Photographs were
made from 35mm slides of Kodachrome 64 (rarely Kodachrome 25).
A Nikon FM camera and, later, a Nikon FM2 with a 28mm (occasionally a 20mm) Nikkor lense was used for all landscape photographs except for the tundra slides for which a Cannon AE1 was used. Close-up slides of range plants were taken using a Macro-Nikkor 50mm lense. All photographps were taken using natural light (ie. no strobs, flashes, etc.) and, with almost no exceptions, in full sunlight. All photographs, including those of range plants, were taken in natural habitats. Greenhouse-grown or outdoor potted plants were never used. Backgrounds in photographs of range plants were of the natural environment. Hence, artificial backdrops (eg. black paper) were not used. Clarity of plant details (eg. awns, general pubescence, veins, floral reproductive organs) was restricted to what could be portrayed without resorting to artificial backgrounds, lightening, etc. Likewise, when scanned and converted to JPEGs (see below) and saved using Adobe Photo-Shop, photographs were not optimized or otherwise modified except for standard cropping.
The two major objectives from standpoint of color, form, key features, and representativeness was for accuracy as percieved by the human eye. For these reasons the slow-speed Kodachrome film was used at full light. This allowed the most accurate portrayal of color in combination with maximum depth of field. Sometimes these two joint objectives were somewhat in conflict and required compromises. For example, light pastel-like colors were sometimes partially "bleached out" in bright direct light. One alternative was to "shoot" them in indirect light or early morning and/or late evening light. Then there would be no depth of field on macrolense photographs of plants and lower stems and leaves could not be presented (ie. "captured" pastel petals and lost the rest of the shoot). The second alternative was to use a faster film (say, Ectachrome) which would permit more depth of field, but then the color would have been even less accurate because certain colors would be "enhanced" (eg. blue colors shown bluer than they really were as seen by human eyes).
The two chief criteria of accurate color combined with maximum depth of field possible were deemed especially critical in presenting range and forest plants at maximum detail yet with accurate human-perceived color. It was not the objective to show "pretty pictures of wild flowers", to enhance colors such as blues or greens, or to show landscapes in unusual sahdes or tones of light to create some "wierd special effect". For example, the long-shadows effect of early morning or late evening (dawn-dusk shots) may make "Oh, neato!" pictures, but they are representative of but a fraction of total time of daylight compared to those of full-sun expecially on grasslands, shrublands, alpine, marshes, and barrens.
A tripod was never used. Experienced photographers, especially those who grew up as riflemen, can use breath control effectively enough to take crisp shots routinely at 1/30 second and, usually, at 1/15 second. The "weak link" of plant and landscape photography is wind not photographer shake. For instance, a windy day on the High Plains will blurr a grass inflorescence at 1/100 second more than will photographer shake at 1/15 second deep in a bluff- sheltered, bottomland forest. Range plant photographers often have to follow the rhythm of swaying plants and "follow through on their swing" (or wait for a rare still split-second). Using a tripod to photograph plants on range (environmnents with almost always some breeze) is like trying to shoot waterfowl with a stationary shotgun.
Slides were saved as JPEG files. Slides of the first edition were scanned or read into a Hewlett-Packard Scan Jet 6100C scanner. For the second edition a Hewlett-Packard Scan Jet 7400C-Scan Jet XPA unit was used. This latter equipment had capacity to scan four slides at a time and was therefore about four times faster than the Scan Jet 6100C scanner, but the latter did a superior jub because it did not require cropping of scanned material. Furthermore, the HP 6100C was many times more accurate in the scanning procedure. It allowed consistent scanning even into rounded corners (which can be seen in slides of the first edition). By contrast the HP 7400C was very crude and approximate. Scanning and cropping was very much a skilled art form that even with the most skill overcropped and eliminated some critical portions around perimeters of slides or, alternatively, left a small black border around the slide image. Another design flaw of the HP 7400C was that it did not project enough light through the viewing screen to enable the user to see clearly the edges of the slide image. In essence the HP 7400C was a "cap-and-ball contraption". For whatever level of technological sophistication the Hewlett Packard equipment had, it was crude, clumsy, and awkward to use.
For later editions of Range Types an Epson Perfection V700 Photo color scanner was used. This machine had capacity to scan 12 slides in a batch with each slide being scanned individually. Color reproduction by the Epson V700 scanner was much truer to the original color of Kodachrome slides than was the situation with the HP7400C. However, there were major problems with reproduction of slides when using the Epson Perfection V700. Perfection the Epson Perfection V700 was (is) not. Just the opposite. Somehow (for whatever reasons) this scanner put out too much light or had some other malfunction so that at the size shown in this publication (305 X 202) most of the vegetation (especially leaves as, for example, in bunchgrasses) had a "glazed", "frosty", or "shot-to-hell") appearance. At this standardized size it was as if the scanner had not reproduced all of the plant material but instead had missing pieces of foliage. Perhaps the infamous Watergate "tape termite" lived in the Epson V700 and ate out pieces of the JPEG.
To add "insult to injury" representatives of the Epson company would not discuss this matter with the author who was "calm, cool, and collected" (initially). Advice to readers: do not purchase Epson products. In this photographer's experience the Epson corporation does not provide any survice or even a courteous "hand-holding" for their equipment.
Likewise, their Epson V700 is a shoddy piece of equipment. The templates or spaces in which slides fit in the slide holder of the Epson V700 are about 1/16th inch oversize (have this much "play") so that when one side of the slide is made to fit against the plastic frame the other side is about 1/16th inch off. This resulted in images being cropped during scanning. Attempts to guess or "guage" the middle to prevent cropping proved futile. Most of the slides were cropped to a distance of roughly half of to the entire 1/16 inch distance. This distance applied to the size (distance) of a 35 mm slide amounted to substantial cropping and resulted in arbitrary elimination of a sizeable portion of the photographic image.
