The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

The Dalton Highway has the reputation of being one of the most dangerous roads in the world. It is one of the northernmost roads, crossing well into the Arctic, and reaching the highest road point in Alaska that is maintained throughout the year, Atigun Pass. Then there is the extreme remoteness. Along its 414 miles there are services only at one place in winter: Coldfoot (population 13). The 240 mile stretch north of Coldfoot is the longest in North America without services. The Dalton Highway was not designed for personal vehicles, but rather as an industrial road for trucks. It was built in 1974 to support the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and Trans-Alaska pipeline. For the first twenty years it was closed to public traffic. Those speeding 18 wheelers can add to the hazards of the road. In summer, gravel flies and windshield damage is likely.

In winter, temperatures become extreme, creating hazardous road conditions. The Wikitravel article on the Dalton Highway warns: “travel from late September through early May is frigid and lethally cold during the heart of winter. Temperatures below -40ºF (-40ºC) are very common and temperatures as low as -60ºF (-57ºC) are certainly possible–before factoring in windchill. The record low windchill in Deadhorse was -102ºF(-74ºC) on February 28, 1989! A chart record of windchill at ARCO’s facility in Prudhoe Bay on 1/13/1975 shows -128. Such temperatures are lethal in less than 1 minute if not prepared for such temperature. Unless experienced with polar temperatures and gear, DO NOT attempt to traverse the highway between November and March! “.

-32F temperature north of Atigun Pass on a sunny day

Why would someone want to drive the Dalton Highway ? It is the only road in the US (and one of only two in North America) which cross the Arctic Circle, providing access to unique landscapes of the far north. In winter, this is one of the best places in the continent for observing the northern lights. At these latitudes, the Aurora is high above you, illuminating the whole landscape, instead of being low on the horizon. In this post, I’ll detail my experience of driving the Dalton Highway in winter and provide some practical information.

Fairbanks is the place to rent a vehicle. A local company specializes in renting cars equipped for the Dalton Highway, however their vehicles were too small for sleeping two, so we rented a full size SUV at the airport. Because the temperatures in Fairbanks are more frigid than in Anchorage (further south and situated on the ocean), all rental cars are better winterized. Amongst other things, they are equipped with a block-engine warmer. This prevents your engine from freezing solid when the temperatures dip below -20F. When parking overnight in the city you connect the warmer to an electrical plug using an extension cord. Such plugs are commonly found in hotel parking lots, near park meters on the street, or even on the Denali National Park visitor center parking lot.

However, when in the wilderness, there are no electric plugs, so to keep the engine – and yourself – from freezing overnight, your only solution is to start your engine every few hours and let it run some. To do that, you’d need to carry extra gas. We were disappointed that our SUV did not have any roof bars that we could use to strap gas containers. Fumes makes it unhealthy to carry gas in the car, so this limited our options for staying overnight. In order to prevent fuel from freezing, we used an additive called “Heet”, which apparently is quite popular since it was sold out at the Fairbanks Wall-Mart.

Having read that the road surface is rough enough that two rim-mounted spare tires are recommended, I found it surprisingly smooth. Possibly that was the benefit of driving on ice. On the flipside, ice made the road pretty slick and we could feel that we were often only a small margin from loosing control of the car. Because of that, we tried to avoid driving in the state of exhaustion which would have resulted from staying up all night for the aurora. Although our SUV was equipped with what would be considered winter tires in California, an Alaskan told us that those were summer tires by his standards.

Cell phone coverage is not available along the Dalton Highway, but the SPOT satellite messenger worked. We also carried a CB radio to communicate with the truckers, but have not found it useful. Although it costs a bit for a heavy truck to stop and restart, in the far north people seem to look for each other. When we got stuck on a shoulder, the first truck who passed by rescued us. In normal conditions, there is enough truck traffic along the Dalton Highway that the wait wouldn’t be that long. However, severe weather or snow drifts could close the road for days in winter. We carried sleeping bags rated for -30F, as well as several days of non-perishable food, and two liquid-fuel stoves (butane/propane stove are useless in those temperatures). One of them quit working during the trip. Personal-size thermos allowed us to prepare hot food and drinks. Without them, they would get cold without a few minutes. Larger thermos bottles kept water from freezing. We bought in Fairbanks a spare battery (returned after the trip), shovel and tow rope – which turned out to be the most used emergency gear.

