Neutral Density Filter Effect

By rinjani | February 29, 2008

One type of image I always like are those with motion, such as the image below of sea stacks. The waves flowing around the rocks blur into a misty background. I took this photo at the end of the day using a 3 stop neutral density filter. The filter allowed me to take a 20s exposure, so that the motion of the waves produced a soft, flowing sea around the solid sea stacks in the foreground. The image itself was taken along the Central Coast of California. The stacks are coloured by the glow from the setting sun which you can see in the background.

Sea Stacks along the Central Coast - ©Jon Bertsch

Details: Nikon D200, Nikon 17-55mm @48mm, ISO 100, f.20, ~20s

Neutral density filters come in a variety of strengths. Buy one and see what different effects with waves, waterfalls and rivers you can produce - maybe you’ll find some new ways of seeing the World.

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Yosemite Valley, Feb 2008

By rinjani | February 24, 2008

We made a quick trip up to Yosemite over the President’s day weekend. Friends gave us a chance to take their cabin reservation at Curry Village and we jumped on it. The valley had about a 3 ft of snow everywhere and was beautiful. The road on the north side of the valley was closed which meant you could enjoy a little escape from the usual roar of cars while hiking. It was a fantastic day with few hikers and lots of peace along the banks of the Merced. The valley was crawling with people since it was a holiday weekend, but all you needed to do was walk a few hundred meters to escape the throngs.

February is the month famous for the orange colours at sunset that hit El Cap and some of the other walls of the valley and multitudes of photographers where there to recapture Galen Rowell’s (and others) superb Yosemite images. I remarked to my buddies that you “couldn’t throw a tripod without hitting one…” and it certainly seemed that way at sunset as they lined up along the banks of the Merced, pointing towards the shear walls of El Cap.

In the morning I spent some time wandering the valley floor before heading off to take some images of El Cap reflected in the Merced that I hade previously staked out. When I arrived a small gaggle of photographers were already in place, 4×5 film and digital vying for position. The image below is “classic” Yosemite photo with El Cap reflected in the waters of the quiet Merced.

El Capitan and the Merced River - ©Jon Bertsch

Details: Nikon D200, Tokina 12-24mm @15m, ISO 100, f.11

The challenge in this photo was to balance the light between the walls of El Cap and the river below. Waiting for the sun to move down the wall it was easy to see that the wall was many stops of light brighter than the river reflection. By using a graduated neutral density filter (Galen Rowell series from Singh Ray) I was able to bring the two halves of the photograph into balance. These are extremely useful filters that were originally developed for film, but even in the digital age they retain a place in my camera bag. It’s much easier to get the images correct the first time than spend hours in photoshop trying to stitch different images together. In this case I droppped the line where the neutral density filter begins right into the tree line where the heaviest shadows were destined to stay.

Yosemite is a wonderful place to visit during the Winter when snow coats the valley floor and high walls. The waterfalls are not flowing heavily, but there is plenty else to see and way fewer people than in the popular Summer months.

See you out there.

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Sea of Cortez, Baja

By rinjani | November 12, 2007

Just back from a one week trip to the Sea of Cortez on the Solmar V. We had some decent days of diving but low to bad viz for most of the trip. A tropical depression south of Baja caused the whole area to get stirred up, killing viz and creating a bouncing ocean for the first day of travel. This was our first trip on the Solmar V and we would definitely go back to do some of their other trips given the chance. Great food and the dive staff were very knowledgable. The boat is pretty sturdy and seemed to handle the seas - though a number of passengers were extremely ill.

The only downer was that apparently, due to the seasickness of some, the captain decided to sit at one site for two whole days. So I ended up doing nine dives on the same site! Not exactly what my buddy and I were expecting, but sometimes that’s what happens. To be fair this site did have a fair amount to see - decent numbers of schooling fish, a mass mating of sea stars, some mobula rays, various types of critters and scorpionfish - but we were there for the sealions, sharks and mantas (the site was “boring as sin” according to my Buddy).

A quick note on the mantas. We had been down here before in 2002 and had great dives with mantas at La Reina, the home to many mantas. However, on this trip the boat made no effort to go their which my wife and I thought strange. On returning from the trip I found some internet articles which suggested that the mantas are now a thing of the past - “mysteriously” gone, though you never know how much to trust one or two articles on the internet. I suspect they were fished out soon after we saw them if they are gone. A sad day. See this search for more.

