Five Weeks in Six Minutes

County Clare, Summer 2010

One of the nice things about taking an insane number of photos while on vacation is that you get to spend a huge amount of time at home deciding what to do with them and then doing it. In a way, it's like taking the trip over for free. That's the way it worked when we were in Ireland in 2006, and that's the way it's working now with the 2010 batch -- only more so.

I've published a few things so far in this space from that trip (here, here, and here, for example, along with the whole "Erin Go Thud" business), but I'm taking my time with the two big pieces. The biggest, an account of the trip in the style of the "HI-POD" series of 2007, is scheduled to be posted on the one-year anniversary of the days, as it was then. The next-biggest, an annotated slide show on sharrington.net, is in process now.

The first step in putting together that slide show was to select the images we wanted to be in it. We picked about 750, or approximately 20% of the available images. The next step was to shrink the selected images to a web-friendly file size, a step I just finished today. That's when I had an "ah-HA!" moment for a little additional project, inspired by Pummelvision (thanks, Mary Ellen Carew!) and by my son Adam's recent work in putting together video clips. Why not slap those 750 images together in very rapid fashion to produce a Pummelvision-style, mad-speed version of the entire trip?

So I did.



(You won't be able to view this video in Germany, due to copyright issues there about the soundtrack -- a jig by James Galway and the Chieftains.)

YouTube's processing clipped the top few percent off each frame, which is kind of irritating but I can't see how to fix that without expending way too much effort. All of these images will be available in still, annotated form over on sharrington.net within a couple of months.

The frames come at you in strict chronological order, so lots of views of our headquarters, Birr Castle Demesne, are interspersed throughout. And, for you Bothy Cat fans, she's liberally sprinkled throughout as well.

Enjoy! You should view this at the highest resolution your download speed (and patience) will allow. Cranking up the volume wouldn't hurt, either.

A Grave Post

Before Diane and I left for Ireland earlier this year, I posted an offer in this space to take photos while we were there for anyone who had a specific place or thing in mind. Our friend Ronnie Peterson took us up on that, as did a friend of mine over on Flickr.

Ronnie's request and its great benefits to us have been chronicled here earlier. Linda ("chocolatepoint" over on Flickr) asked thusly for something that proved, similarly, to be of more benefit to us (in the places we sought out that we might not otherwise have seen) than to her:

Thanks for the kind offer to take a photo that I might want. I don't have anything specific in mind. If you happen to roll by an interesting old cemetery, though, and feel like taking a few shots, I wouldn't mind seeing the photos. You know how I love old cemeteries and genealogy and such. Don't go out of your way, though!

Our ultimate response to Linda can be seen by clicking here, transporting you over to sharrington.net. The set that lives there includes, among others, these sights:

Passage to the heart of the Neolithic tomb at Knowth,

the 12th Century Dominican Priory ruins at Lorrha, far northern Tipperary,

the ancient monastic city at Clonmacnoise on the Shannon, and

Fury.

Once again, click here to view the full set.

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To: Ronnie Peterson From: Ireland

Killeineagh denizen

Before Diane and I left for Ireland this summer, I offered to take photos for SherWords readers while we were there if the opportunity presented itself. Several took me up on the offer, and the results will be sprinkled out over on sharrington.net over the next few months.

The first installment goes to Ronnie Peterson, simply because her suggestions led to two places we otherwise never would have seen (and co-incidentally on two consecutive days, August 21st and 22nd) and which turned out to be highlights of our trip.

One was Killeinagh, a hamlet near Ennistymon, on the southwestern fringes of the Burren, where Ronnie's great-grandfather Patrick Shannon grew up -- and left for America in 1850 during the famine. The other was Clonfinlough, a tiny village on an esker near the Shannon, where her friend Bridget Kelly O.P. is from.

Church at Clonfinlough

Each is a part of Ireland's heart more surely than any Blarney Stone or "Leprechaun Crossing" or the like that we can find all along the fringes of the island, and neither will ever be seen by more than a tiny, very lucky, percentage of us tourists.

Thank you, Ronnie.

Please click here to be taken to the photos.

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411 Years Later, a Debt Collected

Before we continue with the "Erin go Thud" story, I thought that regular readers of SherWords might like to know that some of our best photos from this year's trip to Ireland are popping up on Flickr. They have very little in the way of narrative (that's what will be showing up on this blog as the year progresses), but some of them are pretty:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherwoodh/sets/72157624912483438/

Tilting with Brian

Over on The Fies Files, Brian Fies recently re-posted an article about the technique of "tilt-shifting" a photograph to make its subject look like a table-top miniature. His re-post was triggered by a current insurance commercial that makes use of that process in video form, and his re-post triggered me to try my hand at it. I'll supply a link to his article at the bottom -- I'd far rather have you see his stuff after you see mine so you're not spoiled before you even start looking at these.

