Forgetting the lessons learned from a few vacations ago I figured my D300 and a few lenses would be a good thing to shlep around and photograph with but I soon remembered that, oh yeah, it’s heavy.

Sure, my new love, the Nikon AF Zoom-NIKKOR
80-200mm f/2.8D ED (one of Nikon’s best kept secrets by the way) is unbeatable and didn’t fail to impress, but after a few miles on foot, nothing says “superfluous” like a 120-300mm equivalent lens taking up room in a sholder bag.

Ultimately I fell back on, and had the most fun with, just my trusty Panasonic LX-3 and of course the Leica M3.

I also found that the iPhone was a great fallback when you just wanted to record something silly — and San Francisco has its fair share of silly — and tweet it.

I’ve never been much of a street photography shooter, but the Leica kind of lends itself to it and the touristy nature of a lot of SF makes cameras just part of the landscape so it’s very easy to just blend in. After a while I got pretty good at gauging focus and guessing exposure (f/8 and be there) and really had a lot of fun with it.

So we wandered all over SF by foot, strolling through Chinatown and riding the cable cars and whatnot — in short doing all the touristy things. We toured the USS Pampanito and the old Presidio and finally hopped on one of those open-top busses, because frankly we weren’t cold enough walking around on foot.

All in all a good time.

Clarksville was formed during the Gold Rush and later was a transfer stop (at least for a few weeks, folks were vague about that) on the Pony Express route. It’s located just outside of what today is El Dorado Hills and like so many other areas in El Dorado County though you’re only a few steps off the main road, you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.

Today, Clarksville is located on private property, so you can’t get in there normally. On the grounds are a handful of old houses — curiously, some lived in until shockingly recently — and a number of old stone foundations.

The folks who put it on did pretty well. There were folks in period clothes and wagon rides and all that. There was even a shootout by the varmints in the Blue Canyon Gang.

I also had the odd opportunity to meet one of the six — yes six — candidates running for El Dorado Sheriff. Bob Luca made an appearance and I worked up the courage to ask him about his stance on CCW permits and Open Carry laws in the county. While Luca has taken some heat in the past for not being as rabidly pro-CCW as the other candidates (notably Larry Hennick), he did state he was in support of AB 375, the bill to make California a “shall issue” CCW state (tho we agreed it would never pass), and talked about the need to proceed cautiously, “look what happened over in Isleton.” While I’m still not sure who I’m voting for, that he took the time to show up won him points.

Anyway, while I shot a lot in digital, I also shot a half a roll of Ilford Delta 100 with the Leica. In a few days I’ll soup that roll and hopefully add to the set.

Sacramento Connect is a network of high-quality news providers and bloggers in the Sacramento region and is the brain-child of The Sacramento Bee*. Tying all the affiliated sites together is a toolbar you’ll see at the bottom of all the pages, including SacTraffic.

The toolbar will show traffic related stories from the Sacramento Connect network, allow users to search the affiliated sites and allow greater access to SacTraffic content from the other Sacramento Connect sites.

All it all, I think it’s a nice addition, but then I’m biased…

*Full disclosure: I’m a web developer with the Sacramento Bee and my group was instrumental in the development and deployment of Sacramento Connect and the toolbar.

Anyway, I just finished another set of updates, though this time around the changes are more subtle. Outwardly I added support for geotagging the incident location in the Twitter updates so if you use a Twitter client that supports geotagging, the location of the incidents will appear with the tweet.

Behind the scenes I put in two additional changes. First I converted to Twitter’s OAuth mechanism for authentication, which should provide some more security under the hood and second, I switched to Google’s Closure compiler which provides better javascript compression than YUI Compressor which I adopted back in October.

Last, but not remotely least — and this was something I did back in October — the sactraffic.org code is publicly available via github under an OpenBSD-style BSD license. You can check out the code there and suggest changes.

and yes, this post also serves as a fine test of the Flickr slideshow embed code…

The lettering on it reads:

There were once 7 of those at The Sacramento Bee but today there is just one: and it is mine.

