The night before the morning after

December 24, 2014 • 4:59 pm

by Grania

This just in on Tw*tter:

As the festivities get underway in earnest, I wish all the readers and contributors to this website a peaceful and joyful time. May there be good food and good company, and WEIT will of course also be here in the morning.

 

54 thoughts on “The night before the morning after”

  3. A decent harvest this year. Lots of clothes.

    Happy Yule to those who celebrate that and merry lazy holidays to all.

    Skål!

  4. Thanks to Grania and all the others who ably fill in with such high-quality fare on WEIT.
    I especially enjoyed the book list. May the season be happy for us all.

  8. Arctic fox?? I see 2 pieces of coal in a fluffy blanket. Please don’t tell me there’s nightjar in that photo too!

    Season’s greetings to everyone! Special thanks to Grania for her excellent posts.

  9. Maybe the pieces of coal are really nightjars?

    Yes, many thanks, Grania, and Good Noms to all. ( ours are cooked, eaten, and cleaned up after and now this chef is ready for her tryptophan zzzzzzzz’s…)

  10. A Happy Christmas and Merry New Year to everyone here!

    Is that how it goes?

    And, Chag Hanukkah Sameach

      2. I bought blank Xmas cards this year the wrote on the inside: Heathen’s Greetings. 🙂

        2. I’m sure the NSA have a special little list for people like you. You glued the envelopes shut too – that’s tantamount to encryption, Ko-ko-san!

    2. Who’s Heather and why are you greeting us in her name?

      Regardless, a Merry Christmyth to all, and to all a good night! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

      b&

          1. Nope. Dad is a serious amateur botanist. He was in the “Valhalla” division of the UK’s amateur botany club (thewildflowersociety.com) for years and remains a regional division organiser. “It’s not fossilised – ask Dad” is my response to enquiries about unfossilised plants.
            But inevitably, some of it rubs off.
            Dad and I have a running competition to trump each other. He started it (!) with his FRSC (founded 1848), which I trumped with an FGS (1807). But he undercut me with an FLS (1788). And I’m a bit stuck for places to go. FRS (1662) has an obvious untrumpable appeal, but they’re really hard to get into. We can both make an argument for SAL (Society Of Antiquaries London, 1707), which would get us into a heat. (Incidentally, it would have the family most of the way around the “Courtyard”. And I might use my mad friend to get me up to the top of the courtyard as an RA, (Royal Academ/ -y/ -ician ; artists, ripe for the taking).
            I was neglecting the Astronomers (FRAS, 1820) ! Not much use in the trumps game, and positively profligate with their membership. Fellowship OTOH … still profligate. But there’s an interesting meeting in early Jan … hmmm.

          3. One summer when I moved back to the home country for a stretch, I started to take my sister caving, as she’d wanted to do more of since leaving school. She loved it.
            So we got her kids and boyfriend involved, and they loved it.
            Then we ganged up on Dad, and he chewed the hook for a bit, then we got it firmly embedded by taking him to one of those places where you don’t take strangers … and the photography bug bit him.
            Dad has long said that “insanity is hereditary – you catch it from your children” ; so he was now in a bit of a quandary. Which he solved by getting his father into caving at the age of 73. Which made him the oldest known novice caver in the country by nearly a decade.
            It can’t be my insanity – I’ve still got mine!

          4. I’m not terribly big on enclosed spaces, but my claustrophobia is probably at very typical levels. And I know a friend-of-a-friend who’s a caver. I’ve got a few projects to finish before then…but I have in mind (at least) two crawls…first, to make it to some location worth photographing to scout it out, plan how I’d light and shoot it. Then, a second trip carrying gear and doing the shoot.

            Whether I did more than that (or, for that matter, even did the second one) would, of course, depend on how well that much goes….

            b&

          5. Amjsingly, I read that as “I have the friend of a friend who is a cadaver”. It would make for deadly conversations.

          7. I kinda got freaked out in the caves on Tom Sawyer’s Island at Disneyland (when I was 9 or so)! Would much rather climb great heights.

          8. Heights do it to me, too. But, curiously enough, not if I’ve got a camera in my hands…I’ve been known to lean over the rim of the Grand Canyon in gale force winds to get a shot…and be near terrified of the same (fenced) cliff when fifteen feet away, packing up in the dark.

            I’m hoping it’s the same in a cave: not so much panic that I can’t control it when getting in place, and completely oblivious to it as soon as I bring out the camera.

            b&

          9. Cameras do tend to momentarily suspend your sense of danger. I’ve often thought afterward that getting that one shot could have gone very differently.

          10. Fortunately, I’ve yet to put myself into any dangerous positions. Uncomfortable, dusty, and undignified positions, yes…but not yet any where life or limb (or equipment) have been at risk.

            At the Canyon, for example, the spots right at the rim were behind a very sturdy knee-high chain-link fence, and I was sitting down….

            b&

          11. That’s how we got Dad hooked – and Granddad too. Pretty places, hard to shoot. Not *quite* more people have walked on the Moon, but not far off (we’ll take people there IF we think they can be trusted to keep the knowledge to people they trust to keep the knowledge safe.
            Sadly, we’ve made and published beautiful discoveries, and within a year the places have been smashed to smithereens. We don’t know who the vandals are (fortunately for them), but have to apply security.

          12. Yes — most important. Anywhere I go will have to be someplace that my guides trust me to not put a foot or a flash or a finger where it doesn’t belong, and I’ll have to be careful to scrub all geographical identification from the proceeds. Not only no geotagging of the pictures (not a problem, save perhaps for iPhone snaps of the entrance), but also no pictures of the surroundings and trek there and back that would be recognizable. No descriptions of the site’s location more specific than the US state it’s in — and maybe not even that specific.

