[TR] The Tooth- South Face Cluster-F*** 6/11/2006

[zoroastr]

Climb: The Tooth-South Face Cluster-F***

 

Date of Climb: 6/10/2006

 

Trip Report:

On a gray but meteorologically promising Saturday morning I met my climbing partner, Erick Johnson, a couple of my office mates and their invited guest for coffee at an I-90 Tully's. The plan was to introduce a few experienced gym rats to the glories of traditional alpine climbing in a safe but rewarding manner--it was at this point that Erick announced that he had brought only a single rope. As things turned out, this trip could have appeared in the Mountaineer's Handbook in a chapter entitled : "Don't Let This Happen to You!"

Actually, Erick did a great job of keeping everybody safe, and our whole group got up and down on one rope, two rappel devices, and some Pop-Tarts.

The Tooth is a too-popular, 300-ft., low fifth-class face climb in the Snoqualmie Pass area. About half our party chose to climb the first pitch-and-a-half roped, and then free-climb the less-exposed upper half of the mountain. Here's a shot of climbers strung out on pitch one.

 

 

 

John clears pitch 1, belayed by Erick

 

 

 

John invited Jesse, a petite but frighteningly capable rockster who fairly danced along the mountain's upper reaches in a pair of rock shoes that looked like they'd fallen from a charm bracelet.

 

 

300 ft. above tiny Pineapple Pass, the summit of The Tooth takes on a surreal quality in the mid-day fog as climbers from the Moutaineers club prepare for their first rappel.

 

 

Jesse, A.K.A. "Meatsack #1," prepares to be lowered, single-strand from the summit.

 

 

Back down to pitch #1's belay ledge, the group get set to finish things off, while Mountaineers sort gear 80 feet below. The fifth member of our group is not pictured here, because he graciously volunteered to retrieve a $50.00 cam we'd left about 100 feet back up the route--THANX, Robin! We owe you large.

 

Gear Notes:

Bring way more than we did.

 

Approach Notes:

Hardpack all along the trail and up to Pineapple Pass. Excellent butt-groomed glissade runs on the way down.

Edited June 13, 2006 by zoroastr

[Chriznitch]

cool pics

I bet the mountaineers were surprised that someone else had brought the biggest cluster f#(k

[chucK]

Wow! Those are the best pics I've ever seen of the Tooth. Thanks!!

 

The Tooth is the best

[Off_White]

I particularly liked the discovery process: in the first pic, I'd wondered why you had photoshopped a pink aura to the climbers head, though later images made it clear.

[olyclimber]

DAS TOOF

[John Frieh]

Jesse, A.K.A. "Meatsack #1," prepares to be lowered, single-strand from the summit.

 

The wrinkled forehead, the closest large solid object to hang on to clutched, the wide balanced stance... classic "fuck alpine climbing... I'm staying in the gym".

 

Nice pics d00d!

[layton]

what kind of camera? those are really sharp crystal pics

[zoroastr]

Glad folks like the pics. Canon A520 [3.4 MP], 2 years old, bought from Fry's on sale for 140 bucks....

[EJohnson]

Nice pictures John - Lets not do that again

[G-spotter]

PINK MOHAWK!!!

[Gary_Yngve]

Actually that's not the camera. That's sharpening afterward. Look closely at the border between rock and snow in the last image. You will see a tell-tale border/halo that should not be there. That's what happens from oversharpening.

[zoroastr]

"Sharpening afterward?" ...I only wish I knew what you're talking about--it sounds interesting. Alas, I'm strictly point-n'click.

[zoroastr]

A Parting Shot...

Since people seemed to like the snaps, here's one more. Jesse the photogenic meatsack cautiously down-climbs to the first rap station, as the fog finally clears...

[ken4ord]

As things turned out, this trip could have appeared in the Mountaineer's Handbook in a chapter entitled : "Don't Let This Happen to You!"

 

I wouldn't dis-credit your trip by refering to the mountaineers, hell they would have never taken on Das Toof with a single rope. Sounds like a great alpine intro. Like OW I was trying to figure out the pink halo effect, funny.

