Two-Heel Drive

A reader e-mails to ask where hikers from Marin might want to live if jobs oblige a move to the South Bay. Just to make it interesting, the reader asks, could it also be at least somewhat affordable? Well, that takes Palo Alto, Saratoga, Los Altos (and Los Altos Hills) out of the picture but hey, who wants to live around all those dull moneybags anyway (just because they have better jobs, sexier clothes, bigger houses, faster cars and their very own poolboys, it doesn’t make them superior to the rest of us, right?). A few thoughts, based on my travels and home-hunting experiences:

In San Jose

Berryessa: This neighborhood on the east side of San Jose is close to Alum Rock Park and seems mostly unpretentious and perhaps less pricier than other parts of town (kiss the Rose Garden goodbye, for instance). It’s near the trolley line, if that matters, and it’s close to I-680, which means easy access to the Santa Cruz Mountains on the weekends (Steve Sergeant lives there, if you need any further encouragement).

South San Jose: I’ve heard there are housing deals to be had in the south end of town. The neighborhoods around Santa Teresa and Almaden Quicksilver county parks would be worth a look, though I suspect there are fewer deals around Almaden Quicksilver.

Elsewhere

Santa Cruz Mountains: Scotts Valley, Felton and Ben Lomond along Highway 9 are remote enough that there’s not quite as much demand for housing as you might expect, which could make them affordable. Of course then there’s the gas to drive over Highway 17, and the risk from taking your life into your own hands every day in the process and hoping the daily fender-smasher always happens to somebody else.

Fremont: OK, so it has no downtown and it’s mostly sprawl central. But it’s a pretty quick jaunt down to San Jose from there, and it’s right between I-880 and I-680, and it’s not so far from Coyote Hills Regional Park, which remains one of my favorite hang-outs (more for the birdwatching than the hiking, which isn’t especially challenging). I wouldn’t rule it out.

Milpitas: Also close to I-680, a bit less pricey than the South Bay, but suffers from the tract-house mania that infects so much of the region. This page lists lots of hiking opportunities nearby.

Mountain View: Not exactly cheap, but very close to the Santa Cruz Mountains. A careful consumer might be able to luck into a good housing deal (though Fedak, who lives there, tells me the unremarkable house across the street from him is on the market for $1.3 1.6 million).

Campbell: I always pass it on the way down south on Highway 17. It has a cool/funky (by South Bay “Empire of the Geeks” standards) downtown shopping strip. Housing might be a bit more affordable, though I haven’t really shopped it myself.

Sunnyvale: Some of my favorite hikers (Winehiker Russ and Mike and Kathy of the FOMFOK hiking club) live there; it’s close to I-680 and Highway 85, which offer easy access to most of the prime hiking areas. Little ’60s tract houses in Mike’s neighborhood were going for 700k, the last I heard, but I wouldn’t rule out finding deals here and there.

So those are the first ones that spring to mind. I know some of you live in the South Bay, so how about chiming in?

(Those of you from the rest of the world are forgiven for wondering how we can afford such stupendous prices for housing; I just imagine that I’m on vacation all year, which helps reassure me when I can’t afford to take one somewhere else.)

A travel writer mentions what happens when people try to retrace the steps — and recapture the shots — of Ansel Adams.

The first step on an Ansel Adams-inspired trip to Yosemite is to visit the gallery run by his family. It is in the park’s central area called Yosemite Valley, and displays and sells Adams’ work as well as photos taken by several contemporary artists. Before Adams died in 1984, he spent years living in a house behind the gallery and leading workshops there. Now others teach the workshops, and the gallery is managed by Adams’s grandchildren. The gallery’s staff leads free camera walks three days a week. The gallery also shows a free film about Adams once a week, rents out cameras and tripods and sells keepsakes and guidebooks.

I ordered three books written by Adams from the gallery’s Web site before my trip: Adams’s autobiography, his collected photos of Yosemite and a step-by-step explanation of some of his works called “Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.” By the time our plane landed in Fresno, Calif., I felt well-equipped to step inside Ansel land.

But Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.

“I’ve had people say they are kind of disappointed,” says Glenn Crosby, the curator of the Ansel Adams Gallery. “They only know the park through Ansel’s eyes, and he was only showing you the keepers. The park is not always as dramatic as his work.”

I have to wonder: who the hell are these disappointed people?

Yeah, Adams was one of the greatest photographers to ever snap a shutter and his images certainly rise to the definition of fine art. But if you can stand in Yosemite Valley or at Tunnel View (to say nothing of hiking into the High Country) and experience disappointment, how can you possibly imagine yourself perceptive enough to appreciate the tiny fragments of it Adams captured in his pictures?

Cameras were invented to preserve the memory of visiting places like Yosemite, but no picture can convey the experience of being there.

OK, rant over. Actually, the article offers a nice overview of the relationship of Adams and Yosemite and is worth a read if you’re thinking of visiting.

Carol took some most excellent pictures the weekend before last during our camp-out at Carrizo Plain National Monument. Check ‘em out. (They leave mine in the dust).

The park district has a page with all the winning entries from its 2007 photography contest.

Sunol Wilderness, Morgan Territory and Mount Diablo are among the stars in the show. Click the link to see ‘em all. More great East Bay pictures are at the park district’s Flickr page.

Jason Armstrong shot the Henry Coe headquarters before dawn with a 30-second time exposure that creates an orange glow in the background. Check it out, it’s way cool.

Supertopo, the climbers’ board, has a thread showing rock formations that look like naughty bits. Silly but amusing.

Wonder if this one from the Pinnacles qualifies:

Link via GoBlog (of course).

