The "New" Virtual Guidebooks Site

Regular visitors to this site, if they have been watching carefully, might have detected some differences starting about the middle of February. In particular, all the state pages have new maps and the advertising has been redone.

In actuality, this is a completely new site, rebuilt from the ground up. It is intended to closely resemble the old site, retaining the look and feel, navigation, and of course content (the VR panoramas). But under the surface it is completely new.

The old site was begun in 1999 and coded in plain old html, using just a text editor (BBEdit). It grew steadily and I added features as well as content, and the look and feel evolved. But it was still being built with hand-crafted static html (mostly using Adobe GoLive). Making universal changes got increasingly difficult as the page count rose into the tens of thousands. It was also very arduous to add new content and ferret out errors.

So when I finished my last trip of the year in mid-October 2008 I decided it was time to start over and rebuild the site using up-to-date software. Primarily, this meant coding the pages in php, formatting them with CSS, and pulling the variable data from a MySQL database.

Since I had little experience with CSS and none at all with php/MySQL this involved a lot of learning and experimentation, not to mention a whole shelf of books. I am also very grateful to Markus Altendorff (of the WWP team) for his invaluable advice. It was fun making succesive breakthroughs - my first functional php page, my first successful database access, my first floating page design, and adding details that made for a more interactive interface.

Ironically, the new site has been coded almost entirely using BBEdit, back to the reliable tools that I started with.

I was tempted to go much further with the new opportunities presented by the dynamic page approach, but decided that getting the content back on line was most important. So I settled on a "brute force" method of accessing database info, where some variables are typed into the page, rather than extracted logically. This allowed me to start entering content and actually see some functional pages. By Christmas I had working versions of pages at all levels. The code behind them was horribly crude, but that can be fixed later.

The largest part of the job, though, has not been design or programming, but managing the data. First I had to do a thorough housecleaning of the site contents, organizing 7000 panoramas (each in two sizes) into folders within folders within folders, and regularizing the file names. This allowed me to implement a careful geographic restructuring, with provision for future expansion. At this time I also did triage to separate finished panos ready for publication from old not-so-good panos to be withdrawn, and new panos not yet ready. Generic pages were copied into the folders, ready to recieve their contents from the database, and the whole opus uploaded to the server (about 39,000 pages).

The descriptive data, which had previously been typed into multiple locations with minor variations (metadata, various lists, pano page captions) had to be captured from the old pages and massaged into the new database fields. At each level this got more arduous - 26 state pages (no big deal), 72 guidebook pages (a couple of days), 1915 locality pages (yikes!) and finally the agonizing drudgery of 7398 panorama pages. The pano page data is still not final - tweaking the fields for optimal results when used variously as metadata, captions, and on lists will be an ongoing project.

Several times I had to take a break from this huge task, for mental health and because I have other responsibilites. So during this time I also redrew the state page maps, set up the WWP Foundation, helped run the WWP's Best of 2008 event, gave a couple of public lectures ("A Virtual Tour of the National Parks" is my latest show), supervised a home repair project (that turned out to be much larger than expected), played around with Flash panoramas, and took time off for family Thanksgiving and Christmas. What I didn't do was travel, take new VR panoramas, or process any old ones. (One exception, a weekend trip to Yosemite during a snowstorm in February, too tempting to pass up!)

The final two stages of the site remake were tough. A high priority was to re-think my advertising strategy. First I had to get rid of the banners for defunct TravelPackets and the ancient Amazon banners. The navbars at all levels point to sections on Books, Prints and Posters, so I had to do a quick makeover of my books and posters sections. The third category, Prints, refers to art-quality prints of my own work, a project that I am very anxious to get started on (re-started, actually, see my earlier Blog article on prints). The banners across the top are now dedicated to Google AdSense, while the small square ads along the right side currently feature my own bookstores and lists. But in the future I may choose to sell this advertising space.

The second part of the final stage is problematic - writing introductory text for every state, guidebook and locality page. I think this is important, it makes the site more truly a series of guidebooks, telling you a bit about each area as well as showing you selected views. But the creative challenge of writing these short intros, one after another, has proved daunting. I did manage to provide something (not necessarily the final version) for each of the states and guidebooks by the time the site was released. But the locality text (arguably the most important, explaining each little cluster of images) has got me temporarily down for the count. To see what it will look like when finished (eventually), browse through Nevada, the only state with complete intro text at all levels (state, guidebook, locality).

