Oct 2009 Groom Lake photographs
mi...@sushi.com
<http://www.lazygranch.com/images/a51pan/oct2009/tower.jpg>
Viewing conditions were crap, so I'm not going to bother making a
panorama. Not only was the haze thick, but the wind was brutal.
Desert Shadow
Absolutely great photos again. Thanks for sharing. Your photos are
always the great. I wish I had the equipment, but I bet mine still
wouldn't turn out so good. Would you allow these photos to be used on
other sites, blogs or forums, with the proper link to your site. Damn
good photos. Thanks for sharing again!
mi...@sushi.com
I will eventually put links to the photos on my panorama page. These
photos are mostly a product of significant image processing rather
than good photography, at least for this session. The blue channel is
killed, red and green are combined, then converted to grayscale. The
blue channel has the most haze. The image was run though wavelet
enhancement using an old version of PixInsight. Contrast was cranked
up by a combination of moving the sliders in the histogram and some
nonlinear tweaking by bending the curve.
Desert Shadow
What about using them on other blogs or forums, to get some more
discussion going?
mi...@sushi.com
Clearly I don't want my photographs uploaded to other sites. Placing a
link is acceptable, but not embedding the photograph. Of course,
placing a link to my photos could get you kicked off of a certain
forum. ;-)
You have to understand that quite a bit of physical effort goes into
Tikaboo shots. Money is money, but pain and suffering is something
else, not to mention surviving on Cliff bars and jerky when your body
is screaming for a good steak. Thus I don't like my photographs to be
pirated. The interesting thing about photography is when you take the
photograph, it is essentially already copyrighted. There is nothing to
file.
I recently came across a new site that pirated one of my photos. Quite
by accident, when I first photographed the warning signs, I did so at
wide aperture. Thus you get the warning signs being sharp, and the
background blurry. A good technique for photographing a supermodel,
but kind of dumb for just photographing the signs. However, the shot
is unique enough that I can easily spot when the shot is stolen.
<http://www.lazygranch.com/images/fg/fgsg1a.jpg>
is the shot that gets pirated all the time. As you know, the shot
isn't even current since the signs have changed. But the people that
pirate this stuff don't know that. ;-)
Desert Shadow
I totally understand. Yep, you read my mind. I wanted to post them
on a certain forum. That is too bad.. You always have the best
photos and knowledge. It would make for good discussion. And yes, I
have noticed some of your photos on other sites as well. So you think
if I made a post and said here is a link to some great new photos and
posted the link I would get the "boot". This is a rough world!
Lumpy
> ...The interesting thing about photography is when you take the
> photograph, it is essentially already copyrighted. There is nothing to
> file.
True with all works (in the US).
Songs, manuscripts etc are all copyrighted
the moment they are recorded/written/notated.
Filing with the LibOfCongress is a value added
move that increases the likelyhood of you prevailing
in a lawsuit, and increases the monetary reward
when you win.
But the stuff is copyrighted even without filing.
And you don't (any longer) have to affix that little
(c) or mention the copyright on the material.
Mailing the stuff to yourself is useless, proven
time and time again so. Registered copyrights
are groovy things.
Lumpy
Can you do that FM disc jockey voice?
Yes, but it doesn't translate well in ascii.
www.LumpyMusic.com
mi...@sushi.com
I think song titles are the exception to the rule. I often wondered
what legal case lead to that exception.
Youtube is a real wild west of copyright infringement. Just try
getting anything removed from it as a private citizen. There is some
crappy video on it that takes my photos and converts them to a
sequence of images. Worse of all, the soundtrack is "Mr. Sandman."
Back to copyrights, one interesting court case had to do with
"Stanford". You would think a person's name is copyrighted, but
apparently not. You would think a university with billions in assets
could protect their name, but apparently not. Thus you can have
Stanford Towing, stuff like that. But try having Mickey Mouse Towing
or McDonalds Towing!
As you probably know, Mickey Mouse (Disney) is the source of all
copyright time extensions. Without changing laws, Mickey Mouse would
have fallen into public domain.
