[TR] Liberty Bell Mtn.- Liberty Crack 6/22/2006

[Otto]

Climb: Liberty Bell Mtn.-Liberty Crack

 

Date of Climb: 6/22/2006

 

Trip Report:

We drove up to the Blue Lake trailhead on Wednesday night and camped. Got up at 3:30 and were hiking down the road by 4:15am. Got to the base of the climb at 5:40 after carefully tiptoeing up the hard snow with the help of a scrounged stick. We both had our trusty Cinder Cones on, which are soft soled and not much good for step kicking.

Aid climbing used to go a lot faster, if I recall right. I was slow and rusty, it took 1:15 to do the first pitch. It took my partner, Madcap I believe, about as long to jug it and I knew we were gonna have to improve if we were to get up that day! Things didn't go much better, though. I had forgotten that for me this route takes direct aid on 7 of the 12 pitches. It took pard two tries to make the 4th pitch free, falling on my head the first time. Then I dropped my water backup water bottle, and got a few pieces irretrievably stuck - <<booty alert>>

Things were just not going well and we just plodded along. The pitches were fun as always, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we were going to bee knighted. Sure enough, we hit the summit with no sun left, just red sky at 10:15pm.

Fortunately the gully was mostly rock, and then the snow finger had deep steps pre-kicked in, and hard enough to support our weight, mostly, down into the forest by headlamp.

It's still a wonderful route with its directness and varying rock quality, all kinds of crack moves, and amazing position. I don't know why it took me so many years between return trips this time...

 

Gear Notes:

The bashies have been replaced, I'm glad to see.

[Weekend_Climberz]

Nice job.

 

It indeed sounds like the classic it is.

[Otto]

My partner madcap came through with his trusty disposable camera, and got two 3"x5" prints. Scanned on a nice HP 5920 scanner.

 

madcap on the Lithuanian Lip

 

Otto on the eleventh pitch

 

Working with my current test settings in IrfanView to reduce the screen size, and therefore the filesize.

Original files averaged 600Kb, resulting files are 100Kb.

Vertical size set to 400 pixels, keeping proportion.

The Info screen in IrfanView shows blanks for DPI; not sure why. I'm sure I saw it at 200 DPI on other

photos I've reduced in this manner, but I didn't scan those ones myself.

 

As always until I get this process wired, I'm open to suggestions. Cheers.

[Mark_L]

Good job Bill! Good to see you're sticking with your aid climbing. The pictures look great! If you like free photo software like Irfanview you'll love "Gimp". Its like having photoshop for free only you don't have to pirate it. Its also available for windoze. Try setting your density to 72 dpi. Anything higher than that makes no difference on a computer monitor. My Mt. Goode pictures were sized at 640x480 and I was able to get file sizes of about 70kb.

 

[Otto]

Thanks. This is just the kind of informative feedback I've been looking for. I'll probably experiment with the DPI setting next. So far, I've just set a fixed height, in pixels, that looks close to what other folks are using in their posts.

 

I'm hoping to avoid having to scroll sideways to see the full picture. And avoid pixellation, of course. The other specification is the filesize; the FAQ here says 35Kb max but people say that's wrong, disk space is cheap, make it around 100Kb.

[summitseeker]

Man, that looks sweet. I missed this original posting. I gotta learn how to aid climb...

[mattp]

For viewing on a computer screen, you can save with a moderate amount of jpg compression to reduce file size and you won't see any difference. In photoshop, select "Medium" to "High" image quality instaed of "Highest" or whatever it is. I don't know what compression options Irfanview may offer.

[Otto]

IrfanView provides a "Save quality" slider labeled from "lowest" (0) to "best" (100). On another report, the Price Glacier one, I selected halfway, (50), and the results were noticeably pixellated. Too low. Now I'm finding I can get the desired filesize reduction by leaving compression alone at 100, and just make 'em a smaller viewing size (400 pixels vertical). If 140Kb isn't too big, and Gary_Y doesn't complain, I'm home free!

