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It’s father’s day so I could think of nothing better to do than to go stomping through dry weeds, broken glass and owl poop while carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear. Yep, that’s right, I headed back out to Mather Field to have a look at the those old nuke bunkers once again.

Yep, they’re still there. Yep, still abandoned.

The biggest difference this time around, besides the graffiti and paintball marks on everything, was the owls. Bloody hell, there were lots of owls. Every building out there had at least one owl in it. Like a freaking Harry Potter convention. And the damn things kept waiting for me to walk right up close before they flew off, screeching, and scaring the bejesus out of me every freakin’ time.

This time I did screw up enough courage to actually go into some of the bunkers, far enough to lay some strobes for lighting effects. It’s hard to explain, but the dark, cavernous nature of the things just makes them creepy to me. And the weird echos… and the damn owls. Brrrr.

And no, I never got into that room in the far back of some of big bunkers. It’s some kind of ventalation room or something. One had an owl nest in it and that seemed like a good way to piss off mama-owl. Owls have talons.

So after an hour and a half of tromping around out there I was suitably hot and sweaty and ready to leave. I strongly recommend a good set of boots if you head out there as aside from the usual suite of valley stickers there’s all manner of nasties that can seriously mess up your day — and it’s a long way from help. Make sure your tetanus is up-to-date (mine isn’t).

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If you go by the Rescue Fire department you can get these nifty license plate frames that say, “Where the hell is Rescue, CA?“. It’s funny because, as anyone who lives in Rescue will tell you, you get a lot of “Where there hell is…” when you say you live there. Now that’s cool and all, but what I’d like is, “Where the hell is Skinners, CA?“.

See, the US Postal service says I live in Rescue, CA. Anyone driving by would say I live in Cameron Park, CA because while Rescue is mostly rural I live in a slice of suburbia that borders Cameron Park and is pretty much indistinguishable from it. Turns out they’re both wrong, I live in Skinners, CA.

Never heard of Skinners, CA? Don’t worry, neither had I until first Google and then Yahoo maps enlightened me.

So what’s this about Skinners? Welp, near as I can figure, in 1860 (James?) Skinner set up a vineyard about a mile up the trail from the then brand new Pleasant Grove House Pony Express stop. Today, vestiges of the old Skinner winery are still visible at the nursery at Cameron Park Drive and Green Valley Road, which also happens to be the centerpoint of Skinners, CA on the online maps. Go figure.

In the 1950s roughly 5000 acres was sold to Larry Cameron and later slowly sold off to developers (and I assume something about a Park was also involved ;)). Now somehow ol’ Larry retained top billing rights and James got relegated to cartographer minutia.

It wasn’t until I started messing with the online map engines a while back that I discovered this “Skinners” guy and looked up the history.

Now it’s a lot of fun to put in “Skinners, CA” in various online services knowing that most people — even people who know where Rescue, CA is — will look at it and go, “Where the hell?!?” but most computers will be able to pinpoint it within a few feet of the nursery up the road.

A great example of this is Flickr’s new places feature. When you put in “Skinners, CA” what do you get?

So now you know where the hell Skinners, CA is.

Where yer spurs? — Reno Nevada to New Jersey, in Buckaroo Banzai

Just got home from Reno, Nevada. We were wanting to take Ryan on a vacation and he’d been wanting to go to another state. Seemed like a cool idea so we decided to go to Reno… Reno, Nevada.

Well more specifically we went to Circus Circus in Reno, because with the exception of a foray out to see Ratatouille (not one of Pixar’s best) we pretty much stayed under the Circus Circus tent.

Let me just say, those damn quarter sucking midway games, well, suck quarters. You think you’re in the protective kid-safe zone, but noooo, you’re wrong. Like little kid-safe harpies the machines call to you. Ooooh, drop a quarter in me and you’ll get some tickets! Get more tickets and you can redeem them for cool stuff! It’s only later you realize that you’re missing $100 and have a mountain of tickets and you can redeem them for… a cheap, Chinese, probably lead paint lined, knockoff toy.

At least with a slot machine you can have fleeting dreams: C’mon, Papa needs a new camera lens *shtick tick tick tick tick* Damn!

The other thing I noticed about Reno, and I know of no delicate way to put this, was an odd prevalence of fat people. I mean, damn! I’m a little over weight, but I fit in the freakin’ scrawny category up there. Ya know, I never bought into that obesity epidemic BS you read about. I few pounds of lazy does not equal “obese”. Then I went to Reno!

