Let’s see, there’s Yosemite. Sequoia. Kings Canyon. Wait, aren’t those two the same park? No?

Death Valley. And Joshua Tree, isn’t that a new one?

Hey, there’s also Channel Islands. Redwood, isn’t that along the coast?

And Lassen. Say, where’s that?

Heart Lake, Lassen National Forest

Lassen Volcanic National Park is about five hours mostly north of San Francisco if you drive at the limit. For most Californians, it’s in that part of the state that’s ‘up there somewhere’.

According to the National Park Service, 365,639 people visited Lassen Volcanic in 2009. Yosemite got 3,737,472 visitors, over ten times as many.

Yes, Yosemite has arguably the best glacially-carved scenery anywhere, some of the best backcountry hiking, and great winter recreation on cross-country skis or snowshoes. Everybody knows about it.

And that’s the problem.

Lassen Volcanic National Park was created in 1916 following the eruption of Lassen Peak. The peak had been part of Lassen Peak National Monument, but the 1915 eruption focused the country’s attention on this volcanically-active area in the southern Cascade Mountains.

Today, most of the park is designated wilderness. That means no developed facilities, few trails, and signs and bridges only where necessary. It also means solitude for backpackers on the Pacific Crest Trail and other park trails.

Warner Valley is a hidden gem within Lassen. By driving a few miles of dirt road north of Chester, California, you get sparkling green meadows, lushly-carpeted mountains, hot springs, steaming rocks, boiling lakes, and enough sulphurous odor to make Dante happy just a short hike away. The National Park Service campground offers Douglas fir views through the top of your tent and sounds of a gently-flowing creek to lull you to sleep. There are also bear boxes for your food and toothpaste, very clean pit toilets, and friendly backcountry rangers like Chris Cruz who can suggest hikes to enjoyable destinations. You may also see Western Tanagers and other colorful wildlife.

Drakesbad Meadow in Warner Valley

I like quiet mountain scenery away from crowds and looking at thermal features, so my wife Pat and I hiked to Boiling Springs Lake and Devils Kitchen. We also walked up Flatiron Ridge on Warner’s north side for views of peaks and lakes in Lassen’s southern backcountry.

Devil’s Kitchen, Lassen Volcanic National Park

We wanted to walk to Bumpass Hell, the park’s signature geothermal area. But a trail blocked by shoulder-deep snow stopped us. We’d heard that the Lassen Peak Trail was closed for ongoing reconstruction. But we lucked out - the Lassen Park Foundation offered a Reach the Peak fundraiser at the trailhead parking lot the Saturday we wanted to hike, so the trail was open to the top.

Hiking above 10,000 feet is never easy even if you’re in shape. The panoramic mountain views and closeups of a recently-active volcano were worth the sweat and pleasantly-sore muscles. Hikers at the summit included a 76-year-old grandmother who showed all of us how it was done.

Southwest view from the Lassen Peak Trail

For our last day, we retrieved our dog from Almanor Animal Boarding and hiked the Heart Lake National Recreation Trail in Lassen National Forest, where dogs are allowed. Be prepared to get your feet wet in Digger Creek  just before you burst out to views of Brokeoff Mountain reflected in this pretty lake.

Brokeoff Mountain and Heart Lake, Lassen National Forest

The only problem with hiking Lassen’s mountains is that they, like the Sierras, will probably spoil you.  Local hikes start to look awfully tame by comparison.

See all the pictures here.

Shot Notes -
The best camera is always the one you have with you. Since we carried enough water to avoid purifying any from creeks, and I wore a 24-hour pack of emergency supplies, I wanted to minimize the weight of camera gear. I used a lightweight Leica M8 and four lenses, shooting mostly with a Zeiss 25mm f/2.8 and Leica 35mm f/2 Summicron-ASPH. Exposure was usually what the camera recommended. Compelling pictures of scenery require either a visually-stunning subject or a human presence. You want viewers to imagine themselves in the picture.

Four of us took up ropes course instructor David Aguirre on his offer to climb there. When an experienced climber provides the rope, anchor webbing, carabiners, figure eights, ATCs and knowledge, it’s a no-brainer - I’m going.