Once we were done with La Baillena (the whale) we moved on to the sea lion colony at Los Islotes. Home to several hundred sea lions this is the place to play with them. You can spend hours here playing with the youngsters, getting charged by the bulls and enjoying the acrobatics A huge school of sardines was present when we visited, spread acros the entire dive site, there must have been millions of them. You could watch the entire food chain, fishing eating, fish eating fish, right up to the sealions eating the snappers and other larger species. Beyond the sealions, there are lots of scorpionfish here, schools of tang, angelfish and smaller tuna. The tuna were fun to watch, bombing along the reef in formation, darting into the seething mass of sardine to grab a slow mover. Just fantastic. On the boat we were all comparing it to a National Geographic film.

We also dove at some other sites in the area, Swaine Rock (lots of eels, some sealions, small hard coral reef); the Fang Ming, a boat sank to make an artifical reef; La Salvatierra, a ship that sank here in 1976, which had huge numbers of fish and other sea life; Cabo Pulmo, a protected park and home to some of the largest grouper around, viz was pretty bad here so we didn’t see the beatiful reefs that it is said to contain. We were very happy to see huge grouper and lots of them at Cabo Pulmo, the twenty five fishing boats sitting at the park boundary also gives one the idea that here at least some big fish survive.

We also took one morning to look for whale sharks. They had an ultralight from La Paz join the search and we spotted one a mile or so from the boat. Everyone jumped into the pangas and off we went to join the hunt. We found a juvenile, maybe 22ft long cruising around the shallow sands of the bay and had a fun time snorkeling with him for an hour or so. The pangas would jump ahead of the shark and dump us into the water then we would try to swim alongside him for a while. It was amazing to see this huge creature in 10 ft of water, cruising along with no worries. Since the viz here was pretty bad, the shallow water was great since we had decent sunlight to view his progress. A very cool morning and wonderful to see that such majestic creatures are still able to survive.

Photography Notes

Most of the images I show here were taken with a Tokina 10-17mm lens on a D200 in an Ikelite housing. This was my first trip using this lens so there was a bit of a learning curve. I did have backscatter issues, since the lens is so wide and the water was so murky. Around Los Islotes, the sardine school basically created a wall of murk from their feeding and fish poop. On much of the open water diving the viz was 15ft.

The Solmar V has a large camera area for folks to use, though on this trip only a few people had cameras. If everyone was a photoger on a full trip, things would be crowded. I recommend bringing some bungie cords to tie down your camera when the boat is moving through big seas. Camera rigs can easily get bounced off the table. Otherwise be prepared to sleep with your baby if the water gets rough. The boat runs 120V with North American 3-prong plugs, so US visitors can charge things just as they would at home.

All in all this was a fun trip even though we were stuck at one place for a while. At least there was diving to be had. We’d definitely go back on the boat and try some of their other trips such as the Socorro islands. It’s easy to get to Cabo San Lucas from our local international airport - SFO to Cabo is a direct 21/2 hr flight.

Jon Bertsch

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Diving Pt. Lobos, Carmel, CA

By rinjani | October 15, 2007

Finally able to get my dive buddy out for the first dive of the year! That’s what happens when you have major surgery but it’s incredible that we haven’t been able to hit the ocean this whole year. We rolled up to Pt. Lobos exactly one year since our last dive there and looked forward to testing our skills and getting some underwater time.

We did three dives over the weekend, each was a pretty standard Lobos dive - stumble carefully down the boat ramp, kick out along through the kelp channel a ways until we are near the 40ft depth mark (the end of the second sea stack) and descend down. Visibilty was around 25 - 30ft and a little murky. Closer inside of Whaler’s cove vis was closer to 10ft (or less). One thing we noticed was the lack of blacksmiths and how few rookfish were out and about. Although there were clouds of small fry here and there we both thought the number of fish was quite low - but it could have been the tide or weather, who knows. We saw a few ling cod (small ones) on the rocks and one good sized Sheephead.

By the end of each dive our fingers were getting cold from the 47F water, but our drysuits did their job and rest of us did just fine. Of course my buddy’s 12mm hood might have had something to do with it!

