2.8 lens for my Nikon F6.

Here are some lessons I learned from this trip:

1. Don’t for­get the quick-release plate for the tri­pod when pack­ing. With­out it, a tri­pod is useless.
2. The tri­pod wouldn’t have been much use any­way, as the ter­rain was so rough that it would have been difi­cult or impos­si­ble to set it up.
3. Car­ry­ing a whole bunch of cam­era equip­ment in a back­pack is unnec­es­sary (and really heavy). For next time I’m going to look for some­place that sells pouches that I can put on my web gear to hold my F6 (with a small lens mounted) and one addi­tional lens, and maybe some film.
4. The F6 with its ver­ti­cal grip removed is a per­fect size for car­ry­ing through rough ter­rain. Just don’t for­get to remove the quick-release plate for your tri­pod from the ver­ti­cal grip if you do this.
5. The Cob­ber works really well.
6. Don’t assume that, because you’ve never had alti­tude sick­ness before, you don’t have to worry about it now–especially if you haven’t actu­ally been at such high alti­tudes for fif­teen years.
7. If told to expect “a lot of mos­qui­tos,” be sure you know what the per­son who tells you means by that. While a desert per­son might think “two or three,” the actual num­ber might be closer to “millions.“
8. Two army sur­plus can­teens were a good idea. If I’d only had one it wouldn’t have been enough.
9. It might have been bet­ter (if not as com­fort­able) to camp in the moun­tains instead of get­ting a hotel room in Bishop. Even leav­ing Santa Mon­ica at 2 PM, there was still time to set up camp before it got dark, and prob­a­bly would have elim­i­nated prob­lems with alti­tude sickness.
10. The topo­graph­i­cal maps I got of all the areas we might be going were quite useful.

I went on two hikes dur­ing the trip. The first was Sat­ur­day morn­ing from North Lake. I’d spot­ted a water­fall on a moun­tain­side above the lake, and wanted to get closer to it if I could to pho­to­graph it. My topo­graph­i­cal map showed a trail going up the moun­tain next to the water­fall (which was the North Fork of Bishop Creek), so I decided to head up.

The trail was quite steep, and not marked except for a sign that looked like a big yel­low excla­ma­tion mark. I gather this is sup­posed to sig­nify a trail dif­fi­culty, per­haps some­thing along the lines of “turn back, you fool.” I only went to the top and back down again, but it con­tin­ues on past Grass Lake to meet up with the Lamarck Lakes trail (which is a much eas­ier climb).

The rest of the day I was wiped out by alti­tude sick­ness, but on the way back on Sun­day I took the trail through the Methuse­lah Grove which con­tains bristle­cone pines over 4,000 years old. This time I took only two cam­eras and a pocket full of film, and left the heavy back­pack behind. I had no trou­ble with alti­tude sick­ness, thanks to the accli­ma­tion time the day before and the lighter load.

I won’t know how the pic­tures came out until I get them back from the lab later this week, but I used five rolls, and hope­fully some of them will come out well.

Link: Secret MTA file on pho­tog­ra­phers. The New York Daily News reports that the MTA has a secret film file on photographers:

bq. “MTA inves­ti­ga­tors are keep­ing a secret data­base of peo­ple stopped and ques­tioned for film­ing or pho­tograph­ing bridges and tun­nels as part of the agency’s efforts to thwart ter­ror, the Daily News has learned.

The infor­ma­tion is used to try to deter­mine whether shut­ter­bugs are sim­ply putting together vaca­tion slide shows — or gath­er­ing intel­li­gence to plot may­hem, law enforce­ment sources said.”

If this is true, this is very dis­turb­ing. Both ama­teur and pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers are being turned into mod­ern day boogeypeo­ple. And when a ter­ror­ist inci­dent hap­pens, what do the author­i­ties want? They want peo­ple to send them their tourist snap­shots so that they can try to see if they can spot the bad guys before the act. Argh!! [Photoethnography.com]

It’s not sur­pris­ing, unfor­tu­nately. The Soviet Union had all kinds of silly rules against pho­tog­ra­phy too.

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Ste­fan Kor­shak at moroting.co.za -

A bribe too far! Ukraine scraps all traf­fic cops — After being
stopped every 30 min­utes on a recent car trip and shaken down for a
bribe, Ukran­ian Pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yushchenko decided to elim­i­nate
traf­fic cops. So far, it’s work­ing. [claire­files] [End the War on Free­dom]

Cal­i­for­nia should fol­low the Ukrain­ian example.

