Story Pictures

Summer sunrise lights up Panamint Valley and its mountains to the west side. 

Behind the camera is the Panamint ridge and behind that is Death Valley, and the sun arising.  From my spot the reflective sunrise presents a momentary view worthy of a medium format hasselblad.  Even bigger would be better – but I don’t want to carry anything bigger.

This is one of those shots you have to get up early for and stumble around in the piedmont gravel and brush.  You’re trying, before sunrise light passes over, to get back to that place you think you remember from last trip – or maybe it was the trip before that. 

This time you’re carrying about 30 pounds more equipment than before.  How do those big name photographers get assistants to get up at 3:30 a.m. and carry it all without paying them?  Note to self: engage unpaid tote-man.  They call them interns.  Self, get an intern.

Well, I got no intern.  What I got is a couple of hard disks full of scenes like this of the American West.  This week I finally put-up a group of 40 medium format, California landscape images in Gallery 40  (two pages on this blog).  If I had found this photo file betimes, I would’ve put it in the Gallery and changed the number to 41.  It’s my favorite of the bunch.

View the first 40.

Everybody needs a picture of early morning sunrise over San Francisco — the sun poking through the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.  

Here’s one of mine –  I’ve donated its use to the Meg Whitman campaign for Governor of California. 

The way to take a picture like this is to hang around the Marin Headlands for a long time, months, even years, scouting out angles to view the gate, the bridge and the city. 

Then one morning when you think the sunrise is going to flare and do something spectacular, you get up and speed to your favorite place in the dark before first light.  Set up your camera gear in the cold fog and shiver.  Then most of the time there is no sunrise.  Just the blackness fading to the faintest gray, and gradually a little more gray than dark.  And then that’s it – it’s over, you can go home and wonder why you do things like this.

And then you do it again.

“To appropriate the ideas of another for one’s own use is plagiarism;  to copy the ideas of two or more others is research” — forget where I heard that.  Must have been at least twice.

Plagiarismtoday.com published an article how to avoid plagiarism and reap the benefits of republishing — by Jonathon Bailey:

“EmbedArticle: YouTube-Style Embeds for Text“

“For copyright holders and content creators. [sic] one of the most difficult [sic] they face is finding ways to share their content while encouraging a symbiotic relationship with those who use it.”

You’re supposed to copy and insert this HTML:

<div id=’embedded_article’><p><b>Source:</b> <a href=”http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/03/15/embedarticle-youtube-style-embeds-for-text/”>www.plagiarismtoday.com</a></p><script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://js.embedarticle.com/article/js_snip/4a9833f18d4df14d82cea81214c879541c4a3c86′></script></div>

However you also need to install a plug-in for WordPress blogs like this one to make the Embed work.   Gonna do that soon — stay tuned and see how this post changes.

First checkout Bailey’s critique then checkout the new fix for the publisher’s dilemma EmbedArticle.com .

You’ll be glad you did.

We’ll meet-up in Green River Town on a day on late May, 2010.  Then the two of us will mount up and head south into the red rock country.

First we will revisit the 7000 year old petroglyphs in Horseshoe Canyon. I went there before with a Kodak 280Z camera.  Got a few good pictures.  Since then I have acquired bigger, better, but not cheaper camera equipment, and I want to go back and do the place over with my newer stuff.

Planning logistics is the next step.

Stay tuned.  Blog Category is “2 old men in a jeep”

You should see the other guy.

Kentfield, California – February 2010

I got the bad news late Thursday afternoon:  my jury duty has ended, jury duty for January 29th has been cancelled — apparently because of lack of interest.

I consider this cancellation bad news because it denies me the opportunity to demonstrate the Big Three ways to get out of jury duty:

• wear a full beard,
• flaunt your education (especially advanced degrees)
• dress for gardening.

Juries called for the beginning of the week, Mondays or Tuesdays have a high probability of being seated.  Juries called to appear near the end of the week, especially Fridays, have a high probability of being cancelled — as mine was (Friday January 29th).

But, cheer-up, there’s always next year (actually not always).

Jury Summons from Marin County Superior Court to Me,

Report Date: Jan 29, 2010

How can you get out of jury duty?  More urgently, how can I get out of jury duty?

Let me count the ways:

• I asked Google how to get out of jury duty and its first page of search results returned articles laying out 74 ways.
• Then I asked Yahoo the same question, first page results: 38 ways.
• Bing, same question: 59 ways.

