Posted on by mwhybark

How to look at a Zeppelin

Man, am I beat.

Thus, some brevity, in theory.

Let’s set things up for a ruminantive journey by peeking in on FROM BABYKILLER TO ART DECO ICON: images of the airship, authored in 2002 and concluding with a paragraph that looks ahead to the coming hypercapitalist celebration of the airship.

Having digested that (and franked the letters as apprpriate) we shall turn back the hands of time to the innocent age of 1994, where we confront The Great Pink Floyd Airship Mystery, a conundrum that continues to inspire analyses such as Organization as the Message. For those, like me, who were unaware that in 1994 promotional blimps cruised the European skies, scaring the unwary and pleasing the archetypal bong-toting Floyd devotee, it is worth reproducing the images of these artships.

FloydDay.jpg

The European version

PinkFloyd600.jpg
The American version

The art on the US machine (lost, like so many blimps and dirigibles, in a storm) was created by one Burton J. Dodge, who, it seems, holds what may be a world record for blimps painted, 17.

Of course, there’s always been loads of photos of the blimps and dirigibles. Often the ones that get reproduced emphasize the looming bulk of the items via an extreme foreshortening, or juxtapose the ship, in the near foreground, with an impossibly large item in the near distance. For example, there are aerial photos of at least the Macon and the Akron (and I had thought the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg) off the shoulder of Manhattan, looming in the viewfinder to cover most of the Lower East Side.

These images are striking, and fantastic, and the sheer impossibility of the sight – how can something that big be in the sky? – accounts for a good portion of the wonder and interest that the blimps and dirigibles exert today.

Of course, it’s good to think contextually, as well. The great semi-military dirigibles of the U. S., Britain, and Germany played a role in the interwar period much like the space program. Technological wonders and simple awe helped convey the idea of progress, of the future. One day, millions would slide from continent to continent in grace and style, Bertie Wooster attended by Jeeves aboard the Vickers Transoceanic as a dance band serenaded the passengers beneath the balmy mid-Atlantic stars topside.

R100plan.jpg
An interior view of the deck configuration aboard the British airship R-100, from the Airship Heritage Trust.

But if you’ve ever seen the Goodyear, or Fuji, or Sanyo blimps in the sky, you may have noticed that however big the blimp may be, the sky is much larger. When looking at these things with your eye, your brain communicates the scale to you in myriad ways. But the quantifiable degree of visual space the ships occupy in the vast reaches is quite small. The techniques employed in the images described and cited above counteract this fact to communicate scale.

What would it look like if a photographer consistently framed the great dirigibles against large objects on the ground, from the ground?

TH_GF_13thst.jpg

Theodor Horydczak did just that. In several of his many aviation-themed photos, he framed the Graf Zeppelin in the upper center of his viewfinder over a city street and above the Capitol. The Los Angeles over (and through) the Lincoln Memorial.

TH_GF_mall2.jpg

Graf Zeppelin over the Mall, near the Capitol.

TH_LA_LINC1.jpg

USS Los Angeles over the Lincoln Memorial.

TH_LA_LINc_2.jpg

USS Los Angeles from within the Lincoln Memorial.

Is he constructing a meaning here? I guess that his intent was simply to juxtapose the old (the horse and cart) with the new; the accomplishments of America past with America future. The implicit ironic threat of an Art Deco envoy of the Nazi state hanging over the Capitol with all the shining grace of Damocles’ sword may not have come clear until 1940. The subtler juxtaposition of the Los Angeles (and, although I do not reproduce it here, the Goodyear-manufactured Akron) with the Lincoln Memorial is likely only to strike the paranoid dyslexic as a warning of looming civil war and dystopian threats to democracy developing from the structural pressures of hypercapitalism. Happily, Mr. Horydczak’s images cast the Memorial as a redoubt and temple from within which we peer at the emblem of industry securely.

