Amtrak Pacific Surfliner northbound from downtown San Diego to Camp Pendleton

When Jim and I went to Los Angeles on Sunday, May 11, for National Train Day, our purpose was to ride the trains everywhere we wanted to go. Down the hill from us we caught the San Diego Trolley:

Westbound at the 70th Street Station
5:50 a.m. on National Train Day

The Trolley took us to the historic Santa Fe Depot in downtown San Diego. There we caught Amtrak Pacific Surfliner to points north, ultimately to the even more historic Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

The three videos below show some of the more interesting areas the trains go through. In the first one, we’re heading into Miramar Marine Corps Air Base. There are some neat landscapes but usually the front of the train is not accessible (I had a cool engineer!), the side views are horrible because of the steep canyons, and walking the tracks on the Marine Corps base is not something one wants to do. So the first video is a real rarity.

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This second video is another one that I’ve always wanted to get as the train goes through the marsh that is the eastern side of Torrey Pines State Park. The video shows us cruising down the track at 92 mph, the top speed I caught us going. At the end of the video we have slowed down to 55 mph to go around the curve under the historic Del Mar bridge, currently undergoing much-needed renovation and seismic retrofitting.

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This last video is the final place in San Diego County that I’ve tried so many times to get to. It’s the rail yard for Metrolink and Coaster, where the trains are stored during hours of non-operation. Unfortunately, it’s on the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base and inaccessible to mere mortals like me. We also meet a southbound Amtrak Pacific Surfliner.

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Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, at over 125,000 acres, is what separates San Diego from the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In other words, it’s probably the only thing that keeps L.A. from annexing San Diego — that we wouldn’t like!

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Following are three pictures of Camp Pendleton, all taken from a speeding (85 mph) train with a Canon 550D and a Tamron 28-300mm lens at 300mm.

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
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If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!

When Photoshop Photomerge goes wrong

When I was up in Los Angeles for National Train Day on May 11, I made a trip to the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood. The last time I was there was in 1978. At that time the building had a huge lobby full of gold records, most notably those from The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

I took many pictures, and twenty years later when digital cameras, scanners, and editing software came along, I scanned them. Sadly, I lost all of them in the Great Hard Drive Crash of August 2005. I was hoping to recapture those pictures.

The building was closed on May 11 (Sunday), and looking in the front entrance glass doors indicated that there no longer is a huge lobby. It’s now like most skyscrapers with an unattended lobby with a directory and elevators. No gold records to be seen anywhere. I satisfied myself with pictures of the building.

Since traffic in Hollywood is heavy, getting into the street to take one picture of a tall building wasn’t feasible. Pictures from the other side of the street were full of utility poles and wires. I decided to pick a spot without junk in the picture and take five or six pictures of sections of the building, my intent being to have Photoshop CS6 do a photomerge when I got back home.

Here is what the photomerge gave me:

I think you will agree with me that the first try at photomerge could be considered photomerge gone wrong.

In looking at the six pictures, I saw that Photomerge was trying to merge two lower pictures that looked rather normal with four upper pictures that had that dastardly tall building retreating perspective the farther up the buildng you got.

My solution was to merge the first two pictures, then merge the next two pictures, then merge the last two pictures. That left me with three pictures. Since the top two were more alike than the bottom two, I merged them, leaving me now with two pictures. A final merge of the two semifinal merges gave me this:

Much better.

Leads me to believe that the fewer pictures you force Photomerge to use, the better the resulting picture will be. Thus, if you have lots of pictures in your Photomerge, merge them two by two until you arrive at the final two-picture merge. If you started with ten pictures, your flow chart to the final merge would look like this.

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572

If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!