Mt Whitney Zone
Posted By: Fishmonger Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 04:04 PM
They were 12 this summer, we went out to do a yo-yo hike, but again realized at about Glen Pass that going back would be a ho-hum, been-there-done-that kind of experience, so we just did the TM-YV-TM section in yo-yo mode, then finished up on day 20 at Whitney Portal with Doug's finest burgers and called it another great year. Lots of snow made for great vistas in July, and even though the kids now feel we ought to so something different in 2011, I think that "different" thing will still happen in the Sierra.

Not a real trip report, but if you have the patience to go through all the days' photos and read the captions, you'll get the idea of what unfolded:

http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/outdoor/gallery/JMT2010/

oh, and we did again skip the Whitney Summit. Big dark clouds moving in early, none of us in the mood, Trail Crest was just fine :-)

Anyone know if Sierra, the 7-year-old from Bishop finished with her mother Heather? We last saw them at Evolution Lake when it was her 7th birthday party.
Posted By: Steve C Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 05:49 PM
Woah!!! Your 80 "best_of" pics are SO nice! And those "deep zoom panoramas" are something else -- especially on my 24" wide-screen monitor!

Couple of questions: You detoured to Rainbow Falls; how did you get back to the JMT?

Was Fish Valley a detour?

And how did you make that picture of the tent and the "JMT" letters in that first picture of the "best_of" 80 group of pictures?
Posted By: Zeta4 Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 06:14 PM
Those are some stunning photos. Amazing the difference between someone who knows how to take pics and pics taken with a compact point and shoot. Making want to get out there again!
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 07:02 PM
Originally Posted By: Steve C
Woah!!! Your 80 "best_of" pics are SO nice! And those "deep zoom panoramas" are something else -- especially on my 24" wide-screen monitor!

Couple of questions: You detoured to Rainbow Falls; how did you get back to the JMT?

Was Fish Valley a detour?

And how did you make that picture of the tent and the "JMT" letters in that first picture of the "best_of" 80 group of pictures?


see maps for each day linked from here

http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/outdoor/Muir2009/calendar/log2010.html

the Fish Valley route reconnects just below Silver Pass if you can't take Goodale (was snowed in too much for my liking - steep long snow field compared to Silver, so we reconnected there, rather than after VVR on Bear Ridge as originally planned)

the JMT letters in the night shot were done with my headlight - 25 min exposure, but only a few seconds of writing letters with your headlight in the night sky while wondering how to stay warm as the temp kept dropping). The camera was totally wet from the dew that formed on it after dusk - took me half an hour to dry everything before I even started with these images.

re deep-zooms - I think I'll be purchasing one of those robotic tripod heads that now are much more affordable than I thought ($300), and much more portable than you may imagine, so next time I'll be doing some really deep deep zooms smile

http://www.thegadgetworks.com/


forgot to add this - all the other Sierra Deep Zooms I have are here

http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/outdoor/muir2009/photo_gallery/photo_gallery.htm

those from 2009 are taken with the $100 Canon A590, so don't think you need the fancy gear for that. All you need to do is overlap the images real nice. My daughter shot the Donohue Pass deep zoom with that point and shoot this year, and I didn't even know she did that. Learned from observing, and her first one was a beauty.

The Palisade High Detail deep zooom is an example of how much better it can get if you use telephoto lenses and stitch together dozens of images, which with a robotic camera head gets you into the world of gigapixel images.

Posted By: Steve C Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 08:10 PM
Originally Posted By: Fishmonger

Nice! I see you made quick use of the Joseph's Gmap4 utility.

Are those jagged lines on the trace caused by gps inaccuracies?

( Just for quick reference, here's Fishmonger's Day 7 map link.  I especially like changing the "Terrain" view to "MyTopo". )
Posted By: Steve C Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 08:18 PM
How many pictures did it take to make the Donohue Pass deep zoom?

...can you try posting an embedded "iframe" picture here?