One day in 1906 another American (I presume) set about to fly the airship Eagle in the fair city of Chicago. The crowd gaped.

knackenshire_eagle.jpg
Eagle, Chicago, 1906

About twenty-five years later, on August 28, 1929, crowds gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park to see the Graf Zeppelin on a stopover in her record-setting round-the world flight. They came, of course, to look at the Zeppelin.

GF_chi.jpg
Graf Zeppelin, Chicago, 1929

Posted on by mwhybark

Sky Captain and the Blimp Week of Tomorrow

Viv and I caught Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (link advisory: flash, loud SFX) this afternoon. Following the film we ate at the lovely Le Pichet, a tiny French bistro on First, next to the Virginia Inn. The meal was quite pricey but the food was very good.

Sky Captain, as you must know by now, is interesting formally for other reasons than its’ simple cinematic existence. First, the great majority of what you see on screen is wholly rendered via computer; and second, it’s intended as a kind of retro-cinema, not unlike the initial Indiana Jones film, or The Rocketeer. Both Sky Captain and The Rocketeer are fascinated by that long-vanished dinosaur of the sky, the dirigible, and provide contemporary audiences with the closest thing we’ll ever have to seeing the faceted, fragile leviathans slide by our wondering eyes.

Unlike Indy or The Rocketeer, however, Sky Captain is also trying to recreate the cinematic experience of watching a film shot between 1925 and 1940, and goes to great lengths to emulate the visual experience of the older films. This is mostly via post-production desaturation and a gauzy glow that is perfectly recognizable as a sort of filmic seme for High Hollywood. Viv turned to me as we were watching and wanted to know if the film had originally been shot in black-and-white and then colored, a reasonable question based solely on the look of the film.

The good news for retro-tech geeks is that the CGI is fantastic. Thanks to strategic framing, there is nearly no “grounding” problem (seen when computer-rendered elements appear to ‘float’). Unfortunate for everybody is the combination of hyper-realistic detailing in the CGI with the flattening, overall, blended look of the post-processing filters. In non-character-oriented shots, we’re presented with a flurry of edits intended to convey the richly detailed environment. Sadly, the glowing, washed-out look overwhelms the CGI detail, and leaves the viewer wondering if a plot-point just sailed by there in that 10-frame sniplet.

The real bad news is that the dialog and performances are queerly flat, lacking a sense of investment and urgency. This stems partially from the frantic pace of the non-character shots. Mind you, this is nitpicking; none of the leads appear to be sleepwalking. But Gwyneth Paltrow’s Polly Perkins, a reporter, is clearly an homage to Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson from the 1940 His Girl Friday. That’s all to the good. Yet, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Amy Archer, another Russell homage (from The Hudsucker Proxy) captures the stacatto vocal rythms that are crucial to the thirties mise-en-scene. Alas, Paltrow’s dialog and interplay with Jude Law’s mercenary aviator, while lazily amusing, has nowhere near the verbal power of her character’s forebears.

Much of the relative slow pace of the dialog, oddly, appears to be an artifact of editing. Where the film clips and snips to the detriment of plot in the sequences that include no identifiable human, adding a well-known actor to the frame guarantees a sixfold drop in the cutting rate, and the consequence is that fat remains between the lines. When the DVD for this is released, some enterprising wannabe will trim a solid forty minutes of silent facial tics from the ins and outs of each headshot cut-to and cutaway. I, for one, welcome our volunteer editors, and despite my harsh words here, will anxiously await the DVD of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. With IMDB estimating that the film cost $70m, and with the film making $17m on opening weekend, Box Office Guru [not a permalink] notes that the film saw revenue drop from Monday to Tuesday of next week, and projects $8m for this weekend. Judging by the nearly empty theater at our showing, that seems possible. Alas, that bodes ill for the movie to break even on a six week-run.

It seems probable, however, that the specialized visual content and production processes of Sky Captain open additional revenue possibilities for the film, and the sheer visual and referential density of the piece will lend itself well to DVD (and, one hopes, to video game).