On a humorous note, during the creation of the new site I used placeholder text, the standard "Lorem ipsum", so I could see how the text blocks would fit into the page design. My wife had never encountered this before and was really mystified to see all that Latin on my site! The dummy text has now all been removed, I think, but if you see some fragment of Latin remaining, now you know why.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent commodo libero sed pede. Duis adipiscing libero consectetur neque. Nam eget lacus. Integer volutpat egestas lorem. Cras porttitor. Mauris pharetra turpis aliquam magna. See the Wikipedia article for more information on Lorem ipsum.

So what, specifically, is better about the new site?

error-free navigation - links and navbars are now created from the database

cleaner navigation, no separate fullscreen and standard locality pages

all panos are available in both standard and fullscreen sizes which open in new window

older and not-so-good panos no longer appear on the site

new introductory text on all state and guidebook pages - more like a real guidebook :-)

new introductory text on locality pages, appearing steadily as I write

new improved state page maps

tool-tips on all navbars and clickable maps

thumbnail maps on the navigation bars are clickable! - go to any state on the map with one click

almost all the top level pages (Help, About, How, etc.) have been rewritten and new ones have been added

there are context-sensitive ads (provided by Google) at the top of every non-pano page (please click them!)

a Google custom search box on every non-pano page

ads for my book lists and (potentially) other relevant items down the right side (non-pano pages)

an Amazon search box at the bottom of each column of book ads

updated and expanded book pages for every state

new and updated special book lists (waterfalls, California literature, notable authors)

updated poster pages (?)

new never-before-published panoramas of San Francisco, East Mojave, Canyonlands, and others

new panoramas (from summer 2008) will start appearing soon, the pages and database are all set up for them

future panoramas will appear on the site sooner after they are taken (once I catch up!)

Hopefully my next blog will be to introduce some major new sets of panoramas.

New and Old Panoramas - Missing in Action

In the year 2008 I set a new personal record for VR photography - I took 1377 panoramas in thirteen states. This expanded the scope of my site to include four new states (South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri) and filled in many gaps.

Usually I spend the fall and winter catching up on the photography that I did during the summer. But this year I kept traveling until mid-October, then started immediately on other projects (the new database-driven site and the WWP Foundation). So the new databased version of the site (launched mid-February) was missing about 900 panoramas taken in 2008.

Additionally, my new site policy is not to publish any panoramas for which I cannot present both standard and fullscreen versions. This immediately eliminates almost everything done on film, mostly taken before 2000. But also there were a few instances (as in Alaska) where I rushed to get standard size versions on the site, and never went back to make fullscreens. The bottom line is that I have removed almost a thousand older panoramas from the site, including most of Alaska and the northern parts of Canada.

My oldest panoramas, done on film, often now have historic value, and I would like to bring them back. Re-scanning the original negative film is a big task, though, so it may not get done completely, or soon. But many panos that I took toward the end of the film era have good scans and it will be fairly easy to re-make them and get them back on the site - all the code is already there in the pages, it is just commented out.

If I bring back a whole batch of old VR's I will mention it in this blog, especially if it restores or completes an entire section. First and easiest to do will be Northern British Columbia, the Yukon and Northwest Territories, then Alaska. After that it gets problematic, with panos scattered throughout the site, and some of them not worth the effort to reprocess (many of them have subsequently been re-photographed).

Similarly, each time I finish up with a group of new panos I will announce it here. I look forward to posting some great new views of Utah, Nebraska and South Dakota from my Oregon Trail trip (taken in July 2008); the redwoods, Oregon coast and Portland from my Oregon Coast trip (August); and Bryce Canyon, Great Basin National Park, the White Mountains, and Owens Valley from my Fall Color trip (October).

My immediate priority, though, is not to rebuild the older parts of the site, but to get back out on the road and take more pictures!

Big Changes Ahead for Virtual Guidebooks

I haven't posted to this blog in six months and people have asked whether I am still actively developing the site. The answer is yes, emphatically YES, Don Bain's Virtual Guidebooks will be growing and evolving faster than ever in the next year! Let me catch up now with news and plans for the future.

