Hiking Flag Hill

We knew we were going to go somewhere this weekend. Hiking somewhere, that is. With Spring-like temperatures and clear skies forecast all weekend we knew we had to. Plus, spring, especially early spring in this area, means hillsides that are swathed in brown 10 months out of the year are currently bathed in green. Heck, we'd even try to get out hiking both days!

We got a bit of a late start Saturday morning. Because of that we thought we might want to pick a shorter/easier hike. But then we figured since (a) so many options are relatively close by and (b) Daylight Saving Time (we switched last weekend) means it won't be dark until 7pm, we'd do something a bit more ambitious. What a great time for a Flag Hill hike!



Flag Hill is one of several worthwhile hikes at the Sunol Regional Wilderness in... uh... kind of the middle of nowhere on the backside of the Bay Area. We drove I-680 out toward Livermore but exited the highway in the Sunol Valley, along a stretch of road that seems to have only a concrete factory and a perennial purge of vultures perching on the pylons of high voltage lines nearby. Then, as if that wasn't nowheresville enough, we drove about 10 miles south, deeper into the hills.

Our sense of timing was amply rewarded. It is green out here. Like, ridiculously green. And on a beautiful day like today the park was busy. They had a ranger collecting fees at the entry kiosk— often it's left unstaffed, and entry is free— and we got one of the last parking spots near this trailhead.

The trail up to Flag Hill starts with crossing a creek. There's a steel and concrete footbridge, so that's no issue. Then the trail starts climbing— up, up, up— through a scraggly forest of Live Oak. It takes a while before you can actually see Flag Hill. But when it breaks into view.... Oh, my.



Did I mention how it's so green out here? Ridiculously green? Well, it is. And that fact kept triggering our "Wow" reflex over and over.

Another thing that got triggered was my lingering upper respiratory infection. Yes, the one I boasted about finally being over after 28 days. Nope, not over! It's only subsided well enough that I don't cough or experience bronchitis in the course of my normal, sedentary daily life. Out here on the trail, though, climbing steeply toward a gain of of 1,000', the struggle for breath comes back. D'oh!

I was determined not to let the breathing problems stop me. They would only slow me. I measured myself walking at about two-thirds my normal pace. And maybe taking longer rests than usual.



The good news/bad news about taking frequent rest breaks on the way up to Flag Hill is that there's so much worth pausing to see. As the trail breaks out of the forest about a third of the way up there are views everywhere. And right now they're ridiculously green. I did mention that already, right? And as the trail winds around the hills and ravines below the rocky summit Flag Hill the views are ever changing— views to the ridges to the west (as above), views to the ridges to the east, even views to Calaveras Reservoir to the south would soon appear.

Update: Keep reading in part 2!

Not all "Photoshopped" Pics are Fake (Though this one Is)

There's been quite an uproar in the press over the last several days about a manipulated photo of Princess Kate and her kids. Kensington Palace released the photo a week ago to combat rumors that the Princess of Wales, who's not been seen in public since abdominal surgery, is in ill health or even dead. The picture shows her happy and healthy with her 3 children.

The uproar over this seemingly innocuous photograph arose quickly. Numerous photographers and digital image editors online quickly spotted small artifacts in the picture indicating it had been manipulated— or "photoshopped", as many call it.

In this particular picture all the artifacts are small. There's nothing so obvious here as a person with a third hand (because one was digitally added to the picture) or a curved doorway in the background (where someone "bent" the image, e.g., to make someone look curvier or slimmer). But still, it's become a scandal. "Water-Kate," some are quipping. Everyone from celebrities to even The Onion are bagging on Kate. In fact The Onion offers satirical recommendations from celebrities on how to 'shop better (12 Mar 2024).

Lost in the shuffle amid all the jeering and laughter is the reality of just how common "photoshopping" is in photography.

The term "photoshopping", BTW, refers to Adobe Photoshop, a powerful image manipulation tool published by Adobe. Photoshop has been common in industry for a long time. I started using it personally 30 years ago as a graduate student in 2D/3D computer imaging.

Pretty much all professional images you see online or in print have been processed through Photoshop or a tool like it. A good many image shared by amateurs have been "photoshopped", too. Virtually every image I publish in my blog has been touched up in Photoshop. Does being literally "photoshopped" mean they're all fake?