Outside the boundaries of the sketchy review here offered, some notes are in order. I am happy to report that beginning Monday I will be presenting the first sequential series of Blimp Week entries in a couple of years.

A post on Monkeyfilter has inspired this, and consequently I shall address specific information requests from that thread first; I will be providing mirrored links with drastically shorter entries on Monkeyfilter as well. Here’s one geeky tidbit: the dirigibles seen at Joe Sullivan’s base exhibit an “X” control surface configuration which was only ever widely deployed on postwar U. S. Navy blimps, to my imperfect knowledge. Most historical dirigibles (both the German Zeppelins and the rigid airships designed and built elsewhere) used control surfaces arrayed in a vertical and horizontal cross configuration. Contemporary blimps more frequently employ the cross.

Last weekend, as the film opened, a flurry of referrals came to this website for a variety of topics, including "Sky Captain zeppelin" and "Sky Captain Moorcock." Regarding these referrals from Google that imply some people are wondering about Michael Moorcock’s association with, influence on, or input to the story of Sky Captain: I’m making an uninformed guess that while Moorcock probably had no direct input on the story, some of his retro-pulp fictions directly inspired the film-maker. He wrote a terrific neo-pulp trilogy, The Warlord of the Air, which envisions things not that unlike Angelina Jolie’s airborne aircraft carriers.

Mr. Moorcock himself appears concerned about this. I’m not sure I’d say that he should be, but he’s certainly justified in his desire to learn more.

Despite this, the whole point of The Warlord of the Air is the romantic rehabilitation of discredited and abandoned technologies and ideologies. Moorcock’s central historical figure is the obscure Russian revolutionary Nestor Mahkno, who (as I understand these matters) sought to invoke modernist anarchism as the native, culturally-determined ideology of the Russian revolution, in parallel with the Barcelona-based anarchists of the CNT during the Spanish Civil War. Where anarchism took root in the twentieth century, it always reflected long-standing cultural traditions. Moorcock’s resurrection and celebration of early twentieth-century technology, fantasy, and ideology could not be more at odds with the cultural attitudes displayed by the filmmakers of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Instead of a band of revolutionaries, Jude Law’s Joe Sullivan leads a military corporation explicitly identified as a "mercenary" "army-for-hire" in the film’s voice-over. The Hindenburg III is seen to dock at the legendarily-unused mooring-post atop the Empire State Building. Joe Sullivan’s base is clearly home to multiple zeppelins, something which no nation of the thirties accomplished without the willing assistance of the German state. Among the many lovingly recreated montages is a sequence in which the smoking remains of the Reichstag are shown. The implication is that the giant robots did it. (Historically, a Dutch Communist was swiftly executed for the fire, and it’s been argued that the Nazis themselves set the fire, to justify the wholesale suspension of civil liberties that followed.) A newspaper winks in and out of existence in a parade of front pages, spinning by; the Nazi eagle is clearly shown, but the swastika it grasps is obscured. Is it too far-fetched to imagine that in a few years Col. Lindbergh will become the president of this alternative America?

I do not intend to imply that Sky Captain is a Nazi film. In fact, aviation adventure fantasy as a whole frequently exhibits similar attitudes and tropes. The best example is, of course, the comic-book aviator Blackhawk, a Polish nobleman disenfranchised by the Nazis themselves but partial to black uniforms, peaked caps, and cool aerotech just the same. In the late eighties, the terrific Howard Chaykin took an explicit crack at this aspect of the character and by extension, the whole presence of extreme rightist politics within the aviation-adventure fantasy genre. Like Moorcock’s work, however, Chaykin’s revisionist take simply can’t ever be regarded as mainstream within the genre.

