Rudy’s Blog

I was back in Big Basin Park the last couple of days. I parked at the park headquarters, backpacked in to (near) Sunset trail camp where I spent a night, and backpacked out to Waddell Beach the next day, where my better half picked me up.

I say “near” because I couldn’t find the freaking Sunset trail camp (expected it too soon), and slept on a random outcropping near the trail. I learned that I’d brought the fly of my tent instead of the tent itself, so had to do a lean-to kind of thing. The Compleat Senile Camper.

I started out at the same little waterfall at Timms Creek where I was on June 15, 2005. I mistakenly called it Timkins Creek in the earlier entry.

By the way, one of my regular blog-readers, Mac Tonnies, asks what kind of camera I use. I have a 5 Meg SONY DSC-T1; It’s very small and fits in my pants pocket, which means that I can take a lot of pictures. I walk around blogging my life.

Of course there’s a newer model now, the DSC-T7, it’s even lighter, my wife just got one.

The camera has a Zeiss lens, which seems to take very nice pictures. I sometimes Photoshop them, doing a minimal CTRL+SHIFT+L for “Adjust All Levels” — although I don’t always accept that change, as it can wipe out subtle color tones as it would have in this lightly PhotoShopped picture of eucalyptus bark taken back in Los Gatos. I did end up adjusting brightness and contrast a bit on this one. Really, it would look better as a print.

A dendrogyph or tree-tiki on Sunset trail in Big Basin Park. Features burnt in by firebrands. Spooky in the lonely dusk. Slight fuzziness due to motion blur, even though I shot this six times.

The biggest problem with a tiny camera is blur due to hand tremor in low light. I wish the CCD was a bit more sensitive, as sometimes it indicates low light when I'd like to be able to shoot without flash. You can use the built-in Menu to set the “Film Speed” to 400 to get a bit more speed, but often that's not enough. I’m playing with the EV numbers now to see if I can gain anything that way, seems like a negative EV might use a shorter exposure.

I shoot in lower light without flash anyway many times, as flash tends to flatten out surfaces, and only works up to a few feet. I always laugh when I see people taking flash pictures of things like performers a hundred feet away, or mountains, or even fireworks.

The downside of shooting at low speeds with an ultralight camera is that the camera wiggles very easily — unlike a kilogram-mass “good” camera. IMHO, now that we have tiny CCDs functioning as miniature film, stabilizing mass is the sole advantage of big cameras — people are only still getting big clunkers out of inertia and fashion and a sense that it makes them look professional.

You could glue a brick to the SONY and have a more wiggle-resistant camera. I've seen tiny flexible tripods. Even better would be a a gecko-foot pad. But, lacking that, I squeeze imperceptibly between breaths, or use self-timer release so that I don’t even have to squeeze, or hold the camera pressed against a tree or rock or railing.

In this picture I held the camera against a rock. It shows a rock-filled creekbed in Waddell Creek near the sea, reminding me of the creeks in my boyhood home of Louisville, Kentucky — so many of the Kentucky streams are wide and flat and tiled with flagstones. In my memories it’s often autumn there.

Getting a self-timer picture of myself is always tricky.

There I am.

After sleeping at (near) Sunset trail camp I walked down to Berry Creek Falls, which was looking good. I had the place all to myself. That’s a real win with being retired, you can go places on off days.

I walked all the way to Waddell creek, leaves falling. I felt autumnal.

Hard to believe I’ll be sixty next March. I’m a persistent (so far) pattern, a standing wave.

There were some nice little butterflies. This picture uses a digital zoom, which breaks the highlights into pixelization.

I got a nice series of pictures of flow that first day at the little falls on Timms Creek.

Focusing on this one gnarly, ever-shifting pattern of flow. I used flash on the two close ones.

The real reason my pictures sometimes look good isn’t so much a matter of what kind of camera I have.

It’s because I’ve been continually taking pictures for nearly fifty years.

Photography’s been my hobby forever, something I do to express myself, and without worrying about making money off it.

It’s nice to have a blog to show them on. And then when I walk around taking pictures of things, I feel like I'm not alone.