Goat Rock and much of the park’s exposed stone is Tafone Sandstone, so most climbing routes are full of bucket holds. Castle Rock Falls presents short walls with tighter edges and smear holds, so it’s probably better training if you’re climbing in Yosemite Valley.

I’m not, and was content with Goat Rock’s easier climbs. The ascents and rappels challenged me a lot. It’s tough to see holds when you’re tight against the rock, and relatively inexperienced. The views from the top were stunning, but I’m not ready to pull a Galen Rowell and photograph while dangling from the rope. Hmm, maybe next time.

Climbing provided a great excuse to have fun outside on a gorgeous day.

See all the pictures here.

Shot Notes -
I used a Leica M8 with 35mm and 50mm lenses from ground level, pre-visualizing shots of climbers against a cloud-dappled sky. That’s a difficult exposure situation - you’re going to get either great sky detail and silhouettes everywhere else, or good foreground detail and blown skies.

I exposed for the sky and added or subtracted 1/2 to a full stop for most pictures, using the camera in manual exposure mode for everything. The flash I didn’t have would have filled faces close up, but it also would have given a different look. Had I been shooting editorial, I would have used flash on some pictures to give an editor more choices. My main goal was to tell the story of the day without breaking my neck.

Yes, you’re tied in to the belayer’s rope, and you’re attached to a separate rappel rope with a brake rack or Figure Eight. Yes, you have great control with the brake rack’s friction on the rope.

But instinct screams at you to back off from the edge. That first time over the railing is the hardest.

Climbers, those folks who go up the faces of Yosemite’s El Capitan or Half Dome using their legs and hands, are usually a very safe group. Lead climbers will be roped and belayed from below by a follower. Every 5-10 feet or so, climbers hammer a new bolt into the rock and clip the rope to it, shortening the distance if they fall. Climbing ropes are dynamic - they stretch anywhere from 10-30% when they’re stressed by a falling climber, decreasing the shock. And belayers use simple lock-off devices to stop the rope in a leader’s fall.

Most of us shy away from the human fly routine. But what no one tells you is how much fun it is to defy gravity.

I’d done a little climbing at an indoor climbing gym, but that’s not the same as outdoor climbing. As part of an intermediate backcountry skills course offered by West Valley College, I was lowered near the base of the sandstone cliff face by the Falls at Castle Rock State Park. I didn’t know I was climbing a route rated 5.8, when the toughest one I’d done indoors was 5.7.

The hardest part was the scramble up the seemingly featureless rock face at the bottom, followed by sweat dripping down into my eyes. With some rope tension from above and using very small footholds, I pushed myself high enough to step into the next set of small edges.

Successful climbing requires you to see and plan your next set of foot-and hand-holds as you use your legs to push yourself up. You quickly discover your arms’ lack of strength to haul you up the rock. Handholds are best used for balance.

I conquered my fear of heights with no apparent means of support during the next three days, at the California Department of Forestry’s training center near Ben Lomond. After you go over the railing for the first rappel and head on down, tying off the rope to stop yourself about halfway to the ground, the next time is easy and starts to be fun.

Ascending the rope from the ground using Prusik-knotted slings for each leg and your harness is a little harder. The trick is finding your rhythm - sit back in your harness, push up both leg slings, then step up and push up your harness sling, lean back and repeat. There’s a rush of accomplishment when you reach the top, thread your brake rack through the rope, and rappel back down.

Put this together with patient packaging and transport on titanium litters, and you have useful emergency skills. My class practiced lowering and raising patients on tree-studded hills, with a haul team pulling and litter team keeping the patient level. The litter wheel clamped underneath is the only way to make a five- or ten-mile transport down a trail without sore muscles.

When students asked instructor and rescue expert Kim Aufhauser about high-angle rescue and litter transport on rock faces, his answer was, “We cover that in 12C,” the next backcountry skills course in West Valley’s Park Management program.

So I’ll have to take that class for more hands-on experience.

See all the pictures here.

Shot Notes -
For shooting confined to one area outdoors, you can meter and expose manually, since the light won’t change that fast. If you have a small point-and-shoot digital or film camera, use it. When you’re in a remote location and you can get almost as close as you want, lightweight, small equipment works best.

I used the smallest, lightest equipment I have - a Leica M8 with 35mm, 50mm and 90mm lenses.

