TWiP #296 just dropped and, after a long absence, I’ve popped back up for an interview with Frederick.

What about? One of my latest passions and something I’ve wanted to get into for a long time: aerial photography using multi-rotor R/C aircraft… in a word: drones. But the good kind.

I’m deep into experimenting, tweaking and hacking  a DJI Phantom with a Hero 3 Black Edition and a new QUADframe 2-axis gimbal kit, so I’ll wait until I have some cool results to share before I write a more extensive post. Until then, we cover a lot of issues and do some hardware show and tell in our TWiP discussion, so check it out!

Here’s the drone interview:

 

And here’s the full episode:

 

I’ve got tons to write about on this and other topics, so I’m determined to get back into regular posting. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here’s a rundown of equipment I mentioned during the interview with links and I’ll write more details about each in future posts. Feel free to pose questions in the comments or, better yet, send them to me via Twitter: @halfpress.

• DJI Phantom
• GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition
• QUADframe 2-axis gimbal kit
• DuBro Tru-Spin Prop Balancer
• EPBuddy Glacier LiPo Batteries (love these!)
• Bluecell LiPo Battery Guard Bag
• Graupner 8×5 E-Props (CW & CCW rotation)
• Hyperion Atlas Digital Servos (for gimbal use)
• FatShark R/C Vision Systems
• Academy of Model Aeronautics (MANY reasons to join, from insurance to education to lobbying)

I’m writing this from the Amtrak Accela heading south into DC. It’s been an adventure.

So let’s see… Newark, NJ.

Quick background: I’ve spent two weeks – a week apart – this month at various Crestron training seminars. The first was in Las Vegas the week before last, the second this week in Rockleigh, NJ at their headquarters. This past seminar in particular was pretty fantastic: great facility, superb teaching environment and absolutely stellar, engaging teaching by Marcus Simmons. The dude is a blast.

I arrived in Newark on Sunday by train, easily got my rental car and was on the road to my hotel in New York (the VERY cool Dolce Palisades – IBM’s executive conference center) which was only three minutes from Crestron. The drive was flawless with my iPhone running TomTom… not a wrong turn getting there, nor all week in the Palisades area of New York and New Jersey (note this important fact for later).

As I said, the training was good. The incredibly sad twist comes on Tuesday afternoon during class when I get word that my Aunt Beth has died and I’ll be returning for a small family graveside ceremony on Friday. This was not at all unexpected as she has been very ill and made a conscious decision to cease her dialysis ahead of an aggressive and potentially horrific sarcoma diagnosed while I was in Las Vegas. We’re all quite sad, but also recognize the mercy of her peaceful exit ahead of what would be a terrible and unquestionably terminal experience on the horizon. Obviously, this is a depressing turn in an otherwise peaceful trip.

I finish class on Wednesday, say goodbye to both new friends and others I had met in Vegas two weeks prior. I hit a sushi place in the Palisades area where a very dour looking Korean chef ends up being the neatest, most passionate philosopher on food that I’ve had a chance to talk with in ages. I’d almost call him the Korean Anthony Bourdain. Short of another chance trip to Crestron someday, though, I doubt I have cause to make a visit to the area again.

Now we must discuss Newark.

As I said, my exit from it Sunday heading north was smooth. This tale concerns my return trip to start the journey home. I had booked the night at the Holiday Inn just outside the airport with the intention of returning my rental mid-morning today and taking the 12:57 PM train home to Virginia. I quickly realized that being trapped in a concrete box for 18+ hours in a virtual island outside the airport in Newark was a crap idea. I also realized at this point that I could have taken an evening train to DC, overnighted there and had some DC time before the afternoon train home today (I am a frequent DC visitor and know the city well). Bad planning on my part… but I decided the next best thing would be changing my tickets for the 6:15 AM Accela and having some layover hours in DC prior to my final train home.

I took a 45 minute trip to the fitness center while thinking on it, decided I liked the plan and made my call to Amtrak to readjust the tickets. Now I need to take the rental car back at night instead of the morning since I’ve just changed both the time and the station from which I’m leaving (now Newark Penn rather than the godforsaken airport Amtrak which I vow to never set foot or tires on again).

No problem… GPS fired up on the iPhone and a mere mile to Newark Airport from the hotel. I’ll return the car, hop the airtrain to the hotel shuttle and be back for a few hours sleep before the early train.

I am a stupid, stupid man, apparently.

Fast forward two hours. I’m a crazed, pissed off maniac in a rental car shouting at everything and banging on the steering wheel as I make my zillionth pass through the greater Newark Airport area. By this time I’ve encountered GPS confusion, crazy road signs, road construction, poorly labeled detours, angry drivers, 60+ MPH decisions to choose from exits in all directions and a somewhat humorous conversation with a sweet lady at Enterprise who also can’t figure out where the hell I am.

Seriously… I have a VERY good sense of direction and am an otherwise good navigator. I drive well in crazy traffic. I supplement it with a good GPS and know when to use it and when not. I know how to read signs. And I still ended up utterly confused and lost for a full two freakin’ hours.

The real fun began when I missed a crazy U-turn exit that was about a car’s length within the service road exit. It comes up so fast the GPS can’t even complete the sentence before you pass it. Big deal. Quick up and back and I’m entering the airport which, itself, involves this strange U-turning process even under normal conditions. I follow all the signs through the complex for Rental Car Return. Great. It all goes well until you round the last corner and the Rental Car Return arrow is pointing into a barricade where the road is shut down for construction. There is no alternate information given and you’re suddenly whisked off toward interstates and NYC. I repeated this numerous times looking for the sign I missed. I’m convinced there isn’t one.

I ended up in neighborhoods where I wouldn’t stop, much less get out of my car. I had a crazy lady at a traffic light repeatedly yell at me through my closed window to tell her the time. I did. She thanked me and then started asking me again a few seconds later. Turn green. Turn green. Turn green before this time-obsessed lunatic starts banging on my window. Dear God this lady is getting pushy! Green. GO! (sound of squealing tires)

I finally called Enterprise and we mutually tried to figure out if I was still in the continental US. Even the lady there was apologizing and saying that Newark is impossible to navigate. She still gets lost and she lives here.

I eventually ended up – for the third time – out in a cargo area on the far end of the airport but realized the road I was on matched the road name for Enterprise. Since the airport was now in the distance, I knew I could head that way and MAYBE find the stinking place. That plan ultimately worked, but not before several more misleading options were properly ignored or reasoned out from previous experience. For instance, when reacting in a split stressed out second, you realize that taking the exit that says “Airport Exit” means a quick exit FROM the airport (which it’s not obvious I’m even in, for &$@!’s sake!), NOT the exit TO the airport. Enjoy Manhattan, sucker!

If I hadn’t found it in that second hour, I was sure that the next time I passed through the airport, I’d stop by the blocked off Rental Car Return exit (the one with no alternate signage), get out, rip all four wheels off the car, relieve myself in the back seat and then set that Nissan Altima on fire right there in the street. I suspect others driving by would cheer me on in solidarity.

I wasn’t back in bed until midnight and had to get up at 4:20 AM to shower, get a cab and be at Newark Penn Station before my train. This timing was based on advice from the front desk.

I stagger around in the morning, get my cab called from the front desk and sit to await its arrival.

It gets weird again.