Just because an image has gone through Photoshop does not mean it is fake. There have been a number of interesting posts about that on X this week by Pete Souza, a respected pro photographer who worked in the Obama whitehouse. Souza took some of the most iconic photos of Obama during his time in office, including the famous photo in the Situation Room of the president and his team receiving live updates of Seal Team Six apprehending Osama Bin Laden. His thoughts are nicely summarized in a recent Buzzfeed article (15 Mar 2024).

As Souza explains, it's pretty much de rigeur for photographers to touch up pics by brightening or darkening, fixing highlights and shadows, and adjusting color balance. BTW, these are all modifications that could be done back in the days of film and paper photography, though they were very time consuming and required more skill than needed today with software like Photoshop. And for decades publishers have, correctly, accepted these alterations as reasonable.

Where publishers drawn the line on "Photoshopping" pics is adding, removing, or changing content from the image. Well, some publishers do that. In photojournalism it's not okay to remove an unwanted person from an image or edit the subject to make them look taller, slimmer, or curvier. In advertising, though... well, it's pretty much the rule that parts of the image have been faked to sell better.

In my own pics I do all of the things Souza talks about as normal. I adjust brightness levels and color curves. I also sharpen virtually all of my pics. That's because I keep in-camera sharpening set low as I don't particularly like it. Moreover, I apply sharpening anyway after resizing pics for online.

I also occasionally do the things Souza describes as no-nos for photojournalism: I edit out, or alter the shape of, people in the pics! I did that in one of the pics I shared earlier today from our hike at Flag Hill. Hawk was in one of the pics, a small figure in a wide shot, and her appearance was both distracting and unflattering. Since she was a small element of the pic I was able to edit her out pretty easily— by knowing what to do with Photoshop— and we both agreed the pic was better as a result.

St. Patrick's Day: Let's Talk... Immigration

Today's St. Patrick's Day, a day when thoughts in the US— in the modern US— turn to supposedly very Irish things such as drinking whiskey and green beer and eating corned beef. Although I have Irish-American forebears and grew up celebrating St. Patrick's Day every year wearing green and visiting my (Irish-American) grandmother's house for a meal of corned beef and cabbage and potatoes, I'm not into that form of celebration anymore. I'm too pissed at how crass commercialism has reduced it all to stereotypes about drinking. Instead I've used St. Patrick's Day the past few years as a chance to take a moment and reflect on the experiences of Irish immigrants and their descendants in the US and what lessons we can learn from them.

The lesson I'm thinking about this year is immigration. Most of us in the US, not just those who trace ancestry back to Ireland, are descended from immigrants. But the Irish were one of the early groups that encountered a lot of politicized hatred. When waves of Irish started arriving in the 1840s and 1850s as refugees from the Great Potato Famine, politicians decried their lazy, uneducated, unclean ways, warning that they'd turn cities such as New York and Boston (where they arrived by ship) into cesspools of human sloth and waste. The language and sentiment behind it were eerily similar to what we hear from certain politicians in 2024.

But the Irish didn't destroy New York and Boston. Or Philadelphia. (Many Irish settled in eastern Pennsylvania, too.) Far from it. They went to work. They worked because they came here seeking better lives, via the opportunity to work. They worked hard jobs for low pay that other people didn't want to work. And the influx of their labor helped the US grow.

Many Americans— with no awareness of how they themselves were immigrants or had immigrant parents or grandparents— didn't even like the fact that Irish immigrants wanted to work. Up through the middle of the 20th century signs like "Irish need not apply" on businesses that were hiring were common sights.

The modern analogue to overt job discrimination against immigrants would seem to be immigration policy. Today immigrants who are granted temporary residency aren't allowed to work. Long ago, there weren't such policies. When Irish people started immigrating in large numbers there weren't even controls on immigration. They bought a ticket to New York, walked down the ramp into port, and began their new lives in the US. Ellis Island as an immigration station only opened in 1892. And while the first legislation that limited immigration from any country was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it wasn't until the Immigration Act of 1924 that broad, per-country quotas on immigration (except northern European countries!) were enacted.

So, on this St. Patrick's Day, there are 3 lessons I wish everyone who celebrates Irish-American culture would recognize:

1) The hateful language against immigrants, including your forebears, has been the same for hundreds of years.

2) The claims the haters make about immigrants, including your forebears, harming this country have proven false generation after generation.

3) Immigration doesn't ruin the US, it makes it stronger.