Brian's examples are really superb -- I especially like his one of an amphitheater in Athens -- in part because he takes exquisite care to custom "mask" (designate) the areas of a photo that are to be in focus or not in focus in the end product. For the most part, while fooling around with the process in Photoshop yesterday and today, I used the less-convincing but easier and quicker method that online tutorials (such as this one from "Photo Infos") instruct. Only one of the following tilt-shifted images involved custom masking; can you tell which one it is? Please click on the images to see larger views -- the effect might not even be noticeable at the sizes on this page.

Rambler Marlin, 1965

Seattle Mariners at Oakland Athletics, 2007

Central Park from the Top of the Rock (Rockefeller Center), 1945, from one of my Dad's slides.

Southwestward view from the Top of the Rock, 1945, from another Lynn Harrington slide.
The brown building at lower-left is the Paramount building, which is dwarfed by a crowd of bigger buildings from this vantage point today. The blue building at center -- the original McGraw Hill building, an art deco icon built at the same time as the Empire State Building -- is not even visible from the Top of the Rock now!

So... now you're ready to appreciate Brian's professional-grade tilt-shifts! Enjoy!

Bridge Idyll

(No, not "idle bridge" -- that would be this one .)

In Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park: part of the railbed of the Santa Cruz, Big Trees & Pacific Railway Company.

There was a very nice, short article about our San Lorenzo River valley in the San Jose Mercury early this summer. It was about a feature that our valley still has that is disappearing from other rivers across America: the swimmin' hole, unfenced, unregulated, un-chlorinated, and probably a little unsanitary, too.

The San Lorenzo River is very short; it runs from the crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains southward to the city of Santa Cruz on Monterey Bay, a distance of less than twenty miles. The whole valley, in fact, can be seen in this photo from a recent SherWords post, from its origin near the bottom of that frame to its outlet in the mid-distance haze. (The smoke plume was from the "Lockheed" wildfire of last month.) Its course runs through a magnificent forest of sequoia sempervirens (coast redwoods) and wends its way through several small towns. A few of those towns dam the stream during the summer to make swimming places for kids (and others) and, especially in its last few miles, there are a number of natural pooling places that require no dammed assistance.

One of those natural pools is in Henry Cowell State Park just south of Felton. (That park was itself a recent topic here in a different context. ) It is in an idyllic place in the park -- if you don't think a railroad excludes the entire concept of "idyll" -- where the river begins its winding path through its final steep canyon to the sea. It is under a hundred-year-old railroad bridge, a bridge that now carries only tourist trains operated twice a day for round trips to the Santa Cruz beach and boardwalk by the Roaring Camp folks.

Shortly after I was finished with summer school in August, I took an early-morning walk with my old Nikon and tripod down the railroad tracks to the bridge. Fog from Monterey Bay still hung at about treetop level in the canyon, lending a muted, diffused light to the redwoods and the forest floor.

The bridge itself posed gracefully for its portraits...

... and I clambered down for a view into the morning's foggy glare downstream:

I resolved to come back at a time when the excursion train was scheduled to cross the bridge, and, after checking the schedule, returned two days later at about 10:30am (after having taken a quick trip to the mountains' crest to snap the above-referenced photo of smoke from the wildfire on Ben Lomond Mountain.)

When I reached the bridge and set up my tripod a little downstream from it, a trio of young girls was already there, enjoying the swimmin' hole under the bridge, taking turns swinging on the long, leisurely rope dangling from the bridge to the water. The photos below, if seen only here, show neither rope nor young girls. If you click on any of the next three photos, though, you should be able to see the long rope near the right-hand bridge pier.

When the train arrived, the girls scuttled, giggling, up the river bank into the woods, but...

... even before the train had completely passed over the bridge, they were back.


This confluence of things from a different time -- an old railroad bridge, a languid river's swimming spot, a swinging rope's enthrallment -- led me to indulge myself in a bit of Photoshop cuteness that I don't want to let myself do very much. I altered one of my grade-level photos of the bridge to include a different destination on its far side:

A bridge too far.

(You really have to click on the above image to see it larger to get all that I want you to see. Please?)

I think of the strolling figure on the other side, walking with measured strides farther on down the track, as my Dad, who was deeply intrigued by trains and especially their railbeds' courses throughout his life. I am not on the bridge yet, nor (I hope) will be any time soon -- but I can sure see it from here. One of my sons has the good grace to be behind me, out of sight in this picture. The other has broken the rules, has impetuously rushed across the bridge ahead of me, and is already out of sight around the tracks' curve, as was always his way.