First, a very major change in my life. After a year of increasing dissatisfation I left my job at the University of California (after 22 years), effective July 1. The new Geography department chairman's idea of what my job should be was completely different than mine, and was unacceptable to me. So I quit. Technically, I retired, so I have a guaranteed income and benefits - but the wonderful thing is that now I have full time to devote to my other projects.

Of course the first thing I did with my new freedom was to hit the road. Since April (when I made the decision and started using up vacation time) I have taken six long photography trips, which I will describe below. I plan to stay at home during November and December (just a few short trips) to catch up on the pictures I have taken, develop the web site, and reinvigorate the World Wide Panorama.

Soon after I left the university the department chair broke his promise to continue to sponsor the World Wide Panorama by providing a free server. It was not too much of a surprise -- he hadn't kept his other promises either, and we were prepared. Landis Bennett and I (co-founders of the WWP) had already set up a non-profit corporation, the World Wide Panorama Foundation, to take over responsibility for the project. There is a lot of work to be done, but I see a bright future for this international collaboration and showcase for VR photography. The first appearance of the new WWP will be the "Best of 2008" event, appearing January 1, 2009.

The trips I have been taking will add almost a thousand new VR panoramas to the Virtual Guidebooks site. But before I sketch out where I went and what I saw, let me mention the behind-the-scenes changes being made to the site.

When I initiated Virtual Guidebooks in late 1999 all I knew was html, so the site was built that way. It got less and less reasonable to maintain in this form (handcrafted static html pages) as it grew to a thousand panoramas, then two thousand, then I added fullscreen versions, and growth continued to its present 6000. The result has been increasing lag time in getting new panoramas up on the site, a lack of flexibilty in page design and contents, and an awful lot of work to make changes or additions.

The modern solution of course is to convert to a database-driven model. So I am currently creating a whole new version of the site with PHP and MySQL, learning as I go. It is slow and at times tedious, but also interesting -- and every bit of progress is exciting. I dare not predict when the project will be complete, or even whether the conversion will be in stages or all at once. But I will discuss it in some future blog post.

Spring Break in March, when I was still acting like an employee, was spent mostly in the Mojave Desert. No special wildflower displays this year, but it gave me a very welcome chance to think about my future, and escape from the unpleasant situation developing at work. Expect over a hundred new panos of East Mojave National Preserve, Laughlin and Oatman on the Colorado River, and Valley of Fire State Park near Las Vegas.

I managed another week-long trip in late April, catching the end of wildflower season in the South Coast Ranges and revisiting areas along the central coast and El Camino Real in Monterey, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties. An easy, pleasant trip, with time to work on some new techniques. Another hundred new panos.

I took off half of May for a long trip through the spectacular parklands of the Colorado Plateau in Utah - Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Natural Bridges, and the Kolob Canyons of Zion. I took about 150 panoramas, most of which are finished but will probably not be posted to the site until the big database project is further along.

My most ambitous trip, one I have been planning for a long time, took most of the month of July. I followed the Oregon Trail eastwards (i.e. backwards) from Salt Lake City all the way to Independence, Missouri, focusing on history and rural landscapes. This was mostly new country for me, including nearly two weeks in Nebraska. I liked it a lot, but let me warn you that camping there in the summer requires an air-conditioned motorhome with screened windows!

Actually, I was following the intertwined routes of the Oregon Trail, Mormon Trail, California Trail, the original transcontinental railroad, and the Pony Express. I saw a lot of old wagon ruts, many modest frontier buildings, scenery that was less spectacular than further west, very nice small towns and just two cities (Omaha and Salt Lake). On the way back I toured the Black Hills of South Dakota, another state new to me. In all I shot almost 400 panoramas!

I took barely a week to recover then headed north for the last trip of the summer. First a few days in Redwood National Park (one of my very favorite places), then up the Oregon Coast and inland to Portland. Another 150 panos.

Most of September slipped by while I was distracted with health issues, a major home repair project and similar mundane concerns. But I managed one more trip, a mid-October quest for fall color.

I have been to Zion Canyon when it was just unbelievable - in addition to the always-colorful sandstone, there were brilliant yellow cottonwoods and aspen, orange Gambel oaks and red canyon maples. So I headed for Utah. But I found everything still green in Zion, too early by almost a month, and the aspens at Cedar Breaks already bare, a week too late.