Desert Shadow
So, it looks like the dirt is there to block the view of the planes
(JANET) on the runway. What do you think? Your photo clearly shows
that they were not trying to block the door with the dirt.
mi...@sushi.com
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Maybe they decided to pile the dirt
rather than offhaul it. I guess the expense of off-hauling isn't a
concern to an outfit like Groom, but it does attract attention. During
one of my NTS tours, I saw the dirt haulers around Gate 700. An awful
lot of people without security clearances can get on the NTS, so no
use attracing attention. [The truck drivers bringing supplies to Groom
Lake routinely use the Mercury Highway, then "surrender" their truck
at Gate 700 to a qualified, presumably military, truck driver to bring
the truck to the base.]
I assume the operation near Groom Lake acts like a responsible
organization ecologically speaking rather than a bunch of cowboys
after Jonathon Turley was able to get the EPA on site. So piling the
dirt in the typical 2:1 slope means the dirt is stable and occupies as
little ground as possible. It is also possible they are storing the
dirt as fill for another project. While most people think dirt is
dirt, these soils engineers have dirt down to a science and often pull
dirt from specific locations due to it having some sort of desirable
property. When they built the Keno runway, the dirt came from an area
south of the "Fox 4" gate, I have a photo of the dirt hauler on my
cedar gate page someplace.
The building towards the right with "privacy fencing" is a deliberate
slap in the face to the Tikaboo "peekers." You can see the fence was
added after the fact,
I would guess they could hide the hangar door with a fence or more
likely mesh to block our view, but it is trickier than it sounds.
Quite a few hills will have a view of that hangar door. Photographing
the insides of a hangar isn't all that easy since the light is much
less than outdoors. Of course, opening the hangar at might really
keeps the project hidden.
Lumpy
> ...While most people think dirt is
> dirt, these soils engineers have dirt down
> to a science and often pull
> dirt from specific locations
> due to it having some sort of desirable
Even without analyzing the properties, dirt
is a valuable commodity. I pay for dirt to
be brought to my ranch in Phoenix every couple
of years.
I used to joke about the beaches in So Calif
replacing the sand every year. Then I learned
that San Diego buys sand from Arizona to do
exactly that, replace sand on their beaches
that gets eroded away.
Craig 'Lumpy' Lemke
nos...@notreal.com
fe9e88...@b25g2000prb.googlegroups.com>, mi...@sushi.com says...
I have been out of town so I am a little late to the table but I would
like to add my thanks for sharing the images and let you know at least
one more person appreciates them.
As far as unauthorized use of your images, you might try using
www.tineye.com to do a search for where your pictures might be used. I
tried it with your fgsg1a.jpg image and it indicated it was on 10
different web sites. If you are not familiar with TinEye their FAQ
makes interesting reading.
I also have a question. Have you ever thought of taking pictures from
your various locations with IR or near IR? I wonder if it might reveal
different information - perhaps even a record of a past event where the
heat lingers. I am not up on all the technical aspects so there might
be reasons why it is not practical, but it is food for thought.
Thanks again for your work.
mi...@sushi.com
> In article <3e938dc0-e430-463a-8073-
> fe9e88570...@b25g2000prb.googlegroups.com>, m...@sushi.com says...
> tried it with your fgsg1a.jpg image and it indicated it was on 10
> different web sites. If you are not familiar with TinEye their FAQ
> makes interesting reading.
>
> I also have a question. Have you ever thought of taking pictures from
> your various locations with IR or near IR? I wonder if it might reveal
> different information - perhaps even a record of a past event where the
> heat lingers. I am not up on all the technical aspects so there might
> be reasons why it is not practical, but it is food for thought.
>
> Thanks again for your work.
I've fiddled with IR filters. Here is the deal with IR. If you are
doing a night shot, it is so dark around the range that you might as
well record both visible light and IR. Now for daylight, you can use
an IR filter, but it isn't useful for telescope shots. The IR filter
is so black that it takes very long time exposures to record
anything.
To see where heat has been, you need thermal imaging. This is really
longwave IR. The cameras can capture the NIR. Nightvision is similar,
i.e. around 900nm.
I'd fiddle with the TinEye. I generally just ask that the stolen
images be removed. There are quite a few sites where I have given
permission to use the images, so not all are stolen.