As I said, I don't want to let myself do this very much. But there was something about the old bridge, and the morning's fog, and the redwood forest that let me do it this once.

Joe-Bob Says:

Sherwood-Bob says: Check it Out!

Image by Robert Couse-Baker of Sacramento, one of the most innovative and playful photographers I've encountered on Flickr thus far. Please click here to go to a short compilation of his "Bob's Dreams" works.

Independence A

This old Model A is a bit like the rest of California on this Fourth of July, 2009: a little run down, a little corroded, but still proud of her looks... and fashionably attired.

I hope you all had a fine day, no matter where you live!

(Photo taken in the Santa Cruz Mountains town of Felton, California.)

Three Thousand Words

Last Saturday (May 16th, 2009), Adam and Lynda took Adam's nieces, Grace and Kiana, to a little beach on the east side of San Francisco Bay. Adam captured some arresting images on that outing, including these three:

To Grace's left is the skyline of San Francisco. Directly beyond her is the Golden Gate Bridge. Slightly to her right are the hills of Marin County. She is looking directly toward the place on the Bay where her father's ashes were scattered two years ago.

Kiana tries to give her passenger ladybug the benefit of the doubt.

We can all fly, you know? We just have to try. And we just have to believe.

(All photos by Adam Harrington, who, I hope, will post them to his Flickr account without too much nagging by his father, who really wants to reference them from his own Flickr account. But I'm not pressuring him, no, of course not.)

Lookit What I Got In the Mail TODAY!

... one in an ongoing series.

PART I: COOL STUFF IN THE MAIL:

OH MY

Oh my, oh my, oh my.

I have heard its praises sung in academe, its values debated in high halls, its import profoundly enunciated from all the far-flung corners of realms governed by TCP/IP, and its products displayed on every monitor and slick paper, everywhere.

Photoshop.

I never had it in my hands, though. Until now.

Two thoughts:

1) It's a good thing that I spent my first 61 years doing other things, because the next 61 are probably going to have to be devoted to figuring out how to use this damn' thing, and

2) Thank God (and Martha) for deep academic discounts. I feel like I've just gotten the keys to a Maserati for $1.98. How does any ordinary person afford this stuff?

What's really scary is how quickly its power can be applied, even before someone becomes particularly adept with it. The disks for Photoshop arrived in our mailbox while Diane and I were in San Francisco, visiting the Legion of Honor art museum on one of our Friday "Playin' Hooky" outings. As part of that, we walked across the street to visit (and pay homage to, on this Good Friday) the San Francisco Holocaust Memorial sculpture by George Segal.

I took this snapshot of the sculpture, looking through the barbed wire toward the Golden Gate, the Marin Headlands, and freedom:

... and toward an alert-yellow traffic hazard sign, too, unfortunately (upper-right quadrant).

When we got home, the Photoshop disk was waiting for us in the mailbox. After I installed it, and after I had glanced at our photos from the day, the first thing I wanted to do was to see if Photoshop could get rid of that bright lemon distraction.

It could, and it did, with very little expertise required on my part:

No sign? Nope, no sign.
(How can any jury believe "photographic evidence" now?)

In anticipation of receiving Photoshop in the mail, I visited a number of bookshops looking for "manuals" or "how-to" books. The major bookshops had entire sections -- bigger than the entire libraries of some small towns, I reckon -- devoted to Photoshop guides. Given what I was able to do with that distracting sign with only a few minutes' fumbling, I am staggered by what I've got in front of me in the way of a learning curve.

'Scuse me while I set out to climb a virtual El Capitan! How exciting!

PART II: NOT-COOL STUFF IN THE MAIL:

Received on the same day as the Photoshop disk's upper: this major downer.

I don't care how damn' free it is, I'm not opening this offer. If I conk out, Diane will do what traditional widows do here in the Santa Cruz mountains: sometime in the next rainy season she'll drag my sorry carcass up the hollow a ways past the last cabin and into the woods, sprinkle it with gasoline, and set it afire.

Been done afore, ay-uh. Lots.

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Whatever Shines

Mary Rosse's darkroom, Birr Castle, late 1800's.

John McCain and Barack Obama squared off again last night in the last debate before our Presidential election, and many "sound bites" were spat out by both sides, and will be hashed over and analyzed ad nauseaum elsewhere.

One that didn't get (and won't get) much attention -- because it's so predictable and so pablum -- was McCain's touting of his running mate as what he might call a "feminist": someone who has accomplished hard stuff about 50 years after someone of the other gender could have accomplished it. Good for her. Really.