I was shooting in the shadow of a building, or under heavy overcast, so extreme contrast wasn’t a big problem. There were only a few times when I had to choose correct exposure of a face and blow out some of the background. This is almost always the right choice - your viewers want to see your subject’s eyes and expression.

Suddenly, everything starts to shake. You get up to walk to a doorway, and it feels like you’re surfing a rogue wave. You stumble across the moving floor, past shelves piled with oscilloscopes and other test equipment. Reaching the lab’s doorway, you see co-workers holding scared East Coast visitors in another doorway across the hall.

Finally, after what seems like an eternity, the shaking stops.

Will you be ready to help pick up the pieces?

That was the scenario at the disaster preparedness exercise held by West Valley College and the city of Saratoga last Saturday, April 24, 2010. Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) volunteers, Amateur Radio Emergency Service operators, Santa Clara County firemen, Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department officers, and officials from West Valley College and California state and local governments participated in this practice for a real disaster.

CERT volunteers conducted neighborhood damage assessment and reported to amateur radio operators at Saratoga’s emergency operations center. Then CERTs triaged patients, and transported those needing immediate care to the Red Cross shelter at Saratoga High School for treatment. Volunteers would be on their own in an actual event, with medical and ambulance services overwhelmed and unavailable.

At West Valley College, CERT volunteers did indoor search and rescue of patients in a close simulation of an earthquake-damaged classroom. They also received instruction from Santa Clara County fire department paramedic Rob Hecocks in fire extinguisher use, and got to practice putting out small fires.

In another drill, CERT volunteers practiced cribbing, a way to raise debris and free trapped victims. Using a lever to lift and place supporting 4×4s and 2×4s, a weighted wooden platform was lifted just high enough to allow a dummy victim to be pulled to safety.

A CHP helicopter crew answered questions and demonstrated patient loading for transport after landing their aircraft on campus. Helicopters may be the only way to transport supplies and patients requiring advanced medical care in an emergency, as the recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrated.

Many professionals and volunteers participated in the exercise. It was planned by West Valley College professor and former Federal park ranger Kim Aufhauser and Santa Clara County Emergency coordinator Jim Yoke, with input from Amateur Radio Emergency Service coordinator Don Steinbach, the Santa Clara Valley Red Cross, and West Valley College President Lori Gaskin. Paramedic Rob Hecocks and other members of the Santa Clara County Fire Department provided training and support. California’s DRCCC director of emergency preparedness Peter Wright and Saratoga City Council member Chuck Page represented state and local government.

With practice from exercises like this one, government and volunteer organizations will be better prepared for surprises during an actual disaster.

In earthquake country, it’s just a matter of time until the next big one hits.

Story Notes -
The story at the start of this post came from my experience during California’s Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, when I was a design engineering supervisor at a Silicon Valley semiconductor company. Preparedness exercises will help prevent headless-chicken responses in an actual emergency.

Shot Notes -
When I’m shooting spot news in anything from darkened rooms to bright sun, I use flash. I’ll need the extra light indoors in the dark, but flash fill will brighten dark shadows on faces when there’s some ambient light. I set flash and camera for autofocus assist to get sharpness in the dark.

I always carry spare cameras. On this shoot, I accidentally dropped one camera on pavement - even though it was in a case, the metal body cracked. My backup Leica M8 gave me second-camera flexibility as I covered the exercise.

I’m not talented enough to be in two places at once, so I had my wife Pat photograph in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) while I was shooting CERT neighborhood damage assessment. She also captured wider, establishing shots of scenes, letting me concentrate on close views of specific action. Between the two of us, we told a more complete story of the exercise.

Monterey, California’s Sea Otter Classic is the first event of the pro racer’s calendar. You see competitors from Europe and Australia join the usual American cast for four days of racing in April. The event happens in rain, mud, high winds, blowing dust, sunshine, or wildflowers.

Some of the best years are the ones with crowds cheering mud-covered competitors as they pick themselves up from crashes and wearily crank to the finish line.

However, this year was unusually sunny and mild - shorts and halter tops were the uniform of the day, unless you were racing.

I’ve been covering the Sea Otter since 1995, when there were no crowds for what was a California event. In 2009, 47,000 spectators watched 8500 amateur and professional competitors.