All this brouhaha about newspaper’s “original sin” (see: Alan Mutter, Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, Steve Yelvington and lets not forget Jeff Jarvis for starters) got me thinking about those pre-historic online newspaper days. In looking back, I don’t see any singular “original sin” per se. If anything a Gomorrah-like den of iniquity perhaps, but no single point of failure.

Everything was new and we were pulling the whole thing our of our collective asses as we went (perhaps that was sin #1).

There we’re only 7 of us back then, and of those only 4 who’s day-to-day job was to work on this newfangled web thing. We had a web designer, two content people and me, a “web engineer”. There was also a guy we didn’t see much of at first who had something or other to do with advertising (sin #2 anyone?) and there was, of course, a manager ostensibly in charge of it all. He, in turn, reported to the Director of Advertising.

Yeah, you read that right, sacbee.com was born as a subset of the Advertising department (sin #3?).

We we’re supposed to launch the new site on the 1st of July, but even after months of planning and work we weren’t ready. Our new go-date slipped to the 15th, and that’s when we ultimately launched. I remember staying insanely late that night before, well past midnight, and on the way in the next morning I passed the web designer on his way out — that’s just how we did things then.

I also remember a few days before launch the advertising guy mentioning that we needed a way to rotate the ads on the site, oh and by the way count the “hits” on them too. From scratch, on the eve of launch, I wrote an ad management setup (sin #4?). It was cartoonishly crude by any standards of today, but it did the job — that’s just how we did things then.

On the first day of sacbee.com’s life we broke 100,000 hits. That was damn good for a heretofore unknown site in 1996 and I was pretty pleased about it. The ad guy had mentioned, however, something about hits not being all that important, that he wanted something called “pageviews”. Eh, what the hell was a pageview? (sin #5). A little “grep” action on the Apache logs and we had pageview counts — that’s just how we did things then.

The pageviews were much lower .

After launch all of us got taken out to lunch. Not to the teriyaki place down the street, which would later become a staple, or anything along those lines, oh no. This was still the Golden Age of Newspapers and in case that was unclear they took us out to the Capitol Club, an exclusive, members-only type of place with cloth napkins and actual silver silverware where not having a jacket would generally be enough to keep you out. As we ate, Erwin Potts made an appearance, congratulating us on our accomplishment, as did McClatchy’s then brand new CEO, some baby-faced guy by the name of Gary Pruitt.

Pruitt asked me right off how many hits we’d had and I told him. I was impressed that he knew enough about the operation to even ask that. When he then added, “and how many pageviews?” I was flat out stunned. Crap, I’d just been told about these so-called pageviews earlier in the day, clearly this new guy was sharp.

On the technical side, our operation was supported by Nando.net, the technology company acquired by McClatchy as part of it’s purchase of the Raleigh News and Observer. Nando.net, which would later become “Nando Media” and ultimately “McClatchy Interactive“, was at the time still going through some of the somewhat violent upheaval that came as McClatchy tried to er… align their strategic direction with that of McClatchy’s… ahem (there’s probably a sin in there too).

Because of this, their attitudes toward us were somewhat, fluid. Some of them didn’t give a rip, about us, our needs or their roll in them. Others flat out resented us. Having to watch while 70% of your friends and coworkers are cut loose will do that. It was not uncommon at all in those days to pick up the phone and be told that the person you were working with just last week was no longer with the company.

Anyway, I digress somewhat, the point to take from all this is that sacbee.com, in it’s earliest form, was hosted on a single Sun Ultra 1/140, that literally sat on some guy’s desk at Nando.net (sin #… what are we up to?) — yeah, that’s just how we did things then.

