Not every day in Libya was blue skies and calm, it’s just that I didn’t take my camera out so much when the wind was blowing as in this blustery day photo.
The tent is the surveyors supply tent that has obviously seen better days. We used to import these from India and Pakistan.
The brand new ones would go first to the labor force. As they suffered wear and tear to the point they were no longer habitable, like this one, they’d be recycled to store tents and eventually they’d be disposed of.
This wouldn’t count as a sandstorm, those things would strip the paint of the vehicles. No, this was just one of those annoying days where sand would get everywhere, including in the food!
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A good desert sunset was a rarity, best I can recall, but every now and then a cloud formation would be in the right place to produce something special, such as that in today’s photo.
The wires are a short wave radio antenna. These were pretty lousy at the best of times but I generally found home made ones to work better than these commercial offerings. We were licensed in Libya for three different frequencies. trying to tune an aerial to work well on all three was next to impossible.
Listening to the short wave radio was an art in itself. Many newbies on the crew couldn’t even make out any words cutting through the noise, myself included when I first arrived back in 1984. With experience and practice it became a lot easier. The best aerials in my view were the specially made whip antennas for our long range Land Rovers and supply trucks.
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Today’s photo is a view about 135° anti-clockwise from yesterday’s. It’s of a recording flycamp in western Libya in 1990.
I can tell it’s a recording flycamp because of the two trucks on the left and the number of tents. The two trucks were the trucks the line labor rode to work and back every day and the recording crew had the largest labor force.
Base camp was elsewhere. Base camp would have looked the revers with fewer tents and more trailers. We must have decided that the effort of moving base camp was too much – we probably didn’t want to pack up all the mechanic’s equipment.
Located in a depression behind a gravel berm, the location would serve to protect the camp from some of the wind. The trailer behind the 2500 gallon water tanker on the left is the kitchen. The two trailers on the right, arranged at right angles is the senior staff camp.
I can’t figure out where the showers are so maybe they were one third of the kitchen trailer or maybe there weren’t any. The few camps I lived in that didn’t have showers were never pleasant! You just could never get the sand out of the places you never even expected it to be in the first place!
Since I wasn’t part of the recording crew I’m struggling to remember why I was even here.
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I spent a fair bunch of time trying to title today’s photo before settling on ‘approaching sunset’.
This was taken somewhere in western Libya in the first half of 1990. Running across the photo are a number of water courses. I’ve some (not very pretty) photos in the sequence preceding this of rain in the desert.
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Four in a Row is an expanded view of yesterday’s photo (and also the photo I processed in the soon to be released Topaz Clarity).
On the crews I worked on in Libya, Tunisia and Oman we had six vibs (seismic vibrators). Typically, one was in camp for maintenance, one was on the line as a spare and the other four were in service. In South Africa, depending on the client, sometimes we’d only have five.
Patterns were usually similar though some clients liked to get more experimental. Here the four vibs were running in echelon. They’d take a sweep, lift the pad, move forward a few meters, drop the pads and sweep again, over and over. By adding all these sweeps together the echoes back to the geophones were added on top of each other to produce a louder signal. Sometimes the pattern meant that the distance between swweps was always the same and sometimes the pattern was such that there’s be a longer drive between stations to the next start position.
Just as the geophones were arrayed in a pattern, so was the vib pattern. The net effect was to assume that the energy was being put into the ground at the center of the vib array and being detected at the center of the geophone array.
Given all these approximations, and then my hatchet job of static corrections to eliminate the variations in the surface terrain and the 10 cm shortening of the pegs I mentioned in this post would not have been noticeable, except we were being paid to place the peg within 1 cm. I always found it curious that we’d accurately position the peg and then the geophone arrays and source arrays were all approximated, and neither were centered on the peg.
With these tires the lead driver would figure out the count of treads on the tires that would pass his door frame for the distance he’d have to travel. The other drivers would line something up on their vib with the lead vib to keep their station in the echelon and an observer would check to make sure they weren’t drifting off pattern.
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Topaz Labs recently gave me a pre-release trial of their upcoming Topaz Clarity product that I finally got around to trying. Below is a quick example with the original on the left side of the image and the Topaz Clarity processed version on the right.
Original on the left, processed with Topaz Clarity on the right. I didn’t use any of the cool new features, just a simple preset.
The user interface shares a lot of features with the recently released Topaz Details 3.0 and Topaz Black and White Effects 2.1. So, if you already have a Topaz product, you’ll be able to use Topaz clarity as soon as you install it.
The new Topaz algorithm allows you to boost the contrast and clarity without creating halos, noise or artifacts.
I think the neatest feature, though, is the re-imagined masking workflow. Masking is now attached to each each adjustment tab and comes with a full set of tools including an edge-aware brush, gradient mask, smart feather tool a color aware tool and more.