To get close to the action, you need a media credential. This is especially important in dual slalom, where the action takes place away from spectators on a closed course.

Dual slalom is also my favorite event, and the Sea Otter’s course always has interesting turns for great shots of racers. The big news here was that the top-seeded male, 38-year-old Brian Lopes, crashed out early without even placing. 39-year-old veteran Leigh Donovan, who came out of retirement to race, took fifth place, a far cry from her 9 National Championships in the 1990s and early 2000s.

There was other action in short-track cross country and downhill. Short track was invented in 1998 as a spectator-friendly race. It’s an all-out suffer-fest for racers - the leader wins after as many laps as possible in 20 minutes. Last year’s winners were Emily Batty and Todd Wells, a well-known name in cyclocross. Wells won again this year.

The women’s STXC race went to Georgia Gould, 2006 and 2007 U.S. national champion, another cyclocrosser. Batty had to content herself with fifth, but she’s only 21 so she’ll be back. She signed autographs on young spectators’ jerseys after the race. Not only was it good public relations, it looked like she was truly enjoying herself.

The downhillers were also out in force. Originally thought to be too flat, the Sea Otter added downhill in the early 2000s. Crowds love the jumps and crashes in this race against the clock.

Downhill racers can’t just coast. They have to crank hard to win. You’re also faster if you stay on the ground - air time slows you down, though it can make you a crowd favorite like Jared Rando below.

The Sea Otter is a great excuse to be a part of something fun outdoors. If you couldn’t get there, it inspires you to go outside and ride!

See the other race images here.

Shot Notes -
For years, motor sports photographers used the 200mm as their standard lens. Today, I do 70% of my bike race photography with a 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom. I shoot the rest with a 24-70mm f/2.8. Wide lens openings are good, but you get more keepers using f/5.6 or so. You’ll still get some isolation from shallow depth of field at 100-200mm.

The other key is flash fill of racers’ goggled faces. Otherwise, you end up with them peering out of narrow black caves under their helmet visors.

AA-battery power is fine for one-shot flash fill. An external Turbo Quantum Battery gives you quick flash recycling for fast picture sequences. But it can also radically shorten flash tube life and cost a lot more.

I’ve asked myself that question repeatedly. As a fresh engineering graduate in the late 1970s, my answer was playing music onstage. I wrote and performed alongside engineering jobs until the mid-1980s, when music got to be too much of a hassle. I still miss it sometimes, like an old lover.

Then I started looking for that ideal job. You know, the one where your staff always goes beyond what you ask for, and management approves your most interesting product ideas. I looked in Silicon Valley, and in Colorado near the Front Range. It took me way too long to figure out there’d always be non-ideal stuff to put up with.

After my last design job ended in 2003, I started photographing wildlife. I went to places like Antelope Island State Park, Hardware Ranch Wildlife Management Area, and Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge looking for animal behavior to capture on pixels. After some print sales, a bunch of article rejections, and a few published pieces, including one in a national magazine, I decided to pursue plan B.

I started writing articles, white papers and other content for technical clients. Engineers, management and executives are too busy to write most of the stuff with their bylines. They hire people like me with technical backgrounds to do it for them. In between writing stories there was a stint as a software applications engineer. It reminded me of how much I hate corporate ego games, no matter how good the pay is.

The writing business began to dry up last year.

So I stopped and asked myself what I really wanted, after doing what other people wanted or expected of me for so many years.

That made me seriously consider escaping the office.

My wife pointed out that I sometimes know as much about National Parks and Monuments we’re visiting as the rangers do, and I love these places. After not taking her seriously for awhile, she convinced me to enter a well-regarded program in Park Management at Saratoga, California’s West Valley College.

Consider all the skills you need as a park ranger or wilderness tour leader. Navigating the territory is a small part. If somebody gets hurt out there, the ambulance may not arrive for days, if ever. You need solid wilderness first aid skills for anything from diabetic emergencies to full-thickness burns, frostbite, and arterial bleeding. You and your party may have to survive a midwinter night out if you get too far from camp close to sunset.

You may also have decide what to do about non-native plants the native animals have come to rely on, or how much restoration of cultural artifacts like ruins is OK. Maybe you’ll get to develop an interpretive program for visitors, and present it to them. You may also work a fire line, or report illegal marijuana fields in the backcountry.