I’m learning something new about taking pictures of moving water pretty much every time I go out. The coolest waterfall imagery, to my mind, has a certain flow that you don’t get by setting your camera on “automatic” and hoping for the best. You have to use a tripod, long time exposures — sometimes as much as a second long — and automatic shutter release to ensure the act of clicking the shutter doesn’t shake the camera and blur the image.

Until yesterday I had done all my shooting under deep forest canopy with abundant shade. This is ideal because the moving water will reflect whatever light is available and still give you interesting images with very low shutter speeds.

But what if your moving waterfall isn’t in the shade? I ran into that yesterday at Murietta Falls. I wasn’t in direct sunlight because it was overcast, but there wasn’t any shade to speak of.

A quick photo 101 lesson for those who don’t know already: you control light reaching your camera’s sensors (or film if you’re old fashioned) two ways: by shutter speed and aperture size. A small aperture lets less light in; a big one lets in more (the settings are called F stops … I’ve been so totally spoiled by automatic digital imaging that I’m only now getting around to learning how these settings work).

Here’s what happened when I tried to get the cool stream effect yesterday: I lowered the shutter speed like I always do, but with the aperture set as small as it would go (F8 on my cam), everything got blown out and overexposed.

Lesson learned: those cool-stream images work pretty much only in low light. In an exposed area without abundant shade you’d have to wait till dusk or start out very early in the morning — which, as it turns out, is the best time to take pictures anyway. But Murietta Falls is so far out there you’d have to camp out to make it happen.

The light at Mission Peak was amazing this afternoon.

In honor of my previous post linking to my first-ever Mission Peak summit, I decided to head up there again this afternoon. Oddly enough, after days and days of storms and other climactic obnoxiousness, the skies cleared up and revealed the absolutely best time to shoot the peak — late in the afternoon, in winter (it’s apt to be too hot and dry the rest of the year). The sun dipping in the western sky does a wonderful job of lighting up the peak’s west face.

Won’t be much need for hiking descriptions — I did the basic Stanford Avenue route to the top, though I did go around to the back side, which yielded excellent views of the snowy high country in the Diablo Range around Rose Peak.

The pix:

Try this in the morning and the background gets all blown out.

You know my thing with trees. I think this one’s alive, though.

I took the back way primarily because I’ve been sitting on my arse too much of late and getting a bit out of shape, and felt a bit too tired to take the direct route to the peak. The view on the back side was very nice.

Even a bit of snow on the shady side of the peak.

More great views from the summit.

The Summit Post, with Mount Diablo far in the distance.

My favorite shot of the day.

Note the date: Jan. 28. Hard to believe how much green there is already.

I’ve passed these rocks dozens of times and never noticed the colors before — mainly because I’d never been this way with this light.

Unwritten rule: cows must be included in Mission Peak photo essays. Well, I guess it’s written now.

That same tree on the way back down.

Nothing profound about this outing, though I am beginning to see why the better photographers often return to the same settings — the more you see of a place, the more you see subtleties missed on previous visits. Even works for a hack like yours truly.

I bought one of these Gorillapod tripods last spring and finally made up my mind to take it out in the woods and see how handy it is for hiking.

Turns out it works pretty well — it stands on benches, grasps on branches, balances on rocks… there really are about a zillion configurations. It’s lightweight and easy to use, for the most part, but it’s got some limitations, such as:

1. Your camera’s tripod mount can affect how well it works. Canon A-series cams like mine have the mount absurdly installed on the left-hand side, which makes balancing tricky because the cam wants to fall over to one side. Less of a problem on those really small compact cameras, assuming they have tripod mounts.
2. Don’t be lulled by all the tricks it can pull. I set mine up on a rock looking down at a pool of reflecting water, set the timed shutter release (mandatory, I’ll get to that next) and waited. Not that I’m prone to seeing the dark side or anything, but suddenly the image of my cam falling into the creek flooded my brain. Didn’t happen, but I can see how it could. Bottom line: Keep your hands near the cam so you can grab it if it slips.
3. Why timed shutter release is mandatory: Because it doesn’t hold your camera firm like normal tripod would. It’s kinda floppy. If you try to click the shutter yourself while the cam’s mounted on the Gorillapod, you’re apt to get enough shake to defeat the pod’s purpose. So, learn how your timed shutter release works and give it 10 seconds to let the cam stop shaking after you let go.

Overall it’s a handy little doo-dad for day hikes, but no substitute for a real tripod. There’s also a larger size for big-body SLRs, though I gotta say I’d be reluctant to rest a thousand-dollar camera on one.

Ask Steve why he never takes a camera hiking and he’ll mention the boxes & boxes of slides from backpacking trips of days gone by that he never looks at anymore.

Then there’s Dan, who could equip a polar expedition on what he’s shelled out for high-end camera bodies, lenses, tripods & such.

I’m in the middle — I don’t want to carry the weight, spend the money or endure the aggravation of a bigger, better camera. My digital point-and-shoot brings home OK pictures most weekends; the quality depends mostly on the scenery.

A few conclusions based on a few years of hiking, taking pictures and posting them online:

• Image stabilization technology is the best thing to happen to cameras since the flashbulb. If you’re looking for a light point-and-shoot for hiking & backpacking, pay extra to get it (I’m thinking it’ll be pretty much standard on all digital cameras in a couple years.)
• Cameras that use double-A batteries are far more flexible — you can buy a recharger and a bunch of cheap rechargeable batteries and always have some power ready. GPS units often also use double-A batteries, so you get multiple uses.
• Pictures you plan to air publicly should be cropped for best effect.
• If you’re planning to post a bunch of pictures, leave out redundant images, even if they’re from different locales.
• Master all your current camera’s functions before you buy another one with even more functions.
• Backlighting is evil. You can get some cool silhouette effects, but otherwise, make sure the sun’s over your shoulder.

Well, these are the first that spring to mind … feel free to add suggestions.