The credited works of real-life pilots such as famed German combat aviators Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron) and Oswald Boelcke (Richthofen’s predecessor as commandant of Jagdstaffel 11) helped to create the genre itself. Richthofen’s autobiography was in itself a heavily romanticized work intended for public consumption in Germany during the war, and released as an explicit propaganda device by the state. Events such as Lindbergh’s personal embrace of the Nazi state on the eve of World War II and the development of the military doctrine of bombing civilian populations helped cement a set of genre assumptions that must be viewed as right-leaning.

It’s most typical of postwar works in this revival genre to combat the preceding critique by positing that the hero of the piece is primarily occupied by the challenges of fighting Nazis, even on the eve of World War II (see all the Indy films, for example; The Rocketeer, of course, and, yes, Blackhawk). Perhaps it’s only made notable in Sky Captain by its’ absence.

The mainstream pulp works of the time, like Sky Captain, simply disregard the political milieu of the motivating technology. This disregard, in the end, undermines the appeal of the fantasy world. While we are clearly informed that Joe Sullivan was in Nanjing helping cover the Allied retreat from Shanghai, another conflict is conspicuously not mentioned. I find myself shifting uncorfortably, wondering how much fun would it be to live in a world with giant robots and the Hindenburg III when it’s easy to picture Joe flying for Franco in Spain.

Of course, in the case of a sequel, I could easily be proved wrong. Surely the film’s creators don’t wish for such an interpretation. Choosing to struggle with the conflicting obligations of the twentieth century in ways that reflect on our current predicament might conceivably be profitably explored in a film that mixes Franco’s war with the fantasy world of Sky Captain. Here’s hoping.

Posted on by mwhybark

Let's hope so

‘Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow’: Fending Off Alien Robots, but Still Time to Flirt [NYT] – One of the most positive reviews of an SF film I’ve ever read at the Times, by Stephen Holden. He complains only of the murk (“at times the film is hard to see”), and that perhaps you darn kids won’t get what’s so special about 1939, and damns it by noting that Jude Law’s presence is not as earthy as that of Harrison Ford as Indy (well, duh).

Maybe I’m reading this through rose colored glasses, but these are the kinds of things I find myself writing when I review a film I really, really love, and find it hard to come up with meaningful critical things to say.

So: GOODIE!

Posted on by mwhybark

Video

I spent much of today pushing and pulling at the random video sniplets being generated by our two video-capable digital cameras. I’ve blogged before about shortfalls in Apple’s iTools regarding the use-practice of toting these things (essentially, it’s impossible to just dump the video onto an archival DVD mastered via iDVD).

Poking about in semi-familiar software is a fine and relaxing pursuit in some cases, and so it proved today. I’m interested in writing about my workflow and so forth so the next time I take a few years off from video work I can dig this up and get moving, possibly faster than I did this time.

To begin with, it’s necessary to select the movies you want to convert to an iDVD format. I did that by opening the date-named folders I keep all my camera-generated content in, a folder for each day and camera. I used the old-style window view that includes disclosure triangles, set to sort by file type. Therefore, recent folders grouped at the bottom of the view. Within each disclosure-triangle opened folder the movies also grouped.

Command clicking my way through the list to select all of the movie files, I dragged them into an open new iMovie project on my second monitor. I then went and did something else for several hours. iMovie converts motion media into fullscreeen DV files – a half-meg, thirty-second snippet with sound could inflate to about fifty megs, and on my aged gear, it’s not a snappy process.

Once the files have appeared in the clip tray within iMovie, it was necessary to manually reorder them to reflect the chronological order in which they were shot. If this was a commercial project, I would have logged and probably renamed each clip, as well. As it is, I’m still undecided if I’m going to invest the time to try to slap a narrative onto the clips or not. I think I am planning on adding a soundtrack, simply because the videos from the Veo are silent.

There are two common problems that result from using hand-held still cameras as video cameras. One, it’s easy to shoot in very low light circumstances, and there’s really not much to be done on the spot to address the issue. When you shoot, you gotta make do. Two, because we normally shoot still pictures on the cameras without being concerned about vertical or horizontal composition, I find we do the same thing when shooting video.