Despite some recent revisionist history, our relationship with the newsroom in those days was nothing short of frigid (sin #whatever). There were internal politics which I’ll never understand and there was undoubtedly the fact that we were all 20-something upstarts (mind you, all of us came from newspaper backgrounds) which couldn’t have helped. That the then Executive Editor, Gregory Favre, would have his secretary print out his emails and he’d only reply, in writing, via interoffice mail probably set some kind of “tone” we were unaware of. In hindsight, being a part of Advertising I’m sure made us some kind of radioactive to the newsroom as well.

So, we were at the mercy of the “nightly dump” for most of our content. In those days the “nightly dump” was a series of quasi-formatted text files regurgitated out of the even-then-archaic SII editorial system at around 2:00 am every morning. There were no end of problems with these files and even Perl’s legendary Regular Expressions could only do so much. In the end it was a torturous shift, stepping through news stories via a crude web-based front end at 4:00am, that got the bulk of our content up by 7:00am — that’s just how we did things then.

Wait, come to think of it, not much has changed here (sin #2,643).

So there were lots of sins because we were making it up as we went along. Ultimately we figured it out though, learning from our mistakes (remind me to tell you about the time no one paid the sacbee.com DNS registrar bill and the domain got revoked) and eventually we became the savvy and knowledgeable web staff that you’d assume would be at a mid-size metro daily newspaper.

Over time, however, the various kaleidoscopes wandered off, tucked into boxes and carried off by their owners, off to different jobs or different careers. Perhaps that was the original sin.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. — Voltaire

Man I’ve heard that quote a lot recently, especially in the online news arena. It sounds all impressive and high falutin’, you know, being a quote from Voltaire and all. The problem is the above quote is almost always uttered as an excuse for something less than perfect or good… mediocrity.

Now, some would say that this is an outgrowth of the traditional newspaper mindset where existing in a virtual monopoly state — where “good enough” was in fact all that was needed for 30% profit margins — for so long has dulled that mindset to the realities of actual competition.

I don’t know that I’d go quite that far (tho it is fun to theorize on occasion) but I do bristle at the quote. Online operations are exceedingly competitive — and are becoming more so almost daily with the advent of local news blogs and the like — so if there are people running around thinking we can aim low and still be successful, well…

Since getting a 105mm Micro lens (its real name is AF-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED but yeesh…) I’ve been experimenting a lot with macro photography or in other words shooting reeally, reeally small things up close. Since, I’ve never owned a macro lens before, it’s been kindof a learning experience.

The first thing you figure out when working up real close is that as far as focus goes, there’s little room for slop. Tilt your head a little bit and the image is out of focus. No, not “a little soft” but blown-out blurry.

Of course there’s auto-focus, but when shooting macro it’s not always a big help. Generally auto-focus works pretty poorly up close, it simply pushes the limits of the technology. You can hear the motor frantically trying to move the lens back and forth that 1/16th of an inch you need to get that bug or whatever in focus (usually while you’re holding your breath and trying not to wiggle the camera, which when you do throws the auto-focus off even more).

Now if it’s dark, or you’re sporting an astigmatism in your shooting eye like me, we’ll then sometimes you might have to punt and just use AF. But be warned, if you use auto-focus for macro work it has to be dead on accurate. I used the wicked cool “AF Fine Tune” feature of my D300 to kick the focus of my 105mm macro lens back just a bit (+8 if you care). It’s not that the lens isn’t sharp, it’s just that “a wee bit” is the difference between a bug’s eye being tack sharp and nothin’ but blur.

My favorite subject at the moment is bugs and other creepy-crawlies, probably because they look so creepy up close and given the semi-rural area where I live, there’s a healthy pool to choose from.

Bugs however tend to move around a lot, and often times pretty dang quickly, so they offer additional challenges. I try to use small apertures to squeeze out the most depth-of-field that I can, in case the little buggers move. f/22 gives a little bit of leeway but the downside is that sometimes a little bokeh is worth having. f/5.6 on the other hand is pushing it. That wide and you can have a spider’s eye sharp but the rest of it too blurred to be recognizable.

