Latest Bigfoot Sighting on Droop Mountain (Or Is It the Mothman?)

Our game camera pictures have been plentiful, and much alike. These deer visit regularly. However, Monday morning, the camera caught this:

Seconds later, whatever it was, it was gone.

Was it a bear having a bad hair day? Was it the the Mothman? (If so, he's a long way from Point Pleasant.) We decided it was probably Bigfoot. After all, the BFRO's 2006 sighting on the Greenbrier River Trail was so convincing that they mounted a return expedition in 2008. Of course, we can't rule out the possibility that it was the Yayho, as described by Burl Hammons.

Remembering "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

My wild New Year's Eve activity was watching Netflix's streaming video of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I was expecting something soothing and low-key, and, indeed, there were beautiful landscapes, expert interviews, and hushed voices. However, the effect was astounding, and I've been thinking about the amazing prehistoric artwork ever since. This April, 2011 interview with Hezog is from Scientific American's Youtube channel.

More Game Camera Surprises--Owl and Pussycat

We continue to experiment with positioning the gamecamera for flash on snow. Saturday and Sunday nights saw some interesting activity. On Saturday, a raccoon and skunk visited early in the evening. Around 9:45, this Barred Owl dropped in and stayed for more than half an hour. It was too far away from the camera for a good picture, but I included these because I didn't know owls scavenged on carrion, and I wanted to show proof.

A gray fox passed through around 3 am.

Sunday, we tried half-covering the flash with electrical tape, and this gave better pictures. We had a possum, a gray fox, and two different racoons, but the bobcat really obliged us with some close passes by the camera. This is probably why Princess has been staying on the porch in the evenings.

More Bobcat Visits

A few nights ago, the SD card popped out of the game camera, and we thought we didn't get any pictures. However, the built-in drive in the game camera told a different story.

The racoon didn't linger long under the bobcat's spooky gaze. Sherry's racoon had a more pleasant evening, I think.

Last night, we tried moving the camera farther away from the carcass to avoid wash-out effect of too much flash. The color is a little better, and you can see in our kitchen window.

"Red-eye removal" isn't an option here.

A Glimpse of the Past, and Command Line Adventures

Kodachrome slide from 1951 or 1952. My Aunt Verla, Uncle Bill, and cousins Cathy, Bobby, and Denny. Aren't they cute?

The last few days I've been scanning a box of old Kodachrome slides my mom shot with her spiffy Exacta 35mm camera in the early 1950's. It's the camera I fell in love with as a teenager, using black and white film. A few years ago, I sold the camera on Ebay to a collector in Germany, sort of a photographic repatriation.

I've never seen these images before--they were something Mom always told me she'd show me someday, but it never happened, and it was purely by chance that I found and kept the metal slide box when I emptied her house in 1996.

It's sort of spooky to see images from her life long before she was my mother. In fact I was so focused on this glimpse into her life that I didn't notice I was scanning the images in a format my photo editing software doesn't much like. I want to print some of these pictures to send my cousins (Do you suppose they know how cute they were?), so I need to convert them to a different file format in batch mode.

Fortunately, I have ImageMagick on my Linux box already, and it has awesome command line tools (about which I know very little, so far). I do know how to convert a file format:

rebecca@hecate:~/Moms_slides$ convert covered_bridge.tiff covered_bridge.jpg

Of course, I need to do batches of convert. I could read the ImageMagick documentation (but if that were easy, I would have done it years ago). Or, I could make an executable file of convert commands, and run it. There was a time when I wrote sed and awk scripts in my sleep (I really did--I dreamed about shell scripts.) I was afraid I couldn't remember, but a little help.txt file in an archived directory jogged my memory, and I was back in business directly.

In the spirit of my help.txt files, where I kept a record of how I did whatever needed doing, here's how I converted a big pile of tiff image files to png image files.

rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ ls *.tiff|
awk '{print "convert "$1, $1".png"}'|
sed s/.tiff.png/.png/ >temp
rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ chmod +x temp
rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ ./temp

And here's what the executable file looks like:

rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ head temp
convert 5kids_easter2.tiff 5kids_easter2.png
convert 5kids_easter.tiff 5kids_easter.png
convert 5kids_pinecones.tiff 5kids_pinecones.png
convert 5kids_xmas.tiff 5kids_xmas.png
convert bill1.tiff bill1.png
convert bill2.tiff bill2.png
convert bill_junglegym.tiff bill_junglegym.png
convert bobby_blocks.tiff bobby_blocks.png
convert bobby_easter.tiff bobby_easter.png
convert bobby_junglegym.tiff bobby_junglegym.png

It took a lot longer to write up this help file than it did to convert 75 images to a format I can send to my printer. (For what it's worth, my photo editing software can read tiff files, just not the ones created by Xsane, the scanner software I use.)

Here are some Web resources on sed and awk that I wish had existed when I was learning those wonderful programs:

• Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial Awk Table of Contents. This is way more than I ever tried to do with awk. It's kind of inspiring....
• Linux UNIX Shell Command To Make Creat File Executable. My shell flavor is just a little different than the Unix I learned on, so I needed some help. Found it here.

Snowflakes--"Gem Bestrewn Realm"

In all the years I worked in science, microscopy was my very favorite thing, so I was excited to find this timely video on a collection of early photomicrographs: Winter Forecast: Art to Blanket Region.