The Dalton Highway starts about 80 miles north of Fairbanks. In winter, the last gas station before Coldfoot is in Fox at junction of Eliott and Steese Highways just outside of Fairbanks. Until Coldfoot, the landscape is dominated by rolling hills of boreal forest. The first landmark is the long bridge across the 2000 mile-long Yukon River, which surprisingly features a wooden road surface (mile 56).

At mile 115, you cross the Arctic circle. This sign is found next to a pullout east of the highway.

The only services between Fox and Deadhorse are found in Coldfoot (mile 175), which has a truck stop with gas, a restaurant, and a payphone which can be used with a calling card. Their motel, the Slate Creek Inn is expensive and uninviting. The better choices for accommodations are in the historic community of Wiseman (mile 188): Arctic Getaway Bed and Breakfast (we stayed there: friendly owners, cozy cabin, reasonable rates, satellite internet during breakfast) and Boreal Lodge.

The most spectacular section is from Coldfoot to a few dozen miles north of Atigun Pass (mile 244), where the Dalton Highway crosses the Brooks Range. Since we could not carry enough gas to stay overnight north of Atigun Pass, we visited that section as a day out of Wiseman. We avoided driving the Atigun Pass at night as the pass is quite steep. It would have helped there to have better tires or chains. Further north, the landscape turns to flatter tundra terrain that we did not explore on that trip.

Thanks to good weather, our first drive up the Dalton Highway in winter turned out to be uneventful, however we came back with more respect for this harsh and inhospitable environment.

See more images of the Dalton Highway, images of Wiseman

Additional information

• Alaska Geographic visitor guide repository: has current 24-page BLM guide.
• Lonely Planet’s guide to the Dalton Highway
• Wikitravel guide to the Dalton Highway
• Winterscapes Of The Alaskan Arctic by Ben Hattenbach

Part 2 of 5: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Last winter, I traveled from March 12 to March 23 with my friend Regis Vincent to Alaska to seek the Aurora Borealis, also called Northern Lights. Since this was my first attempt, I sought to maximize chances of seeing the Aurora:

• Auroral activity is strongest slightly above the Polar Circle, which in North America is most easily accessed from Fairbanks, served by an international airport.
• Auroral activity follows a long-term cycle of about a dozen years, peaking in 2012-2013. Within the year, the peak usually takes place during the two equinoxes.
• March has generally much clearer weather than September in Alaska.
• While a bright moon provides illumination and color, it can potentially interfere with sky photography and overwhelm a faint aurora by lowering its contrast. Our stay coincided with the fourth moon phase (from half to new moon).

In order to remain mobile and keep an option to drive to wherever the weather is clear, I planned a road trip rather than a wilderness expedition.

This post is centered around my experience. Subsequent posts will detail logistical and technical aspects, which aren’t simple. At the end of this post, I also provide links to articles written by other photographers that give a great introduction to aurora photography.

Since I am a (adopted) Californian, the first night we decided to work not too far from Fairbanks as a “warm up”. If some cold weather equipment turned out to be inadequate, we could easily gear up. We initially planned to photograph at the Twelve Mile Summit (milepost 85.5 on the Steese Highway), which offers a great view over snowy mountains, but it was just too windy to stay outside for any extended period of time, let alone attempt night photography. Snowplow operators recommended we go back promptly because the snowdrift threatened to block the road, which was closed a bit further, at Eagle Summit.

We drove down to a large pullout. As it was our first night in Alaska, we were excited to see the green band of light of the Aurora show up, but it was rather low on the horizon. My friend shivered during the night. As we drove back to Fairbanks, the aurora got brighter in the rear view mirror, putting on a much better show. We stopped many times to photograph, getting to a hotel only a few hours before dawn. Low (2).

We spent the morning shopping the numerous outdoor stores in Fairbanks, a better way to gear up, since they have polar-grade gear in abundance to try. I bought thick insulated, windproof bibs for less than $100, and my friend got a better sleeping bag. The next two days were to be at level 4 according to the UAF Geophysical Institute Aurora Forecast. The higher activity levels give a chance to see the aurora far south of the Arctic Circle while with lower activity levels, the activity is confined around the Arctic Circle. To take advantage of the opportunity, we drove south on the Parks Highway, hoping to catch activity above Denali National Park. The afternoon was cloudy, with just a bit of color appearing at sunset.

