At the end, I am at home in the woods
In 1992, Kellogg’s was collaborating with World Book to deliver educational content to kids on cereal boxes. In addition to its popular encyclopedia (still in print and updated every year), World Book produced Childcraft, a 15-volume set about everything interesting to kids. Childcraft produced the cereal box content.
About 10 years ago I started making digital copies of old film negatives and color slides. The scanners I had access to produced disappointing results, so I tried taking a closeup of the film with a digital camera (Figure 1). The camera was the first DSLR I owned. This made very good copies, capturing most of the information in the old film.
In the late 1980s, I established vegetation study plots at 10 sites along the eastern side of Glacier Bay in southeastern Alaska. These sites were more or less evenly spaced between the retreating Muir Glacier and the terminal moraine which the Glacier Bay ice had built at the end of the Little Ice Age. The youngest site had been exposed by retreating ice in 1968 and the oldest site had been exposed around 1770 soon after the ice melted back from the 1740 moraine. So on average the age difference between “consecutive” sites was about 20 years (202 years ÷ 10).
There are three approaches to learning things from this series of different aged study sites:
I saw Riggs Glacier on my first trip to Glacier Bay in 1984. Of the three tidewater glaciers in Muir Inlet at that time, only McBride Glacier reaches sea level today. In 1990, as one of the final field tasks for my dissertation, I established permanent study plots between Riggs Glacier and Muir Glacier. This summer Galen and I used old sketch maps to find all five of them and recorded GPS coordinates.
My second youngest study site at Glacier Bay is on a bench of outwash about 150 feet above Muir Inlet. Before alders covered the young surface in the mid 20th century, the bench offered a good view of the retreating face of Muir Glacier to the north. William O. Field established a photo station there maybe in the late 1940s and marked the spot with a cairn assembled of several large rocks. I found the cairn in 1988 when I set up my study plots in a dense thicket of alders.
It was not easy to find a photo of these bookshelves as they were installed in my parents’ house. The shelves were behind a table and hard to photograph, and they were also not very photogenic. I thought they were cool and modern in the sixties, but I never thought they were important (I do now). The shelves are probably in the background of some other photos, but this one from 1972 was the first I came across and is certainly more interesting than the rest. Many of the books in this shot are still on these shelves.
Last spring, Barry Warzak of Midwest Optical Systems (MIDOPT) in Illinois contacted Ned Horning about writing an article on dual bandpass filters. Ned got me involved, and Barry also became interested in having us try some of the new filters he was developing. The primary focus of MIDOPT is industrial machine vision filters and lenses, but Barry recognizes the potential in the emerging market for agricultural analysis and aerial imaging. Barry has sent us samples of 15 different filters that could be used for infrared plant health analysis. Some of these are fancy dichroic filters that transmit one or two very narrow bands of color, and others are high quality glass filters that have spectral qualities similar to Wratten 25A, Wratten 15, or Schott BG3 filters.
The levee of Bayou Petit Caillou supports the long strip of houses that is Chauvin and Cocodrie, the narrowest towns I have ever seen. Way down delta in Louisiana, you are either on the levee, in the bayou, or somewhere out in the salt marsh. For exactly 100 years, Cecil Lapeyrouse’s Grocery has been on the levee. Today most of the houses are seasonal, and the store gets by with business from people coming down to shrimp or fish or have fun. We stopped by on our exit from the LUMCON Marine Center in Cocodrie where Public Lab held its annual meeting. That had fallen into the fun category. Continue reading “Gas Ice Bait Beer”
Update (March, 2015): The KAPtery has moved to kaptery.com.
Thanks
Click photos to enlarge
Click photos to enlarge.
