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Saturday, October 22, 2011
Scattered leaves
As I prepare for my trip tomorrow to NARA II to try and answer, amongst other things, the appearance of Battleship Arizona during the attack, I am looking for some files on Radio Direction Finders to see if there any I have found but not posted. I came across this, one of the few documents I've found in the NARA Seattle Naval records on Arizona that still survives there:
Arizona's Roster of Officers for December, 1941. It's nearly 70 years old now. It would be a lot of work to post it as HTML, but it seems a shame to leave it where no one else can see it and perhaps make a connection to this ship and the human cost associated with her history.
The wind is blowing the yellowed leaves from the branches out my window as those still green hang tight.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Picture Post - Fort Casey Coastal Artillery - Battery Henry Kingsbury
While looking through my records for something else I stumbled across this tidbit I'd forgotten I had scanned in:
I have a connection to Fort Casey; having spent time there as a kid (Fort Flagler as well for that matter). It's a single-piece scan, so there's not a lot I can do with it. But, while preparing it to post I figured I'd cover the steps I used, since I do post blue-prints on a regular basis. I could just post them in all their blue glory, but I know people like to print things, and I'd hate to be the reason a few printer ink cartridges choked and died, so I always make them black and white for better printing.
The process is below, and is based on the ancient Photoshop (6) I use. Invert the image, set a white point to make most of the remaining background color go away, then grayscale and level the file to darken the dark and whiten the white and remove the noise.
Takes no more than 30 seconds once you know how to do it; the harder part is cleaning up the borders and holes.
You can read more about these guns here (and you might even see a familiar drawing!):
http://www.cdsg.org/HDPSdata/kingsbury.htm
http://fortwiki.com/Battery_Kingsbury
They were a great place to run around in as a kit!
I have a connection to Fort Casey; having spent time there as a kid (Fort Flagler as well for that matter). It's a single-piece scan, so there's not a lot I can do with it. But, while preparing it to post I figured I'd cover the steps I used, since I do post blue-prints on a regular basis. I could just post them in all their blue glory, but I know people like to print things, and I'd hate to be the reason a few printer ink cartridges choked and died, so I always make them black and white for better printing.
The process is below, and is based on the ancient Photoshop (6) I use. Invert the image, set a white point to make most of the remaining background color go away, then grayscale and level the file to darken the dark and whiten the white and remove the noise.
Takes no more than 30 seconds once you know how to do it; the harder part is cleaning up the borders and holes.
You can read more about these guns here (and you might even see a familiar drawing!):
http://www.cdsg.org/HDPSdata/kingsbury.htm
http://fortwiki.com/Battery_Kingsbury
They were a great place to run around in as a kit!
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