It was a great trip nevertheless. In addition to Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks I spent a day at Great Basin National Park in Nevada, hiking in the bristlecone pine forest at 10,000 feet, then drove diagonally across the sparsely inhabited heart of Nevada from Ely to Tonopah. Finally three days in Owens Valley (with some fall color) and a day in the White Mountains shooting still more ancient bristlecone pines.

So keep checking this blog and this site for major changes. My goal is to have the databased version of Virtual Guidebooks launched and all this summer's panos up by the end of 2008.

Updates to the Northern California Coast

The Virtual Guidebook to the Northern California Coast and North Coast Ranges covers everything between the Sacramento Valley and the coast, from Arcata south to the northern edge of the Bay Area. Its unifying features are the redwood forests and the dramatic coastline.

When I first started arranging my VR panoramas into "guidebooks" (regions) back in 1999, the area covered by each one was much smaller than now. Through a process of gradual amalgamation, this guidebook evolved from earlier separate guidebooks for Eureka, the Redwood Highway, the Lost Coast, the Mendocino Coast, the Sonoma Coast, and the North Coast Ranges. Maybe I have overdone it - there are now 47 localities with 251 panoramas .

In November I made a trip to update the sections on Fort Bragg and Mendocino, and in January/February did the same for Eureka, Shelter Cove, and Sinkyone. There are still some areas up there that I want to fill in or update (notably Arcata), and the stretch of coast from Mendocino to Salt Point needs a lot of new panos. I want to hike the Lost Coast again, both the northern (Mattole River to Shelter Cove) and southern (Sinkyone Wilderness) stretches, and climb King Peak.

The Redwood Highway section needs to be completely redone, and supplemented with Headwaters Forest and Grizzly Creek. I currently have nothing at all from the higher coast ranges (Yolla Bolly, Snow Mountain) or the Clear Lake area, nor from the beautiful vineyard valleys of the upper Russian River. So this guidebook is far from complete.

Here's a review of the new additions to this guidebook.

Samoa is an old company town, formerly the property of the Hammond Lumber Company. Now it is famous mostly for the Samoa Cookhouse (standard size or fullscreen), but most of the old buildings are still in good shape and there are plans for redevelopment. It is located on North Spit, site of some big industrial properties and a long stretch of dunes and beach.

Eureka is one of the under-appreciated small cities of California. There is the commercial port and a newly developed waterfront. The impressive historic section known as Old Town is rivalled only by Port Angeles in Washington and Old Sacramento. Downtown Eureka boasts some fine old buildings and a vibrant arts scene.

Ferndale is a true gem of a small town, a Hollywood favorite (Outbreak, The Majestic). I managed to reshoot it in the last hour of winter daylight.

The Lost Coast Headlands are something new, recently acquired by the BLM and opened to the public. This is a notoriously unstable bit of coast and one stretch of road dropped down 400 feet a few years ago. It could be a new and vital link in the California Coastal Trail, which now goes far inland here.

Shelter Cove is an isolated development in the middle of the Lost Coast. Laid out by real estate developers in the 1960's, it features an airstrip, golf course and campground, a few motels and small stores, and a scattering of houses with more under construction. Its wild and lonely location makes it worth the long winding drive over the coast ridges from Highway 101 at Garberville.

I photographed the old Cape Mendocino Lighthouse ten years ago in its original location by trespassing, so it was nice to see it restored and relocated to the park in Shelter Cove (standard size or fullscreen). Also of note is the Black Sands Beach just north of town.

Sinkyone Wilderness State Park is one of my personal favorites. I made a special trip there in February and was blessed with a sunny day followed by a foggy day, both with 15-20 foot waves. The northern section, Whale Gulch, is pictured here in the fog, a very common condition.

The center section of the park features the old Needle Rock Ranch. I was fortunate to be able to walk right through the herd of Roosevelt elk that lives there (standard size or fullscreen) on my hike back from Whale Gulch. I camped at Barn Camp (that's my van parked by the barn, my tent in the trees standard size or fullscreen) and spent an hour shooting the sunset from the clifftops (standard size or fullscreen) and (standard size or fullscreen).

From Needle Rock a dirt road leads south to Bear Harbor. My favorite shot here was taken on a dangerously unstable cliff edge above the roaring surf (standard size or fullscreen).