I’ve found having a strobe handy is a huge help. Even a small strobe can easily throw enough light for f/22 at close range and have enough left to cycle quickly. I tend to pop my SB-800 on the camera, sometimes with the diffuser, and let the iTTL mode do the right thing, usually matching whatever f-stop I choose. Other times I just use it for fill.

It’s a lot of fun, and along the way I’m picking up a lot about the various critters we share this part of the world with. Did you know there are tarantulas in California?

Of course you don’t need a marco lens for those.

Early in my photojournalism career a Sacramento Union photographer once gave me some simple advice: get a hold of all the film you can and shoot it up. But as I’ve gotten back into photography, even when shooting digital which isn’t constrained by the limits of a 36 exposure roll of film, I’ve found it’s just sometimes easier to say to yourself: nah, I’ll shoot it next time…

You don’t make good pictures that way.

Tonight as the midwest-grade thunder cracked and lightning lit the sky up, I finally remembered those words and decided, no, it was going to be this time and I headed out into the rain.

I’m thinking that’s how you make good pictures.

I won’t repost the whole thing here but I will pull out the interesting bits…

We will begin to move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free. Instead, we will explore a variety of premium offerings that apply real value to our print content….

Charging for content is of course is all in vogue these days and in some cases might be smart but I think that if Media News tries it (or rather when Media News tries it) they’ll succeed only in driving traffic (and revenue) to the local (free) alternative media sites. As they sit in the middle of a very technology savvy area I think their risks are crazy high here.

They go on with:

We will begin differentiating our sites from the newspaper and focus on strategies designed to reach younger audiences and extend our reach. The websites, newspaper.com as we call them now, will become a different product. This new site, which we have been calling news.com, will be a regional news site that is actively managed to present breaking news. It will continue to draw a content from the newspaper (but probably in a more abbreviated form), but will also have user-generated content, community involvement and third party content. News.com will continue to serve our existing audience, which spends a lot of time on our sites, and drive significant traffic. They like and depend on our sites for their national and local news. We must not alienate them as we strive to expand our audience and attract younger people and non newspaper subscribers. Obviously, our sites must draw upon the content of the newspaper, but the presentation of that content will be different. News.com will be an entry page to new content offerings, local retail advertising opportunities and premium offerings.

This is the real nugget. I’ve always felt that the newspaper and the “newspaper.com” were different things and so should be handled as different things. Most newspapers today see their web sites as just electronic versions of their print offerings which is (to me) a big part of why many are struggling. Media News looks like they finally want to differentiate the two and I applaud this. They even go so far as to want to take it a bit further (note the distiction in “newspaper.com” and “news.com”).

This is a win but then further down they stumble headlong into 2002.

“We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces.”

Er, a portal? Seriously? In 2009? Good luck with that.

But if throwing back to 1998 wasn’t enough. Then someone had to really stir it up with a rousing game of buzzword bingo:

In order to execute this vision, we have agreed that these new strategies will be done with a template approach, using a menu of common tools and vendors. We will take advantage of the size of MNG to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform that allows for fast implementation and a companywide rollout.

What this means is that they’re gonna build one site and change out the masthead for each affiliated newspaper. Epic fail.

Users know when you’re “phoning it in” and nothing says “half-assed” like identical sites with the word “San Jose” crossed out and the word “San Francisco” in it’s place. Especially in a tech-savvy area like the Bay Area. No, someone was simply buzzword drunk here and, if they really do try to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform they will in reality only deploy mediocracy when they need to be competing against the best and the brightest.

So Media News gets points for the whole differentiating the newspaper and the “news.com” thing but man, they just can’t seem to wait to get their whole face in front of the shotgun with their other ideas. It’s OK though, I figure that in a few years there will be a wicked liquidation sale where I can pick up all kinds of retro newspaper stuff.