A window frame like this is a good way to test lens distortion and/or your post-processing workflow. As much as I hate it, Adobe Lightroom did a reasonably good job compensating for the lens distortion.

1/1000sec at f/8. Nikon D780, VR 28-300 f/3.5-5.6G at 82mm.

I have always had a strangely strong relationship to places. It’s difficult to verbalize, but having a deep familiarity with a locale has been a fundamental way I relate to the world. This extends into mapping fantastic places I’ve read about upon the physical world.

For example, when I spent some summer months of my tweens on the Gulf Islands near Vancouver, the archipelago became Earthsea in my mind. Around that same timeframe, I lived near Altadena. When I “discovered” Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth started imprinting upon the local terrain.

The San Gabriel mountains formed an excellent stand-in for the Misty Mountains. In winter, the clouds sit on the peaks, in Spring, the “June Gloom” does the same, and in the summer, the mountains were nearly hidden by the swirling smog of the late 70s.

The area is filled with places that mapped across those worlds. There’s a windy road above a tributary to the Arroyo Seco that goes through forests of oak and deodar, and in the early evening when the sky grows dark the lights in the windows of houses on the lower slope twinkle mysteriously. It was exactly what Rivendell looked like in my mind’s eye.

As I’d read, local places would overlay. The craggy entrance to Colby Canyon with its guardian trees, the steep drop-off ridges around Mount San Gabriel, the rough-hewn tunnel just down the trail at Eaton Saddle, the rustic cabins among the bright streams and white alder groves in Sturtevant Canyon, the high forested ridges above Ice-House Canyon — all mapped to places within the Lord of the Rings for me.

Decades later, when the blockbuster movies came out, I opted not to see them. The images in my head and the mappings to places I know were too important to be overwritten by Peter Jackon’s vision.

(Disclaimer: this photo has been digitally altered beyond just adjusting color and exposure. I removed telephone poles, a power pylon, and a lot of wires.)

Descanso Gardens are ridiculously photogenic at any time, but on a slightly overcast spring day?

My cousin sent me a box of old photos that she had inherited from her mother. It turns out that my mother and her mother would send photo albums to one another throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1980s.

Many of these pictures are interesting to me, and I’d like to digitize them. The average online service wants between $0.65 and $1.25 to scan a print without doing touchup. I’ve used services to scan negatives in the past, but I have an old phot scanner and I have digital cameras that I could use to take photos of the prints.

The prints are degraded to various degrees and many are not really flat, so my first thought was to put them under glass and photograph them. I set up a rig to do that, but it was pretty finicky. Lighting to prevent reflections isn’t easy (I’m space-constrained by boxes of old junk in my office). The prints are many different sizes, and positioning each one took a lot longer than I wanted to spend on it. I don’t really need these in 12 or 24 megapixel detail, plus my macro lens is old and introduces some distortion.

So I decided to use my old Epson Perfection Photo 3170 from … ulp … 20 years ago. It’s USB-A and my current M1 MacBook only has USB-C ports, but I have plenty of USB-A to USB-C adapters for this kind of situation. I plugged the scanner into my M1 MacBook, but it was not recognized. I downloaded a new driver from Epson, but it wouldn’t install, giving me the helpful message “You can’t open the application “EPSON Scan Installer” because this application is not supported on this Mac.” Is that because it’s Intel code and I can’t run drivers in emulation? I have no clue.

I tried downloading VueScan, which is widely recommended for scanners where the driver is no longer provided, but it couldn’t see the scanner either. Mysterious. I’m beginning to think it’s something to do with the hardware itself. It used to work. Had the scanner died from sitting neglected?

I dug through one of those aforementioned space-constraining boxes of junk, and got out my Intel-based MacBook Pro from 2011. I powered it up, plugged the scanner in, and Image Capture immediately recognized it. So I’m scanning on the old machine.

Image Capture under old Mac OS is a little annoying, but I can scan 4 photos at a go into 32-bit TIFF files. I’m only scanning at 600dpi, so I’m getting roughly 6 megapixel scans of these photos. I considered scanning at a higher resolution, but the time and effort and storage involved didn’t seem to be worthwhile. I may regret this someday.

Anyway, here’s a birthday cake I decorated for my best friend Charlie back in March of 1978.

This guy was a great model. The hummer who’s claimed the front garden as his territory this year is not as happy in front of a camera.