But wouldn't a real feminist superheroine be one who breaks a barrier before some dude cracks it? Like maybe the Irish gals whose audacity is recounted in Whatever Shines Should Be Observed, a slender tract by Susan M. P. McKenna-Lawlor.

Whatever Shines Should Be Observed, part of Kluwer Academic Publishers' Astrophysics and Space Science Library, tells the stories of five remarkable Irishwomen who were pioneers in a variety of modern sciences and technologies. From the introduction by Alison, Countess of Rosse (the current Lady Rosse of Birr Castle):

This book gives us the lives of these five exceptional, but little known, Irish women. They achieved high recognition in scientific subjects at a time when women in the propertied classes were hardly allowed out of the nursery before their marriage, and schooling for daughters was very much an afterthought behind the education of their brothers. These five ladies, due to their own persistence and high intelligence, taught themselves astronomy, microscopy and photography, an unusual achievement in itself. But more than theat, they were to become experts in their fields and successfully pursued these ambitions, indeed, followed their stars. Mary Rosse won the Dublin Silver Medal for Excellence for her photography. Mary Ward [a cousin of the time's Lord Rosse -- SH] published authoritative works on astronomical subjects and microscopy and, by 1903, Margaret Huggins and Agnes Clerke were invited to become honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

(Mary Ward has another, sadder distinction: she was Ireland's first auto accident fatality, thrown from [and run over by] a Parsons invention, the "Road Locomotive," on the grounds of Birr Castle on August 31st, 1869.)

Diane and I will be going back to Birr Castle, the home of the remarkable Parsons family, in 2010, and will be combing the archives of these astonishing people and their friends and cohorts in the castle's archives room, which we had an all-too-brief look at in 2006. Look forward to more then here in SherWords... we sure do!

Photo Stuff

I recently stumbled on the very fine works of an Irish photographer, Steve Ford Elliott. If you liked some of the Ireland photos that appeared here last year, you'll love Elliott's work -- and his captions, too! I suggest that you start here, but anything in his photostream over at Flickr is well worth perusing.

In order to leave him a comment thanking him for the enjoyment, I had to have an active Flickr account -- and, since I had one of those, I thought I might as well start filling it up. So I did. I'm trying to limit the entries to photos of general interest, so family stuff is generally absent. So far, I've popped in stuff from the archives up to 2003 -- please go have a look!

Independence Day, 2008

In Adrianne's garden.

Several of the regular readers of this irregular blog posted articles celebrating Independence Day on July 4th: Mike did, Ruth did, Dann did, and even ronnie posted a wish for us from north of the unstressed border.

Selfish lizard that I am, though, I didn't. Instead, I chose to indulge myself by enjoying some of the benefits that ultimately came tumbling out of the events of 232 years ago. I spent the day taking a long, leisurely drive around the beautiful area I live in, the land around San Francisco Bay, and enjoying a gathering of the extended clan at Adrianne and Grace's house for a great barbeque. Thanks, Declaration signatories (and all the others who, through the years, have furthered and defended their vision); I enjoyed on that day the stuff you started. The only downer was that Diane couldn't accompany me, since she was still not feeling completely up to snuff after a little accident she had a few weeks ago.

Here's a top-down map of my wanderings (click the map to see a version you can actually read):

The light blue trail is my path to Adrianne and Grace's place in Pleasant Hill, while the purple one traces my return. The numbered spots indicate locations from which the photos below were taken. I tried to avoid freeways as much as practicable, given time constraints. If I was going to pay almost fifty bucks in gasoline for the roughly 200-mile round trip, I sure as shootin' was going to enjoy the ride.

Fair warning: what follows, especially the long section at the barbeque, will be of interest only to family, if them. But others are, of course, welcome to join us in virtuality!

The Ride Up to Pleasant Hill

Here's a perspective view, courtesy of Google Earth, from the Boulder Creek end:

(The termini of the routes marked are the centers of the towns, not our actual home locations. I'm not that unconcerned about putting such personal details out here on the web-o-sphere.)

Photo position 1, from a vista point parking lot along California route 35, also known as "Skyline":

Looking eastward. My destination today, Pleasant Hill, is beyond -- but not a whole lot beyond -- the most distant band of clouds (whose slight brown tint is due to smoke from the Big Sur fire, far to the south on the coast.) The water is San Francisco Bay, and the white patches are salt evaporators.

Photo position 2, in an old section of the town of Fremont in the East Bay:

This photo was taken specifically for, and in homage to, the world-famous Canadian blogging cat, Mojo, who is somehow under the impression that he is the President of Cuba.