I was carrying my D200 and Ikelite housing and managed to get a few images. Since it was the first time for a year I didn’t expect much but I was happy to play. The two wide angle images were taken with a Nikon D200, Tokina 12-24mm lens and Ikelite housing with 8″ dome (standard port extension).

Here’s an interesting nudibranch egg ribbon that I noticed as we were cruising around.

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Restoring a MySQL database table

By rinjani | October 12, 2007

Once in a while somone will accidently overwrite a bunch of data, drop a table by mistake or find some other way to corrupt a database table. This is when you get the call to please restore data from the backups (which you have right). Well, I do this once in a while and noticed today that most information about this for mysql assumes that you have a sql dump of the data. What if you use mysqlhotcopy to backup your data? There’s not much I could find about it on the web so I thought I would just write a quick note.

We assume this is MySQL and you use mysqlhotcopy to do backups.

We also assume you are the root admin.

It’s pretty easy.

Login:
mysql -u root -p

and give you password when prompted.

switch database context:
mysql> use database_name;

drop the table:
mysql> DROP TABLE table_name;

run your restore:
mysql>RESTORE TABLE table_name FROM ‘/path/to/backup/database/directory/’; e.g /var/lib/mysqlbackup/database_name/

You ought to see:

+---------------------------+---------+----------+----------+
| Table                          | Op      | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+---------------------------------+---------+----------+----------+
| table_name                 | restore | status     | OK       |
+---------------------------+---------+----------+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

If you get an error make sure that you have privs to read/write the files.

Good luck.

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Warming filters in the digital photography era

By rinjani | September 19, 2007

A few years ago, back when film ruled, all serious photographers learnt about warming filters and why they are useful. The filters come in serveral strengths, but the most common are 81A, 81B and 81C (in increasing power). In a classic case you might find yourself taking photos in a shady area using Ektachrome under a sunny blue sky. Once your film was developed you would find that everything had a blue cast due to the light quality. The light under these conditions might be measured at 7000K or higher, very blue. By adding a warming filter you could bring the light hitting the film back down to a lower kelvin level (”warmer”) and eliminate the blue cast. Adding a warming filter when taking photos of people generally made their complexion better, especially if you were using any type of strobe, since these are usually balanced to 5500K. The idea was to warm up the image by enhancing the red and yelow end of the spectrum, producing warmer colours. In the digital age however, warming filters are no longer necessary. There are various ways to approach this, one is to do some post-processing with Photoshop using the built in photographic filters that are available, or to play with the RAW white balance settings, but this extra work takes time. Instead it is easier to ust have your dSLR do the work. There are various ways to mimic the action of a warming filter in most dSLRs, i) is to set the white balance manually to something like 4800K; another method is to use the built-in white balance options such as cloudy or shade which will alter the white balance to a lower Kelvin temperature; in some cameras such as my D200 you can adjust the auto white balance to -2 or -3 which has a similar effect to the other approaches I have mentioned.

On a recent trip I did some side-by-side comparisons to see what effect the camera controls would have a particular scene. In this case we had high bright clouds with no sun. The conditions made for rather cool light in the area I was especially since I was working in an area with lots of black and grey coloured rocks. below you can get an idea of how the camera settings can affect the resulting image. The following are in no way exhaustive, but they give a god idea of what you camera can do by changing a few settings.

The first image shows the auto White Balance jpg. Giving a rather grey and cold image.	The next image is slightly warmer with white balance set manually to 4800K. This looks a little better.
The next image was created with the white balance manually set to 4500.	The final image was created with white balance set to shade.

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Don’t leave home without it…

By rinjani | August 30, 2007

I’ve tried this on a couple of photo trips and most recently in Iceland - a power inverter. This little gadget will take the DC power supply from a car cigarette lighter and convert it to AC for charging your various portabe devices and batteries. Much easier than having to buy separate ones from each gadget company you can just use the inverter to charge everything with their standard chargers. I’m all for reducing the number of pieces of wire and charging device that I have to keep track of and using this makes things a little easier when you have anumber of different devices with you. I charged my Mac powerbook, Nikon batteries and AA NiMHi batteries using it with no problems. Works best with the engine running, so you can charge while driving from place to place. The model I have is pretty lightweight and was easy to pack for my Iceland trip. You can find them all over the web or at electronics shop, they are inexpensive and work, as far as I can tell, around the world in any car out there.