[chucK]

Aftersharpening

try looking at the rest of the report gary

 

you're just sore cause nobody slobbered over your pictures like this

 

 

fuckin' a great pics Zoro dude

 

"Meatsacks" that's a goddamned flattering thing to say

[ivan]

i prefer "meat-popsicle" more meself

[goatboy]

Looks more like the rare "Meat Muffin" to me....with or without the halo!

[layton]

or Meat Curtains

[goatboy]

Yes, FLING WIDE THE MEAT CURTAINS!

[Gary_Yngve]

Aftersharpening

 

try looking at the rest of the report gary

 

you're just sore cause nobody slobbered over your pictures like this

 

 

fuckin' a great pics Zoro dude

 

"Meatsacks" that's a goddamned flattering thing to say

 

After reviewing the pictures closer, the artifacts I am seeing are the dreaded purple fringing (a product of demosaicking and possibly chromatic aberration or blooming?)

 

closeup:

 

The pictures should be pretty sharp in general (bright daylight, fast shutter, large depth-of-field). But they do appear especially sharp.

 

The answer I believe is the process of sending the 3.4 MP picture down to a .5 MP picture. Whatever the software is doing, its means of downsampling is involving some sharpening, or at least little to no smoothing (as what should be done to avoid high-frequency jaggies).

 

Look at the closeup of the rope here:

 

 

You'd expect more antialiasing of the weave.

 

The other thing going on is that the jpeg compression is super-high -- 250 KB for a .5 MP file is pretty large.

 

ChucK, I'm not sore at all. I just see a lot of details in pictures that other folks miss. Now that you mention it,

 

-there's blurring along the halfway seam in the first stitched image.

-the second image has blown-out snow.

-the third image has a black spot in the lower-right corner.

 

But none of these issues are directed toward the original poster -- these are technical limitations of the camera and the software.

 

Anyway, the point is that cameras are not magic, and a lot of "magic" can happen afterward, but sharpening, whether implicit or explicit, is not perfect.

[Gary_Yngve]

These three shots give you a rough idea of what sharpening can do for you.

 

The original pictures were 4 MP, sent down to .5 MP.

 

Bicubic resampling, no sharpening

 

Bicubic resample, unsharpen rad=1 thresh=2 amt=200%

 

Bicubic resample, unsharpen done twice, rad=1 thresh=2 amt=200%

 

Choosing the right amount of sharpening for your final postprocessing step is essential but painstaking to get the best sharpness but no halo. My guess is his software is choosing to do some pretty aggressive sharpening.

[hey_wtf]

Jeebus... what a way to crap on a thread. Seems to me you need a little sharpening Gary. Can that be done with software? What about a halo?

[Mr._Natural]

seriously. dont you have a meeeting with your advisor or something?

[Gary_Yngve]

If a mod wants to send the digital photo talk into a separate thread, fine with me. Layton asked what camera, I suggested it was not the camera, and things went from there.

 

We've been specifically talking about sharpening lately, e.g. the last few pictures here:

 

http://uw.cascadeclimbers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15942&highlight=#15942

 

It's subtle, but you can see telltale halo artifacts.

[zoroastr]

Wow....fascinating foto trivia! As I mentioned earlier, I'm more the naiive, point-shoot-pray shutterbug, but just to set things straight, here's exactly how I manage my images:

1. I never snap at the camera's highest resolution, but choose the next one down [1200 by something, I think].

2. after sucking 'em into the computer, I manage and edit using an older 32-bit app called ThumbsPlus.

3. After cropping for composition, and downsizing to either 67% or 50% of original, I occasionally tweak the values for saturation, contrast, seperate RGB values, etc., but since I have a rather crappy monitor, I hardly ever mess with this level of editing, since I don't trust what the screen is telling me.

 

For the pictures from this last trip, all I did was crop and resize using ThumbsPlus, which may be applying some magic fairy dust that I'm not aware of...