Encrypted VOIP Phone. Phil Zim­mer­mann (of PGP fame) is about to debut his encrypted VOIP phone project. I pre­sume it will be free and open source, and that the cryp­tog­ra­phy will be strong enough for any appli­ca­tion. I don’t know when it will be released, but it’s cer­tainly an excel­lent idea.

Does any­one know of any other encrypted VOIP projects, either open source or oth­er­wise? [Schneier on Secu­rity]

There’s PGP­fone (also from Phil Zim­mer­mann), but that hasn’t been main­tained in a very long time and doesn’t work with cur­rent OSes. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what he comes up with this time.

Gov­ern­ments Should Be Afraid .…. Intrigu­ing trailer here for the upcom­ing movie adap­ta­tion of the anar­chist comic book V for Vendetta. [Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog]

The trailer looks very promis­ing. I’ll cer­tainly see this when it comes out.

Recently I’ve been learn­ing Cocoa, since part of my job at Syman­tec is con­fig­u­ra­tion man­age­ment for the Mac group. My impres­sion so far (as of chap­ter six of Cocoa Pro­gram­ming for Mac OS X) is that it’s a bit like “REAL­ba­sic”, but much more com­pli­cated. It’s also pretty use­less out­side of a nar­row aspect of my cur­rent job, but more knowl­edge is always a good thing.

Reporters’ Log: Lon­don Tube alert. A num­ber of Lon­don Tube sta­tions were evac­u­ated and some lines closed after minor blasts occurred in what the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police described as a “seri­ous inci­dent” on Thursday.

BBC News cor­re­spon­dents reported on a day that Lon­don came under attack for a sec­ond time. [BBC News]

I won­der if this was some sort of hasty copy­cat attack by peo­ple who didn’t really know how to make bombs?

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Patrick J. Buchanan at Cre­ators Syn­di­cate via The Mil­i­tant Lib­er­tar­ian -

Why Are They Killing Us? — because our mil­i­tary is tres­pass­ing in
their coun­tries, says Robert Pape in his book

Dying to Win: The Strate­gic Logic of Sui­cide Ter­ror­ism. [mil­i­tant]
bq.
What Pape is say­ing is that the neo­cons’ “World War IV” — our
invad­ing Islamic coun­tries to over­throw regimes and con­vert them into
democ­ra­cies — is sui­ci­dal, like stomp­ing on an anthill so as not to
be bit­ten by ants. It is the pres­ence of U.S. troops in Islamic lands
that is the prog­en­i­tor of sui­cide ter­ror­ism.
[End the War on Free­dom]

Unfor­tu­nately our Dear Leader has no inten­tion of giv­ing up his empire to end ter­ror­ist attacks. And why should he? Ter­ror­ism is a big help to the gov­ern­ment, giv­ing it the means to stam­pede the sheeple into throw­ing away the rem­nants of their freedom.

GUS DIZEREGA: Repub­li­cans and Com­mu­nists. Read­ing many of the Repub­li­can com­ments on the Rove/Plame issue reminds me of the reac­tion of Amer­i­can Com­mu­nists after learn­ing of the pact Stalin signed with Hitler. The Com­mu­nists went from lock step denun­ci­a­tions of the Nazis to lock step praise of them as peace lov­ing. (They changed again when Hitler dou­ble­crossed Stalin.)

We see the same kind of dis­hon­est behav­ior from peo­ple hav­ing the temer­ity to call them­selves ‘con­ser­v­a­tives” though all they seem to want to con­serve is their… [Lib­erty & Power: Group Blog]

Since many of the Neo­con­ser­v­a­tives actu­ally are Com­mu­nists (they say they’re for­mer Com­mu­nists, but their actions sug­gest oth­er­wise), the sim­i­lar­ity is not surprising.

I recently upgraded to the lat­est verion of “REAL­ba­sic” and used it to write a small tool for inter­nal use at work. Since the IDE no longer runs in the Mac OS, I switched to the Win­dows ver­sion with this upgrade. I didn’t want to give up my license for the older Mac ver­sion, though, and Janet at REAL Soft­ware was nice enough to acco­mo­date me by sell­ing me a REAL­ba­sic 2005 Pro Win­dows license for half-off, while allow­ing me to retain my REAL­ba­sic 5.5 Pro Mac license. It’s nice deal­ing with com­pa­nies that actu­ally care about their customers!

When I first saw the all in one win­dow tabbed inter­face of the new ver­sion at REAL­world 2004, I was skep­ti­cal. In prac­tice it works really well, espe­cially on Win­dows machines that only have one monitor.

I was able to com­plete my project in about one work­ing day (although the time was actu­ally spread across about four days), and most of that was decid­ing how I would imple­ment undo. Pretty good for my first Win­dows app!