When it comes to photography, a Wilson Bentley image can be described much like his favorite subject, the snowflake: Each is one of a kind. After all, the Vermont farmer was the first to ever photograph one....At the age of 19, "Snowflake" Bentley jury-rigged a microscope to a bulky bellows camera and took the first-ever photograph of a snowflake....Bentley saw his microphotographs as more than scientific contribution. In a 1910 article published in the journal Technical World, he wrote, "Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature possessing the charm of mystery, of the unknown, sure richly to reward the investigator."

I don't know what the kids are calling them these days, but when I was a member of the American Microscopical Society, we called them "photomicrographs," not "microphotographs." I found this wonderful article via /.

A Peek at My Scanning Project

I've been scanning materials from the Pocahontas County Historical Society archives since this past summer, and the last few days, I've been working on an annual report for the project. Most of the scans are hard to read handwriting, but there are a few photographs. This is Susan A. Price, daughter of my old pal, William T. Price, sometime after she graduated from the Womens' Medical College of Baltimore in 1903. The photo was taken in Marlinton, perhaps in her sister's home, which is now houses the Historical Society's museum. She served as a physician in several mental hospitals, and lived and worked for many years in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she was avidly interested in historical preservation of that city.

Gotta love the outfit--especially those elbow-length kid gloves. Doesn't she look like the cat that ate the canary? Here's another photo taken the same day, showing more detail of her dress, and a more contemplative expression. I suspect that if I had that outfit, I too would read with those gloves on. In fact, I probably wouldn't take off the hat.

DIY Book Scanner--Piracy or Not?

For the past 18 months I've been working on a digitization project for local history materials. (Hence my unhealthy co-dependent relationship with the Reverend William T. Price.) That's how I came to follow Digitization Blog's RSS feed, and discover Wired Magazine's article: DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes.

For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files he could then read on his PC.

Book scanners, like the ones Google is using in its Google Books project, run into thousands of dollars, putting them out of the reach of a graduate student like Reetz. But in January, when textbook prices for the semester were listed, Reetz decided he would make a book scanner that would cost a fraction of commercially available products....

"The hardware is ridiculously simple as long as you are not demanding archival quality," he says. "A dumpster full of building materials, really cheap cameras and outrageous textbook prices was all I needed to do it."

Reetz went on to upload a 79-step how-to guide for building a book scanner (.pdf). The guide has sparked more than 400 comments. It has also spawned a website, DIYbookscanner.org, where more than 50 independent book scanners spread across countries such as Indonesia, Russia and Britain have contributed hardware refinements and software programs....

For details on the "how-to" of it, you can visit DIY Book Scanning news and forum, or download the 79-step how-to guide for building a book scanner (.pdf). The Wired article focuses more on the "whys" and "why nots" of do-it-yourself digitization.

Reetz says the DIY book-scanning forum isn't about distributing pirated content, but he can see the temptation. "My project was founded in angry desperation," he says. "It was a watershed moment when I realized getting an 8-megapixel Canon camera was cheaper than buying a bunch of textbooks."

As adjunct faculty at a couple of colleges, I sometimes teach science, math and computer classes, and I can tell you the cost of textbooks will make your hair stand on end (even at the intro level, where economies of scale could keep expenses in check). The schools won't let the students see the ISBN numbers of the required texts, to prevent them from shopping online for second-hand books, and they even forbid cell-phones in the campus bookstores, lest price-conscious students photograph shrink-wrapped book covers. Patently unfair practices like these seem designed to encourage piracy.

So are Reetz and the builders of the DIY scanner pirates? That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.

....If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is "fine, and fair use," she says. "Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work," says Samuelson. But not so individual users who already own the book....For publishers, though, the growth of the DIY scanning community could hurt. Publishers today sell digital versions to customers who already own hardcover or paperback versions of the same book.

"You cannot look at this idea from the perspective of whether the publisher can make extra money," says Samuelson. "Publishers would love it if you can't resell books either, but that's not going to happen."

Dust On the DSLR Sensor

I had a little camera excitement the other day. I took some fall foliage pictures, and it became painfully obvious that I had dust on my camera's sensor cover. I have a Nikon digital SLR, (mostly because I've used SLR's happily for 40 years, and couldn't figure out how to operate a point-and-shoot camera), and I change between a macro and a telephoto lens often. You are supposed to change lenses in a dust-free environment, but I don't have one of those, so dust in the camera was inevitable.

As it happens, I was able to blow the large chunk of dust away with a Nikon-recommended blower-bulb, so most of my Web-reading has been for future reference. I didn't have to decide what sort of expensive or inexpensive equipment I need to buy, but now I know what's out there, and what other people do. Here is my collection of sensor-cleaning links.

• CCD / CMOS Cleaning
• Cleaning your Sensor: Are those spots you're seeing, or have the dreaded dust bunnies inhabited your camera?
• Nikon CCD Cleaning Guide from Nature Photography Central
• Image Sensor Cleaning Tips and Techniques--a collection of links from UltimateSLR
• Excerpt from the Nikon sensor cleaning video on YouTube. Nikon USA tells us not to touch our sensors or we void our warranty, but in Japan, they sell a cleaning kit, including a video showing how the Nikon technicians clean sensor screens. It involves lens paper and a wooden chopstick.