My visit to 38°N, 123°W

Introduction

On Tuesday, the ninth day of January, 2001, I visited the degree confluence at 38° North latitude by 123° West longitude. The trip was inspired, at least in part, by The Degree Confluence Project (subsequently referred to as "The DCP"), which I was recently made aware of by a friend of mine.

The confluence in question lands on the side of a small hill along the Point Reyes National Seashore. The picture to the right is from the National Park Service's page, modified to show my guess (based on comparing the shape of the land in the picture to a map I have and my recollection of walking it) at the approximate location of the confluence.

According to The DCP's web page, I was not the first person to make a trip to this confluence, but of the 4 nearest confluences to my home, one is in the Pacific Ocean, and the other 3 had all had previous visitors, and I decided to try for one nearby that had already been done as my first attempt, rather than going quite a bit further to the nearest not-yet-visited confluence, though that may come soon. Also, this one had been visited in August previously, and so my January visit shows, at least if you look closely, a bit of a different perspective.

For example, you'll notice two peculiarities in the various shots of my GPS receiver: 1) there are droplets of water on the screen, and 2) It's being held not (directly) by my hand, but by a towel. Each of these owes their presense to the light rain that was falling. And the effects of my frequent use of the towel can be observed in the form of streaks across the GPS receiver (in particular, on the large center rocker-button) in some of the shots.

Homing In

So, now for some pictures from my actual trip... First, we see that I'm getting very close (I pre-entered the confluence as a waypoint in the GPS receiver, and set it as my destination. In case it's hard to read, the second field of text is labeled as "DIST TO NEXT" -- distance to the next destination, in this case, the confluence -- and has a value of "5 ft". I'm within 2 meters! Woo hoo! :-)

So then I was close, so I changed pages on the GPS receiver. This next shot is of my location at that point:

You may notice (if you can read through the glare) that the time that's displayed is "21:44:23", on "09-JAN-01". That's in UTC, so it was about 1:45 PM in the local time zone of Pacific Standard Time, or PST.

After a minute or so (and a visible wipe from the towel), I'd gotten a little closer, but given the combination of me being out in weather I wasn't really dressed for, my out-of-shape self, and the beauty of my surroundings, I quickly tired of trying to get all zeroes after the decimal points (I think I actually got 'em on the screen at one point, but not on film). Anyway, here's another shot of the screen when I was a tad closer to target (and hey, what's a few hundred-thousanths of a degree? not bloody much. ;-):

The View

So, after simply observing things for a little bit, I decided to take pictures to make a panorama of the 360° view that surrounded me.

The Images

Here's a thumbnail of the panorama, with some numbers indicating a few points of interest which I'll describe shortly:

And you can click on the following links to view a large-ish (~128KB) or full-sized (~512KB) version of the assembled panorama. Or view the individual components from which it was assembled (presented in alignment with their positions in the assemblage -- assuming you're using a browser that displays this table as intended):

View Description

Here are the highlights, as indicated in the legend above:

1. North (approximately). This guy appears twice on the panorama, because the panorama goes a little more than all the way around.:-) Viewable in more detail in component images 6 and 30 through 32 -- I think the little blob of whatever it is that's roughly in the center of the water is just about due North.
2. The waves. These waves are some of the most beautiful waves I've seen in my life. Just a little nook in the landscape allows their view from the confluence, and unfortunately, they don't show up very clearly in these pictures (go visit North and/or South beaches at Point Reyes to see the real thing), but what can be seen of them is visible in component images 28 (on the right) and 29 (a little clearer, on the left).
3. South (approximately). Also peak of the hill upon which the confluence is sitting. Viewable in more detail in images 17 and 19.
4. "The mound", which sits at the top of the "Authorized Vehicles Only" road, is somewhere in this general direction. Not that there's much to see (the mound is hidden by the hill), but component image number 13 shows (if you look carefully for it) a bit of a valley between the peak to the south and other parts of the hill. Beyond the additional portion of the hill is where the mound resides.

