A few people have asked some questions concerning how far, how many, how much, etc. So I figured that I would just put together a quick ‘by the numbers’ post.
Just in order to get our statistical figures correct we need to know how many days this excursion took. For those of you following along in the home version of the game, you probably already know that I was on the road for 18 days. For those of you who don’t know that; I was on the road for more than 17 days, but less than 19.
So first, how far. Going by my odometer (and not Google Maps), I traveled just slightly less than 5400 miles. That comes out to right around 300 miles a day. Being fair the first few days and the last few days were spent racing across the likes of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma on the Interstate. On those days I was often covering between 400 and 500 miles in a day just to get across them. That plus the fact that some of the national parks would add LOTS of miles just to get across or to drive up. I would say that a safer estimate for the daily drive in the middle of the trip was more like 200 miles a day. That is more manageable, especially if you are making multiple stops to see and do things.
So what did I do while I was driving? A lot of the time I was actually looking for things to photograph. On occasion I would chase things (like the train or the large dust devil that I caught in photographs). That was always a fun adventure. When just cruising along, I was listening to either audio books or podcasts. For the audio books I used the free LibriVox service that has volunteers record books that are in the public domain. This has its good and bad sides. On the good side, you don’g get bored with a single reader and the service is free. On the downside, you can get some interesting readers. For example, there was one that would try to read each quote in character .. however she always seemed to sound like the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. Or my favorite, was probably this wonderful Portuguese woman who, when she ran across a French word she didn’t know would read the French word, in English with a Portuguese phonetic and accent. It made for some interesting phrases that just can’t be represented in written text very well. Sorry. So that books that I read (r listened to) were ‘The Three Musketeers’, and ‘Twenty Years After’ by Alexandre Dumas.
I’ll have to say that the book was quite a bit different than any of the Hollywood interpretations of the Musketeers. I’ll leave out the specifics so I don’t spoil the ending for you. What I didn’t realize was that the follow on book was completely different. I am surprised that Hollywood hasn’t made a follow on to any of the movies using that second book as a guide. There is a third book ’10 Years Later’, but to be honest I have only gotten about 40% through it. It feels like the third Matrix movie to me. Like Dumas was just trying to milk the financial cow for this story line. So far I am less than interested.
When my daughter found out that I was struggling with the third Musketeeer book she suggested that I follow a blog called The Boghouse. The two story tellers are an IT guy/musician and PhD holder in music composition (who has written commissioned works for our own St. Louis Chamber Chorus – I highly recommend that you check them out). They decided to buy and rehab a theater. Anyway, they found what was basically an old outhouse pit in the basement and excavated it. I’ll leave it at that. The story interested me because I am into music, computers, real estate and genealogy. Believe it or not, the blog covers all of that and the antics between the two are great. I recommend it. Anyway, back to the numbers.
Counting the number of pictures taken is a little difficult. I know you are thinking, how hard can it be, just count the number of files that you have on your memory card. Well for those of you not interested in photography; it just isn’t that easy. For starters, each ‘picture’ that I take creates two files. One in RAW mode and then other as a JPG. The JPG files are the ones that I quickly posted during my road trip. The RAW files include ALL of the information that the camera sensor collects. That information can be used in post processing to make the image look more realistic, or more ‘creative’ if you want to. In addition to that a huge percentage of the photos that I took were ‘bracketed’ photos.
Our eyes and image processors in our brain are rather amazing. If you are walking in the woods, you can see an image that has a very bright sky, a well lit path and then some things that are off in the shadows. Our brain quickly adjusts as we focus on each part of the image so that we can see all of the detail. A sensor in a camera can’t do that. As a result, you can take a photo and then when you look at it say, ‘this isn’t at all what I was looking at’. The colors are flat, the sky is blown out and and you can’t see anything in the shadows. Well this can be fixed with bracketed photos and some software processing. Essentially you take a normal photo of your picture in the woods. The normal path and objects will look fine (but the sky is too bright and the shadows are too dark). You then quickly have the camera take the same picture under-exposed. This allows you to capture the details in the sky. Lastly, you take an over-exposed shot and now the details in the shadows are clear and visible. Later you can use software to put together the parts of each photo that are correctly exposed and get a photo that looks much closer to what your eyes thought you where looking at. Finally, you can do what is called HDR Processing. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Since you have collected so much information in your three photos, your software can now have much more information to play with to being out colors, highlights, etc. You can then perform some HDR processing with software to make the picture ‘pop’ even more than it really did in life.
So, back to the original question. How many photos did I take. In terms of files, I ended up with well over 17 thousand files. In terms of photos taken, I think that I was around the 8700 mark. In terms of separate ‘images’ that I shot, I think that I was probably in the neighborhood of between 3000 and 3500. Sorry, I ‘m not going to take the time to be more exact. This is also why you will have to come back later when I post some of the photos that I have processed to hopefully make them look like something other than a ‘snapshot’.
Number of skunks hit: 1.
Number of Books ‘read’: 2
News-casts listened to or watched: 0
Social media looked at: 0
Number of bugs hit: 17,348 (I quite counting after that).
How much did the trip cost? Believe it or not, I was able to do this trip on an average of about $200/day. That includes hotels, gas, food/essentials, and entrance/activity fees. Buying an annual pass to our nations national parks for $80 helped a lot in this area. The most expensive activity by far was the balloon trip at about $225.
So that is pretty much it. My trip by the numbers. Now you know what to expect when you do this for yourself <grin>.
Gynzer's Pics, Trips, & Quips 