The last day of that February trip I started to work my south along the Mendocino coast starting at Westport, but the bone-chilling fog quickly discouraged me. I will pick it up again at Cleone and McKerricher, maybe next fall.

The famous and very interesting central Mendocino coast has already been covered in this blog (see Weekend Trip to the Mendocino Coast).

Fort Bragg and its port, Noyo, get better all the time, making a long transition from the old economy of timber and fisheries to a new one of tourism and art. Mendocino itself (properly Mendocino City, but nobody calls it that) is widely recognized from movies and television and well established as a venue for art. Actually, most of the artists now live elsewhere, notably in Fort Bragg.

Back in November I also managed to photograph a few places in the coast ranges inland from Mendocino, the pygmy forest and Albion River, and one of my favorite redwood groves, Montgomery Woods. I used one of the redwood pictures as my entry in Best of 2007 on the World Wide Panorama site.

Though I took them over a year ago, some panos of Sonoma Coast State Park and Bodega Bay have only just been added to the site. And finally, a token few shots of the wine valleys, specifically Boonville and Anderson Valley.

Redwoods in the Fog - the Print

For over two years now I have been making slow deliberate progress towards selling panoramic prints of the images on my Virtual Guidebooks site. My wife has had several of them framed and hung them at home, and I have shown a number at lectures and art fairs. A later blog post will announce availability and give details when my fine art panoramic prints are ready for sale.

Most of the prints I have made so far are straighforward wide-format panoramas, usually the complete 360°. They have an interesting distortion, a unique form factor, and people seem to like them. Since I draw them directly from the 6000+ archive of Virtual Guidebooks images the range of subjects and locations is enormous - something for everyone.

But some of my most dramatic VR panoramas are cubics, which pose special problems for printing as flat media. Here is the story of how I dealt with this challenge for one of these (from the Virtual Guidebook to Redwood National Park) - be sure to look straight up:

Huge trees and chest-high ferns in the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. (6-19-04)

Standard Size or Fullscreen Size

The original photos were taken near the dedication site in the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, Redwood National Park, California. A foggy day was chosen both for the soft even lighting and because of the close ecological relationship between the coastal fog zone of northern California and the geographic range of the redwoods.

Some of the trees here are over 300 feet tall (100 meters) and 10 feet diameter (3 meters). Visitors to old growth redwood groves are struck by the cathedral-like quality of the forest and the majesty of the amazingly tall straight trees. Although over 90% of the original redwood forest has been logged, many of the finest groves are preserved in national and state parks.

Below the massive redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) grow tanbark oaks (Lithocarpus densiflorus), California rose bay (Rhododendron macrophyllum), salal (Gaultheria shallon), and sword fern (Polystichum californicum).

In its print form I call it simply "Redwoods in the Fog". After printing it a few times at home I made a larger print (60 by 30 inches) on the big Epson 9800 at my computer lab. Here I am posing with the final mounted print on the balcony at the Geography department, UC Berkeley.

This striking image began with a series of 37 separate photographs. They were taken with carefully controlled geometry using a tall tripod and a special camera mount. Because of the shoulder-high sword ferns the camera, a Nikon d100 digital SLR,  was held about seven feet (2.1 meters) above the ground.

Here the original photos are shown arranged in three tiers, plus a zenith (straight up) shot. There is no nadir shot (straight down) because the dense vegetation made it impossible for me to step out of the way.

Using a special computer program (PTGui) the individual frames were warped and overlapped, then blended, to form a continuous image that covers an entire spherical view. Image procesing programs such as Photoshop can only deal with a rectangular matrix of pixels, so the spherical image was reprojected and saved as an equirectangular image – twice as wide as high, equivalent to an unprojected world map (known as plate carée).

This equirectangular image was then processed into a digital movie file. This uses a cubic imaging model, so the equirectangular image is reprojected to six cube faces.

Viewing software allows the user to direct the view in any direction, unwarping the image in real time for a realistic geometry. This is what you see on the web site.

Note how the equirectangular image completely fails to convey the impression of great height that is so striking in the interactive version, and also when you are there in the redwood forest itself. To approach this ideal on a flat surface a distortion of the spherical image is needed, a problem similar to that of map projections.

First I explored traditional map projections. The Mercator projection results in straight and parallel tree trunks, but it is unable to show the zenith – just as a Mercator world map cannot show the poles.

