I'm now in sweltering New York City, after spending a few days in the mountains where it's cool and dry. Cannot wait to finish what I'm doing here and get the hell away to someplace where the climate doesn't lock me in 24 hours a day.

Here are a few images of my birthday away:

PikaField Mouse perched near it's burrow
[Many thanks to "rob boo" for pointing out the deficiencies in my knowledge of the rocky mountain animal population. More about pikas at Pika Works]

Chipmunk looking for food

Chipmunk not quite sure what to do about the long black cylindrical device pointed at it...

Wrath of the RHIGF

I spent my day snaking hairballs out of my shower drain.

The drain has become progressively worse and worse since my Raven Haired Italian Girl Friend (RHITF) stayed here a while back.

I believe I have now completely cleaned out all the long strands of raven-colored hair from the drain, and I can shower without quickly standing in dirty water up to my ankles.

Still, sort of miss having her here, though a recent shorter-haired visitor of Czech origin has made up for the company. Too bad she's returned home too.

Israel Passport Update

Well, I got the document as discussed the other day. But apparently only good for one year. It seems that the US government has been concerned about foreign nationals arriving here, "losing" their passports, and then getting new ones in an effort to avoid anybody noticing that they stayed far longer than their tourist visas permitted. This avoids their being blacklisted for future travel. In most cases passports are not even renewed: the person is usually given a one-way transit document good for only a few months and allowing the holder to go home.

I was allowed to get an actual passport because my old one which was issued in 1973 was "lost" so long ago and because there's no question of my legal status in the US. Still, at the US government's insistence, I can only get a 1 year document after reporting a loss. In six months I can go back and request that it be extended out for an additional nine years, upon proof of being here legally, which I already provided.

Yet another example of our Department of Homeland Security generating lots of rules and "action" with no real results.

Weekend Cat Update

The RHIGF is the source of only one type of problem hair this week. With the recent increase in temps, shedding activity has increased significantly. Time for some serious grooming.

Panorama Photo Update

Got myself this neat little device from Really Right Stuff, who make some of the coolest camera-support equipment available. I've calibrated it and did some experiments, and it's pretty fantastic. Don't have any really worthy images, but look for some soon. My 20mm lens seems to be just about perfect for panoramas on the digital Nikon.

iPhone Mania

My own take on this is that it'll open up the smartphone market for consumers in a way that it has never been open before. That said, as Kevin Wassong notes, it's not a device for my mom, and in truth is overkill for my needs too.

But it's not going to displace the BlackBerries in the business market until things like integration with enterprise email servers are worked out, and possibly not even then. I have not had good results with touch-screen keyboards of any size in the past and am somewhat skeptical of the reviews claiming that it's not an issue. Maybe not for casual consumer web surfing, but has a real crackberry addict tried it and liked it?

The Death of Biotech and Pharma

David Miller of Biotech Stock Research points out in this month's newsletter that it is quite possible that biotech and pharma, along with much of health care, is likely to become uninvestible in the coming years. Copyrighted stuff, so can only give tidbits here. Justifications for this are mostly political: in addition to the liklihood of more regulation and price controls, the FDA has come under so much political pressure to avoid approving drugs with risks, that the liklihood of approval has been signficiantly reduced, the liklihood of approval subject to ongoing re-evaluation much increased, and thus the costs of bringing something to market increased signficantly. At this point a drug that experiences significant side-effects in only 1% of the people who take it is being questioned. That type of scrutiny would have kept lots of current drugs off the market. It is a big deal.

He forecasts that in coming years, we'll see a move away from drugs that work for everybody and towards solutions that integrate genetic testing of the potential patient, with a selection of drugs that are uniquely suited to that patient. From my perspective, the problems with this will continue to be political. What if you come up with a drug that works well only with people whose "genetic identifier" includes the gene for blue eyes or low-skin pigmentation? Think the polticians won't intervene against a "racist" cure, even if grounded in good science?

Summer Travel

It looks like this summer's travel will be mostly related to my mom's upcoming move. While my brother and I are happy to finally see this happen, an August move in Manhattan is not sounding like fun.

Perhaps I'll manage to squeeze in a quick birthday trip to the mountains.

-btc

A couple of weeks ago when I was in Utah I experimented a bit with panorama photographs. I didn't have much to work with since, as I mentioned at the time, I had decided to leave the good camera home in order to make room for some (ultimately useless) hiking boots and other equipment.

So I played around a bit, trying to keep everything lined up and level as much as possible just by eyeballing it on my pocket digital's tiny screen. In the end I got four of them, all taken on my second day there, in the general environment of the Snowbird resort.

Snowbird from the balcony of a lodge where I had dinner. One thing I notice about panoramas which is true of all wide-angle perspectives is that the perspective tends to make the mountains look a lot less steep than they are. Virtually everything left of the middle is advanced or expert terrain, though it doesn't quite look that way.