I have no idea where that idea came from. Really. I don't.

Photo position 3, on Palomares Road, just off its intersection with Niles Canyon Road:

Niles Canyon provides a narrow slot through which a single-track rail line and a two-lane highway find a shortcut from the Livermore area through the East Bay hills down to the heavily populated flatlands by the Bay.

Palomares Road is a scenic ten-mile byway through the heart of the hills that generally parallel two busy Interstate highways: 880 along the East Bay's flatlands and 680 on the east side of the East Bay hills. I discovered it in October, 1989, when I was living in Oakland. The Loma Prieta earthquake of that month devastated normal transportation routes around the Bay for months after, and I used this road as part of an inventive-by-necessity daily commute from Oakland to Cupertino and back.

View to the east from Palomares Road.

At the Barbeque

Adrianne shows off the first season of her raised-bed vegetable garden!

Grace has become quite the swimmer: she's great at diving down to the bottom of the pool and retrieving the weighted rings. It is so very hard to adapt to the fact that she'll be six years old next month. By the time I do, she'll probably be seven. And then 15.

Grace's cousin, Kiana, and her aunt (and Adam's sister), Reva.

Grace and Kiana in the pool.

We had very special visitors from England at this celebration of separation therefrom: Adam's uncle John, the younger (but not youngest) brother of Adam's late mother, and his wife, Ngoc Thu. John, recently retired from a long and successful career at Reuters, is a naturalized British citizen. I had only seen him once in the past 40 years, and that one time was more than 20 years ago. I was delighted at how the years fell away with grace and ease. John is the fellow in the blue shirt; the guy in red is Bill Lombardo, who was a great friend of Doug's. Bill is a musician from, yes, that Lombardo family: Guy was his uncle.

John and Ngoc Thu live in the south of London most of the time, but they have a new second home near Lyon, France. Ngoc Thu is in dark blue, above. Adrianne, in green at right, is famously petite, but notice that Ngoc Thu is standing on a step, and, even then, is only a little taller than Adrianne. Like Adrianne, though, she packs a very large personality in a very small package.

Grace's step-granddad, Adam's stepfather, Reva's father, Kiana's grandfather, Parris, was there with his wife, Dierdre. They live in Grass Valley, California, now, which is where Diane's parents lived after her dad retired. It strikes me that some sort of diagram of this family's relationships to one another might be interesting. Or maybe even form the basis for a doctoral dissertation in sociology.


Uncle Adam and Kiana.

Through his voiceover career connections, Adam hooked Kiana and Reva up with an agent who now has Kiana doing professional photo modeling. I am not kidding; that's real.



"Sometimes my uncle is just so silly that it's beyond words. Rully, it is."

Adam and Lynda.
If you can, zoom in on the right lens of Adam's sunglasses (the left one, of course, from our perspective here.) You'll see a very proud father in the act of taking a snapshot of two wonderful people.

Adrianne's mom's dog, Jack, and I hit it off very well. He knows a sucker for small dogs -- or just a sucker, period -- when he sees one.

The Trip Home

Gramps heads out (photo by Adam.)

Google Earth perspective view of the trip home (the purple trail, at left.)

Photo position 4:

The trip back involved a ride down the length of Niles Canyon, starting in the village of Sunol (and its old-timey but functioning train station) at the top.

Sunol had its Warhol-McCluhan quarter hour of fame in the early 1980's, when its citizens sagely elected a black labrador retriever, Bosco, to be their mayor. The Chinese were famously not amused. According to this 1990 article in the New York Times:

One of the more unusual attacks on the United States came in February in a sarcastic front-page article in People's Daily and other newspapers, asserting that the idiocy of American democracy could be seen in the election of a dog as mayor of a California town called Sunol.

''Western democracy has reached such a pinnacle that there is democracy not only among human beings, but also with dogs,'' the newspaper crowed. It added that the election ''is a wake-up tonic for those kindhearted people who blindly worship Western democracy out of ignorance and naivete.''

Bosco, they hardly knew ye.

Photo position 5 (you'll have to go back to the first map to see this location; it's very nearly all the way back home in Boulder Creek):

Fog drifting into the San Lorenzo Valley.

The Jeep rattled home, over the Saratoga Gap on Highway 9, past this vista point (which we elegantly call "pee point" because of its handy latrine) at nearly sundown, with the Pacific's natural air conditioner flowing into the valleys of the redwoods. It had been a very good day, with the notable exception of the absence of my girlfriend.

And the absence of my older son. You didn't think you'd get through this entire post without mention of him, did you? Not yet, no, not yet.

Thank you, gentlemen below. I couldn't have done it without you.

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