The top of a hill

I haven't been hiking much lately. I've mostly been riding around in the Ranger. My sister might have been right; I'm going to get fat. I decided I had better go climb something. I headed for a very scenic part of Bulldog Canyon. Along the way, though, I realized that I didn't like the way the clouds looked, and I didn't want to take pictures of a scenic area with bad clouds. I stopped at the part of Bulldog Canyon that was burned by the Ghost Fire in the summer of 2005. It's still a pretty desolate looking area.

There are few saguaros, but lots of saguaro skeletons.

I started climbing a fair-sized hill near the road. About halfway up, I heard a voice. I knew it wasn't God because it sounded like it was coming over a PA system. I've heard hikers talking up to half a mile away when they're on the side of a mountain, but the wind was blowing the wrong way for the sound to be coming from any nearby mountain sides. Also, hikers don't use PA systems either. Then I remembered seeing Apache Trail Tours Jeeps in this area before. They do use a PA system. Sure enough, one of their Jeeps pulled into view pretty soon. It stopped. They do that sometimes so people can take pictures or talk about something by the road or quell their motion sickness (that's bound to happen sometimes on those roads, even though their drivers seem to go at a very safe (and slow) speed). I zoomed in and took pictures, but they were too far away for me to tell what they were doing. I ambled on up the hillside.

Apache Trail Tours.

As I neared the summit, the hill got steeper. They tend to do that. It got steeper than I wanted to climb or descend. The Jeep was still there. I don't know if they saw me, but if they had stopped to watch me I sure didn't want to slip. They had been sitting there for a long time by now and I wondered if they had spotted me and were curious about where I was going. On the other hand, if I couldn't tell what they were doing when I had my camera zoomed all the way, it seems doubtful that they had even noticed me. Still, I didn't want to fall on a cholla in front of an audience. I worked me way round to the right and the hill got even steeper in that direction. I was on my way (very carefully) around to the left and had just spotted a way to the top when the Jeep started moving again. Whew. I could relax.

There were more people on the other side of the hill. I'm sure they never saw me.

The view was nice, but not stunning.

While I was up there, I took a 360 degree panorama and put it on my Photosynth page so you can view it full screen and zoom in and all that stuff.

360 degree view from the top of the hill.

Click below to see all of the pictures.

BC_2010_12_26

Yet another panorama of the Superstition Mountains

Sweetums and I were going to go for a ride through Bulldog Canyon yesterday but she had to cancel at the last minute. I decided to go anyway and climb a small hill to check out the view. I couldn't get the lock open, though. The locks at the Wolverine Pass entrance and at the Packsaddle road entrance are often abused. It was getting close to sunset, so I just drove around a little and then decided to make a panorama of the Superstition Mountains from the intersection of Idaho road and McKellips.

A couple more Photosynths

It was still a little warm on Saturday so I didn't want to go on a long hike. I decided to go up to the top of Coronado Mesa and take pictures for a Photosynth of the canyon to the north. I was going to try something different, too. I took HDRIs and tweaked the contrast before stitching them together. I didn't zoom in a lot. I didn't want a lot of detail. I just wanted to get a picture that showed the view.

Click below to see the rest of the pictures.

2010_10_02

More lessons learned

I've been feeling the urge to get out and do more hiking lately. I feel it every time I try to zip up my pants. Most people would complain that their pants are shrinking, but I know what the problem is. So I went for a short hike to burn a few calories.

It's tarantula season. They guys are out looking for some cute gals.

I went wandering around near the First Water trailhead. I thought I would go someplace I hadn't gone before, but I fell into some old footsteps. It must have been humid yesterday because it wasn't long before I had sweat trickling down my temples. It fact, the air has been much more moist the past couple of years than when I first moved out there. The relative humidity is rarely in the single digits anymore.

Does this remind you of a dog?

I wound up on top of a small hill near the trailhead. I decided to experiment with making a Photosynth panorama without using a tripod and found out that I shouldn't do that. I also zoomed in quite a bit for the pictures. I shot in RAW mode and corrected for the vignetting, but the stitched result still has smudges in the sky.

I found out that if you click on the "expand" symbol on this, you can view the picture full screen.

I need to keep experimenting to figure out what the limitations are with the equipment I have now so I can decide if I want to go out and buy something like a Giga Pan. Maybe by the time I figure that out, I'll have taken huge pictures of everything I want to do that with. And no remarks about my prepositions, please.

From the south side

Thursday was a beautiful, cloud-free day. After work I headed out to Peralta road. I went to the top of a small hill south of the Superstition Mountains. I set up the tripod on the side of the hill and tried to get it level. I thought it was but for some reason I looked through the viewfinder with my left eye, and then it looked very crooked. One of my eyeballs must not be screwed in right. Anyway, I actually used the bubble level app in my new Droid phone to get the tripod level. Who woulda thought it could actually be useful?