Edit: Thanks for posting one below.
Hint to people: Click and drag the picture to change the view. Or for a full-screen treat, click the icon in the top right corner. (Use your keyboard Esc key to return to normal mode.)
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 08:38 PM
Donohue Pass was just four 8 megapixel images on the A590is, while the Palisades High Detail pano is made up of 42 12 megapixel images, I think.

These are the 4 images from Claire's camera used to make the Donohue Pass pano:

http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/outdoor/gallery/jmt2010/20100713/IMG_0286.jpg
http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/outdoor/gallery/jmt2010/20100713/IMG_0287.jpg
http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/outdoor/gallery/jmt2010/20100713/IMG_0288.jpg
http://didnt.doit.wisc.edu/outdoor/gallery/jmt2010/20100713/IMG_0289.jpg

loaded into the (free) Microsoft ICE with a drag/drop, then exported to Deep Zoom Panorama tile set, uploaded to web server, slight hack of the html to get rid of the MS logo and a few other tweaks.
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 08:42 PM
"...can you try posting an embedded "iframe" picture here?"

trying a smaller panorama, after the big one from Muir Pass failed to load here. Have to see why that is.

Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 08:51 PM
Originally Posted By: Steve C


Are those jagged lines on the trace caused by gps inaccuracies?


Most of these go away when you zoom in - the line is pretty fat in gmap4 because I use the original GPX format for those maps, and GPX doesn't let you set line weight. I removed most of the GPS scatter with a filtering application (GPX Editor) that also reduced the number of points by about 30%, so the majority of these clusters of bouncing lines at each break should have been removed. Zoom in in Topo view and you will sometimes see that what looks like scatter in Terrain view is actually a tight set of switchbacks with the directional arrows making up the majority of what looks like random scatter. The only time the GPS wanders is when you totally stop, and that is where you get about 10% extra distance on each day, especially on rainy days when you sit around for hours and the GPS wanders around wondering if you have moved or not. Once moving, it usually stays very much on track and doesn't wander more than 50 feet off course laterally, even in deep valleys. Go to Satellite view on that Day 7 map and zoom in deeper than Topo view allows and you will see that most of these fuzzy areas are actually very tight switchbacks.

Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 08:53 PM
Trying Muir Pass again - embedding it smaller, with an initial zoom to Mount Solomons


this apparently works now - zoom out and find my shadow :grin: then post it as a link like this:
Shadow of Photographer on Muir Hut that
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/15/10 09:16 PM
by the way - this is the kind of stuff you can do if you have a good long lens, solid tripod and a robotoic panorama head:

31 gigapixel Swiss Alps:
http://www.hdviewpano.com/DeepZoom/Panos/naturpanorama_ch_P006061.asp


My goal is to at least get some 5-10 gigapixel images from the Muir Trail captured next time I'm in California.
Posted By: Rosabella Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/16/10 10:16 PM
I really enjoy reading about your JMT trips with the kids! What wonderful memories they will have.... and how lucky they are to start out their backpacking lives like this!!

...and...OMG... your pictures are amazing!!!

I also have a question - last year (or the year before?) you had posted info on a book that you had printed for the kids on one of their JMT hikes... what was the publishing company? I remember that you were really happy with the result, and had posted it... I was impressed.
Posted By: Steve C Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/16/10 11:00 PM
So... Rosie... How about a little JMT report from you, too?   smile   Your pictures are nice to see, too.
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/17/10 01:31 PM
Originally Posted By: Rosabella
I really enjoy reading about your JMT trips with the kids! What wonderful memories they will have.... and how lucky they are to start out their backpacking lives like this!!

...and...OMG... your pictures are amazing!!!

I also have a question - last year (or the year before?) you had posted info on a book that you had printed for the kids on one of their JMT hikes... what was the publishing company? I remember that you were really happy with the result, and had posted it... I was impressed.