As if feeding the problem (*snicker*) Circus Circus ran this tram between their two buildings. A… very… slow… tram. It was quicker to walk, seriously, I timed it.

WALK PEOPLE!

Anyway, we have a few more stuffed animals now and Ryan can say he’s been to another state. Me? I think I’m gonna go for a run.

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So I was out looking for something to contribute to the 24 Hours of Flickr project and I swung by Cameron Park Airpark. Nothing like airplanes in the garage to fill a frame… but I digress…

I swung up to the fence along the runway just for the hell of it and I just happened to look up and there was an airplane on approach… but it looked funny. There was something sticking out the plane’s nose!

This other guy there yelled over to me, “Did you see that?!?!”. Uh, I thought I did. “He’s too low, he’s not gonna make it!”. Right there my brain went into photojournalism mode.

Of course I haven’t shot news in 20 years.

20 years ago, there were two knobs on your camera and you just knew they were set to 1/500th @ f/11 and you were shooting Tri-X. You focused yourself.

Today, you have a small computer in your hands that makes decisions you might not make. As the plane was coming in I discovered the difference between “single-mode” and “continuous-mode” autofocus, I was set for “single-mode” (actually “auto” but it it didn’t seem to care) and I’d get the little *beep* telling me it was all focused and then I’d pause to compose the frame and by the time I actually shot, the damn plane would be out-of-focus. Funny how that works.

I figured it out and the later frames are better, but damnit, that was annoying. I think next time, if things start happening fast, the best idea might be to spin the little knob to the idiot icon for “sports-mode” and just go with that.

For what it’s worth, the pilot did just fine. He came in low, somewhat slow and touched down nicely at the very end of the runway. He certainly had more of a handle on his equipement than I did :).

On Feb 20th an IM conversation I was having with a friend contained this lovely:

“I was thinking the other day that it’d be interesting if newpapers pushed photos to Flickr or something and, as part of captioning, link to the article.”

And that was how it started. Nope, not my idea… but I love it just the same. And then the Portland Oregonian goes and does it. (Actually, it seems they uploaded their first photo on the 18th. They — in fact — win)

But there’s room to do it better.

First of all, it doesn’t appear that the Oregonian is uploading all their photos only a subset, and not on a daily basis either. I’d like to see all the photos that ran in that day’s paper automagically uploaded, with links to the stories of course.

I’d also like to see all the EXIF data pulled as well. I think it would be neat to see camera types and exposure and even geocode (mapping) data if it’s there. The Oregonian seems to strip all that.

Of course I’d use Flickr’s sets for various categories: the generic news, sports and features come to mind, but I’m sure more could be thought of. I’d use tags in the same way too, plus a few for other metadata like the photographer’s name (the Oregonian does this).

I’d also automatically put photos into various groups.

The automatic aspect is really a necessity. Even I recognize that Flickr would not be a huge traffic draw, and it would be tough to justify a staffer massaging daily photos into various groups and sets and whatnot everyday. Therefore to make it work, it would have to be an automatic process.

And really, why stop at Flickr? Why not video to YouTube? Why not headlines (or perhaps just breaking news) to Twitter? Just like newspapers are realizing it’s not just about paper, it’s not just about a single outlet on the web either.

-30-

Well, I went out to another out-of-the-way place to take a look around. This time I chose the antenna complex south of Highway 50 near the El Dorado county line. I’ve only driven by it a million times on my commute, and I’ve always wondered what was there. Much like the Mather forays I used Google Maps to figure out how to get there.

After bouncing along a mile or so of what can only loosely be called a “road” I finally reached the the antennas. It was late and the sun was setting (always the case) and even though you command an impressive view from up there, it was too smoky for any good panoramic shots (and like an idiot I left before the beautiful smoke-reddened sunset).

Much to my dismay I discovered two shortcommings of the D80 and the new lens:

First, the lense vignettes when wide open at long focal lengths. That was a little surprising. It may freak you out if you shoot blank skies at 200mm at f/5.6. Uh, ya think?! You can see just a hint of this in the upper right of the main image above.

Second, I shot some in black and white mode and I turned on the D80’s B&W “filter effects” to mimmic a red filter — to darken the sky and bump the contrast. Ok, this feature just sucks. One, it doesn’t seem to be a very RED red filter (i.e.: it doesn’t darken the blue sky very much at all - but it WILL exacerbate the vignetting mentioned above) and two, even tones (hello! like the sky!) in the resulting image are mottled, like it tries to add Tri-X grain or something. All it accomplishes is making your images turn to shit.