I took pictures of stuff like this.

It was uncomfortable bending over to take pictures, so I didn't zoom in much so I wouldn't have to take a lot of pictures. Still, you can zoom into this picture quite a bit.

Photosynth panorama of the south side of the Superstition Mountains.

I had the camera set up correctly this time, so I think that helped it stitch together a little better. I took the pictures in RAW mode so I could correct for the darkening in the corners. As usual, I was hurrying to get the pictures taken before the sun got too low. When I was done taking the pictures I wanted, I grabbed a water bottle and stood there and finally looked around me. It was wonderfully quiet and the lighting was perfect and the temperature was perfect and there were no bugs buzzing around my ears. I'm glad I stopped and looked around before I hurried home to see the pictures.

I've been seeing a bunch of animals recently that I keep forgetting to mention, so I'll catch up now. On the way home from the hike along the top of Ittindi Rock I almost hit a deer that ran across the road in front of me. Something else ran across the freeway in front of me later, but I think that was my imagination. When I was taking pictures on Sunday for my first panorama of the Superstitions, there were a few bats flitting around near sunset. That's the first bats I've seen this summer. They were thick last summer but ominously missing this summer. Maybe that's why there have been so many bugs this year. Then, on the way home yesterday, I saw something that I've been trying to get a decent picture of ever since I moved out here. A roadrunner ran across Peralta road in front of me. I knew it would be long gone but I stopped where it crossed and it was still standing there. I knew it would be a wasted effort but I got my camera out to take a picture, and the roadrunner just stood there. It stayed there while I took several pictures. There was barely enough light, so the pictures are grainy but I think they are pretty good, considering.

Finally, a picture of a roadrunner!

I saw some cows, too.

Click below to see all of the pictures.

2010_09_23

The dark side

I was playing with ICE (Image Composite Editor) Friday evening and kept looking at the "Publish to Photosynth..." button. From what I remembered about Photosynth, ICE composites didn't belong there, but what the heck; I pushed the button. The result is below.

My first ICE/Photosynth panorama.

The cool thing about that is it's the full resolution image. You can zoom way in and see lots of detail. The viewing area is rather limited in this embedded image. You can go to my Photosynth page and look at it almost full screen there.

Naturally, I started thinking about what else I could do with this newly discovered capability. As an experiment, I decided to take a bunch of pictures zoomed in on the Superstition Mountains and throw those into ICE. Since it was kind of hot yesterday, I planned to wait until late afternoon. I waited a little too long, though, and was almost running to get to a spot with a decent view before sunset. I stopped at the first acceptable spot and took some pictures. Then I continued to the hill I wanted to be on for the pictures. There was still enough light so I took a bunch more pictures. Since I was in such a hurry, I didn't have the camera set up quite the way I wanted, but that didn't seem to have a detrimental effect. I was still in a hurry when I got home and the first time I put the pictures into ICE, the result reminded me of Brundlefly. While eating dinner I realized that I had put pictures taken at both locations into ICE at the same time. No wonder I got strange results. I had to geotag the pictures to figure out where one batch ended and the other started. One of the panos is made up of 31 picture and the other has 80 pictures. Not all of the pictures are perfectly focused. ICE had a little trouble stitching the pictures together in a few places, too.

Superstition Mountains super panorama composed of 80 pictures.

While I was skimming through the Photosynth blog, I saw that geotagged Photosynths are put on bing maps within a few hours. I thought that would be cool, but there were a couple of issues to overcome. First, even though all the pictures were geotagged, the final Photosynth isn't. I had to geotag it manually, which was a little tedious since Google aerial views and bing aerial views don't look exactly the same. A nifty feature is that you can also specify the orientation of the Photosynth, though. Second, and this is the kind of thing that makes me mad whenever I have to use microsoft tools, how to turn on Photosynth pictures in bing maps is far from obvious. I tried a couple of times Saturday morning and gave up. On Sunday morning I went down a path that didn't seem right but could not be ruled out, and there it was. Typical microsoft. If anybody else is able to figure it out, please let me know. I want to know if microsoft tools are really as obtuse as I think they are or if I'm just a dummy. Wait, maybe I don't want to know. I'd rather just grumble about microsoft.

I just remembered a third irritation. While geotagging the Photosynths, I thought it might help if I looked at the bing map in 3D. Guess what; 3D works ONLY in internet explorer. Typical microsoft. I'm getting mad thinking about all this. That's good. I haven't gone completely over to the dark side.