The Panorama Assembly

Here are some notes on how the panorama was constructed, for any that are curious. If you're not curious about technical stuff, or if you're not familiar with the technologies involved, feel free to ignore, and/or feel no guilt in not understanding, the text of this section.

Taking the pictures

I took all the pictures for this visit with my Canon EOS Elan 35mm SLR camera, with the 28-80mm zoom lens, loaded with Kodak Gold 400 film. The panorama shots themselves were taken with the lens set to about a 50mm focal length, which I realize now was a mistake; I should have used a more telefoto setting, as there was distortion in the images that made it difficult to merge the images into a panorama, and in fact impossible to make it a truly smooth assembly. See below for more on that.

I stood in place at my best estimate of the exact confluence spot, facing north for the first shot, and then spinning clockwise around and taking the shots such that each frame would roughly half-way overlap with the previous shot. I did this so as to make sure I'd have plenty of material to match up, and I'm glad I did, given the distortion problem. Also, while I tried to take the majority of shots along the same horizontal angle, I found that doing so left a few shots without a horizon, so each time I ran across one of these, I took an extra shot moving the frame up, instead of to the right, then back down and to the right for the next shot. For good measure, I also took a final shot downward in a similar fasion.

Another thing that I did, which I didn't realize until later, was that I over-exposed the whole roll of film by way of having had the ISO setting on the camera set to 200 instead of 400. Ah well, at least it was only 1 stop. Also, as for exposure, I took a grey-card reading early on and set a shutter speed and aperature in manual mode, and then didn't adjust it... so all of the shots are exposed the same, despite changes in the brightness of the various frames. As such, since the digitization of the images was not done by me, and was almost certainly done by a process that was completely automated, averaging was done such that the brightest frames appear darkest, and vice versa. Hence the changes in the brightness of the hill as you go through the panorama.

The processing

The film was processed by way of sending it to the folks at Ofoto.com, and the digitizations are theirs. I'm generally fairly pleased with their service, though certainly it leaves something to be desired with respect to having individual control over the brightness of the scans, etc. Perhaps when I get the negatives back, I'll scan them myself, using a constant setting across all of them. Don't count on it, though. :-)

The assembly, proper

After downloading the scanned images from ofoto, I launched my copy of Adobe PhotoShop on my Apple Macintosh PowerBook G3 laptop. I opened each image seperately, and then created a new blank image of a size that I thought would be appropriate to hold all the images. I then did a drag-and-drop copy operation from the layer window of each component image into the main window of the composite. Then the real fun begins.

Initial positioning

With all of the images imported into a single composite file, and placed very roughly into their appropriate positions, now it was time to do initial match-up. Using the Move Tool, and selecting each layer in turn, I would, with the exception of the first layer, make the layer semi-transparent, and then move -- with the arrow keys on the keyboard -- the image over its predecessor trying to match up key features of the two images. I would then make the layer opaque again and go to the next layer.

Transparency masks

In preperation for the next process, I added a transparency mask to each layer in turn. I added it by choosing the layer, using the Magic Wand tool somewhere on the background, and then choosing Layer->Add Layer Mask->Hide Selection from the application menus.

The merge

Once all the images were in place, I turned off the visibility of all but the lowest two layers, set the second layer once again to 50% opacity, refreshed my memory on where the features were closely matched.

Unfortunately, even getting some features to align quite well between the two layers, the images in their whole did not align. This was due to the aformentioned distortion from the overly wide angle of view that I had used when taking the pictures. Or perhaps it's an issue with the optics of the lens itself, which I hope is not the case, but which I worry about particularly also because the center of each frame was more brightly exposed than the outer edges. Future expirimentation will surely be telling on these issues.

So, with memory refreshed, and perhaps some fine-tuning of the positioning if I didn't like the match that I'd made previously, I would then set the edit mode to be ....... I've left this unfinished. I hope to return to it some time, but for now it stands as is, as my time is being spent elsewhere. Just FYI so this doesn't cause any more confusion than does the sudden ending.

Anyway, there's more to say, and more pictures to show, but I'm working on filling in this page, so check back a little later, if you like.

Feel free also to visit my general confluence visits page.