Rosie,
thanks for the kind words - going to be harder and harder to get them to do this now that they turned into true teenagers at thirTEEN smile

Book company was blurb.com, the link is in my signature. The place is one of the more affordable online one-off book printing outfit that lets you print them in quantity 1 if you wish (and the software they provide for free is relatively easy to figure out compared to pro publishing and layout software).

It's expensive per copy, especially in the large format I chose, and thus not really meant for volume resale, but for memories there's nothing better than a fat hardbound book with large two-page spread sized images of your trip. I'm definitely going to do another one for 2010, but right now am not really sure what format to use. The big satellite maps and daily multi-page coverage for the entire trip may be a bit much and somewhat repetitive. Maybe a collection of themes and memories, dunno yet.

One day I'll also publish my German language JMT guide, which I first wanted to write in 1990 when publishing something like that would have been a tough undertaking, but now I actually have no excuse left other than the time it would take to do it. There's a lot of info Europeans don't have easy access to unless they do a lot of online research before their trip, and a brief guide focusing on logistics and other basic stuff that's never covered in the guides available now may just find a few dozen buyers a year, especially if I keep the book small and to the point.
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/17/10 04:50 PM
and another place to show off your fancy panoramas, if you don't have your own web server: Microsoft's Photosynth site (20GB storage free, which is enough for a few years of this stuff)

here's what you get:

Posted By: Rod Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/17/10 08:49 PM
OMG those panoramas are simply AMAZING and FANTASTIC!!!!!! words don't do justice to the greatness of those pictures. Thanks Fishmonger
Posted By: CaT Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/17/10 10:14 PM
Really superb pics!!

CaT
Posted By: wagga Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/17/10 11:54 PM
Awesome pan!. Perhaps we should start a separate feature for pans?

And note this. That single 31 Gigapixel image would nearly fill my VelociRaptor! Larger than all the hard disks in the world combined not all that long ago!
Posted By: RoguePhotonic Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/22/10 07:07 AM
Awesome trip Peter, I got word of your travels from a hiker on the trail and wondered if I might run into you but no such luck.

Wonderful images of course! really shows me that I have so much to learn about taking photos, I can never get the sharpness that you seem to have, this year I took most of my images with a decreased aperture trying to get more sharpness because I was sick of landscape images with the focal point in the center and the rest of the photo looked a bit blurry even when all objects are far away but it didn't help. =/

It's going to take me forever to get my images up.

You went through Fish Valley without stopping at the Iva Bell Hotsprings!? shame on you! lol I spent two nights there.
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/22/10 03:21 PM
Originally Posted By: RoguePhotonic
Awesome trip Peter, I got word of your travels from a hiker on the trail and wondered if I might run into you but no such luck.

Wonderful images of course! really shows me that I have so much to learn about taking photos, I can never get the sharpness that you seem to have, this year I took most of my images with a decreased aperture trying to get more sharpness because I was sick of landscape images with the focal point in the center and the rest of the photo looked a bit blurry even when all objects are far away but it didn't help. =/

It's going to take me forever to get my images up.

You went through Fish Valley without stopping at the Iva Bell Hotsprings!? shame on you! lol I spent two nights there.


Hey, we thought of you when we came up Pinchot - we stopped at the same place we chatted in '09 and took a panorama of Lake Marjorie.

Not sure about your sharpness issues - have you ever swapped lenses and compared the results? Shoot something similar to the resolution testing images you see at places like DPreview.com and see if you have a technical issue in the camera or lens. I only had 12 megapixels and two $200 ebay lenses this year, so no magic in my equipment bag. The camera was really only bought for the JMT - it's light, it's almost disposable at half the price of what I was originally going to buy, but it worked out very well. Only lost the flimsy Flash card door, which I covered with some gaffer tape and that was fine until I got home. The $50 battery grip was great - allowed me to use AA Lithiums - just two sets of 6 for the entire trip, all videos and over 1500 exposures, lots with flash.