Add them up:  171 ways.   Who’s got time for 171 ways?  Not me – once I count past seventeen I lose track and have to start over (hey!  that’s number 172).

I’m going with the big three: 

1. Wear a beard. You might need to plan four or five months ahead of time – don’t worry, you can get a six month extension over the phone or by e-mail).  Go for a full beard like one of these (L to R):  Lt. Gen (Old Pete) Longstreet CSA. Herman Melville, John Muir – no sissy goatees).
2. Get educated, list your college degrees, preferably with an advanced degree or two.
3. Dress for gardening.

 

Beyond the big three, I have no story and I’m sticking to it.

———

Photos from Wikipedia.

I stopped buying new bookshelves in the 1990’s, but I continued buying new books.  I had found Amazon.com, where I could sell books (after I read them) for a few dollars less than I had paid for them.

Then everybody found out how to do that and they did. 

First, it knocked down the pricing of used books.

• So I bought used books through Amazon, read them and sold them on Amazon for about what I had paid for them.

Then everybody found out how to do that on Amazon and they did.  Used bookstores disappeared from our neighborhoods.

 
• Pricing of new books began to slide with deeper discounts. Used book pricing on Amazon dropped, often below $5, then lower still — 99-cents is not uncommon.

This reductio ad absurdum on Amazon nearly blew away my personal read-and-recycle program.  Even with shipping and handling added to the financial calculation, I couldn’t motivate myself to pack-up a book and carry it to the post office for a net gain of small pocket change.   Who is doing that?

• Well, I bought a used copy of Bruce Berger’s "There Was A River" for one cent plus $3.99 shipping.  The invoice came through Amazon, showing the supplier as Red Shield Stores – also known as the Salvation Army.
• Then I got a DM through Twitter — self-introduction from the Bay Area Free Book Exchange.

The Book Exchange deal:

• You give them your books for free and you can take as many of their books as you want.
• They cherry-pick whatever books they can sell profitably on e-Bay and
• Use the money to run their free facility in Berkeley.

So, I cherry-pick my own books for sale on Amazon — although fewer of them make the cut. I put the rest into boxes in my garage.  My New Year’s resolution is to give these unsellable books to the Book Exchange this year.

So, how has Kindle begun to play a role in all this?

• Simply, giant Amazon owns the Kindle and now actually sells Kindle editions of 390,000 titles, mostly at $9.99.
• When Amazon actually sells a lot of Kindle books (as they did this Christmas), the actual selling price becomes a valid force in the book publishing, buying and selling market place.

New "physical" books already feel the Kindle’s pricing pressure.  Where?

• On Amazon of course.
• One of the top-selling "physical" books, "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown, discounted from $29.95 to $12.00, also became the best selling Kindle edition at $9.60.
• At this writing, I cannot find a meaningful used price — but "The Lost Symbol" is clearly headed for a quick trip to the Book Exchange or the Salvation Army.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle Reader is turning my garage into a library.

Here is a picture of the 26 volumes that I’ve accumulated (Genshoku Nihon no Bijutsu) since publication for the Meiji Centennial in 1968:

The four volumes I need to complete this set are:

• 8 Emakimono
• 23 Men to Sho Zo
• 24
• 26

Long, long ago, when I was going to school at Sophia University in Tokyo, the Monbusho subsidized publication of a 30-volume series (Genshoku Nihon no Bijutsu pub by Shogakukan). Many of these were further discounted through the bookstores in Jimbocho, where I picked up about 16 of them. 

Each time I visited Tokyo over the years I went through the Jimbocho bookstores, and finally got up to a total of 27 volumes.
One of my wife’s bone-headed friends spoiled No. 8 — so I’m back to 26 books.
Now, I’m looking for four non-sequential volumes to fill out the set of 30.

By the 1990’s the Jimbocho bookstores seemed to have exhausted their supply of these books.  So, even if I visited Jimbocho today, I doubt that I’d find any of this series at all — and very unlikely to find the 4 volumes I am seeking to complete the set.

The Deaths of Firenzi

By Peter Neibert

What we have here is a fear-gripping, white-knuckled, leg-crossing story of the Deaths of Firenzi.

The story is here, but the pictures aren’t ready yet.

I’m working on that – post them when I get to it.

You can read the story without the pictures, and no one will care if you move your lips.