Over my shoulder and across the lobby I hear a male asian man possibly speaking Korean. He sounds excited and kind of loud. Then louder. Then clearly angry. I can’t understand a word, obviously, but the timbre of his voice says it all. I glance over and the man is standing in the lobby and viciously dressing down what I assume to be his wife. Clearly, I find this to be monumentally bad form. Geez, dude… put a lid on it and don’t treat your wife like that.

He really gets going, too, and she just stands there staring at him. It’s getting exceedingly uncomfortable.

Then the dude hauls off and pops her one… right there in the lobby. My mouth drops open.

She shoves him back.

He yells again, then pops her again. She shoves him back again. By now, all I want to do is wish Newark totally out of existence. I’m fed up.

The couple separate a few tens of feet, sit down and get quiet. Clearly we’re entering the sullen standoff stage. Someone at the front desk is pointing at them and talking to the manager. I head out to either find my cab or hotwire a car – whatever will get me out of here faster.

A lady outside tells me that this lobby cage match is round two and that they were REALLY going at it last night. Security shows up just before my cab arrives, so I’m spared witnessing how this plays out.

My cab driver is very nice. He pops the trunk, loads my luggage, asks me for specifics on my destination, etc.

He then rolls up to the edge of the road and, without putting on goggles or a pressure suit, proceeds to kick the car into something several times the speed of sound. This is punctuated by whipping between lanes and stomping on the very effective brakes every two to four seconds so he doesn’t hit whatever he’s rolling up on (or potentially over). It’s all I can do to hold on in the back seat and not scream like a little girl all the way to Penn Station.

Last night I found lots of potholes. He hit all the same ones, but a whole lot harder.

We ultimately roll into Penn Station, stand the car on its nose outside the main entrance and, after collecting my teeth from the back of the passenger side headrest, I kind of stagger out of the car, pay him too much (he claims to have no change and I don’t even care anymore by now) and I go stand in the Amtrak station for 20 minutes waiting for them to open so I my updated tickets can be printed.

Things have been a lot calmer since, improving as I get the heck away from Newark. The only hitch on this otherwise comfortable train has been the 15 minutes it took in the cafe car to get a bottle of water. As I feared, my absence led to my seat being taken by a man who was already asleep in it when I got back. Wonderful. At least I found a window seat this time.

DC in about 30 minutes. I’m exhausted, but at least I’m not in Newark anymore…

Indulge me for a bit, dear reader; I feel a monumental free-association nerd ramble coming on.

It’s always fun when you can cook up a project that combines your favorite hobbies, interests and skills. For some reason lately I’ve gotten the bug to start dabbling in 3D modeling again. It’s something I’ve done off and on for years, mostly as a creative outlet. I don’t claim any great talent at it, but I enjoy the geeky blend of creativity and hardcore technical skills that this particular mix of art and science demands.

A test Modo render of my Pac-Man arcade model as it nears “completion”.

Waxing Nostalgic

I toyed with Videoscape 3D on my Amigas as a kid in the 1980′s and, some years later, spent more serious time on the original versions of Lightwave that came with the Amiga-based Video Toaster. A few years ago, Alex Lindsay got me interested in tinkering with Modo 201 and I’ve since owned copies of 201, 301, 501 and, as of this last week, the rather amazing 601 release. I was distracted during the 401 era and only had time to churn out one super-quick project using a trial copy. Keep in mind that much of my life is focused on being a professional network geek and, at that time, I was busy planning a massive upgrade of the entire campus network. Now that I think back, that quickie 401 project involved making simple animated 3D fly-throughs of the campus for a Keynote presentation I was giving to our board of directors. Why? To request funding for that very network overhaul. This is why I love my job!

Close-up of the Pac-Man joystick with a very shallow depth-of-field.

By the way, Modo 601 is fantastic. It came screaming onto the scene with no real notice whatsoever. One minute Brad Peebler of Luxology is spending half the day tweet-teasing us with previews of a “forthcoming release” (assumption: in a few months), the next minute he’s casually mentioning that all that awesomeness is ready for download now. Enjoy! You could sense the community-wide gasp, followed quickly by what I can only imagine was a massive spike in outgoing bandwidth for Luxology’s download servers.

Luxology is one of the most likable and “personal” companies I’ve dealt with for ages. I say that for several reasons. First off, they have a team of mad geniuses that create this fun product called Modo. Secondly, Luxology and Modo have character and… well… voices. One of those voices is Brad Peebler and his always entertaining, endearingly off-the-cuff demo videos and “modcasts“. Everyone in the Modo community knows the other voice, too: the dulcet, british-accented tones of Andy Brown. I can’t watch five minutes of one of his tutorial videos without coming away both humbled and inspired. The man plays Modo like a violin. So if I close my eyes and think of Modo, I see it’s interface of subtle grays and fine lines… but I hear Brad and Andy. The user community is also precisely that: a community. It feels passionate and accessible.

An overhead shot with a medium depth-of-field.

Since I’m getting my geek nostalgia on anyway, I’ll throw in this additional bit of personal history. I had been working with Modo 201 for a short time when I happened to notice a Mr. Allen Hastings posting in the Luxology support forums. “No freakin’ way…”, I thought. He was the man behind the other software I used so many years ago on the Video Toaster: Lightwave. Beyond that, Allen was the guy who wrote the first tools I dabbled with when I was all of 14 years old: Videoscape 3D.

Spurred by a few fuzzy memories, I did some Googling and actually churned up his replies to questions I posted about Videoscape on Usenet (comp.sys.amiga) in November of 1988. His reply made reference to what was then the unreleased project that became NewTek’s Lightwave. 24 years later, by sheer chance, I’m still using products made by the amazing Allen Hastings and I’m still getting helpful replies from him in the forums. (I also seem to remember that, around that same time in the late 80′s, I was running my Amiga as a dial-up uucp node to get my newsgroups… but I’ll save that for a series of posts I’m pondering for the future.)

NOTE: While editing this prior to posting, I suddenly had a picture in my mind of a some junk in the corner of the attic. After a quick trip up the stairs I found that, for once, that picture in my mind was actually accurate. Here are two relevant things (in three pictures) I managed to dig up in the last few minutes. Click’em to embiggen. 

Front of the VideoScape 3D box I found in my attic.

Back of the box showing the credits and copyrights.

The UUCP tools for my Amiga in the 80′s.

Sadly, despite this span of 24 years, I don’t have any kind of significant 3D work to share (though I chanced into one of my Modo models appearing on the freakin’ History Channel a few years back). I’ve been vastly more prolific as a photographer than a 3D modeler. This is why all I can say is that I dabble and tinker… but I learn more every time and I start coming back to it more and more often.

Part of the attraction is that the tools are getting so incredibly powerful. Back when I was 14, the modeling process involving plotting your ideas on graph paper and translating them into ASCII strings of coordinates. Today it’s realtime 3D sculpting, puppet-like rigging of characters, and built-in tools for simulating the real-world physical dynamics of hard and soft objects in your animations. The resulting imagery can be anything from cartoonish to staggeringly photorealistic. Oh… and this is on your laptop… or your iMac. At home. During evenings and weekends.

I will mention, though, that being a geek who oversees a campus network full of servers and labs has its perks. Paired with Modo’s cool network rendering and very generous built-in 50-slave license, I often fire up rooms full of lab computers in the wee hours to do my distributed render bidding. A few clicks from home using some scripts in ARD and dozens of campus Macs snap to life and start chewing on “render buckets”.

