Tioga Road to Open in Yosemite National Park

See you at the Mobil Station for fish tacos, it's Tioga Pass time!

From the NPS:

Yosemite News Release
May 19, 2008
For Immediate Release

Tioga Road to Open in Yosemite National Park
Visitors urged to take safety precautions for upcoming Memorial Day Weekend

Yosemite National Park Superintendent Mike Tollefson announced today that the Tioga Road will open for the season on Wednesday, May 21 at 8:00 a.m. for all vehicle traffic. The Tioga Road, bounded on both sides by State Highway 120, is the popular east-west crossing of the Sierra Nevada. There will be no commercial services available along the road. Additionally, the Tuolumne Meadows Campground, other campgrounds along the corridor, and the Visitor Center will not be open. However, there will be restrooms available on the road. All visitor services, including the campgrounds, store, gas station, etc. will open over the next several weeks.

Visitors who are planning to visit Yosemite National Park over the upcoming Memorial Day Weekend are urged to take extra safety precautions, especially along the Merced River. With the current warm weather and accelerated snowmelt, the river is running fast and cold. People should take extreme caution along the river and watch children at all times.

The park is expecting a very busy weekend. People should plan on arriving in the park as early in the day as possible. People visiting Yosemite Valley are urged to take the free Yosemite Shuttle Bus to explore the sites and hike on the trails. If people can not arrive early, they should wait until late afternoon to enter the park as park entrances can become congested, especially mid-day.

There are a limited number of first-come, first-served campsites available in the park. However, those are expected to fill up as the weekend approaches. There are many opportunities for hiking and overnight accommodations in the gateway communities surrounding Yosemite National Park.

Finally, the cables on Half Dome are up for the season. The cables allow visitors an opportunity to climb to the top of Half Dome and view the park from an elevation of 8,842 feet above sea level.

Glacier Point Road Opens Friday

The National Park Service in Yosemite has announced the expected opening of the Glacier Point Road May 2, 2008.

With the opening of the Glacier Point Road, photographers gain access to spectacular views of Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, and the High Sierra, as well as easy access to a unique and varied forest ecosystem that includes majestic Red Firs and Great Grey Owls.

The road to the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias opened April 26. Plowing continues on the Tioga road, with no opening date set.

Tuolumne Meadows Winter Conditions Update

From the NPS

TUOLUMNE MEADOWS WINTER CONDITIONS UPDATE
April 24, 2008
Weather: (April 16 to April 23)
High temp: 59° (April 18)
Low temp: 6° (April 21)
New Snow: 3” (April 22)
Total settled snow depth: 23” as of April 24
Ski Conditions and Weather: It has been a cool and windy week at Tuolumne. A series of storms have passed us by to the north, bringing many prolongedepisodes of high winds and cold temperatures. We did get a few inches of new snow on Tuesday, but most of that blew away in the high winds the next day. The snow has been firm to icy in the mornings, softening somewhat in the afternoons. The Tuolumne River and most of its tributaries are now free of ice, in most spots the only way across is to use the summer trail bridges. The latest snow conditions report from the east side is that the Tioga Road (Highway 120) has been plowed from the road closure gate outside of Lee Vining up to the lower end of Tioga Lake. If all goes according to plan, Caltrans will have the road cleared and open to the public up to the park boundary at Tioga Pass for the opening day of fishing season on April 26. On our west side, skiers coming up the Snow Creek trail report that the snow line begins just above the summer trail bridge, which is about 1/2 mile above the top of the switchbacks; everything below that level has melted out. The latest report from the west end of the Tioga Road is that plow crews have cleared the first 12 miles of road east from Crane Flat.

Avalanche and Snowpack Conditions: For the latest avalanche advisory for this area go to www.esavalanche.org for the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center and click on advisory. The ESAC site is updated several times a week and more often during weather events.