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Iceland - land of ice and fire

By rinjani | August 22, 2007

Recently returned from a trip to Iceland for my brother’s wedding. While there we had the opportunity to travel around the country a little and see some of the sites. The country is really amazing with stark vistas, gigantic icecaps, geysirs, waterfals and volcanoes. Perhaps the easiest way to see the land is to rent a car and travel highway 1 around the entire island. From Reykjavik it takes a week to travel the entire road, but if you have longer then you’ll have time to spend at some of the major sites. Some of the main attractions are the geyser at Strokkur, the waterfalls of Gullfoss and Dettifoss, the icecap Vatnajokull, the floating icebergs of Jokulsarlon, the West and East fjords, Lake Myvatn and surrounding area, and the towns of Akureyi, Husavik. There is more than I could describe in a short post here, but I will add some photos later.

I have posted some images on the my main website under an Iceland Gallery and on my Flickr site.

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Babel the movie - really, really lame

By rinjani | August 12, 2007

OK, I don’t go to the movies much and I am not a fan who has to see every movie that gets nominated for an Academy Award so I was amazed that a movie like Babel could get nominated for any Academy Awards, let alone seven (are you folks nuts?). On top of dragging myself through 40 minutes of Borat, another movie that I had seen a fair amount of press about, just a week, before I can only say that we are being short changed by the movie industry.

Borat - my wife gave up after 15 minutes - was just poor quality and lame, with ethnic and gender jokes that simply were not that funny, especially with no decent plot to space them out. I had managed to get the faint memory of it out of my skull by last night and settled down for Babel with the “Brad”.

Babel had a concept that makes sense, seems cool and could really be interesting. How one action in one place could have ripple effects across the great six-degrees of separation Universe; thus, having made a friendly or peaceful gesture in the wilds of Morocco, we see how a Japanese man’s life intersects with people in So. Cal. and the unknowing vectors in between conspire to turn an attempt at friendship into a disaster for someone in another culture and place.

Sadly, really, you find me shouting at the screen “get on the freakin’ bus or let it go”. Why, please someone, why did Brad care if the bus left. His girl couldn’t leave on the bus we were confidently told, so we get scenes of the bus passengers waiting, for what? why? Brad wants to have an ambulance so why does he need the bus around. Let it go! Then we have the idiot nephew of the illegal nanny of Brad’s kids, a wedding, and subsequent deportation from the US. Of course the vectors in the middle who cause the actions are not to be forgotten. Shooting an AK47 at random objects seems idiotic, especially a tourist bus. Then at the police - never a good idea.

All in all, crap.

I had to hope things could get better for the story but no. It just went south. Inspite of the Japanese youth scenes (and skin moments), the Moroccan youth scenes, the Mexican wedding scenes and the Brad anguish scenes.

I say avoid this movie. Seven oscar nominations, what does that say about the horrendous state of the movie industry?

Bring on Die Hard, at least I have no expectations and know what I’ll get!

For more see the Rotten Tomatoes review

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Road trip on Highway 395

By rinjani | April 3, 2007

Took a few days out and drove the circuit from Oakland south on I5, around the Sierra through Bakersfield, and back home through Tahoe along highway 395 to route 50 to the bay area. Spring is a great time to visit the Eastern Sierra, not to many people on the road and the weather is comfortable. Since most campgrounds are still closed and many stores and businesses still boarded up visitors tend to avoid the area. Perfect if you want a quiet morning photographing or hiking. At Mono Lake for the sunrise there were just eight of us, one group of six and two others (including me). The evening before, at sunset just two. I’ve been at Mono in the morning with something like two hundred (yes!) people - that sucks, it’s no fun. So think about trying the off season, it is a good time to avoid the crowds and enjoy a popular location in relative peace. The area around Lone Pine is beautiful, with the Sierra and Mt. Whitney in the background it’s hard to beat the location. The Alabama Hills, just minutes out along the Whitney Portal Rd. offer fantastic photo ops. I spent an evening and part of one morning at the Mobius or Galen’s (after Galen Rowel) arch without a single other person. At another arch I waited patiently for the sun to rise high enough to shoot the Sierra in the background with the stone of the arch lit up by the early sun and not a soul to be seen. What a fantatasic place to live. I’ll be adding some photos soon with links to others.

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