I've just finished a first cut at a web page with pictures and text covering my visit to the Gunks in July. Not sure if I should be posting this in the "Other Areas" category, but hell, for me it is an "other area"!

Here's the address for anyone who's interested:

gunks page

Another page covering Canada and the Dacks is still in the works.

Hope you like!

Great photos.
Good narative too.

Chooch is right; I'm envious!

I Like!

Very good photos from different points of view.

Great shots, whatever you're doing now professionally, STOP and go become the next Cory Rich or Greg Epperson. All my trip shots are what we call "butt shots", belayer looking up my skirt while I'm elvising. You're's are stellar! Good job.

ed note: your's

B-dog's right - awesome shots, amazingly few of the famous 'butt-shots' that seems to populate roll after roll of amateur film.
Good stuff, and thanks for sharing!

Good stuff.

All I have to say is ...

MORE!

ed. note: yours

Ya know, I went back and forth w/ the apostrophe and without, and wouldn't you know it, I picked the wrong one. good catch.
(at least I get half credit for knowing it wasn't the 'you are' contraction )

I now resign from my ed note duties.

(exception - phil is just too much fun to ed note )

jow pics!

digital camera or no?

BTW -- finally ordered that long sought after Film Scanner. Should be scanning Gunks slides in a few days. Some will be direct digital (i.e. much higher quality) reproductions of the photos already at my AOL page. Others will be totally new. I have Gunks shots, but also J-Tree, Idyllwild and Acadia. Now all I need is a real web site!

Got the film scanner ... testing.

nice hair

Is that Richard Simmons?
(I didn't know he climbed)

Let's try another one. Darn, these things are so freaking technical!


BTW -- the hair is courtesy of my former climbing buddy ... John Blumenthal.

Here's Mr. Red Tights, back in action. You've seen this photo, just wanted to see it on nice crisp detail.

I'll have new ones in a bit.

"BTW -- the hair is courtesy of my former climbing buddy ... John Blumenthal."

Your climbing buddy does your hair?
Was his middle name Serge?
(not that there's anything wrong with that )

Ahh, the tights are red in this pic - they looked pink in the last one. We were thinking that you and Phil shopped in the same place.

ps - nice pics - keep 'em coming!

Post deleted by LesterLeBlanc

She has a leg coming out of her right hip - OK - but an arm for a left leg. That is rarely seen.

Maybe if it's a little larger it will help. There's someone below her in the alcove belaying the next party.

Finally ... real color! The Trapps.

And just to show we're not Gunkscentric (this is the Other Areas board anyway) ...

Old Town, Precipice Cliff

Wow, nice pics, and you're really getting good quality with that scanner. What kind is it? Is it hard to use? (And did you have to mortgage your house to pay for it?)

All my shots are done with my little 35mm point and shoot. For about 4 bucks, most photo shops here in Tokyo will burn you a CD of your roll of film at the same time they do the developing and printing.

The images on the CDs themselves are pretty good, but both the image sizes and the file sizes are huge. I have to re-size and compress them to use them on the web, both to get them to fit on the page and also to get reasonable download times.

Compression and re-sizing is where I really seem to lose quality. (I'm currently using a program called Advanced JPEG Compresser, by WinSoft Magic Development.) Anybody got a solution to this quality loss problem? (I know, I know - buy a good digital camera! But aside from that, any suggestions?)

That is a perfect photo - belongs on a calendar or something!

About that arm growing out of the climber's left hip.....

I took some liberties and did a bit of editing on Lester's picture. Some cloning here, copy/paste some patches there, feather an edge or two, adjust some contrast, and we get....digital arm removal. Removed the trailing rope as well while I was at it. (see attachment)

Thanks to Lester for allowing the stretching of the fair use clause in copyright law and giving permission to post the altered photo.

Hey Bill:

I'm just slowly making the move from chemical to digital photography, so my knowledge base is minimal.

But the bottom line for digital image quality is resolution. (The same for chemical photography, but folks tend to talk about optimum exposure and saturation.)

So the starting point for quality is the captured image ... i.e. the quality of the photos you take. For digital cameras, a high resolution is important. For analogue 35mm, it all comes down to your lenses and how well you exposed the film. If you obtain an optimum exposure with good saturation, the image will transfer well to other formats. In fact, the crisper and more well-exposed a 35mm negative or slide is ... will create more data to capture for the digital version.

Of course, once you digitize your photos you face the problem of digital memory. The smaller the file, the less resolution. No way around it.

I got the Nikon Coolscan IV ED Film Scan 2900 DPI USB. It's essentially the non-professional version of the Coolscan 4000 ED and has most of the same features. The pro version is capable of 4000 DPI resolution and the "pro-sumer" version is capable of 2900 DPI. Also the IV connects via USB cable and the 4000 connects via firewire -- which helps make the transfers faster for the higher resolution, but we're talking a difference of 20 seconds to a minute max. The Coolscan IV will scan a slide or negative in about 30-44 seconds. Longer if you use the some of the cool image features Nikon includes. Digitial ICE eliminates dust and blemishes. Digital ROC restores color to faded images. Both work exceedingly well.

The Coolscan IV will run you about $840. Good price, I think, considering you are essentially getting a professional or near-professional level machine. (Pro units usually go for 1200 to 300 bucks.)