This results in sideways video, something which should be so trivial to address that I’m still amazed at the way I ended up resolving it. To an extent, I feel that a low-light correction tool should also be available in iMovie (as well as a rotation tool). On the other hand, iPhoto has no good low-light correction tool either, so who knows.

To address both issues, I ended up using Final Cut Express, which I picked up a ways back cheaply as a promotional upgrade from Premiere. The solutions to each are far from intuitive, but at least one’s easy to figure out.

I identified the problem clips in iMovie by name, and then in FCE, selected the menu item “Open.” Navigating to the iMovie project folder containing the media files, I selected each one of the DV clips, one at a time, to open.

With the file open, I then dragged the “Motion” and “Filter” tabs away from the preview window to create a side-by-side layout for the clip. In the case of a sideways clip, using “Motion” I scaled the clip by 75% and rotated it by 90 degrees. I then set the background to “black” in the Background menu item. I then exported the clip to a new QT movie using the same settings at the original DVD clip iMovie had created (same size as the clip being worked on, 29.97 fps, etcetera).

When opened in QuickTime Player the resulting movies played well, and have the additional benefit of not requiring additional processing time from iMovie when reimported.

To correct a low-light asset, I opened the file in FCE as described above. Then I added several filters to the Video Filters tab (sadly, I didn’t take notes and it’s been over an hour since I did this procedure, so details are sketchy). Among the filters enabled were Brightness and Contrast, Color Correction, Unsharp Mask and Desaturate Highs. The conceptual steps are:

  • lighten the overall image
  • center the color contrast so that whites appear white
  • darken the shadows without losing the detail that appears when the brightness is turned up.

These manipulations are likely to cause obvious artifacts in the image. I found Unsharp Mask to be helpful in addressing these problems, as well as adding definition and depth to the transition areas.

Posted on by mwhybark

Iphigenia at Aulis

Having managed to view fragments amounting to one half of the final episode of the decidedly average The Spartans, I variously learned or was reminded that:

  • Upon the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, about 7,000 Athenian invaders were imprisoned for a fair period of time in a quarry at Syracuse, exposed to the elements and fading fast. According to the transcript of the show,

    The Athenian prisoners had only one chance to live: the Syracusans had a passion for the verses of the playwright Euripides, and prisoners who could recite them in a style that pleased their tormentors were allowed to leave the quarry to be sold as slaves.

    To clarify: The Syracusans held the prisoners of war in an outdoor prison camp, subject to torture, and would not let them go until they said words which pleased them.

  • Upon the Spartan-led defeat of Athens, the Spartan leader Lysander erected an expansive monument to himself and his allies. The show did not display a reconstructed image, and I wonder if someone has assembled such a thing. I had thin luck Googling for it at all.

  • Following the Spartan defeat of Athens, Sparta was the dominant military power in the region, and “her commanders became known for corruption,” a fact which sourly comforts me.

Interestingly, I came across these class notes for a play by Euripides which appears to directly address these themes.

Posted on by mwhybark

in a lonely place

Saturday night, I caught two Bogart films on TMC, 1951’s uneven The Enforcer, a fictionalization of the discovery and prosecution of the notorious Murder, Inc., and a great film I’d unaccountably missed in my peerings at and mumblings on the era’s work.

That film is In a Lonely Place (1950), based on the recently-republished Dorothy Hughes title of the same name. earlier this year, Bookslut ran an intriguing, thoughtful appreciation of the original book.

I won’t rehash the plot here, but I will reiterate Bookslut’s note that the film is much changed from the original. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, whom Hughes presents as a wannabe writer; in the film, he’s a has-been screenwriter.

The film’s writers, Andrew Solt and Edmund North, have a ball with the screenwriter’s tension between book and film, going out of their way to establish the screenwriter’s obligation to discard the book. The film’s tense narrative kicks off with the murder of a hat check girl last seen at Steele’s home. She has come by to retell the narrative of a potboiler that Steele is being sought to adapt. Steele makes no bones about his contempt for the source material.