Since the pre-release I have has only a limited subset of presets I’ll leave my review till I can download the full version after release sometime next week. Topaz Labs are holding free webinars to introduce the new Topaz Clarity so if you can make the time, sign up to learn more:
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Today’s photo is of a seismic vibrator – a Failing Y1100 on a Birdwagen Mark III hydraulic 4-wheel drive buggy.
The vibrator is the piece in the middle. It has a pad in contact with the ground and above that, hidden in the chassis of the vehicle, a hydraulicly powered mass. On a start signal from the recording truck, the electronic controller would cause the mass and pad to vibrate through a known series of frequencies.
The sound waves would travel down into the ground and get refracted at various rock density transitions and get echoed back to the surface where the vibrations would be detected by geophones and their signals recorded. Correlating the echoes coming back with the sweep put in would, through the magic of maths and computers, result in sections through the earth showing the major rock layers. Certain rock formations form traps for oil and gas so reading the seismic sections along with other inputs helps a geophysicist know where to site a well for a better than average probability of finding oil or gas.
It’s not foolproof though as the oil or gas might have migrated in the millenia after the traps were formed, and there may never have been any organic matter below the trap to start with.
The ‘Birdwagen’ was named after the founder of Industrial Vehicles International, Inc., James M. Bird of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The hydraulic drive had no transmission, no transfer case, no universal joints, no differentials or axles. Instead, each wheel had its own hydraulic motor.
To give you an idea of the scale, the tires are about 60 inch (1.5 m) diameter.
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Me and my Land Rover or my Land Rover and I? Probably the latter if I could be bothered to reach for one of my several style guides. They just happen to be about two feet beyond my outstretched hand and I’m feeling too lazy to make the effort.
Libya, 1990, probably about 150 miles (230 km) south east of Ghadames, or about 60 miles and four or five years away from this totally different shot (this Land Rover is a 110 and is white).
Gravel, as far as the eye can see. I recall a semantic discussion on the difference between not knowing where you are and being lost. They’re not the same. It was a discussion we were having with the Shell company man who wanted to ban driving between the survey lines, rather he wanted us just to drive along the survey lines.
Besides the additional driving distance and time this would entail (and time was certainly money), it really belied his lack of confidence in himself and his natural navigating competencies.
We drew our own maps out here as we went, starting with a blank sheet of paper and slowly filling in features as the lines were surveyed. Towards the end of the job we had very detailed maps. At the start of the job they were comparable to those that Columbus had – large expanses of blankness with ‘Here be dragons!’ written everywhere.
I remember missing a cairn one day. By the time I knew I’d gone too far I was closer to a sister crew than my intended destination. I drove on to their camp, made up some story about needing to borrow something, had a nice lunch then headed back. I didn’t know where I was, but I knew I wasn’t lost!
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Not really another day, another wadi, more the same day and the same wadi as yesterday’s image.
Today’s photo shows the wadi stretching into the distance where it makes a left hand turn and disappears behind a headland in the distance.
The flow marks in the wadi are more evident here and you can see the density of the bushes appears to increase as the wadi slowly descends to the plain hidden behind the headland.
Layers of hard and soft rock are more plainly evident. Then, as now, I was contemplating the formation of this landscape, wondering over how many years it took to form and what happened to all the water that carved out this wadi. Maybe some of if filtered down through the layers of rock to the Nubian Sandstone fossil aquifer.
Oil exploration in the 1950s led to the discovery of this fresh water aquifer which is believed to have accumulated during the last ice age. My guess then, is that with the ice covering much of Europe, the climate here would have been more temperate with much more rainfall and flowing rivers and this would have been a lush and verdant landscape, teeming with life. Is this a model for the potential effects of climate change and global warming on temperate zones of today?
Now I’ll have to see if I can figure out the temperature rise in this part of the world since the last ice age.
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William Wordsworth’s poem, commonly known as ‘Daffodils’ was first written in 1804 and revised in 1815.
It’s the opening lines that inspired my title for today’s photo. If you don’t know, ‘Daffodils’ starts with the lines:
‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills…’
This image, taken in Western Libya in 1990, is a far cry from Ullswater in 1804 England, and there are no daffodils in sight, but the lonely cloud, the Vales and Hills are all represented.
I’m up on top of the hard rock layer you can see capping the jebels in the distance. The land between has eroded over the millennia.
In the mid-ground of the photo you see the sandy base of an occasional water course, dotted with bushes indicating the presence of water. In the distance you can see ribbons of sand where rainwater feeds into this occasional water course.
I never saw it wet but you can see from the channels in the sand that sometimes the flow has been quite strong.
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by Richard Davis