Initially, the Coolscan seemed technically overwhelming, but in the end, I'd have to say it's very easy to use. Especially for the basics. I found I got the best results with the least frustration by scanning images at full resolution, saving to JPEG format and then doing any resizing through Photoshop. I do the color correction with the Coolscan, though to get the initial image as close to perfect as possible and the controls for using the Coolscan are very easy.

Once I'm done scanning an image, I can save the file to hard disk in several formats. But selecting regular JPEG, there is no noticeable decrease in quality (for monitors and general home printer use). That brings the original file size from about 32-35 MGbytes down to 2MGbytes. From there, I've been using Photoshop to easily resize the image to file sizes that can be used for web publishing or attaching here at Gunks.com. Each time you downsize and decrease the file size, you lose some quality, but as you can see, if you start off with a high quality image, the difference is not huge ... especially for web page display.

I know there are some real tech wizs around here who can better answer your question about resizing and losing quality.

But I've found that having a high quality original image does make a real difference. The photos I shot with my Weathermatic and the ones I shot with my Nikon FM are world's apart in terms of quality and it makes a difference through the entire process.

Thanks, Cori. Here's another for the Gunks calendar!

Wow! Looks great. Now about that socked foot in the upper right of the frame ...


PS: did you do this with Photoshop?

Great photos.

Another one that looks great is the top one on Ralph Erenzos page about Tuthilltown.

at: http://nys.alpineclub.org/bunkgunk.htm

I really like the color depth and resolution on that one (not to mention the view).

pda:

That IS a great shot. It was shot by local photographer Hardie Truesdale and has been used on cards sent out by the Mohonk Preserve.

Thanks. I'm embarassed to admit I did not know that. It is similar to a photo on the Preserve website, which is apparently also a Truesdale.

I left the socked foot in for comic relief!

I used Paint Shop Pro 7.0 by JASC. It's kind of a poor-man's Photoshop. It has almost all the same capabilities as PS and can even run most PS plug-ins. Some aspects can still get pretty technical, like in PS, but in general the learning curve isn't as long.

The big advantage is that while PS is around $500, PSP is about $100. They have some other pretty good pieces of software, including something called After Shot. Basically it's a scaled-down version of PSP expressly aimed at the tasks you would do with photos. Their site is www.jasc.com

Marc:

Thanks for the info. I just read an article in the NYTimes today about Photoshop Elements 2.0. Seems to be a much more user-friendly version of PS with most of the more common features. But retails around 85 bucks. I'm thinking of checking that out -- as the LE version I got with the scanner has few features and is very non-user-friendly.

Gunks photo for the day. (Christopher Lawrence on the crux of Filipina.)

So that's where it goes! I always got kind of lost up there and really never successfully found the second pitch.

Damn - looks like he's getting his money's worth.

Can't tell for sure, but it looks like his first visible placement was actually two small nuts of which one has lifted. That'll sure get your attention!

Nice tights, too.

Great pic.

The piece that looks pulled was just another nut that he didn't want to take the time to remove from the biner. The cruddy pin under the roof made him spend a lot of time trying to get pieces in below. Neither piece was very good. Me and the other guy at the belay, though, had a grand time making fun of the placements: "Oh yeah. That's BOMBER! That should hold at least 7 pounds!"

And oh yeah ... Gunks pic of the day.

Trinity?

Look out folks. Lester has a scanner and he's not afraid to use it! Daily pics of gunks classics is gonna cement my routine of daily views of this thread. You rock, Lester!

BING BING BING BING!

You are correct, sir!

The route in the photo is Trinity 5.11. Notice the last gear placement. The climber is working on the next placement. Notice the distance between these two placements. Notice the distance to the ground.

That's why this route didn't get much traffic. Despite being outrageously great.

*Note: This is a Skytop climb. Don't try this at home. Or at Skytop.

At the rate of one a day, your routine will be over shortly.

But ... I have many more non-Gunks pics.

Stay tuned. Same Gunks time. Same Gunks channel.

Never fear, others have Gunks pics too. OK, who can recognize which route THIS (attached) is?

Good one. You stumped me. Looks like the Nears.

My Gunks pic of the day ... I won't ask anyone to quess.

Bonticou 5.10

Looks like grand central to me, Mike.

Glenn is our winner. Thank you all for playing. (photo was taken from the Layback belay)

Is it before or after the roof/bulge?

Darn. That was the only route that came to my mind. But something about it didn't look right. Oh my, it has been a long time, hasn't it???


Gunks Pic O' the Day

Climber on the 5.12 above the crux roof of "New Mutants" 5.13

Once more into the past ...


Lanman 5.11a/b Bonticou

Nice leaves!

Can anyone name this gunks classic?

Would that be Zig Zag Man.

Looks like Skytop or Lost City. I'll go with Zig Zag Man as well.

This is my last day for "Gunks Pic of the Day" -- at least for a while.

So here's a three-for ...

First up: Survival of the Fittest

Second --

One of the things I miss most about Skytop. The Shake Your Booty ledge. Here are two old guys TRing Flashdance Arete.

Third and last ...


Finishing the last moves on Belly Roll.

sorry not zig zig man..here's another perspective on Gravity's rainbow

nice shot, very. um rainbowy

Still looks like Zig Zag Man.

OK, Ok, Ok already....I don't have a scanner but am now gonna' buy one.

To all the folks who posted photos on this thread...they all look great. Keep 'em coming!.

How about this one? Call it food for thought for the webmasters that be...

I'd like to move/continue this thread to the "General" forum now. Thanks