            I barely trust myself with something like this, and I certainly don’t trust any but a minuscule fraction of the rest of the population…and maybe not even them….

            b&

          13. GPS doesn’t work out of sight of the sky. In an office building you may see enough sky to keep “on location” with what you can see through the windows. But in the Faraday cage of a ship, without more than a 0.5 sq.m window (looking into a TEMPSC – lifeboat) or underground, no problems. no signal.
            Many phones try to triangulate their location from the strengths of GSM signal towers. Again, not a problem underground. We use RF for location mapping and it’s in a very different frequency band to GSM or GPS.
            But photos of the entrance … that’s where you get to have to be invasive. Any geolocation information gets taken out by us, and no, you don’t keep your originals.
            Better to take a dumb camera – fewer questions.
            There are protocols for this – the editor of the Cave Diving Group journal (a.k.a. the Newsletter) is accepted as a safe harbour for location information. So if your car is found at 2 in the morning on a desolate moor, the body-recovery team can be directed with reasonable confidence to your leads in that area. By definition, the people going to recover your body need the best information they can get. Most caving regions have some other respected safe harbour who can store such information and warn people “Fred is working another dig in that area too.” (because your digs may connect. But otherwise, deciding when to publish is a serious decision.

          14. Oh, of course. It’s mostly the above-ground pictures that’d be suspect.

            But, still…phones these days have inertia sensors that probably rival the ones originally developed for inertial navigation systems. And I wouldn’t at all be surprised to discover that, if not now then with a future operating system release, they manage to track you even underground.

            I can also see that as being of great interest to cavers — a virtual breadcrumb when you’re in and automatic 3-D map generation when you’re out….

            b&

          15. Hmmm. Might be of interest. But an experienced caver lays his own breadcrumbs. Well, you don’t get to be experienced without doing the “Where the FLOCK am I?” thing. But when you’re concentrating, the information goes in and adheres. At least for me.
            We’ve got robust survey techniques. The emphasis on the word “robust”. Repeated experience shows that 100mph crashes may leave the car (or van) scattered over the scenery, but the caving gear unharmed. A friend was field-testing some new tackle bags … fill them with bricks, tie them to back of car, drive 50 miles across the country. Bags intact? Fit to go underground.
            Electronics have a high mortality rate underground. It is getting better (Oh, a week of hauling a couple of hundred kilos of ground-penetrating radar in and out of Gaping Ghyll … a trial and a half. Leaking antennae ; wet DAQ laptops … frustrating. But it told us what we suspected from reports from the “Don’t look at the roof!” brigade. It’s not much fun when the roof moves. Less fun if the walls move too. Or the floor. All 6 of them moving at the same time leads to the OUTBEs and an absence of return visits.

          16. Electronics have a high mortality rate underground.

            That’s one of the things that worries me about the photography…I could maybe do an underwater enclosure for the camera, but the lens I’d most likely want to use wouldn’t be compatible with one. And that’s the easy part…the lighting is really going to be a bitch.

            b&

          20. Lovely. My next thing I want to do more seriously is macro & that means flashes. I’m not good at making harnesses for things but the cheap way is to get a couple of flashes (I already have one) & mount them so that they are at the end of the lens. I don’t know how this works with zoom – maybe you mount it to lens, I have no idea – my brain doesn’t understand the mechanics of things. So, in other words, I’d like to save my pennies for a nice ring flash & be done with it already!

            I gave my dad my old Canon 40D & he is busily looking for deals on lenses. That was a good camera that I dragged all over the world & imho as nice as my 7D.

          21. The good news for macro is that it’s all about geometry…and even the smallest of studio flashes is as big as the sky when placed in proximity to something tiny.

            The problem only comes when you want portability. Even then, geometry works in your favor. Get a typical camera-mounted flash unit, cheapest one you can buy, point it straight up, and tape some white note cards to the end so as to make a reflector that bounces the light to your subject. You can get fancy and make a miniature softbox that way without much trouble.

            Rather than a macro ringlight, if you want to buy gear, get a twin-head macro flash. The ringlight is good for medical specimens where you want perfectly flat, perfectly boring light…but, if you want the slightest bit of dimensionality, you’re going to want to get the light off-axis and get some directionality to it.

            b&

          22. Ah yes, the twin heads appear to be cheaper too. I have a decent flash unit (430 ex) so I will try it in the summer with my lens.

          23. The 430 is a great unit. If you’ve still got some downtime at the moment, grab a sheet of paper and some tape and fold it around the top to make a scoop-shaped reflector, and use that to photograph something small, like a pile of tea leaves or rice or what-not. You’ll likely be quite pleased with the results.

            Use the flash in manual mode, and manual exposure…aperture for the depth of field you want (very small aperture for macro); shutter at 1/125 if the flash is the sole source of illumination, much slower to also capture ambient; and fiddle with flash output until you get the exposure you want. ISO at base if flash-only; otherwise, raise as necessary for ambient exposure.

            That’s about all there is to it.

            b&

          25. Kinda what I was afraid of.

            If one were to wave a magic wand and magically get the equipment to the photographic site without dirt, what’re the chances of being able to remove it from its magic packaging, shoot, and get it back in its packaging without undue risk of damage?

            I’m thinking of a Pelican case or the equivalent….

            b&

          26. Oh., bloody WP swallowed my reply again. helicopter on deck in 30 minutes. Got to go.

          28. Huh? You can reply by mail? I’ll have to read the damned things more carefully.

  13. Depressed Santa bears a distinct resemblance to the Hairy Cornflake, which may explain the depression. And we all know that a wizard’s staff has a knob on the end, which may explain why he was recognised as Gandalf not as The Hogsfather.

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