Nancy’s Blog

I love webcams — I love seeing what it really looks like someplace far away, right now. Or not even that far away.

WeatherBonk shows the weather for most anyplace you can name, plus nearby webcams. It’s worth lots of wasted time, trolling around looking at places you’ve been, you want to go, you’re curious about…and so forth.

I was disappointed, however, to check a couple of places where I know there are webcams and to not have them show. Then I saw the “add webcam” link — yup, you can add a webcam. And it shows up instantly. Instant gratification, and the sense that you’ve done something good for the world (when all you’ve really been doing is procrastinating by surfing the web).

The one problem is that the webcams that I added, I don’t know EXACTLY where they’re located. You locate them on a Google map, and you tell the site which direction the webcam is facing. I could approximate the location better for some than for others, and some tell you the direction they’re facing, but with others I had to guess. Which means, of course, that I also cannot trust that the other webcams on the site are mapped accurately.

Interesting site – Nokia and Flickr together mapping photos from last 24 hours from Nokia’s high-end N-series phones, with a time slider.

Me in front of Ahwahnee Webcam

Originally uploaded by NVH.

I keep the browsers on my various computers set on one or another of the webcams hosted by the Yosemite Association, Ahwahnee, Sentinel Dome, and Turtleback Ridge. So, of course, when I’ve gone to Yosemite I’ve tried to track them down. This time I not only tracked down the Ahwahnee webcam but had a cellphone signal and called around and found my friend Morgan by a computer to capture the image. (Morgan also posted one of these images.) My Flickr stream shows the site of the webcam. I’m that tiny figure at the bottom of the image — you need to click on this image to get to a larger version to actually see me.

So for those of you who weren’t parked at your computers watching the Ahwahnee webcam yesterday, here’s one of the images. I’m waving my hat and I’ve got a cellphone to my ear as I moved closer to and further from the webcam (over the door of one of the employee housing units on Ahwahnee Meadow, aimed up at Half Dome, so I had to go way out in the meadow to get into the frame).

And my apologies to any strangers who were monitoring the webcam, as I do, and watched all our jockeying around as I moved closer to the camera and further back and Morgan captured the images.

Others had evidently done the same: there’s not a trail, exactly, but a path through the meadpw where the grass has been walked on, walking out from the webcam to where I was.

(The Tioga Pass webcam has been a bust — it has been on the same image since July 1. The Turtleback webcam appears to be at a PG&E site atop the tunnel between the Valley and Glacier Point road. The Sentinel Dome webcam may be accessible from Glacier Point Road –I almost tried looking for it this weekend, but I was feeling the altitute up at Glacier Point.)

Interesting new effort from the Smithsonian. Terrific idea, but I have to say that on my first, quick foray into the site, it was very confusing.

From the International Visual Studies Assn mailing list:

Smithsonian Launches Online Photography Initiative: The Smithsonian’s 18 museums, nine research centers, and the National Zoo collectively preserve some 13 million photographs which now, thanks to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, will begin to be made accessible to researchers online. The images found in some seven hundred collections throughout the Smithsonian are organized by museum and discipline…The Smithsonian Photography Initiative is devoted to the presentation and study of these photographic images, viewing photography as an art form, a record keeper, and a cross-disciplinary medium that encompasses science, history, popular culture, and more. Beyond offering more information about where to find photography collections throughout the Smithsonian, a new website aims to be an educational tool, serving anyone who wishes to study, explore, and enjoy photographs of many kinds. To view the website go to: http://www.spi.si.edu/ where you will be provided access to some 1,800 digital images, the work of 100 photographers, who used 50 different processes.