The most serious problem with the Epson V700 Non-perfection remained the "sparkle-like" image (eg. especially of grass leaves and shoots, conifer needles). Many of the plants in slide images scanned by Epson V700 Far-From-Perfection appeared to have been shot with a shotgun instead of a camera. The author invested his own time and money in the "cap-and-ball" V700 and then was stuck with inferior equipment and, worse, unsatisfactory results. Avoid Epson equipment.
The "frosted", "glazed", "sparkled", or "chrystalized" appearance of images was largely absent when images were enlarged, but this author and his assistants did not know how to program this capability into this publication. Rather, viewers can go to Google Images and, after typing in the caption title, get some images (those in later editions) that can be enlarged. Unfortunately, often the Google Image search shows the first photograph in a chapter of many pictures leaving the viewer to scroll down through much of that chapter of Range Types.
The Epson V700 and HP 7400C scanners required approximately the same total amount of time per slide, but the Epson was automatic so that the operator could work simultaneously at other tasks. Overall efficiency and quality/truer reproduction of color made the Epson V700 overwhelmingly superior to the HP 7400C scanner in these features. Unfortunately, as just explained, the Epson Perfection V700 scanner automatically cropped slide images because, like the HP7400C scanner, it could not scan or read into corners of photographs mounted in the 35mm slides. This resulted in the Epson V700 scanner automatically cropping roughly two to three (sometimes about four) percent of the image on some or all of the margins of each photographic image. This automatic cropping frequently resulted in elimination of critical features of plants or landscapes, especially in foregrounds of photographs. Furthermore, automation of the Epson Perfection V700 preculded saving of these parts of the photographs. This automatic loss of features was opposite from the situation with the HP7400C scanner. The HP scanner had to be operated by use of a cursor which could be skilfully manipulated by dexterous use of the computer mouse to save parts of photographs. In other words, automatic operation of the Epson V700 scanner precluded manual manipulation or human overriding of automatic (and apparently unavoidable) cropping of photographs by this brand of scanner. For this feature and purposes of conserving photographic images the HP7400C was superior to the Epson Perfection V700. Best of all for this purpose was the simple little Hewlett-Packard Scan Jet 6100C scanner.
Overall, this author/photographer concluded that both the HP 7400C and the Epson Perfection V700 scanners were marginal for the purpose of copying photographs. Both brands of color scanner had major flaws in design and function and both would have been unsatisfactory for the purpose of this publication except that there appeared to be no other option (unless one waited for technological perfection before posting photographic images on the Internet). This farm boy-author was just grateful that the state of the art in hay-making equipment was much more advanced and satisfactory than that of the newer technology of photographic copying. It was also fortunate that the Nikon FM and FM2 35mm single lens reflex cameras were flawless workhorses that represented perfection for the purpose for which they was made. Scanner manufacturers should take note instead of just taking customers money for inferior equipment.
Much of the difficulty in operation and application of equipment employed in this project likely reflected the "frontier" state of technological advancement in this field of endeavor. That will always be part of the price for being on the forefront, the "frontier of science and education.
A much larger and omnipotent overriding question remains that of permanency of this medium. The more one uses this educational medium, this avenue of knowledge dissemination, the more skeptical he becomes of it's value. If web material is not permanent, if it does have "staying power", it is largely worthless because the medium of web communication is so time-consuming that it cannot possibly justify the inordinant amount of time required to compile knowledge in such packages.
Time will tell.
Advice from the author. Number one: always get a hard copy (those who get the journals "over the net" get nothing lasting). Number two: preserve the "tried and true" media. The finest "WWW." innovations pale beside the great inventions of paper and the printing press (and, for tht matter, chalk and the chalkboard). A good hardbound book and the blackboard will still be functional when computers and their tackle are disintegrating in land fills.
For Writing and Arranging of Text
The first phase of this project was created using Microsoft FrontPage 2000. Most of the text was written using Microsoft Word which was then copied and pasted into the FrontPage. This did not work well as the two programs were not compatable and this procedure resulted in creation of many typographical errors. Slides that had been saved as JPEG files were inserted into the project. The project was copied to a Compact Disk, using a Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus.
The second edition was done in the DreamWeaver program which was a great improvement over Microsoft FrontPage. Microsoft was horrid software for a project of this nature. The basic premise of Microsoft Word seemed to this author to be: "I'm going to think for you because I know better than you do what you want". Software programs that stop the writing of simple correspondence by some paper clip cartoon character insult the intelligence of any literate human being. Simple tasks like typing outlines are essentially impractical in Microsoft software because, again, the programs were written to automatically override the writer which is supposed to be a person not a computer.
Fellow authors were herein warned to avoid Microsoft products "like the plague". Microsoft was a "pox" to earlier versions of Range Types of North America. Dreamweaver programs (eg. Dreamweaver 4) were "head and shoulders above" anything comming out of the Microsoft company whose deplorable features of automatic capitalization, indentions, and other such annoying/distracting capacities both insult the intelligence of the educated user and injure his literate sentence composition. Microsoft products were deemed by this author to be unsatisfactory and awarded the letter grade of F for this purpose.
In short, for all of the sophistication of "web equipment" it remains grossly primitive and underpowered for tasks such as this web project. The Nikon FM camera that was used for over 23 years to take the slides never malfunctioned one time. It performed flawlesly and effortlessly every single time the shutter was depressed. By contrast, all computer hardware and software used in production of Range Types of North America malfunctioned repeatedly. Microsoft Word was dreadful.