I shot mostly AF (51 point matrix) and rarely ever did an override. Maybe it's the RAW processing that makes my images come out snappy. I never shoot in-camera JPEGs - you lose all kinds of control and the ability to recover crappy exposures, of which I had a LOT at the beginning, because I didn't realize that when I set up bracketing to go off in one of the self-timer modes, it retained that setting over subsequent images in single exposure mode, so for a few days I had every third frame just right, every third frame +2 stops and then every third frame -2 stops. That messed up a few of the panoramas, like the one at 1000 Island Lake - could not recover those shots. Also, all the HDR I shot is just garbage, at least in Photoshop CS4, I can't get anything out of those bracketed frames I like. I may have to break down and buy the proper software Photomatix, I think. In general, though, I think HDR is not fo rme.

Anyway, some of my images are soft because I had sweat on the polarizer ;-) Then there are the night exposures mostly out of focus because I could not find the infinity setting on these cheap AF lenses in manual mode in the dark, and after I messed up the setting when drying the massive dew off the camera that had accumulated over 3 hours following sunset, it was all messed up. At least one frame was ok, but that's the one I didn't expose long enough.

As for depth of field - I shot almost everything at the lowest iso 200 for low noise, and somewhere around 1/60-1/125th of a sec, getting the max depth of field. On the D90, I also enable "auto iso" and I think I set that to 1/20th of a sec, meaning any time the shutter went down below that time to get the proper exposure, the camera would just boost sensitivity. That's great for snap shots and other stuff when you have to make sure you get the shot. Most of those are still ok because of the VR lenses, but for landscapes that's rarely useful.

Iva Bell - we had a thunderstorm roll in just before the intersection to the Goodale Pass trail, spent about 2 hours hiding under trees, cursing at Gregory Packs for selling me junk that fails in the middle of nowhere (hip belt semi-failed, rest of the hike hanging on by a thread - literally), so there wasn't a lot of interest in heading to a warm water hole that evening. We knew we could make it to our great camp site from the year before, with water fall and flat ground half way up the big climb to the valley above. The trail was a river for the most part - without gaiters this would have been a very cold and wet climb, but we did ok and stayed dry with just one cold wet crossing half way up. I think when going north, Iva Bell is more tempting, as you usually have more dirt on your body. Coming from the hot showers at Reds that same morning, we never feel the pull to go to Iva Bell.

Looking at your trip - I think I will have to do something like that in the coming 1-2 years as well, especially if the kids drop out and let me head out alone. I've always wanted to do something like a yo-yo roaming up and down the mountain range, and combine non-JMT with JMT to reduce the overlap of the two directions to an absolute minimum. That kind of plan would justify being up there for a month or so, maybe a little longer.
Posted By: RoguePhotonic Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/22/10 10:11 PM
Quote:
Hey, we thought of you when we came up Pinchot - we stopped at the same place we chatted in '09 and took a panorama of Lake Marjorie.


Yeah I did also! I noticed the same spot and was thinking that is where we were talking.

Quote:
have you ever swapped lenses and compared the results?


Actually no because I have no other lenses lol. Since it set me back 5000 to buy my starting gear I have not got anything else yet.

I did notice your use of flash which helps allot to balance lighting in bright portrait situations but I also took so few images of anyone else, I think allot can be learned with portrait photography but I have never had the chance to practice it at all.

I still have no flash though also because that is going to cost me another few hundred dollars for one.

I also mostly shoot in AF and I use the auto setting with options that allow quick changes to the aperture and shutter speed. I also use landscape mode for more proper blue and green balances.

This year I did not use my polarizer once, I stopped using it because of too many unbalanced skies that I could not correct and then I just never put it on, turned out to be dead weight.

I loved Iva Bell myself even coming from the showers at Reds Meadow, I never got into the pools up high with the nice views but my favorite pool had a nice gravel bottom that was just deep enough to sit on the bottom and lean against a rock being neck deep in the water, the pool was shaded by trees all day long and surrounded by wild flowers. When I was in there I thought to myself "life is always good in the Sierra but sometimes it's better" =P

I saw the pics where you said Claire had passed out due to dehydration, I almost passed out last year from that also, it's a problem in the mountains for sure!