I don’t know if it’s just the “filter effects” mode that does it or if the whole B&W mode is jacked up. I’ll probably test that more tommorrow.

Anyway, I’d like to head back up on a clear day, like the day after a good rain. It might be neat to shoot at night from there too. Or maybe even a decent sunset (d’oh!).

At a friend’s suggestion I headed back out to Mather Field and poked around an old bunker complex out there.

I felt like a spy or something. As for directions, all I had was, “It’s south of the golf course… on the left.” So I pulled up Google Maps and zoomed in on the area. Oh, yeah… those looks like bunkers. I actually printed the satellite images out and had them with me to navigate by.

Hmmm, satellite maps of a military bunker complex — 20 years ago that would have been a ticket to jail.

The road leading up to the complex was barred preventing vehicle traffic but not much else. I ditched the car and walked the few hundred yards to the main gate, or what was left of it. Everything from that point on was either open, unlocked or just ripped apart.

It was all pretty cool. It was clear that at some point in time the area was very high security, what with bullet proof glass everywhere (mostly on the ground) and even firing ports in some buildings.

It was also pretty clear I wasn’t the first person there. Some of the bunkers looked disturbingly lived in. Some pretty funny graffiti too. At one point I startled some kind of owl and it scared the crap out of me. The echo from the bunker doorway was a great effect though.

*SCREECH* Oh crap…ap…ap…ap! Heh…eh…eh…eh Cooool…ool…ool…ool.

All of the buildings were completely gutted. One building, one that looked if possible even more high security than the others, was pretty comical because while the door was still locked with a mechanical punch-button keypad, the bars on the windows were all ripped off and the place smelled seriously funky. I didn’t have the guts to venture too far in.

The whole complex is pretty big and I was on foot. I missed a lot simply because the sun was setting and I had to move fast. You know, those big bunkers don’t look so big until you take a “short cut” over one… or two. Yeah, they’re big… *pant* *pant* *pant*

Nothin’ but hardened, reinforced dumpsters out there now though.

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Hey, the F works!

A guy at Action Camera took a look at it and with some minor additional cleaning and a fresh set of batteries the motor spun for the most part fine. “It just needs to work out some.”

So work it out I did. I shot some from the bluffs above the Old Fair Oaks bridge and I discovered what I think is an F-ism:

As you depress the shutter release (the main one, not the motor-drive ones) the mirror pops up, then the shutter fires. If you depress the shutter release button slowly, as you would pull the trigger on a rifle, you reach the point where you lift the mirror but haven’t yet fired the shutter. Then as you keep pressing the shutter fires and the mirror drops.

It’s a disjointing feeling as I wasn’t all together expecting it and I wasn’t sure it was only the mirror being slow and not the shutter. I shot a lot of frames twice.

Shooting without a meter is fun by the way, f/8 and be there. I found that I can make use of the spot meter in my D80 and then… um bracket. Seems to work pretty well :).

Every now and then the motor misses a beat or just locks up. Keeping it in single mode side steps this for the most part.

Addendum: a co-worker who owns several F’s pointed out, “you’re not shooting in “H” (high-speed) mode are you? You’re supposed to have the mirror locked up in that mode.” Oh, oops. Motor works fine now.

I had some time today and decided to mosey around Mather Field which was once known as Mather Air Force Base.

I found myself near the “Alert Pad” where, although I didn’t realize it at the time, B-52s would sit waiting to be loaded with nuclear bombs to drop on the USSR.

What I found was Area 2, which was apparently a park. It must be the only part of the former airbase left untouched since the Air Force left in 1990.

It was creepy. Standing in the weeds I imagined kids playing under the shadow of the Alert Pad. I wondered if their mom’s watched them, chatting with other Air Force moms, while their dad’s were busy with their flying machines. As I stomped through the over-grown brush, I wondered if the mom’s were worried at all… worried about the dads, about where they’d live next, worried about the mission that the dad’s had while at the Alert Pad.

Did they all wheel around and stare when the plumes of smoke rose on the horizon when that B-52 crashed on takeoff in 1982?

But that’s all gone now. Nothing but weeds and dead trees. I wonder if the kids who drank from that fountain 30 years ago remember.

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