Modo 601′s render tab showing scene previews and setup.

When I was 14, I  took photos that required a darkroom or lab to develop and making a “movie” involved borrowing a friend’s expensive VHS camcorder (which, if memory serves, was roughly the size of a dorm refrigerator). I did make 2D graphics and animations that I could put on VHS using a “genlock”, but there were no accessible digital tools for doing actual editing. It was tremendous fun nonetheless. Today the iMac on my desk lets me process extremely high resolution stills and high-definition video from a single camera, edit it easily, create and apply visual effects and mix in 2D and 3D animated elements. Well, the potential is there anyway…

The Quintessential 80′s Game: Pac-Man

Some years back I spent a while collecting and restoring 1980′s era classic arcade games as a hobby. It was great fun, but it takes up a ton of room and is seldom your wife’s choice in home decor. I parted with most of the 30+ machines I had, but kept three (Millipede, Marble Madness and Pac-Man). Emulation is another of my techie passions, so I get to mix my love of arcades with Linux, MAME, wires, power tools and soldering irons. That’s another whole topic… one I pretty thoroughly documented on a mostly dormant blog of mine that you can still find here.

Reference left side photo of my Pac-Man arcade.

One of the three arcades sitting here in my home office is a fairly unmolested Pac-Man upright. I bought it from the college where I work after it had lived an unusually sheltered 20+ year life in the campus bistro. Most arcades got the crap beaten out of them in a few short years and are then were stripped of their identity and converted to some crappier, newer game (many arcade operators of the 80′s were notoriously stingy folks whose actions, in retrospect, horrify purist collectors like myself… but their actions were justified at the time in an industry that, after all, made its often meager profits in increments of 25 cents). A Pac-Man squirreled away in the corner of the cafe of an all-women’s liberal arts college in semi-rural Virginia is generally spared the usual abuse and indignities suffered at, say, a laundromat or pizza place. It has all of its original parts and plays like a champ.

I decided to use the Pac-Man machine as my subject for a fresh round of Modo self-training. It’s a hard-surface rather than organic model, but still involves some interesting geometry and shading challenges. I parked it in the middle of my home office behind my rolling chair and, over the course of a few weekends and nights, photographed, measured, partly disassembled and repeatedly stared at it the blue-flecked yellow behemoth while trying to recreate it digitally in three dimensions.

I’m not completely done, but far enough along that I felt like sharing the results in the form of a few rendered stills. I have some test fly-by animations, too, that include the real game playing accurately on the screen… but I need to tweak and re-render those before sharing.

So Where Does The Photography Come In?

Early test render of the cabinet.

Photography comes into play in a few ways. I used straight-on, distortion-corrected shots of the sides as an on-screen reference in Modo to accurately recreate the profile of the cabinet’s contours. Those 2D curves became extrusions that became sides with accurate scale applied. The rest is a series of parts built from there; tackling the moulding, door locks, control panel, buttons, joysticks, marquee, etc., as individual parts. It’s tremendous fun watching it come together over time and get more and more realistic with each addition.

I also photographed some bits of the artwork that I couldn’t already find in digital form online. My father, a retired graphic designer with far more Adobe Illustrator knowledge than I’ll ever have, traced them to generate EPS files with transparent knockouts that would properly overlay on procedural or image-mapped textures on my model.

Early test render with marquee placeholder.

Some of Modo’s camera settings.

Lastly, knowledge of photography plays a big (and very fun) role in 3D modeling. You set up scenes in much the same way you would photograph something in a studio. This involves realistic lights, the properties of surfaces in the scenes, and manipulating a virtual camera right down to accurate focal length, aperture, and even blade count in the virtual iris of the virtual lens. Using this knowledge, you plan your depth-of-field and even control the geometry and softness of the bokeh.

Basically, I can be a real-world photographer to gather the reference imagery I need to build a scene. I then get to be a virtual photographer with far more control over the elements than real-life would ever allow. From a composition standpoint, the creative thought process and technical approach is much the same in the virtual world as it is in the real one.

Coincidentally, a great article on PetaPixel (a photography blog I love to follow and highly recommend) appeared in my Google Reader feeds the other day: How to Visualize Photography Lighting Setups in Blender. Cool, huh?

Another camera angle and different lighting of the Pac-Man models.

As a photographer experimenting in 3D, you can also use your real-world camera skills to photograph textures that can then be used to enhance the realism of your models. You can use your skills and tools for shooting 360° panoramas and HDR’s to create environments that realistically light your 3D scene.

The list goes on and on… but I’ve yammered on way too much already (hey, I warned you!) and I suspect you probably stopped reading many paragraphs ago. I’ll share more Modo creations as I produce them and, if I get time soon, will write a few posts of  my fond Amiga memories. I’m sure Brad Peebler will remember more than a few of the names those will stories will conjure up… names like Carvey and Stockhammer. Yes, the Amiga community was small enough that attending a developer’s conference included partying with the NewTek team and ending up on rides at Epcot with the inventor of the Video Toaster (who happened to also be Dana Carvey’s brother… you know… Wayne’s World and the Church Lady?). Fun times, indeed.

Oh… and my new iPad arrived yesterday around mid-morning. That retina display? Whoa! I’ve had to re-render the images above just to fill that gorgeous screen pixel for pixel.

I was very honored to be invited by Jon Beard, the über-creative and adventurous photographer behind Exposure Roanoke, to speak at their weekly event today. The primary topic: getting into DSLR video as a still photographer. I used my trip to the pacific northwest and the video I created this past December as a framework for discussing various equipment, techniques and thoughts on making videos that highlight your still photography. Today’s format was the casual, somewhat Q&A-driven format that I prefer when speaking with groups and I got a lot of good questions both during the talk and afterward.

I told the group I’d follow up with links to some of the equipment and software I mentioned today, so I’m using this post to fulfill that promise to the best of my memory.

First off, a lot of what I discussed can be found on my perpetually updated equipment and software list found in the Pages menu at the top of this page. Some of my past blog posts from before and during the trip will recap some of what I discussed today as well.

The most time-sensitive item I mentioned is the forthcoming 50-Dollar Follow Focus (note: be sure to watch the video on that page) that is currently being funded on Kickstarter. The funding window closes this Monday (Feb 13th) at 10 AM EST. I’m sure they will be available for purchase afterward, but I don’t know the timeframe for delivery… though I would assume that, unlike some Kickstarter projects, the post-Kickstarter price would remain the same since it’s built into the name. I was really pleased that one of the group members, Robert Bryant, had a different rail and follow focus kit with him to demonstrate the concept. I’d invite his links to the one he demo’d as well.

The follow focus kit I recommend does not include the mount and rails, but the designer, Wiley Davis, emailed me yesterday to recommend one from Jag35 that I think I will probably purchase once my 50 Dollar FF arrives in March. I also found this one at Amazon in a similar price range (which, now that I see it again, looks remarkably like the one Robert Bryant was demonstrating today, at least in its larger kit version).

The digital audio recorder I showed today was the Zoom H4n, but I also recommended its less expensive and extremely-capable little brother. I couldn’t remember the model number at the time, but have since remembered that it’s the Zoom H1. A worthy competitor that falls in the middle of these two price-wise is made by Tascam.

For Macintosh users just starting to experiment with video, I highly recommended the iMovie that likely shipped with your system. The latest version is iMovie ’11 in the event that you wish to upgrade from an older release. There is nothing lacking in iMovie for creating a tasteful, HD-quality video based on stills, video or any combination of the two. The upgrade path, should you really fall in love with editing, would be Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X.