When I started at Hetch Hetchy it was 100F and I almost had heat stroke on day one!
Posted By: Steve C Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/23/10 06:04 AM
> I saw the pics where you said Claire had passed out due to dehydration, I almost passed out last year from that also, it's a problem in the mountains for sure!

I missed that. Can you fill us in a little?
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/23/10 04:45 PM
Originally Posted By: Steve C
> I saw the pics where you said Claire had passed out due to dehydration, I almost passed out last year from that also, it's a problem in the mountains for sure!

I missed that. Can you fill us in a little?


she has a history of fainting from pain - started years ago when I popped a blister on her hand and she just dropped to the floor like a rock.

it happened again on the way down to woods creek this summer, exhausted, heavy downhill before that, some small blisters on her feet starting to bother her, probably dehydrated. We were sitting down at the far end of a creek crossing and she said she was thirsty and getting dizzy, and within seconds her eyes turned up and she started to drop. I was able to catch her body before she hit the ground and knew what to do (legs up, loosen straps, etc, and she came right back to, but it was scary. We took a long break, she drank a lot, and we made it down to Woods creek fine, checking on her every minute, walking close to be able to help in dangerous places should it happen again.

then, at the very end of the hike, in the Whitney Portal Store, it happened again - long downhill, neglect to drink on the final run the finish, I guess same thing. two more reasons why we called off the yo-yo well before we got to Whitney Portal.

Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/23/10 05:07 PM
Originally Posted By: RoguePhotonic

I still have no flash though also because that is going to cost me another few hundred dollars for one.

I also mostly shoot in AF and I use the auto setting with options that allow quick changes to the aperture and shutter speed. I also use landscape mode for more proper blue and green balances.

This year I did not use my polarizer once, I stopped using it because of too many unbalanced skies that I could not correct and then I just never put it on, turned out to be dead weight.


the flash I use for those fill situations is the small thing built into the camera. You can do that with anything that works on a Canon. I don't do anything fancy with the flash - just pop it open, tell the camera nothing new. If the resulting image looks too bright and there's a chance for a second shot, i drop the flash by half a stop or so. If I was not hiking, I'd also try a diffuser.

re white balance - when you shoot raw, none of that really matters. It's a post processing decision. I leave it on auto, but only as a starting point. About half the images I have online needed white balance tweaking in Camera Raw. If you want to be certain you know what was "white" at the exact time of each image taken, you'd have to carry one of these white balance calibrators along and re-measure every single time you shoot, as the light keeps changing constantly over the course of a day. I just ballpark it when looking at the images next to each other.

I think a lot of my "not so blue" blue skies may be a result of my rather low-budget polarizer (it also doubled as lens cap), but I don't lose much sleep over it - this is digital, so by design it's going to be challenged in return for the convenience (1500 images this summer, that is about 50 rolls of slide film on three tiny plastic cards - well worth a little drop in quality, not even counting the $$$ for the film and processing saved). I keep telling myself I gotta take the film body back up there, but I think that train has left the station and it's digital from here on.


Posted By: RoguePhotonic Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/23/10 08:21 PM
Sounds scary to have her pass out like that, probably freaked them out in the store!

Last year I almost had it happen at the Blayney Hotsprings, it had been a very hot day dropping down to that altitude and i'm sure I didn't drink enough then I sit in the hotspring for an hour with no water and I get out to walk over to the little lake near by and it took all my energy to walk the 100 feet to it and I started feeling dizzy so I closed my eyes trying as hard as I could to fight it and then I had to sit down and slowly I brought myself back but it was close!

I guess you have to learn yourself like twice I was going into shock over small wounds because I learned I was dwelling too much on it, like once at work I just cut my finger bad and I was all pissed and kept thinking about how much it sucked and how annoyed I was and I began to get dizzy and sweat horribly and my ears began ringing and I almost passed out. Had it happen another time also when I stabbed a power drill through my finger and smashed the bone on my finger tip, had a piece of bone on my drill tip lol.