The western panorama from Hidden Peak, at the top of the Snowbird Tram. The Salt Lake valley is off to the right under the haze. Note the skier walking back up on the far left. He's just skied the Little Cloud bowl's north-east facing slopes, then walked back up the opposite side where there wasn't much snow. At this time of year, walking back up to take the tram down is a lot easier than walking down 2/3 of the mountain through varying terrain and conditions.

The eastern panorama from Hidden Peak, at the top of the Snowbird Tram. Alta is just past Mt. Baldy, which is the closest big peak. The terrain to the left is part of Snowbird's Peruvian Gulch and the terrain to the right is called Mineral Basin. You can just barely make out the cables for the Mineral Basin chairlift at the very far right.

A northwestern panorama from Hidden Peak, including a the Snowbird tram and a bit of the loading dock

A few learnings here.

I was in Utah over the weekend, primarily for a meeting of my vacation spot's HOA finance committee, but also to get out into the mountains, hike, maybe mountain bike a bit, and generally enjoy the outdoors. There was a lot of good, interesting information exchanged at the meeting that has wider implications and about which I will comment tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I chose to leave the nice camera home and took the little pocket one. Figured I would rather hike unimpeded than hike with a bunch of camera stuff on my back. I also generally prefer not to have lots of carry-on baggage with me when I forget to check-in early and end up in the Southwest "C" boarding group.

Leaving the good camera was a bad choice. It was a great weekend for photography and a much worse one for hiking. These conditions don't lend themselves to navigating across the terrain unless you also have snowshoes, a rope, preferably a partner, and a variety of other safety gear:

American Fork Twins

In fact, there were still a few guys skiing out there, coming off the top of the Snowbird tram which runs year-round. I thought about it chucking everything and taking a run or two, but decided that the beginning of June was not the best time to start skiing after four months, especially with the bottom 1/2 of the mountain mostly mud and rocks.

Probably could have driven to a lower elevation and found something nice, but driving would have defeated the whole purpose of being there.

So I contented myself with time in the pool with a few glasses of wine and as much photography I could do with my little "toy" digital. My friend Leo has recently been experimenting with freeware stitching software to make panoramas from multiple images, and I found the top of the Snowbird Tram to be a good place to play with the possibilities. I will post my attempts as soon as I have them put together.

And of course I dined at my usually spot, hoping for a Larry appearance. As is his habit in the summers, he was off in the trees somewhere, presumably eating pine nuts and not needing any helpings of bread. So, here's a photo of him or one of his friends, taken in January:

Larry loves bread

-btc

Photography has been my interest, and at times my unparallelled passion, since I got my first camera back in junior high school. I won a bunch of prizes as a teen, did a lot more with it in college, then pursued it very seriously later, doing both 35mm and large format (4x5") work, mostly in black and white.

I fell out of photography again in the mid-90s, because the lack of a darkroom really made it impossible to do the kind of work that I enjoy, which tends to be very printing-intesive. I got back into it a few years ago, still working on film, but often moving to digital for my post-processing work.

Still, it's only recently that I've moved away from film entirely. For one thing, reasonable quality printing of digital photos is finally good enough to satisfy my needs. For another, the papers have come a ong way. Photoshop has also come a long, long way and now allows me to do just about everything that I ever wanted to when working in chemicals. Until very recently I still kept one film camera -- there were still a few things I liked to do, and certain effects I liked that were tough to accomplish with a digital camera and Photoshop. 10+ megapixel cameras and better familiarity with the application have solved those problems for me. My photos don't look the same as they do in silver medium, but they are a look that I like and it's a medium that I've become conversant enough in to abandon its predecessor.

I've slowly sold off my 4x5 camera equipment, then some of my 35mm film cameras, and now finally the last one. My last roll of film, started last winter, will be processed unfinished, because I can't think of any reason I'll ever finish it.

But, I've got to be a contrarian here. Digital works fine for me, but I still think film has a future, and that people like my former instructor John Sexton, are perhaps being a bit too concerned about the disappearance of silver-based potography as an art form.

Make no mistake about it, digital will rule the consumer and commercial worlds in the years to come. But just as there are those who still work in platinum, palladium, daguerreotype and other commercially obsolete technologies, there will also be artists who continue to work in silver for the unique look it makes possible.

In fact, I suspect that the opportunities for those who want to work in silver will actually expand in the coming years, particularly for those who are working in black and white. The reason is that the tyrrany imposed by Kodak and others whose manufacturing methods and scale demanded that they produce only large runs of similar product will be over. As with other purely artistic mediums, silver photography will come to be dominated by smaller firms, selling highly differentiated products, working in small batches and tailoring their products to small niches. There is already evidence of this happenning, as small manufacturers around the world (many in eastern Europe) have sprung up as the big players have abandoned the niche.

Though I have moved my own work to digital, I hope to continue decorating my walls with the works of those who continue to work in other media as well. And I suspect that they'll probably have a far greater set of choices and creative options than I did when I worked with silver and chemistry a decade ago.

-btc