Perhaps I was sensitized to this content by last year’s wonderful Adaptation – but I sure didn’t find any commentary about it elsewhere on the web.

The film is one of the most effective films I’ve ever seen Bogart in, and I highly recommend it to you.

Posted on by mwhybark

ividly

I spent a big chunk of today finally exploring the integration features in iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. I’m working from a mixed base of assets representing the two most recent camping trips we went on (to Mount Baker in June and to the Olympic Peninsula this month).

As it happens, long-time MacWorld editor Jim Heid saw a prior entry on the topic of helping my Mom learn to use her new Mac, and kindly offered to send a copy of his book, The Macintosh iLife. We corresponded, and he sent a copy, inscribed to her.

I hadn’t ever really even attempted to use the apps as they were designed to be used (with the exception of iTunes), and before I sent the book on, I wanted to work through a demo project involving all the integration features with the book at my side, so I would be familiar enough with it to refer Mom to a chapter as needed. It’s been helpful, although my questions have been a bit more specific and technically oriented than the book is designed for.

For example, I did find a passing reference to the fact that iDVD only supports slideshows composed of up to 99 individual picture files, as I searched for reasons a folder of images was not generating the anticipated button upon drag-and-drop.

So, beyond the passing help the book’s provided, here are the issues I’m having that I think are failings in the suite of apps, speed not being considered (I’m using them on a G4/400 at the very low end of supported machines, and the speed is quite intolerable, something I cope with by time-slicing with household chores such as laundry and dishes).

The best feature that the suite provides is the ability to marry sets of images to selected songs from your music library. Unfortunately, each of the image-oriented apps – iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto – provides this feature with a slightly different implementation, and thus far I have not found a good way to seamlessly combine the various implementations. iMovie, for instance, will render your stills into a sliding, cross-fading quicktime montage using the well-known Ken Burns Effect. Unfortunately, the various transitions available in iPhoto, for example, are unavailable (at least at first) in iMovie, and in particular in the attempt to create a Ken Burns extravaganza. Furthermore, selecting and previewing a song and transition sequence in iPhoto is easy, easy, easy. Duplicating that in iDVD, or iMovie, is not quite so straightforward.

(UPDATE: Yes it is. in iDVD, dragging an iPhoto album from the iDVD Photos selection pane will also bring iPhoto slideshow effects into the iDVD slideshow.)

iPhoto offers an ‘iDVD’ button, presumably to allow you to send your iPhoto slideshow to iDVD. I say presumably because each time I used it, iDVD would launch and then crash. If it launched, would it add the sideshow to an existing project, or close the current project, replacing it with the new slideshow? I can’t say.

iDVD disappointed me in ways that are similar to and reflective of QuickTime Pro, rejecting native mpeg files for drag-and-drop inclusion in menu-item playback. I’ll be experimenting with optimal ways to incorporate the variant mpeg formats generated by our cameras into iDVD, probably routing through iMovie.

As I noted about a month ago, Apple’s applications treat video and photos as truly disjunct, something which made sense prior to the prevalence of dual-media recording devices. This is something that Apple must change to retain the leading-edge cachet regained with Jobs’ return.

Posted on by mwhybark

Hitting the books

Well, yesterday’s filmic experiment was a dud, apparently due to my ignorant choice of media to export the file to. Once, I swear, I had all this stuff down, but it’s been a few years since I needed to whack off a movie clip for download and browser display. I guess I expected iMovie to just take care of that at the media level, but I clearly should have known better. Microsoft and Apple infighting and Apple crippleware strikes yet again!

Just a few moments of Googling would have revealed this page of useful brush-ups on iMovie export formats, which clearly implies that mp4 is not the way to go. It also notes that plain old mpg movies are not supported by iMovie’s export.

Smack! Bad Apple!