For Windows users (and Mac as well), one of the most powerful and affordable packages for starting out (and beyond) is Adobe’s Premiere Elements, the smaller sibling of Final Cut Pro’s main competitor, Adobe Premiere Pro.

One of the competitors to the GoPro Hero camera we discussed today is made by Contour. They demonstrated a WiFi-enabled model at CES recently called the Contour Connect, but I don’t see any major promotion of it on their website just yet.

I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting, so I invite questions and reminders in the comments section and I’ll add updates to this post as needed.

Sadly, the audio quality today in the theater really did a nasty number on the music and ambient audio, so I invite you to watch the video again on your own system if you’re so inclined. A small copy is embedded below and a choice of larger versions can be found on my vimeo page. A quick note: the video (especially the 1080p version) requires a decent bit of bandwidth to play without buffering, so if it stops on you, simply pause it and let it load to completion before resuming.

I really enjoyed meeting everyone today and having a chance to geek out on a topic I really love. I look forward to shooting with many of you during future Exposure Roanoke events!

As usual, I’ve been derelict in my blogging duties, but I’m determined to get more active here in 2012. My last post was almost seven months ago after my trip to the Pacific Northwest and San Francisco. Life has been plenty busy in the meantime, most of it focused on my real job as a network geek and a bit less on my photography. It’s not that I’ve not been an active photographer… I’ve just had a lot less time or reason to write about it. Somehow I also got into an almost entirely photo-centric mindset with the blog and have done little writing about the rest of the technology in my life. I’m going to try to broaden things going forward.

One of the things I’ve always loved about working for a small private college is the vacation time and relative peace and quiet of the Christmas/New Year holiday season. I always take the time to dive into some project or another for a few days. This year was my first chance to finally explore Final Cut Pro X. I’ve been using FCP to some degree since its initial release in the early 2000′s, but most heavily with the previous version (FCP 7). I’m also a big fan of Motion and have used it extensively for projects over the last couple of years. The new FCP X release is a complete reboot of the product (less of a change to Motion) and has met with, to put it mildly, mixed reviews from the pro community. Fortunately, I don’t claim such pro status by any stretch, nor do I rely on it for my livelihood.

To summarize: I like it a great deal and, for the types of videos I tend to make, it’s actually a big improvement in many ways. Yes, it has some fiddly quirks and I can see quite a few of the pro-level gripes (though, again, am personally unaffected by them for my needs). In the first days and weeks after it was released, the blog scene was quite overheated with claims of one missing feature or another. Once people stopped freaking out and spent some time exploring the redesigned UI and absorbing the new approach Apple was taking, many of those “missing” features turned out to be either fully intact or, in some cases, no longer needed. I think the bigger missing parts will be addressed by Apple in future updates.

During my trip to the Pacific Northwest, I shot thousands of photos and quite a bit of video. The video shot on the 5D Mark II was primarily atmospheric and came in short snippets for seconds or minutes. I shot tens of hours, though, of video on a GoPro Hero HD. The

latter was purely intended to provide context and document the travel and photography process itself. I almost never got in my rental car without it shooting raw 720p, 60fps video from the front bumper just above the road. Much of the time that I was hiking in the rain forest I had it fastened to my chest with a harness. The results of the chest cam can be a bit wobbly, but useful for passively recording the world around me with no real effort on my part. To round this all out, I recorded a great deal of ambient audio on my Zoom H4n which I use in the beginning, middle and end of the video.

I wanted to create a video that did two key things: convey the mood and atmosphere of the places I visited and, to some degree, document the travel and photography process itself. To this end, I broke the trip into two parts which are set to separate pieces of music that I felt fit well and provided me with a great foundation for the editing process. I am very thankful to Crowfoot and Tomáš Dvořák for graciously granting me the permission to use their music.

I’ve embedded the video here, playable in the window or full screen. If you prefer, you can watch the 720p and 1080p versions on the Vimeo site. Both versions require some decent bandwidth (the 1080p version in particular), so if it stutters from the outset, please pause it and let it load to the end before resuming to keep from destroying the flow. You can also toggle off the blue HD button at the cost of some image quality.

The video opens with fairly soft ambient audio, so turn up the volume a bit.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. I’ll write another post soon on my other creative outlet this past holiday: returning to Modo and finally getting far more serious about 3D modeling. Believe it or not, a tremendous amount of your photography knowledge – both creative and technical – comes into play when creating and rendering 3D scenes and animations. I think each endeavor helps improve your insight into the other. But more on that later…

I’m sitting in the San Francisco airport with about an hour to kill, so I figured it was the ideal time to write the last on-the-road blog post before arriving home late tonight.

I was quite sad to leave the pacific northwest last Saturday. The entire experience bordered on sensory overload for me between the rain forests, the rocky coast, the massive mountains and the deep glacier-fed lakes. Fortunately, my journey didn’t end there and, as it turns out, the final leg of the trip was the perfect transitional buffer between the relative solitude and tranquility of the old growth forests and the incredibly busy summer I have piling up for me back at work.

I flew from Portland to San Francisco Saturday night, arriving fairly late but still making good time picking up my rental and heading out to stay with relatives in the Mission district. Quick aside: I’ve rented from Budget and Enterprise this week and, while both were fine, I’m going to give Enterprise the major edge for simplicity and customer service. Both services gave me free upgrades (due to the standard class I rented being sold out with my late arriving flights). At SFO, I ended up with a brand new (I was the first renter with it only having 150 miles and that new car smell) black 2011 Hyundai Santa Fe. I’m really not an SUV guy and this was at least mid-sized and not truckasaurus. It was GREAT however, right down to the bluetooth in the audio system that bonded seamlessly with my iPhone 4 which I used for both calls and GPS navigation. If the thing got better mileage and I wasn’t pining for an electric (or, more realistically, a hybrid-electric), I might consider buying one.

Anyway, in true San Francisco fashion, even arriving at my relatives’ house well after 10 PM doesn’t mean the night is over. The Mission is a very artistic district of the city and, two blocks away, one of their best friends, Carl, was having an open house and exhibiting his mind-blow, highly creative robots. My uncle’s bachelor party was held in the same space some years ago and I was thrilled to get to see a few of my favorite of his works again as well as a whole series of new pieces that were both gorgeous and capable of shredding you like a weed whacker when cranked up to their full RPMs. I only had my iPhone with me at that moment, so I at least grabbed a little video of a few of them:

(NOTE: Some of the media – specifically the videos – will appear temporarily as links. Once I get home, I’ll be in a position to re-embed them with proper poster frames. Check back!)

http://halfpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/bots-2.mov

http://halfpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/bots-1.mov

(Thanks, stupid SFO free WiFi, for dropping the connection and causing me to lose three paragraphs I wrote before moving to another seat nearer to my gate. Thanks SO very much.)

One of my best friends, Wiley, who was my intern at SBC when he was in high school some 15 years ago, is also out here from Virginia this week. He’s attending WWDC having, as team leader, just completed the first edition of Rosetta Stone’s iPad application in record time. We teamed up on Sunday for a great day of visiting friends and eating fantastic food. It started with excellent Dim Sum at the Mayflower, followed by a stroll around the ruins of Sutro Baths on the coast. Sunday night, however, was the meal for which I had made reservations weeks ago: Zuni Cafe. If you’ve never eaten there, you really should. While everything on their menu is delicious, I have a particular weakness for their brick-oven roasted chicken (for two) with its highly addictive bread salad. It takes an hour to prepare once ordered, time well spent with good wine and, in my case, a hands-on demo of Rosetta’s iPad app from the guy who wrote a lot of the code and led the development process. Quite the treat for this geek.