It’s a lot more than wearing a uniform and Smokey the Bear hat. I hope for a job doing interpretation. Instilling respect for the resource is a must in today’s disposable, over-packaged world. But I also want to use my knowledge and career to advocate for a responsible answer to the question, “Where does it end?”

The good news is that the park management job picture, already pretty good due to the growing number of baby-boomer retirees, should be even better when I finish the program in two years. Meanwhile, I hope to build my skills and connections with summer work for local agencies.

Shot Notes -
I’d gone to Antelope Island to photograph bison in December, when males are playful and not fighting over mates. I was packing up when I noticed this group of shy pronghorn antelope munching sage and grass fifty yards away. I captured a couple frames with a 500mm f/4L IS lens and 1.4X teleconverter before they glided away. Equivalent full-frame focal length was 910mm on an EOS 1D mark II. Light was soft and overcast, so contrast was easily within the camera’s range.

Its 1024 X 768 screen isn’t natively compatible with 720p HD at 1280 X 720. For a device that’s touted as a deluxe video/movie/TV program player, that’s a huge oversight. Yes, you can play H.264 video encoded at 720p, but it won’t be full 720p resolution on Apple’s screen.

The lack of Flash support is also pretty bizarre for a web-surfing device like iPad.

There’s no word on compatibility with Kindle books or book files from Barnes & Noble, but I’m betting the iPad will only support downloads from the iBook store. However, I’m sure there’ll be a hack for Amazon and Barnes & Noble book files before too long.

There’s only indirect mention of networking compatibility with OS X and Windows computers, but this is a must for any machine with limited mass storage like the iPad.

Still, the UI looks very good - flipping pages with your fingers like a real book is cool. I guess haptic feedback on the touch screen was too expensive, and I agree an SD card port and user-replaceable battery would have been nice.

With handwriting recognition and audio recording, the iPad would become a must for any college student taking notes. I’m surprised a company like Apple with a historic presence in the education market didn’t see this and add those features.

As a lightweight laptop replacement for a photographer in the field, it may be a winner. If the software supports it, you could use an external card reader to upload image files to the iPad for later transfer to your PC. If there were a version of Lightroom for it, you could sort and edit pictures on it too.

You’ll at least be able to transfer pictures directly from your camera with Apple’s add-on camera kit.

It looks like this product announcement was an attempt to preemptively capture the market, though that’ll be tough for a device that won’t be available for 8 weeks.

Add several hundred people over three days, and you have the recipe for the 35th Winter Fancy Food Show at San Francisco’s George Moscone Center last week. I went to discover new trends in food, and talk to vendors about my photographic services.

Dark chocolate bars from Colorado and Ecuador, goat cheese, and many shapes of pasta were all popular favorites. I’d been warned about the samples - you’d be very tempted to break your diet just with chocolate. New products included Happygoat’s caramel made from free-range goat milk. It had a much smoother texture and better flavor than ordinary caramel made with cow’s milk. I was also impressed with the flavor of Popchips’ potato chips, made without frying or baking.

I started out looking at the vendor list for health food and organics, but ended up just stopping at booths where vendors’ badges showed California locations. I asked about the chocolate or cheese or sauce to discover a little about each product, then asked, “Do you use food photography?” That usually led to discussion of needs and an exchange of business cards. Mine show some of my food work on the front and back, along with contact information.

After tasting some molé that stood up very well against memories of fantastic molé at the Red Iguana in Salt Lake City, I wandered over to the organic and health food section of the show. I left my card with several cheese makers and a teryaki sauce specialist.

I don’t usually carry a cell phone, but I had mine with me on vibrate since I’d been expecting to hear from my wife. With about 20 minutes before the show closed for the day, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was a vendor I’d left a card with earlier in the afternoon. The vice president of marketing for Marie Calender’s needed booth photography, and how much would it be for me to do it on the spot?

Photography at the show wasn’t permitted. At one point, an usher told me to put my camera away. But that didn’t stop me from carrying one. I explained to the vice president what I could do with the equipment I had, and said I could come back next morning with lighting for a more professional shot - at a higher fee. He said doing the shot now was fine, and told me he wanted a picture of the entire booth. I had him clean up and hide what he didn’t want in the picture. Then I took the shot he requested, plus a few other compositions that looked good to me.