The page also notes that none of the default Windows media video formats are supported by iMovie, not a big surprise. To be evenhanded, we’ll turn away from the burning cheek of Cupertino and deliver a satisfying, meaty blow to the unshaven, pale cheek of Redmond.

Smack! Bad Microsoft!

I am sure there are some hoopty-hoops I can jump through here to convert the file outside of iMovie. I actually have both piles of shareware movie-file converters and manipulators and Apple’s prosumer video editing software, Final Cut Express, so I can get thar fum hyar. But I’m trying to think within the box, so to speak.

Pre-iMovie, registering your QuickTime install and coughing up $30 unlocked a raft of video manipulation features that were present by default in any open movie window – some cool, useful stuff, such as resizing, rescaling and cropping, or even rotating the orientation of the video. Either I don’t have a registered copy of QTPro any more, or these features have been disabled. Googling fails to reveal a flurry of squawking users, so it’s probably the latter. Unless it’s just because I was hoping to use these features with MPEGs.

Oh, nooo, it’s not like I would ever want to use these editing features on movie files created by our cameras. Sensibly enough, the manufacturers have selected the MPEG format as the most broadly-supported video-file interchange format. Oh, wait.

That bit up there about never needing to use these features on MPEGs? Strike that. Invert it. Verrrry good. All together now:

Smack! Bad Apple!

At any rate, sorry for the bad asset.

Here is a .mov format file of the film from yesterday. 1 minute, 1.x mb. Sorry QT phobics! Maybe next time. The MPEG-4 is still available, and it looks much better.

Posted on by mwhybark

Microfilm

lake_crescent

(1 minute. 6 mb 1.8 mb, 320 x 240 mpeg, no audio. Control-click to download, looks like I have Apache set to not stream mpegs or something.)

As I mentioned, Viv and I (and Spencer) were out of town this weekend. We were on the Olympic peninsula, in an ill-advised attempt to visit the Hoh river valley on the rainiest day of the summer. We failed.

Instead, we gave up fighting the rain in Port Angeles, and eventually moseyed over to stay at the Crescent Lake campground, Fairholm, on the far east end of the lake. (Cabins and a lodge are also available – oh man, I bet a winter stay here would be something.) On the north side of the lake is a flat, wide trail, a converted railroad after which the trail is named, the Cedar.

Partway along the trail is a large railroad tunnel, filled with ties and collapsing within.

At 1 am, Spencer and I walked down to the lake and watched cloud formations over it move around. The moon rose over a high shoulder of the steeply forested surrounding hills, and I saw a bright green meteor flash in, arcing from west to east.

Sadly, we did not get much hiking done, due to extreme dawdlesomness, but on the way back we drove up to Hurricane Ridge for the obligatory best picnic table in the northwest, where we were accosted by the usual menacing array of deer, chipmunks, and mid-size birds. Our meal was closely supervised by two regally nonchalant adult ravens, each the size of a small black pony. The deer and assorted other wild hooligans have been my acquaintances in that spot for years; the ravens were something quite new.

Crescent Lake is currently in the local news, on and off, for diving recovery projects. Years ago, the lake was also the site of a celebrated, grisly murder mystery that began with the recovery of the saponified body that became known as The Lady of the Lake, a tale I sadly neglected to learn before camping. Next time, I get to tell the ghost story to end all campfire ghost stories.

I do have loads more pictures. In fact, an overwhelming amount; in addition to Viv’s new camera I brought both the old Kodak and the tiny, Lomo-esque Veo, which I think I am getting the hang of. It has a truly irritating interface and settings are totally transient, so you can’t assign a default mode for it to boot into, but the lens produces shading and hazing that are clearly in the Lomo tradition (not to assert that the Veo has any of the magic of the eastern European wonder, mind you).

The film above was iMovied from bits of 10 to 30 second silent mpegs captured with the camera. Amazingly, I filled the card up with stills and clips on one AAA battery.