Monday morning began one of the planned highlights of my trip to San Francisco: an early morning drive across the Golden Gate and up through the hills to Petaluma, home of Leo Laporte’s TWiT Cottage. The timing was very specific since my goal was to sit in-studio to watch Alex Lindsay and Tom Merritt’s live coverage of the WWDC keynote. I sat in the jump seat in the corner just off camera, a great location to stay out of the shot but observe the entire process firsthand. With Alex sitting a few feet away and only at a slight angle to my position, I couldn’t resist using my iPad to tap out cue-card-like thoughts, questions and comments to flash at him during

the course of the coverage. While my role there was purely that of guest, it’s hard to break some of the past producer tendencies carried over from TWiP in this kind of situation. With only a few minutes in between shows and a quick run to the TWiT Toilet (which has a cranky handle, by the way, and a post-it note informing you of this condition), I returned to my corner seat while Alex began hosting a special episode of MacBreak Weekly.

I spent most of my time there trying to take in all of the great character the cottage exudes. Everywhere you look you see mementos, knick-knacks and fun notes to Leo and the gang scribbled by past guests. The warm wood interior, with the glass cabinets and shelves is genuine but fully encased in a dizzying framework of lights, cables and cameras that cramp the place but create the inviting atmosphere you see on the various TWiT shows. Leo was down in LA for E3 coverage, so other members of the team sat on the big blue bouncy ball and operated the Tricaster throughout the two shows I hung out for. And, as impressive and intimate as the cottage might be, the new studios being built a couple of blocks down the street are going to take their capabilities to a whole new level. Divided between Leo’s TWiT universe and Alex’s Pixel Corps team, the facility will be chock full of the latest production tools and a full cadre of capable geeks processing media of every imaginable kind.

The visit gave me a chance to catch up with Alex in person for a couple of hours, a refreshing change from our usual jumbled mix of random emails, text messages, phone chats and periodic pre- or post-show Skype chats. He showed off the new 24-camera motion capture studio they are just completing, the first of its kind that I had ever seen. It was being calibrated during my visit and seeing the real-time tracking of the little reflective balls velcro’d to your clothing or, in this case, on the end of a precisely calibrated rod used for tuning the system was fascinting. Alex’s description of what is happening now and what is being planned for PXC in the coming months is pretty enticing, appealing to both my media interests and my role as a network engineer and systems geek.

(Well, this is a first… started the post in the airport and, if lucky, will finish and post it here from 20,000 feet using inflight WiFi.)

After a great day at the TWiT Cottage, I headed back to the Mission and, on the advice of my relatives, walked four blocks to have some of the best sushi I’ve had in ages at a seriously fun place called Blowfish Sushi. The atmosphere is great, the fish fresh, the rolls creative and the anime playing on the big projection screen behind the chefs (I sat at the sushi bar where I could watch them create their masterpieces) was a great touch. I’m not a big anime fan, but seeing it playing without audio while a great selection of music plays in the rest of the joint just added some great energy to the scene. The heavily tattooed wait staff was equally fun and full of great advice on rolls to try. The chefs loved to show off their creations and I grabbed a few shots on my iPhone (as I am wont to do). Wiley and I got back together after his first full day at WWDC, discussed the announcements in our usual geeky detail and met up with a friend of his at a dive on a street whose name I can’t even recall now. All in all, a great day.

I started to wind down the trip on Tuesday and took a more relaxed pace. I spent a while just driving around randomly and exploring various neighborhoods of San Francisco. There’s something thrilling and slightly alarming about taking an SUV up and down the insanely steep streets… the kind where the top of the street simply meets the sky and you have no idea what’s on the other side until you nose down what feels like about a 60 degree slope. At one point I drove by and then was passed by the enormous SFPD Bomb Squad van, lights flashing, which I ended up following (only half intentionally) until I realized a healthy self-preservation instinct would dictate that going the opposite direction is probably far wiser. Shortly afterward, Frederick Van Johnson and I met up on Townsend for a great, leisurely lunch at Tres Agave, chatting the whole time about the podcasting scene, future plans and highlights of my previous week in the northwest. We took a quick spin around the area afterward as he pointed out great spots for street photography on a future trip. Here’s an in-iPhone-processed shot he grabbed of me at the start of our lunch.

Speaking of driving in San Francisco… there’s one word for parking around there: infuriating. Most any gap you see is there not because it’s an open parking space, but because it’s a driveway or otherwise covered in signage laying out reasons why you can’t park there between X and Y hours on various days of the week with the exception of this or that… stuff you practically need an iPhone app to calculate but have to quickly parse while someone is behind you honking their horn to get by (or whipping around you in one of the three lanes to your right or left). Then there are the bus lanes, the taxi and bus-only left turns and the fact that you’ll be pulled from your car by a cop and summarily tazed to death if you’re seen easing through a right turn while any pedestrian, legitimately or not, has so much as a toe on the pavement in your general vicinity. My uncle told me this morning that San Francisco makes up about 2% of the California population but pays something like 35% of the parking fees collected in the state every year. I believe it. How I managed to not run over someone or scratch up my new-car-smell rental over five days is a mystery to me.

My final evening there was a fun one, very family and friend-centric. I picked up my uncle and we, in turn, then picked up my little four year old cousin from what looks to be a fantastic pre-school and my aunt from her office, then headed across the bay bridge to Oakland. This was my first time across the bridge and my uncle gave me a steady stream of fascinating information about the roads, the bridge, the history, the new replacement bridge that is appearing parallel to this one. Barges and massive waterborne cranes are floating all over the area as they prepare to start attaching the decking with suspension cables from the massive center tower that looms over the current bridge. Our destination was a unique meal at a place called Homeroom where we met up with my other cousin (whom I’d not seen in easily 30 years prior to this trip), her husband and their pre-school aged son.

Homeroom is a neat place. There’s a sort of schoolroom atmosphere to everything, including a set of card catalog drawers (straight out of grade school) where you fill in a card that you file to track your visits (with little stars). So many visits and, I suspect, you get a meal or side or something or other. Homeroom does one dish: Mac’n'Cheese… gourmet style. I had a nice glass of Riesling while partaking of a hot, oven-baked bowl of homemade Gouda, pecorino and chorizo mac’n'cheese complete with bread crumbs on top. I couldn’t finish it all, partly from its size and partly from the sheer knee-weakening richness of the dish. We followed it up with homemade warm “oreo” cookies a good three inches in diameter. If you’re in or around Oakland, this is really worth a few visits!

On our way back into town, we took a quick detour so I could drive by one of the places I dream of seeing on the inside someday: Pixar. I talked with the guard at the gate for a minute (super nice guy) and took a quick shot through the gate of the enormous ball and lamp in their lawn, giant physical versions of the characters you see in their opening logo sequence. My fondest wish was for John Lassiter or Brad Bird to glance out the window, see me forlornly shooting through the bars of the fence with my camera and order me brought inside for a tour and ice cream. Somehow, this didn’t happen. Maybe someday…

Wiley and I took the town again for my final night there by making a return trip (for me) and a first visit (for him) to Blowfish Sushi. I was still full of God’s Own Mac’n'Cheese, but I still had to squeeze in two pieces of yellowtail nigiri. Wiley ordered a sashimi combo of some sort that arrived on a pile of shaved ice decorated with flowers, bamboo and fruit and set in a bowl positively gushing out a cloud of dry ice that drifted over the bar and down toward our legs. Ten points to Blowfish Sushi for a wickedly nice presentation.