He liked what I showed him on the LCD of my camera, a Leica M8. After agreeing to show him proofs online in the next day or so, we shook hands and left.

I post-processed to approach the light effect from strobes and light modifiers, darkened some distracting areas that competed with the subject, and cropped one shot slightly to eliminate the ceiling and its lights.

The VP liked the online proofs and requested high-res copies of two pictures, which I emailed the next day. He also said he’d be calling me for food photography for their next new product release.

I love it when I make a customer happy.

Shot Notes -
A 25mm lens on a Leica M8 gives coverage of a 33mm lens full-frame, and tons of depth of field at f/5.6 or f/8. I used ISO 1250, braced on tables and wall supports, and over-exposed slightly to reduce noise in shadow areas.

When is it time to upgrade?

Canon just announced the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II lens. It released the updated EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II last year, along with a new EF 24mm f/3.5L TS-E II.

Canon revamped its digital SLR line with four new models in the last 18 months. One of them, the EOS 5D mark II, replaced a model that was 4 years old. The 5D mark II offers a self-cleaning sensor with much-improved noise reduction and almost twice the resolution, plus four times more dynamic range. It also offers full-frame HD 1920p video, originally a competitive marketing feature unused by many of us.

But new gear doesn’t make your old stuff stop working. In fact, Canon’s other new dSLRs seem evolutionary compared to their predecessors. I never upgraded to the EOS 1D mark III since it just didn’t offer enough improvement over an EOS 1D mark II I still use.

 

This image was made with that camera and Canon’s original EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS (not the II). I’ve used that lens with a variety of cameras including my 5D mark II, which reveals all the warts and defects (aberrations for you physics majors) of any lens you mount on it.

I’ve yet to see anything I couldn’t live with using the original EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS for food, commercial portraits, pro mountain bike races, and wildlife. My philosophy is getting it right in the camera, since I don’t particularly enjoy endless tweaking in Photoshop. That lens delivers the raw image quality I need.

On paper, the new 70-200mm f/2.8 II looks very similar to the original - same number of elements with different grouping, slightly closer focusing, same weatherproof construction, same 77mm filter diameter. It’ll probably cost more.

I also have the original 24mm f/3.5L TS-E. The new one has some nice new features for combining lens tilts and shifts. But I don’t combine the two. In fact, most of my architectural work uses shifts alone to correct perspective.

The 24mm f/3.5L TS-E II’s enhanced corner sharpness would be nice, but I can’t justify spending $2200 for it.

So where does that leave us?

These new Canon lenses may show improvements, but without obnoxiously nasty behavior in the originals, it’s hard to justify replacements.

Commercial photographer Kirk Tuck once told me not to be an equipment junkie, that I could make salable stuff with a Yashica MAT 124 as easily as a high-bucks Leica. For commercial clients, I use better equipment than that old Yashica, but usually stop short of Leica.

After all, your unique contributions to any client’s projects are creative shot design and lighting, not the tools you use.

There’s a much better time to enjoy everybody’s favorite park. In winter, most of the tourists are gone. You can actually contemplate the best vistas on foot, or get out and see the ones no one ever sees from cross-country skis or snowshoes.

 

If you’re short on time during one of your days, try skating beneath the Valley’s walls at the Camp Curry ice rink. Even between Christmas and New Years, crowds shrink to manageable proportions.

 

Everyone photographs the same iconic views in Yosemite. I always challenge myself to capture something different, especially since I’ve been there so much over the years.

The hand of man disappears under winter snow and fog, the cars drive away, and you begin to see Yosemite as the Ahwahneechee Indians saw it 200 years ago.

   

See all the pictures here.

Shot Notes -
Yosemite gets dark in winter, so you’ll be using long shutter speeds - bring a tripod. I could also have used my tilt-shift lens for undistorted pictures of granite walls. The tripod was a must for the moonlight shots from the Wawona Tunnel View. A late-model dSLR like the EOS 5D mark II gives you high ISOs without too much digital noise. You may also want a prime, non-zoom lens for shots into bright light sources like the full moon. With fewer glass elements, primes are much less likely to flare than zoom lenses.