As a landscape photographer, even in shots where most of the interest is in the sky, I look for significant land features to include. Although our first night at the South Denali Viewpoint (milepost 135.2mi of Parks Highway), the aurora did show up, it was behind a dense cloud cover so we saw only a glow. Moderate (3). The next day, the clouds cleared up. At night, the aurora made a spectacular appearance above Denali and the Alaska Range, about forty miles away. Active (4).

Despite going to sleep (in the car, parked quite close to the highway since the pull-out was snowed-in) quite late, I got up to photograph the sunrise over the seldom-visible Mountain.

We drove back to Fairbanks, then went back to the Steese Highway. Since the next day we planned a long drive, we contented ourselves with observing the aurora from Cleary Summit. The scenery there consists mostly of meadows and rows of trees, but less than half an hour from Fairbanks, relatively high and free of light pollution, with a large parking area, the spot is popular with locals for aurora watching (larger version of the panoramic image). Active (4).

In order to get to the center of the aurora action, further north, we tacked the famous Dalton, the northernmost highway in the US, and its most isolated (more on it in a future blog post). There is only one place for services, midway of 414 miles of road, at Coldfoot. After refueling there, we arrived in Wiseman at dusk. During the whole afternoon, the weather had been cloudy.

The weather forecast called for light snow at night, so we were actually looking forward to a night of sleep, but after cooking dinner, we noticed that the sky was clearing. While the mountains of the Alaska Range range were distant, here we were at the base of the Brooks Range mountains (northernmost in the world). As we looked for an interesting mountain as a foreground, we found prominent Mount Sukakpak (milepost 207 of Dalton Highway). Active (4).

North of Wiseman, the road was solid ice. From what I read, it’s actually nicer than in summer, when gravel flies. The Dalton Highway, built to support the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and Trans-Alaska pipeline, is traversed daily by more than a hundred 18 wheelers trucks, and only partly paved.

Although this year I didn’t set foot into Gates of the Arctic National Park proper, I managed to find a good view over the mountains that form the eastern boundary of the park. The Aurora was there again, for a sixth consecutive night. Active (4). It had been a remarkably favorable week.

Resources

Here is a list of articles, all by photographers with great Alaskan aurora work, that I have found particularly useful:

• How to photograph the aurora borealis by Carl Donohue
• How to photograph the northern lights with a digital camera by Patrick Endres
• Hunting The Great Alaskan Aurora by Ben Hattenbach

Thanks for you help, and also special thanks to Rolf Hicker, another photographer with great aurora images from Alaska and the Yukon.

For aurora forecasts, I’ve relied mostly on the UAF Geophysical Institute Aurora Forecast which is easy to use and can even be accessed through dedicated iOS App, Android App and mailing list. During the first few days of our trip, the server was down due to volume of requests, but the mailing list was working. Here are a number of other forecast sites:

• Aggregate forecasts
• OVATION Auroral Forecast from NOAA
• NOAA POES satellite measurement
• AuroraMAX from Canadian Space Agency
• spaceweather.com news about Sun-Earth environment
• solarham.com solar cycle and radio VHF aurora on Tweeter @solarham
• AK Community Aurora notification page on FB on Tweeter: @auroranotify

Part 1 of 5: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

While Earth Day has been internationally celebrated for more than forty years, National Parks Week is a relatively recent initiative from the US National Park Service.

It has been argued that the National Parks are “America’s best idea” – recently in the Ken Burns film with that title. That idea first came to fruition with the creation of Yellowstone National Park (1872). Because at that time there was no state that could take care of such a vast land, Yellowstone National Park was placed in the custody of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which have continued to run the National Parks since, creating the National Park Service to that effect.

National Park Week (April 21-29) is a good time to visit, since the National Park Service is waiving all entrance fees. Personally, I always renew my annual National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands pass. Given the number of National Parks visit I do each year, it is a bargain at $80, but even if I did only a few annual visits, I’d still get it to support the system. Besides free entrance, this is a perfect time to consider how fortunate we are for the Park Service and for the nearly 400 lands and monuments that have been added since to the system.