Wildlife: Birds seen in the past week include Mallard, Common Merganser, Killdeer, Northern Flicker, Williamson’s Sapsucker, Hairy Woodpecker, Black-backed Woodpecker, Violet-green Swallow, Steller’s Jay, Clark’s Nutcracker, Common Raven, Mountain Chickadee, Brown Creeper, White-breasted Nuthatch, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Townsend’s Solitaire, American Robin, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Dark-eyed Junco, White-crowned Sparrow, and Brewer’s Blackbird. We are still seeing quite a few Painted Lady butterflies migrating through the meadows during the afternoons. Animal tracks seen in the past week include Coyote, Pine Marten, Chickaree, Mice/Vole, and Hare. No sign of any bears up here yet.

Questions: If you have any ski related or weather questions feel free to call 209-372-0450 between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm. If we are out skiing, leave a message and a phone number so we can return your call. Please don’t call us with questions about road conditions, as we live 20 miles from the nearest plowed road and don’t do any driving this time of year. For current park road conditions call 209-372-0200. (Jeff and Kathi, the Tuolumne winter rangers)

Tioga Road and Glacier Point Plowing Update 4/24/08

It's that time of year again when us photographers living west of the Sierra Nevada eagerly await the plowing of the passes that allow us easy access to the beautiful Eastern Sierra and the high country. On the Glacier Point Road, initial plowing to Glacier Point is complete, but additional plowing (widening), road work, and hazard tree work must be completed before the road can be safely opened to the public.

Work continues on the Tioga Road:

Update on Tioga road Opening 4/24/08.
Tioga Road opening operations continued yesterday.
Tioga Road progress for April 23, 2008:
Starting Location: 11.3 miles from Crane Flat Gate
Ending Location: 15 miles from Crane Flat Gate (Mc Swain Summit)
Distance plowed today: 3.7miles
Average Snow depth: 6 ft.

Visit the NPS website for the most current information.

RAW Support

If you are using a digital camera, one of the things you’ll have to keep on top of is software updates.

For us film photographers, the latest versions of Photoshop and other programs often don’t offer us much. I can do everything I want to a film scan in Photoshop 7 that I can do in Photoshop CS3, except use the cool new pano stitcher. Not so if you are using a digital camera and photographing in RAW. Software vendors are constantly updating their products to get the most out of RAW.

If you use Apple software like Aperture, iPhoto, Preview, etc., you may need the latest version of their operating software to access your RAW files as Apple programs use the OS to convert from RAW. You can see the latest list of supported cameras here.

Adobe takes a different approach and builds RAW support into the application itself, and doesn’t rely on the OS to do it’s RAW conversions. In the case of Photoshop, it’s handled by the Camera RAW plug-in, so when new cameras come out, or Adobe comes up with better ways to convert from RAW, they just update the plug-in, which is a small download and easy to install.

The way Adobe does it lets them update their products for new cameras faster than Apple, which is just one compelling advantage of Lightroom over Aperture.

What does this mean to you? It means you should install updates and upgrades to your photo processing software on a regular basis if you want to get the most out of the RAW format.

Fixing Photoshop's Feather Command

There is a frustrating little glitch in the feather command in Photoshop CS3 that I want to convince Adobe to fix, and I need your help to do it. It’s going to take more than just me e-mailing Adobe to get it done.

I know, I know, it’s been months since CS3 came out, but my to-do list is pretty long, and I’m finally getting around to addressing this.

The problem lies in how the feather command deals with selections that go to the edge of an image.

In Photoshop CS2 and earlier (for as long as I can remember), if the edges of a image are selected, the feather command EXCLUDES the edges of the image.

But a change snuck in with Photoshop CS3. In CS3, if the edges of an image are selected, the feather command INCLUDES the edges of the image in the feather.

Here’s a simple side-by-side comparison that shows what I’m talking about.
I started by selecting the top half of the image with the rectangular marquee tool (tool feather set to zero).













I then chose the feather command and entered a radius of 20 pixels.

In CS2, this resulted in a mask that made a perfect approximation of a neutral density filter. The only place that was feathered was where the selection intersected the image. The edges of the image were left alone.












Photoshop CS2 20 Pixel Feather

In CS3 this is clearly not the case:













Photoshop CS3 20 Pixel Feather

Here you can see that instead of a nice mask that divides the image into two halves, I instead have a strange square/oval mask that feathers the corners and edges of the image, and would not give me the same effect as previous versions of photoshop did.