Other map projections gave interesting results, but my final choice was a filter designed to make fisheye lens images rectilinear. The “de-fished” panorama shows all the way from the photographer’s toes to the zenith high above in the fog, with an interesting outwards bowing of the straight tree trunks.

Another way to display a spherical image is to project it to a series of facets which can then be cut out, folded, and assembled into a three dimensional display. It is shown below as a “philosphere”, with square and triangular faces.

I would like to do this on a large scale so it could be viewed from inside. A philosphere would be simple, but the more facets the closer it would be to reality. The hole at the bottom is where I was standing when taking the pictures (the missing nadir shot).

If this polyhedron were large enough, and lit translucently from outside, the viewer could stand up through the hole and receive a realistic impression of being in the redwood forest.

Updates to Redwood National Park

The Virtual Guidebook to Redwood National Park covers that magical far corner of California from Trinidad north to the Oregon border. It isn't just the national park (which is actually a composite of national and state park lands) as it includes Crescent City, several small towns, a number of state parks and some national forest.

This was one of the first areas that I set out to cover methodically, and hence has a large proportion of older panoramas (before 2000). These were shot on negative film and although the photographic quality is high, the scanning process did not produce true colors and sharp images. Maybe someday I will take the time to re-scan so I can produce first-rate panos, but my immediate plan is to re-photograph these areas whenever I have the opportunity. This is no real hardship, as I love visiting this area.

Starting at the northwest end (my usual way of ordering geographic contents) we come first to Crescent City - and a lot of old panoramas. These will stay until I can get back up there for rephotography. The older film-based panos are instantly recognizable by their smaller thumbnail images, and the absence of a fullscreen version.

The "Redwood National and State Parks" begin just outside Crescent City, with Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park on the Smith River. A major part of this park is on Mill Creek, which can be seen to advantage from the Howland Hill Road, an unpaved one-laner which has hardly changed since stage-coach days. The Boy Scout Tree Trail leads from this road through some of the most magnificent forest on earth, home to a number of world champion trees.

I have a lone pano from the Smith River Recreation Area - a favorite destination of mine in pre-panography days. I need to get back there to document the beautiful South Fork of the Smith River, the historic Kelsey Trail, and the unique geology and botany.

Del Norte Redwoods State Park spills down the high bluffs south of Crescent City. Hiking the Damnation Creek trail down to the coast here has been high on my "to do" list for years. More rephotography is needed at Klamath and the north end of Prairie Creek Park.

Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is considered one of the crown jewels of the California state park system. Though I visit it almost every year I still don't have a good set of panoramas, partly because I am often with a class (see my blog comments on panography and the field class). But no excuses - I need to make it a high priority to photograph Elk Prairie and its resident elk, plus the amazing redwood forests.

Prairie Creek park spans from the sheltered valley of the creek across low ridges to the coast at Gold Bluffs Beach. The incomparable Fern Canyon is hidden here in the coastal bluffs.

For the second-ever World Wide Panorama event the theme was World Heritage, and Redwood National Park is a UNESCO listed world heritage site. I made a weekend trip and got some great photos. The one I used for the WWP site was taken on the Boy Scout Tree Trail as a full spherical image - but I didn't have time to create it as a cubic pano for the event. I have done so subsequently (standard size or fullscreen). This was also the trip where I captured one of my best panoramas ever (standard size or fullscreen), in the fog and huge ferns of the Lady Bird Johnson Grove.

My memories of Orick and Redwood Creek go back to high school, when I made one of my first solo trips to the newly created Redwood National Park. It was truly an adventure, including three days spent camping alone at the Tall Trees Grove. I repeated the hike a few years later with my sister and a group of college friends - by that time intensive logging was taking place all around the park perimeter. Given that personal history, I really need to produce a better series of panos, retracing my hike up the creek to the Tall Trees. Next summer - I promise.

The Humboldt Lagoons are a lovely string of freshwater lakes, drowned valleys cut off by barrier beaches. With the exception of Big Lagoon I haven't done them justice. I have always wanted to boat across Stone Lagoon to the primitive campsites on the far side.

I did manage to update my Patricks Point panos with a trip this last January - normally the north coast is not a prime destination in winter, but I was very lucky with the weather. I was particularly glad to be able to shoot a new series of the re-created Yurok Indian village of Sumeg, built within the park by Yuroks and park staff. My old panos have been very popular over the years, especially with school kids studying Native Americans.