So this morning was just the scramble to the airport which, it turns out, I did well ahead of schedule and with no real stress. I’m now trying to wrap up this post at about 30,000 feet using in-flight WiFi and a rapidly draining MacBook Pro battery. And, no, the 17″ MBP is NOT made for coach seating. This is a real chore of odd angles and neck strain. I was going to write up a list of observations from the trip, mostly technical and photography related, but I’ll save that for home in the next couple of days.

More to come!

I was hoping to write blog entries each day, but so far I’ve only managed one. A lot of that is due to exhaustion at the end of a long day of hiking and shooting… just not having it in me to compose something despite having a million thoughts and observations I’ve filed away (and likely forgotten) for the next entry.

The other big issue the last 36 hours has been crappy connectivity. That’s not all bad, frankly, since when I do have connectivity I tend to spend more time online and less time shooting or otherwise engaging in things I can’t do once I leave this amazing place.  What connectivity I have involves sitting in my car outside of the main office of the resort where I’m staying. Inconvenient to put it mildly.

In my previous entry I was deep into the rain forest of Lake Quinault and, thus far, I have to say that it’s quite simply my favorite part of the trip. I’m glad I scheduled the most time there. I had intended to set out early Wednesday morning for my next location, but I just wasn’t quite ready to leave. I cleared out my room, packed the car, said goodbye to what had been my riverside home for the last three nights and set out on South Shore. My goal was to wrap up that leg of the trip by going deeper into the rain forest using the six mile long Graves Creek road. I’m glad I did, because I saw even more beautiful areas than before including several of the greenest glades I’ve ever encountered, complete with two much closer Roosevelt Elk encounters.

The sense of being alone was even greater than past days with the exception one chance encounter.

As I rolled slowly through yet another amazing riverside glade, I noticed someone’s upper body pop up out of a low spot a little way off to my right. It turned out to be a park ranger who was actively splitting a 500 year old fallen cedar. He was doing it the “old school” way with modern wedges and some downright antique, but purpose-built tools seldom encountered today. The split twelve foot cedar segments would be dragged out and used as replacement rails up in another part of the park around Port Angeles.

He invited me over to see what he was doing and very enthusiastically explained the process, lamenting that he is likely the last of the rangers in that area with the skills and passion to do this. He also allowed me to record and film a good 20 minutes of the process (which he narrated) along with other discussions that ranged from his being attacked by a bear last year and, despite that tidbit, just how much he loves his job. He manages the trails throughout the deepest parts of the park and, as a result, lives eight day stretches in a tent as he hikes from point to point doing all sorts of trail maintenance and new trailblazing. After each eight day shift, he’s off for six days and returns to his six acre property at Lake Ozette (which is likely just as lush as the park). He made it quite clear there is nothing else in the world he loves more than his work and, frankly, I can see why.

After perusing a campground I fully intend to use on a future trip, I grabbed a final lunch at the Lake Quinault Lodge and, finally, pried myself away to head for my next stop: La Push, a Quileute Indian reservation on the coast northwest. Aside from their fishing harvest, their other primary commercial endeavor seems to be the medium sized beachside resort they operate. It sits on national park land that is under their management (since it overlaps the reservation) and fronts what is know as First Beach, directly facing the largest single sea stack on the coast (James Island). The island is a critical piece of their tremendous history since their ancestors repeatedly used it as an impregnable fort during wars between tribes. Seeing it, you would suspect any attacker would just shrug and go home. This stack juts up out of the ocean to a tremendous elevation and offers little but sheer rock faces that you could helplessly stare at while being pelted from above.

Today, La Push is a small reservation with a tribal population somewhat over 700, a  small marina, a single restaurant (where I am alternating between eating dinner, looking out across the river and writing this entry), the beachside resort I mentioned, a small school whose curriculum still includes their unique native language, a community center, a small fish processing facility and all the other things you’d expect in a tiny community. La Push itself sits right where the Quileute river meets the Pacific. I highly encourage you to read the Wikipedia entry to get a sense of their history and culture.

The resort is… functional. It has a certain charm that falls somewhere between rustic and reasonably modern. Granted, I’ve only experience the A-frame cabin I rented rather than the motel or the varying levels of larger cabins that look to range toward condos (the word “luxury” is used on their website, so I’ll not assume the fit and finish of my cabin applies to the higher-end ones). Honestly, for the very reasonable price I am paying, my no-frills cabin works well even if things are a bit clunky and clearly done on the cheap. I small allotment of firewood (cute little pieces compared to the 30+ lb logs I burn by the stack in our outdoor wood furnace back home) is left on my porch each day and I use them in the tiny wood stove in the kitchen/dining/bedroom (plus a loft above) that is the cabin’s single main room.

After some issues starting the wood stove, I got it burning so well that at 1 AM I woke up parched and hot as all hell, having pushed the now dry heat of the little cabin into the stratosphere. I staggered out of bed, closed the damper and cracked a window. I awoke some hours later cold due to the fire being out, the window still cracked and apparently the front door swinging a quarter of the way open due to my not latching it properly before bed (again, things are a bit fiddly and rickety here and there). It’s all, however, part of the adventure and I’d gladly stay here again in the future.

My self-induced climate control adventures are an appropriate analogy to the weather here. I’ve seen blue sky and clouds and pouring rain, often only minutes apart and in several cycles over my day and a half here. One of my main goals last night was shooting a sunset and the weather all day seemed to support that possibility. Minutes before the sun hit the horizon, though, a rain squall obscured it and then proceeded to roll in on me as I rapidly piled back into the car. I did get a bunch of nice pre-sunset shots, one of which I assembled as a slightly overdone HDR. (When I came here to dinner about 6:30 PM it was raining and, in the course of writing the paragraphs above, the sun has now come out rather blindingly, teasing me with another opportunity to shoot a sunset. Over an hour to go, so anything could happen…)

Between dinner and the sunset last night I wandered over to the tribe’s community center where I was invited to sit at their spiritual drum circle and fish dinner that occurs every Wednesday night. A member of my tribe called out my name (I had signed a register coming in) and greeted me during one of the many seemingly impromptu talks given by various tribe members from within the circle. Members of the nearby Hoh tribe were also present and participated in a number of the drumming segments. They took carefully paced steps and made strokes with a ceremonial paddle they each carried, miming the paddling of a canoe as they walked the circle. I grabbed some video and stills, of course, along with some longer audio recordings that I hope to use in whatever mixed media creation comes out of this trips in the near future. I was fascinated and stayed for a while before quietly excusing myself and making a dash for the sunset.

Needless to say, the contrast between the rain forest and a rocky, sea stack-studded coast is pretty dramatic… all the more by it being a mere 40 minutes of driving before first glimpsing the pacific and the massive stacks towering out of the water. The beaches are littered with a staggering quantity of bleached white ancient trees that have floated down the rivers before being unceremoniously thrown back along the coast like so many jack straws. Most are worn smooth and eerily resemble a seemingly endless jumble of whale bones. Outside of my cabin on First Beach is the largest such tree that I’ve seen and it is every bit as large as the moss-covered monsters I have marveled at in the rain forest for three days. Even on its side, it towers over you on the beach, the upper end of it disappearing who knows how deep under the sand and rocks.