CS3 does not let me use the same tool to achieve the same effect as it did in previous versions, an effect that tens of thousands of hours of Photoshop use have ingrained into my brain, and that’s frustrating to me.

Are there workarounds? Yes, there are, but none of them are perfect, nor are they quick.

The new Refine Edges command lets me obtain the “Exclude Edges” effect most of the time, but there are still cases where it includes the edges. It’s also much more time consuming, as I have to enter in settings for five different controls instead of one. It’s not nearly as simple nor effective as the way the Feather command used to work. When you are using this tool a couple of hundred times in a day, it can be a real drag, and it violates one of my rules of photographic tools: A good tool should be so intuitive and automatic that you scarcely know you are using it, so that your expression is not hindered nor slowed. Refine edges does not meet that test to the same degree that the old feather command did.

You can also use the blur tool on a mask, but that does not have the same exact effect, takes several steps, and again, disregards thousands of hours of countless users getting in the habit of using the feather tool to do the job--and now being forced to change for no apparent reason.

What can be done about it?

Simple! We need to tell Adobe to change it back!

Go to http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

And cut and paste the following text:

Dear Adobe,

In Photoshop CS3 you made a change in the way the feather command deals with a selection when that selection includes the edges of a image. In CS2 and earlier, the feather command would not feather the edges, but in CS3 it does feather the edges, as explained at www.westcoastimaging.com/CS3.htm. This is not a beneficial change for photographers using the feather command as part of their dodging and burning techniques. Please make the feather command in CS3 work like it did in CS2 so the thousands of hours of muscle memory put into using this command are not thrown away.

If there is a reason that some users want the edges of an image feathered, please put that option in Refine Edges to “include” or “exclude” edges from the feather.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Then, e-mail this story to all of your photographer friends...post it on your blog...even put it on milk cartons...whatever will cause as many people as possible to contact Adobe asking for this fix.

This is a positive thing. Adobe wants our feedback, and wants to hear from photographers who use their products to make sure the products work the way we want them to. If we want Photoshop to work for us, we need to let Adobe know what we need.

The Feather tool worked fine for many years, so we just need Adobe to change it back. Thanks for taking the time to write Adobe on this issue, and if you are part of the Photoshop team, thanks for listening to our feedback.

Photoshop Basics: Using Layer Masks - WCI Pixel Podcast

by Melanie Crutchfield

Adjustment layers are one of the most powerful tools in Photoshop because of their ability to make non-destructive edits to your image. But if you want to unlock their full potential, you need to know about layer masks.

Layer masks allow you to make creative adjustments to lightness, darkness, and color balance to the whole image, a part of the image, or anywhere in between. It's also the easiest way to dodge and burn your photograph.

Using layer masks is simple and easy. Watch our Pixel Podcast, then give it a try!

Watch the 600x800 quicktime or the YouTube version.

Are you Geotagging?

Geotagging is simply adding the exact latitude and longitude of a photograph’s location to its metadata so that the location can be used by database software. Its uses can be seen most prominently when using Google Earth or Picasa2, where you can see photos from the location you are browsing.

ATP has announced Photo Finder (~$150US), a cool new tool that lets you geotag your photos without a computer, which makes the process much easier. The Photo Finder is a small GPS receiver with a build in card reader. You carry the receiver with you when you photograph, and it logs your location every 5 seconds. When you are done, you plug in your flash card, and Photo Finder syncs up your photos with their location by using the time stamp on the photos, and then automatically adds the location to the metadata. It couldn’t be more simple.

As programers provide us new ways to search, organize, and share our photographs, I expect to see geotagging become commonplace, and a valuable tool for many photographers.

30 inch color accurate LCD

As if I didn't have enough things on my digital want list, NEC has just announced a 30 inch, 4 megapixel color accurate LCD that displays 97.8% of AdobeRGB. Street price will be about $2,200.

Check out all the geeky details on the press release.

Will it make you a better photographer? No. But would it look really good on your desk? YES!