Google Maps is Crazy

I’m planning a long weekend in North Carolina’s Outer Banks for my anniversary. I decided to go to Google Maps and take a look at the possible routes from College Park, Maryland, to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. What I saw convinced me that relying on electronic maps and software to do the planning for you is an insane idea, at best. Oh, it’s a great technology, and a good starting point. But relying exclusively on the software is like expecting Microsoft Word to really understand what you’re writing and to know if you need “see” or “sea” in a particular sentence. No software can do your thinking for you.

Google Maps has me driving counter-clockwise around the Capital Beltway, and then south on Interstate 95, down to the Richmond Beltway, and then working my way east. I would certainly get caught in the Washington, D.C. metro area’s horrific traffic and spend at least an hour — and probably more — to go just about 30 miles from home, and still be in traffic. Unless, that is, I left the house at 2:00 a.m., which isn’t going to happen.

Instead, I’m planning to go clockwise around the Capital Beltway, from Route 1 to Route 50, then east and south along secondary roads. Google tells me it’s about 5 hours, 28 minutes by the software’s recommended route and about 6 hours and 10 minutes by my chosen path. But it can’t calculate for traffic tie-ups, and it doesn’t take into account “APM,” or aggravations per mile. APMs work like this: if you drive one mile and have one traffic light, that’s an APM of one. Two traffic lights and three messy merge areas or driveways in a one- mile stretch of road rates an APM of 5. We’ll see. I hope the vacation trip APM is less than my daily commute, which is about 3.8.

At any rate, an extra half hour is worthwhile if the drive is scenic, relaxing, or just not frustrating. It’s a short vacation, not another race to get to work on time. Plus, the secondary roads are populated by coffee shops and rest stops, thank you! I want to see a little bit of America as I drive on vacation, not just blow past the towns and see their names up on the interstate signs.

Look for photos of the Outer Banks to show up on Focal Plane sometime next week. Even if the weather turns out to be rainy, the ocean is still going to be there. And my rainy day photography usually turns out to be some of my favorite mood photos. See you next week!

Pennsylvania Monument Details

I went back to Gettysburg National Military Park during the Thanksgiving weekend with my husband. We both enjoy photography, so we spent some time at the battlefield taking pictures. Unfortunately, that Thursday it was bitterly cold and after only about 20 minutes my hands were so stiff that I could hardly hold the camera. It was also approaching 4 o’clock, and getting overcast.

The late afternoon light wasn’t adequate for available-light photography, so I decided to try some flash photography and take some interior shots of the Pennsylvania Memorial. Even in the unheated interior of the building it was a little warmer than outside, and it was out of the wind. I spent some time experimenting with flash fill and adjusting the intensity of my flash. I don’t work with flash very often, so this was a learning opportunity for me.

My objective was to have a strong enough flash to light the subject adequately and give some highlights to the highly textured wall detail without washing out the whole scene. I also wanted to achieve the kind of visual texture that so much good black-and-white photography has, and the stairwell was a good subject for texture. I used a bracketing technique and took several shots of the same scene. I first selected an aperture, then adjusted my flash intensity and took several shots at different speeds. I selected a second aperture setting and did the same thing.

It’s easy to do bracketing with digital photography because there’s no wasted film. In a sense, I think that digital photography can make a photographer lazy because it’s easy to just keep taking shots until you have one that you like. But on the other hand, it allows photographers to play without worrying about wasted resources, and so I find that I am more likely to experiment with aperture and speed settings.

Detail on a door at the Pennsylvania Monument at Gettysburg National Military Park.

The interior of a stairwell wall in the Pennsylvania Monument at Gettysburg National Military Park.

A Visit to Gettysburg

Back in November I took a one-credit undergraduate history class through the University of Maryland University College on the Battle of Gettysburg. Although I live only about an hour-and-a-half away from the battlefield and have visited it several times, I had never actually studied anything about the area. Our history classes in junior high and high school always seemed to get stuck on the Civil War, but somehow they never really seemed to teach us much about the war itself. I decided it was time to really learn something about such an important event.

The class itself was conducted over two weekends. On the first Saturday, we spent the day in the classroom learning about the basics of the battle. We talked about terrain and tactics, and the kinds of weapons that were used, and why the American Civil War is considered to be the first “modern” war. We also talked about the Union and Confederate armies, their strengths and weaknesses, and a bit about the personalities of the leaders. I learned more in that one day about the Civil War and Gettysburg than I had ever been taught in all the years of public school history that I’d had to take.

Our second class was a field trip to the battlefield. We drove ourselves there and met up at the new Visitor’s Center. During the day, we watched a movie, toured the museum, and then had lunch. Afterward, we went outside to walk the battlefield. The mid-November day was overcast and it even snowed a little. We were cold, but the walking and climbing (Gettysburg battlefield is not flat) kept us warm. I had worn a pedometer that day so I could see how much we walked, but somehow I managed to reset it. I’m fairly certain that we walked at least five miles. Later, we returned to the Visitor’s Center and had our final exam. We sat on benches by the window or at empty lunch tables and did our paperwork. It was the most unusual final exam that I’ve taken.

Gettysburg is well worth a visit, not only for the Civil War buffs, but for anyone who wants to learn a little more about our country’s history. I would recommend to anyone who wants to visit that they do a little background reading before getting to the battlefield park, because understanding the events that took place here gives meaning to the monuments. And there are a lot of monuments at Gettysburg; plan to spend a day or more touring the battlefield and Visitor’s Center. But don’t rush home — the town itself is also worth a visit and has numerous restaurants, boutiques, and Civil War related stores.

Photo: This mile marker is one of several at the Pennsylvania Memorial in Gettysburg National Military Park.