[Gary_Yngve]

The images look fine to me. I'd have to run experiments to see if how much of a space savings 75-90% quality in Irfanview affords (and how low before noise/artifacts become readily apparent.

 

A few of your images exhibited slight color-casting (e.g. the snow in your 2nd pic has a greenish tint), a byproduct of either the film or the scanning process. Photoshop has cool semi-automatic ways of fixing this, but not Irfanview (in Irfanview you can tweak color-balance, but it's not intuitive how to do so to correct the colors the best way).

[Otto]

Thanks for the feedback! I'll do some testing myself on future posts. On this one, the film and scanning were out of my control. I plan to get a digital camera soon, so the unknowns will be reduced. BTW, all those white flecks were on the prints. Chalk dust on the lens?!

[Mark_L]

Some of us out there still use dialup. Its a pain in the butt having to wait 10 minutes for a TR to load a bunch of pictures that won't even fit on a 17" monitor without scrolling. Its not just disk space, think about bandwidth too. I would imagine that it also slows down the cc.com server if there are a lot of people viewing.

[Otto]

That's what I'm trying to prevent, that's why I've been asking for suggestions. So, this is your experience viewing my photos in particular, but not others (other TRs with photos)?

 

If so, I will certainly choose less than 400 pixels vertical for my next test post.

 

If you get that experience with all photos here, I'll just blow you off and say, "dial-up is Not Supported"!

 

I am certainly thinking about bandwidth, that's why I'm trying to reduce the resolution without introducing pixellation - finding the ideal balance. Thanks for the notes!

[Alpinfox]

The images look fine to me.

 

I don't know what Gary's smoking; I think those images are terrible. That sort of image quality is OK if you are trying to prove the existence of Sasquatch, but not for pictoral storytelling. No offense intended. I'm not saying you are a bad photographer or image processor - Ansel Adams probably wouldn't have faired much better with the tools you used. The subject matter is obviously top-notch, but I wouldn't bother sharing the pics that you have posted due to their crappiness.

 

600X800 should be the max size for an image in a trip report (any larger and some folks with antiquated monitors will have to scroll back and forth to read the text and see the whole image). Most images in a TR would be fine at 480X640 or something and then for the really "golly gee wow" pics, use the 600X800. Filesize should be <100kb, and preferably ~50kb. This is more for page loading expediency concerns rather than server storage space concerns.

 

I look forward to seeing more of your pics when you get a real camera.

 

Thanks for the TR and booty alert though.

 

[chucK]

Since we're laying it all out here. Not that I'm any expert but....

 

Those white specks are not chalkdust on the lens. They are from dust on the scanner and/or on the prints.

 

Your Madcap picture is TOO WIDE. "Properties" says 1167 pix wide. TOO WIDE. Scrolling concerns. Makes any thread that it is in a PITA. Make them more like 700 wide. There's a ton of sky you could've cropped outa that one. With digital photo processing, cropping is your friend.

[willstrickland]

White specs are dust on the scanner or neg/slide.

 

I don't do Irfanview (use Photoshop 7), but in general a monitor is only capable of displaying about 72ppi (pixel/inch). If you are saving versions specifically for web display, anything larger than 72 ppi is wasted as far as quality goes.

 

Clone stamp in PS is a very quick and easy way to clean up dust spots. I don't know if Irfanview has a similar tool, but Gary Yngve Malmsteen can maybe tell you.

[Mark_L]

That's what I'm trying to prevent, that's why I've been asking for suggestions. So, this is your experience viewing my photos in particular, but not others (other TRs with photos)?

 

Actually Bill, I have no complaints about the loading time for your photos, its those people who post those 2460x2048 pictures straight from the flashcard in their camera. As for the technical quality complaints from other posters, having played in garage bands myself, I understand the difference between content and technical quality. Your content was great on the photos and they were definitely worth posting. Given your propensity for dropping cameras on big climbs , perhaps disposable cameras are the best bet for you.

[Dave_Schuldt]

Don't worry about the details just post the pics!

[Otto]

Thanks, Dave! I will. The photo spec. talk is just a sideline of mine, being a geek.