Finally we come to Trinidad, a delightful little town with a harbor and lighthouse, beach and pier. My panoramas continuing south from here can be found in the Virtual Guidebook to the Northern California Coast (currently being revised).

Another big update to the Redwood National Park guidebook will probably be forthcoming next fall, after my summer trips.

New Panoramas of Oregon

With two years of catching up to do, this update increases the number of panoramas of Oregon on the site from 257 to 375. Let me tell you about it guidebook by guidebook.

The Oregon Coast:

In June of 2006 I finished my long trip to the northwest with a couple of days on the southern Oregon coast. I came over the mountains from Corvallis to Newport on Yaquina Bay, then worked my way south. There are new panoramas in the following localities: Newport, Alsea Bay and Yachats, Heceta Head, Cape Blanco, Port Orford, Rogue River, and Boardman State Park.

My favorites are one taken late in the day at Whaleshead Beach (standard size or fullscreen), and a scene with local people crab fishing by the big bridge at Yaquina Bay (standard size or fullscreen).

Portland and the Columbia River Gorge:

I have added several new views of Oregon City, including the John McLoughlin House National Historic Site. See the Oregon City localities, upper and lower. This was the first incorporated city in the west, along with many other firsts, and was the official end of the Oregon Trail.

In the Columbia Gorge section I added some much-needed spherical shots of waterfalls, such as Latourelle (standard size or fullscreen) and Multnomah (standard size or fullscreen). There are new panos in every locality except Bonneville Dam, just start at Crown Point and work your way east. I particularly like this shot of Wah Gwin Gwin Falls at the Columbia Gorge Hotel (standard size or fullscreen).

The Willamette Valley and Southern Oregon:

New panos of historic Champoeg (the birthplace of American Oregon), Canyonville, Grants Pass, and the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument near Ashland. Once again I had to skip Salem because of a lack of time - but next year for sure.

The Oregon Cascades:

In July 2007 I spent a week in the Oregon Cascades, enjoying a long day hike in the Marion Lake area, another day seeing waterfalls and forests on the upper McKenzie River and Willamette Pass Highway, plus the dramatic lava fields of McKenzie Pass.

I planned to spend two days on Mount Hood, but had to cut it short when heavy smoke from a fire on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation cut visibility and made breathing difficult. All I managed to see before beating a trategic retreat was Timberline Lodge. But there was an unexpected bonus - it was Smokey the Bear's birthday, and he posed for a picture with me (standard size or fullscreen) (Smokey is the one on the left).

I also finally got around to taking the boat tour at Crater Lake. The views of the lake from the rim drive viewpoints are beautiful (standard size or fullscreen), but the lake level perspective is very different (standard size or fullscreen).

Only two tours a day go to Wizard Island, which I have always wanted to visit, so I had to get up early to stand in line (no reservations taken). We only had two hours on the island, just enough time to hike to the top of the cinder cone, around the rim, and have lunch. Fast-moving clouds made panoramic photography difficult, but it was a very satisfying day's outing. Recommended. My favorite shot features one of the silvery snags on the crater rim (standard size or fullscreen).

Eastern Oregon:

In summer 2007 I targeted a few previously overlooked areas east of the Cascades. First, the lower John Day River and John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Painted Hills unit and Sheep Rock unit. I particularly like an other-worldly shot of the boardwalk at Painted Cove (standard size or fullscreen).

Back closer to the mountains, I documented the charming town of Sisters, including one of my periodic personal appearances, in a delightful campground in the ponderosa pine forest east of town (standard size or fullscreen). Further south, I added a few shots from Newberry National Volcanic Monument and the interesting area around Fort Klamath.

There are a lot more panoramic opportunities waiting for me in Oregon and I plan to visit there every year. I need to revisit the Kalmiopsis area in the southwest corner and Smith Rock near Bend. I love the river canyons on the west slope of the Cascades, and need to get back to the alpine meadows on Mount Jefferson when they are summer green and flowery. The Oregon coast always beckons, and I need better panos of the Seaside/Cannon Beach area, and the Cascade Head preserve.

But most importantly I need to spend a few days concentrating on the charming city of Portland. It was on my itinerary in both 2006 and 2007, but got rained out both times.