But anyway as for flashes I really wish the 5Dmark2 had a flip up flash but it doesn't, no built in flash at all so your stuck with pulling out some big thing and putting it on.

Sadly I am stuck with white balance with these images because I shoot in JPG on really long trips because I don't have enough memory, normally I always shoot in raw but I get about 550 shots for a 16gig card and I only have 3 16 gig cards and even with JPG that just gets me through on a summer hike.

We just have to keep looking forward to the day digital becomes way better than film ever was, it will happen some day!

Perhaps the shutter could be scaled down to about 50 shutters and sensors to take every bit of the frame in the perfect balance of lighting to get rid of this "do I want over exposed sky or under exposed foreground?"
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/23/10 09:34 PM
Originally Posted By: RoguePhotonic

Perhaps the shutter could be scaled down to about 50 shutters and sensors to take every bit of the frame in the perfect balance of lighting to get rid of this "do I want over exposed sky or under exposed foreground?"


you're talking HDR now - I played a little with that idea this summer, bracketed a few shots, then tried photoshop cS4 HDR automate (forget about it) and a few days ago I installed the trial of Photomatix; result - yawn:



compare to the what I consider "proper" exposure of that view:



yes, more texture in highlights in the above, far more detail in the shadows, but it is like compressed audio - everything is loud, so nothing stands out nor is there any subtle gradiation of anything. If you turn the top image into gray scale, you can barely tell what you are looking at.

I figured a back-lit Rainbow Falls could be improved with HDR, but this turned out like a total cartoon, even though I used the "natural" preset to start



So even if cameras can record all that stuff in the shadows (the falls are based on a single RAW image, not a stacked set of many different exposures), the display of all that within the 8-bit contrast range of our screns just doesn't cut it. I doubt we'll really ever get far beyond what we see now, but cameras will increase their native dynamic range (Nikon D3 is 14 bit, my camera is just 12 bit, we look at 8 bit on the screen), that's really not what film was all about. Slide film especially didn't have anywhere near that contrast range, so it was all about something being more "natural" and analog I guess.

Flash - get the smallest hotshoe flash possible for your body - you won't need the wedding photogapher's mega blaster. Just a tiny filler is all you need to light up those shadows, but not having it built in probably means you'll rarely ever use it.
Posted By: RoguePhotonic Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/24/10 07:25 PM
Did you use a tripod for the HDR shots or can you over lap them like panoramas do? I always thought you would need a tripod for a perfect fitting frame.

I have never tried to do an HDR because I don't know how! I do have CS3 but I rarely use it, I do all my work in Lightroom.

So much to learn about photography for sure and by the time you get it all figured out the rules change.
Posted By: Fishmonger Re: Third Muir Trail with my kids - 09/24/10 08:47 PM
Originally Posted By: RoguePhotonic
Did you use a tripod for the HDR shots or can you over lap them like panoramas do? I always thought you would need a tripod for a perfect fitting frame.

I have never tried to do an HDR because I don't know how! I do have CS3 but I rarely use it, I do all my work in Lightroom.

So much to learn about photography for sure and by the time you get it all figured out the rules change.


don't need a tripod with the good software, but it's better. Much bigger issue is moving water, but Photomatix can line that stuff up pretty nicely

download the photomatix trial - it's free and full featured, just puts that logo on the image you see above. You also can use it to "tonemap" RAW image files - much better than just using curves in Photoshop. I clearly haven't been able to figure out how to manually get to the setting I want, or I just don't like this look you are bound to get by making everything fit within the more medium brihgtness values.

so much to learn, you're right. I just bumped into something totally new to me that is based on HDR concepts, but for a totally different purpose - noise reduction in shadow areas:

http://www.guillermoluijk.com/article/nonoise/index_en.htm
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