Naturally, I’ve been taking photos non-stop of all of what I’ve mentioned above (and more, including one of the four bald eagles I saw 50 feet outside the window while I ate breakfast this morning). All of this coastal beauty aside, I’ll be honest in saying that my heart is still in the rain forest of Lake Quinault. This is area is rugged and beautiful and there is lots of creative shooting still to be done… but I’m drawn back to the forests. I even took a quick jaunt to the nearby Hoh rain forest today for a quick fix.

On another photography note, I ended up being one of three be-tripoded photographers gunning for a sunset yesterday evening. We ended up congregating after silently orbiting one another for a bit, ultimately having some fantastic discussions about our travel experiences, techniques, gear, etc.

Two of us were shooting digital SLRs (Canon for me, Pentax for the him). The third person, an older white-haired gentleman, was using a large antique view camera, a handheld meter and throwing a black drape over his head as required to see the composition and focus. Of the three of us, though, I think he was the one most screwed by a sudden rain squall that ended up blocking the sun in the final minutes. The other two of us were shooting HDR and squeezed out a little drama, however contrived. I venture to bet, though, that his work is far, far more compelling than ours in the end and I’d love to see it. In talking, I learned that he was visiting from New Hampshire and UPS ships all but the camera ahead of him for any trips involving flights.

And while I’m sad to be ending this Pacific Northwest part of my trip in just over 36 hours, at least I’ll be ending it on another crystal mountain lake surrounded by old growth forest and waterfalls. Tomorrow morning I set out for Lake Crescent and its early 20th century lodge. It will only be a quick taste of that area, though, since I’ll need to pack again Friday night in preparation for more airline travel out of Portland Saturday afternoon. I’m truly not looking forward to the packing or, above all, the leaving…

In closing, I’ll just randomly list a few observations I’ve made in the last few days:

• The air here on the coast is much different than I’ve experienced on the Atlantic side. When walking the beach, I don’t get coated with a layer of salt. On the east coast, this often makes me refuse to take my camera anywhere near ocean water without a Kata bag.
• Second Beach is amazing. The hike there is nearly rainforest lush. Oh, and look, they carved out handy stairs down to the beach! About ten million of them. High steps, too. Only one direction is fun when using said stairs. You take a wild guess which direction I’m referring to while I go find a defibrillator.
• The beaches are a mix of sand and millions upon millions of smooth rocks ranging in size from peas to softballs. The variety of colors and shapes is amazing and, whether flat or ball-like, they are tremendously smooth and rounded. I could spend hours picking through them and finding neat specimens.
• If it weren’t for the risk of an accident, I’d gladly drive through Forks, Washington with my eyes shut so I didn’t have to see the word “Twilight” every six feet.
• Banana slugs are cool.
• Otters are also cool and fun to watch on the dock when eating dinner here in La Push.
• When walking along and suddenly startling a bald eagle out of a tree just over your head, the proper reaction is to jump and then squeal like a little girl. I actually failed the squealing part… but I still think it would have been an acceptable response under the circumstances.
• In various places around La Push, I see official looking blue highway road signs that simply say “Smoked Salmon”. I have no idea why. So far, nobody has given me salmon when I’m near one of these signs. I think they should and failure to do so is immensely disappointing to me.
• It’s raining… again.
• I’ve never been somewhere before where the Evacuation Route signs on the highway weren’t for hurricanes, but rather tsunamis. One of the pictographic signs would strike me as somewhat amusing in its portrayal had I not seen very graphic video of the devastation in Japan some months back. This, too, makes me prefer the inland rain forest.
• It’s stopped raining… again.
• As of tonight, I’m over 120 GB of photos and 102 GB of GoPro Hero raw video.

I lied. One more thing. There was another sunset tonight and I got some decent HDRs, but one in particular really made me happy. This is Chloe, another photographer who dropped by to get a shot of the sunset. I saw her and, since I was already bracketing for HDR, figured I’d get a dramatic silhouette and, if she didn’t move at that moment, a full HDR. I got both and here is the HDR version. Enjoy!

Just so I don’t completely leave everyone thinking all it does is rain here at Lake Quinault (a place that DOES get around 145″ of rain per yer, mind you).

On the road in a while for two days at the coast… in the meantime, here are my philosophical ramblings and some shots from the first two days.

I’m finally getting a chance to write my first post on this trip. I’m totally in my element as I write this, too… sitting near the giant fireplace in the main room of Lake Quinault Lodge. This is your classic 1920′s-era pacific northwestern lodge with open beams decorated in native american designs, massive leather chairs the size of small sofas and the requisite elk head and various other antlers arrayed over the mantle. I could pretty much sink into one of those sofa-chairs and never leave. It also just occurred to me that the background piano music I am hearing is, in fact, a pianist in the next room. Nice touch. The chef here also makes a mean cornish game hen and quite an excellent pan-seared Alaskan Halibut over a crispy risotto. But that’s another blog post…

Aside from US Air fouling up my flights, the trip here has been good. Due to flight problems, I only saw Portland after dark and in the early AM as I scooted north in my shiny black, slightly aggressive looking rental car (hey, I drove what they gave me at the rental counter). While I arrived at Lake Quinault early in the afternoon, the jet lag and general travel fatigue were rapidly sapping my wherewithal to focus. Serious photography would have to wait until the next morning.

Let me back up slightly to mention why I’m here. All my life I’ve been attracted to imagery of the pacific northwest. The huge old growth forests, the gray skies, the mist and the rain all appeal to me a great deal. Most any movie, TV show or even video game (Alan Wake on the XBox 360, anyone?) in this setting grabbed me on a visceral level (Twin Peaks still makes no sense to me, but the scenery was appealing). Yes, I realize there is far more to the region than my assuredly stereotypical description portrays… but those traits fit like a glove to my first stop on this trip: the temperate rain forest of Lake Quinault in the Olympic National Forest.

As I rolled into the area, the first things to catch my eye were the staggeringly large trees… particularly the firs and the cedars. They make even our largest oaks back at home look like stubby pencils by comparison. The next thing was the sheer amount of green that surrounds you… every shade you can imagine, mostly in the form of moss and ferns covering, quite literally, everything. All of these trees and moss and ferns, by the way, are on ridges and mountains that seem to just shoot out of the ground next to you and, hanging on their tops, are the fogs and mists I find so fascinating.

So, back to the jet lag. It was Monday morning (yesterday at the time of this writing) before I was deep into my first rain forest and I was immediately in awe. Maybe it’s just the pre-tourist season, but I’ve spent most of the time feeling like I was the only person in the forest. I’ve hiked trails for an hour or more without seeing anyone else. This makes the immersion all the greater and I’m having a wonderful time gathering not only photos and videos, but atmospheric audio using my digital field recorder (see my previous post on gear for more details on the geeky stuff).

