I have been working the last few months to catalog my image collection. I took a break today to play with a color collage using images from South San Francisco Bay. This was fun.
As is evident in the header images for this WWW site, the South San Francisco Bay salt evaporation ponds take on a variety of colors due to halophilic organisms that adapt to the various salinities of the ponds. It makes for a vibrant landscape.
Prompted by a recent post in the KAP Discussion page (thanks Kelly) I revisited the idea of a color collage today.
These are aerial photographs, most taken from kites, others from poles, a couple from the ground and one through the microscope..
For a couple of years now Wayne and I have been puzzled about the driving forces for the environmental, and hence microbiological, circumstances of a site just north of Alviso. It is a trough about 50 meters long that we have named ‘the weep’ for it is always moist to some degree. If you search the Hidden Ecologies WWW site for ‘weep’ you will find many mentions of this modest, yet entertaining, depression that runs along the side of the Southern Pacific Railroad grade. Over the months we have puzzled about the role of tidal waters and the adjacent salt ponds in driving somewhat counterintuitive and complex cycles of wet and dry at the site. In any event the weep has become a special place to watch and ponder.
Figure 1. A mosaic of aerial images c. 1928 showing the railroad corridor from Drawbridge to Alviso. These photographs have recently appeared on the South Bay Restoration Project WWW site by way of the San Francisco Estuary Institute who in turn references the Cargill Corporation. They are fantastic, thanks to all.
http://maps.southbayrestoration.org/sbsp/viewer.htm
Over the last couple of years walking the salt marsh has been a journey of discovery. Not just in terms of discovering Hidden Ecologies, but in a wider sense of personal discovery.
I gave a presentation last week to the California Colloquium on Water (in an oddly pitched voice).. They asked if I would cover the technique of kite aerial photography with examples drawn from California wetlands and streams. As it turned out they videotaped the presentation and put it on YouTube — such a world we live in.
On December 4th I will be giving a talk on kite aerial photography as part of this year’s California Colloquium on Water (5:30 pm, 112 Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley). All are welcome.
Abstract: Given a chance I suspect that most of us would slip our earthly bonds and see the world from new heights. An aerial view offers a fresh perspective of familiar landscapes and in doing so challenges our spatial sensibilities, our grasp of relationships. This playful talk will chronicle ten years of aerial photography from kite-lofted cameras. Examples will be shown from California’s wetlands including the South San Francisco Bay Salt Ponds, Herons Head Park, and the Berkeley/Albany Codornices Creek restoration project. Along the way Professor Benton will touch on the history of early aerial photography as well as methods and motivations for using kites as a photographic platform in the current day. Simultaneously an art form and a remote sensing exercise Benton’s low-level approach yields photographs that can be beautiful, useful, or both.
It has been one year since Wayne and I were kindly issued Special Use Permits from the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge for our Hidden Ecologies activities. In late summer Wayne successfully applied for a renewal of his permit while mine was somewhat delayed by the summer’s teaching duties in Denmark.
I am delighted to report that I am out of arrears, having now submitted a progress report on Hidden Ecologies’ aerial photography activities and a request for permit renewal. You can browse the progress report online via a rather large PDF.
In May and June of this year, just before taking off for Denmark, I made a couple of interesting hikes to Drawbridge. My previous approaches to Drawbridge came from the Alviso side with a hike northward along the salt pond levees. On these more recent hikes I used a trailhead in Fremont near the Warm Springs site and hiked southward. This was my first real exposure to the Warm Springs area and it is really fabulous.
An aerial view showing Salt Ponds A23 and A22 in a drained state (they often seem to be drained). I have noted my hike route as a transparent purplish line. There were two major springs visible along the route (green circles) and a scattering of small hummaocks or mounds containing pairs of sunken barrels (blue squares). Aerial view retrieved on Nov. 12, 2007 from website maps.google.com.
In a spirit of play, rather than objective science, I created a 1,000x videomicrograph of salt marsh Cyanobacteria, and set their dance to music. Click on the dark triangle in the middle of the picture below [your system will need the sound turned on and the free-ware version of QuickTime Player].
This is the other side of Cris’s previous post. My job on that outing, and on a subsequent outing, was to measure the elevation of the Heron’s Head Park salt marsh ponds and of the tides that wash those ponds. Here is the most recent version of our instrument:
On June 14th I joined Wayne Lanier, Patrick Ready, and Maria Mortati for a pleasant outing at Heron’s Head. My job was to capture some overhead shots documenting several of Wayne’s micro-organism sampling sites.
Wayne and Maria crossing the wash, backpacks matching the nearby dodder.
On 15 May, Wayne and I joined Peter and Susan from the Exploratorium and a couple of students from Stanford to hike out to the weep. Among other things we carried a lovely old K+E Transit out to shoot an elevation profile along a transect that crosses the weep perpendicular to the railroad grade.
Parking lot transit play before the hike (taken with my new Peleng 8mm fisheye).
In general, we have been wondering about the physical mechanisms that drive the weep’s cycles of moisture. Sometimes the weep is relatively dry, sometimes wet. Sometimes the moisture seems to come predominantly from the railroad grade, sometimes from the levee for Salt Pond A15. The patterns do not seem to follow our general winter wet and summer dry seasons. The weep lies along the west-side ditch between the railroad and Salt Pond A15. A similar ditch on the east side of the railroad may be open to tidal flow. I am beginning to think moisture variations we observe on site are related to the (salt) water level in our flanking salt ponds (A15 & A16) but the ditches and patterns of tide and weather offer interesting alternatives. Perhaps they all combine to produce the weep’s moisture dynamic.
Our project looks at places -- starting with several transitional geographies along San Francisco Bay -- in ways that juxtapose scales, collect different points of view, and encourage the sharing of ideas.