The rain forest is pretty overwhelming to the senses and, as a photographer, I’m immediately snapping away at these expansive seas of green and trying to find good angles for trees that are, quite literally, 200 feet high. Being somewhere this different and stimulating to the senses always puts me in my photographic element and there’s a certain nervous energy that comes with that heightened state of awareness. By the end of the day I was sorting through my first thousand-photo-batch from the day and…

Sure, I have some shots I really like and I certainly have lots of images and videos that document the experience. Few of them, however, really capture it. A sea of green vegetation when you’re standing there is just overwhelming with its color, textures and the additional sounds and smells that go along with it. In a photo, however, it’s mostly just a profusion of greenery. The massive trees continually amaze me, but a photo of a big tree is pretty much a photo of a tree, even if there is something familiar in the frame to give a sense of scale. Now, as a photographer, this talk sounds like heresy since we all strive for that shot that captures the subject and, when possible, takes it to another creative or artistic level. I just haven’t gotten those shots yet.

In a funny sort of way, I think I’m too enamored with the environment here and my senses are too tweaked to have a realistic view of my shots at this stage. On the other hand, I also realize that the truly artistic and dramatic photos of the rain forest are going to come with unique light, specific atmospheric conditions and, in many cases, a lot of luck. I know in my mind’s eye what I want for some shots… but the perpetual gray and, yes, even those few hours of blue sky and sunlight aren’t going to make those happen. Wildlife encounters are, of course, even more a game of chance. Finding those situations is going to take more exploration on my part and, frankly, that’s not a bad thing since I know I will want to keep coming back here to dig deeper. From the outset I’ve been reminding myself that this is just my first foray and nothing more than a quick sampler over the course of a week. It’s the travel equivalent of that little tasting spoon at the ice cream parlor that you try before deciding what flavors you’ll dive into in your little waffle bowl.

The danger that comes with this kind of situation, too, is an almost subconscious drive to keep pushing the photography, likely to the detriment of experiencing the place itself. I’ve been forcing myself to just stop and take it in over the course of my second day here and, as a result, I’ve taken far fewer and less varied shots. On the one hand, pushing and experimenting increases your chances of finding that shot and getting more experience in how to work in this environment. On the other hand, it can lead to coming home with a ton of acceptably decent shots but no real sense of having truly “been” there.

What did I get during those moments this morning? A coyote and I exchanged glances over a stream this morning while deep in a maple glade. In that same glade I saw, and did photograph very casually, a single Roosevelt Elk grazing its way through the underbrush. And while trying to slowly circle around for a better angle on the elk (carrying, at the time, my field recorder to capture the sound of the stream and the seemingly hundreds of birds) I caught sight of a shaggy black head coming up out of the ferns to my left. Making eye contact with a black bear, even one some tens of yards away, is a bit alarming the first time… especially when it’s 7 AM and you’re totally alone in a primeval forest. I did what came to mind first (bad, photographer!) and backed the heck away. The bear did the same, so my only shot is his or her hairy rump among the ferns just prior to vanishing. The field recorder does have some choice profanities on it though, that I’m not likely to share. And I’ve also found myself wanting another bear sighting with some decent shots to go with it.

From a technical perspective, things are going relatively well. I’ve been bringing 40-60 GB of imagery and video back to my room each of the last two evenings, so those 500 GB drives are paying off. The GoPro Hero is going to bring a lot to whatever I end up putting together at the conclusion of this trip, even if it means mere seconds of video taken from hours of otherwise boring footage (that was, in fact, the very idea). The HyperDrive is working decently with the exception of some problems it immediately developed talking to the external backup drive I have paired with it. Those problems, of course, never appeared in testing prior to leaving home and I’m not yet sure whether it’s a drive or an enclosure issue… though I’m leaning toward the enclosure at this point. I’m working around that just fine, though.

I’m doing what sorting and editing I can at night, but I’m dead tired after a day of sensory overload and hiking coupled with not having fully adjusted to the timezones. That’s working to my advantage, though, for getting an early start. The poncho and Kata bag I brought proved quite useful today as the skies let loose with showers of various intensities. My new hiking boots are no longer stiff and have, along with the hiking socks I bought (an idea I initially thought kind of absurd) have become BFF’s with my feet. The little things like travel power strips for my lodgings and power inverters for the car are all proving to be the necessities I anticipated. I’ll know more in the coming days what was overkill and what was oversight. So far, however, so good.

Since I’ve put all of my energy into writing this post tonight, I’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow to post the first galleries. I also need time to work through finding some satisfaction in shots both unedited and unseen before I share anything. In the meantime, I’ve peppered a few into this post to provide context.

Tomorrow I’m out of the rain forest and off to the rocky coast. Here’s hoping I have WiFI there so I can get some shots online!

Night!

P.S. Chalk up another experience I have always wanted: listening to a loon’s cry on a lake in the morning fog. Done!

This coming Saturday morning I’m going to fly out at the obnoxious hour of 5:30 AM and, two layovers and three timezones later, arrive in Portland, Oregon. After grabbing a rental car and some supplies, I’ll do my best to tackle the jet lag in an airport hotel for the night before driving north to the Olympic National Forest for a week. Afterward, I’ll hop to San Francisco for a few days to visit family and friends, absorbing some of Apple’s WWDC excitement by omsosis before heading home.

I’ve always wanted to see the Pacific Northwest since I have a thing for misty forests, rocky beaches and mountains. Over the course of the week, I’ll shoot thousands of photos and hours of video in the temperate rainforest near Lake Quinault, along the rocky beaches of the Quieleute Nation, and around the crystalline, classically be-lodged Lake Crescent. I’m sure a week will barely scratch the surface.

I’ll mostly be taking still images, of course, but will also be grabbing a great deal of video using both my Canon 5D Mark II (w/Zoom H4n for audio) and a GoPro Hero HD. The GoPro Hero stems from a desire to easily capture hours of “b-roll” type video of my travel, hiking and the environment around me. This tiny water and bomb-proof camera will mount on the front of the car near the bumper and, at times, will be fastened to my chest using a small harness to record the hiking and shooting experience. See my post of a week or so ago with test footage of various angles I’ve tried while driving.

Obviously, picking gear and packing for such an excursion is always a challenge. Having a rental car makes life a lot easier, but the airlines still make the process of affordably hauling everything you’d really want a gigantic pain in the butt. It also means that all of the expensive and important stuff has to be with me on the plane rather than in checked luggage.

My main travel camera bag is a rolling Think Tank Photo Airport AirStream which is designed to fit in the overheard compartment or slide under the seat in front of you with ease. I pack it as tight as I can for the flight and carry my laptop and iPad as my combined “personal item”. The picture here shows the AirStream packed the way I’ll take it on the plane. Once there, of course, I’ll decompress a good bit and hike using a shoulder sling bag that will have been transported in my checked bag.

Unlike my TWiP colleagues, I’ve not taken the time to do one of the bag videos/interviews. In lieu of that, though, I’ve spread out virtually everything photo-related that I’m taking with me on this trip and created a clickable image that you can explore. If you hover over an item with your mouse, a tool-tip will appear with a brief description. Clicking any item will take you to the manufacturer or a vendor website for additional information. Sadly, as much of a fan as I am of the iPad, the tooltips don’t work in a mouse-less interface. You can, however, tap the items to be taken to the extended links.

Click for a larger view with descriptive tool-tips and links.

I hope to be blogging and uploading photos throughout the trip. That is subject, of course, to both available internet connectivity and the mental wherewithal to be creative after a long day in the woods. Either or both might well be in short supply, but I’ll know in a few days. With minimal connectivity, though, I can at least keep a decent twitter stream going.

More to come!