This year, my images are associated with two products whose release coincides with National Park Week.

Fotopedia has just launched bersion 2.0 of Fotopedia National Parks app for iPad and iPhone with 3000+ of my images of the National Parks. Compared with version 1 (description here), there are notable improvements:

• several hundred new images
• high resolution images sized for the new iPad Retina display
• thematic stories updated every day in magazine-like format

To celebrate National Park week, the App is free. Download it on iTunes. Here are a few mentions of the App in the press: USA Today, LA Times, Forbes.

MapQuest has just launched MapQuest National Parks, a web-based guide with information on activities, wildlife and history, and some video commentary by park rangers. Each of the 58 entries opens with one of my panoramic images, and there is also an a series of posts featuring my comments on some favorite images. Here is a mention in Huffington Post.

Everyday should be Earth Day. We should remember year round that our planet and its resources are finite. Yet the occasion is a great catalyst for change, bringing 190 countries together, connecting because of a common concern instead of our differences. Let be sure to learn something new today, and apply it to our everyday life.

Brown most of year, dotted with poles and fences, the hills looming over Gorman Post Road, a country lane parallel to interstate 5, explode in color when spring conditions are right at about this time of the year. As a reminder not to take anything for granted, the area is slated for development.

When I strolled the streets of Daegu (fourth largest city in South Korea), I saw a pedestrian street lined up with retail stores for many outdoor gear brands, including Millet and Lafuma, two French brands that I’ve hardly seen anywhere in the US.

On the Namsam Mountain, near Gyeongju, there were as many hikers as on the Mist Trail – Yosemite’s most popular – on a summer day. But it was a rainy mid-November week-end, and the shortest trail there required 3 hours of walking, more than the Mist Trail.

It was an interesting mix of hiking and pilgrimage. Namsam Mountain is dotted with shrines and other religious sites at which hikers stopped to make offerings and prayers. Above the Sangseonam hermitage, a woman offered some kind of sacred bread to every passing person.

Since that was Asia, for most this was a social event rather than an individual pursuit. At the summit, groups proceeded to eat a picnic lunch, which didn’t consist of granola bars !

The next morning, I got up early to catch the first flight from Busan (second largest city in South Korea) to Jeju Island.

My goal for that day was to hike to the summit of Mt Hallasan, the highest mountain in South Korea at 1,950 metres (6,400 ft) high. The guidebook cautioned that one would need to start early. When I inquired at Jeju-si airport about public transportation to the trail head, I was told it was already too late for the day. To save time, rather than taking two buses, I hired a taxi.

Although Jeju Island has been called Asia’s Hawaii, it was already cold at sea level. When I got out of the taxi, I had to wear everything I had. I started on the Yeongsil trail, the first part of which consisted of a wooden staircase. After a steep climb, in a moment of great beauty, the forest above began to be turn to a rime ice-covered wonderland.

I stepped on a plateau with meadows which must have offered great views, except that everything was enshrouded in a white-out.

Such was the cold that I had to keep moving to stay warm. I couldn’t stop for more than five minutes. Yet, I crossed plenty of other hikers of all ages.

Boardwalks are supposed to make walking easier, but they turned out to be the most treacherous parts of the trail: once frozen, they were as slippery as an ice rink. In order to avoid tumbling like many others did in front of my eyes, I held onto the fence rails – which were frozen too.

Because of the conditions, it was pointless to continue further, so I warmed up at the Witseoreum shelter (where they sell spicy noodles) before going down through the less popular Eorimok Trail.

Fortunately the trail turned to lava rock, which because of its texture, was not slippery. It was curious to see the trees coated in ice and the ground dry. In the US West, during the winter bare trees stand above snow-covered ground.

I exited the summit cloud-cap just in time to observe the last light of the day on volcanic pinnacles. At the smaller trailhead, the last bus had left long ago. Thankfully, a kind restaurant owner who was about to close shop called a taxi for me. In the while I’d have to wait – since the taxi had to come from the airport – he offered me tea. Using my guidebook, I tried to figure out how to use public transportation to go to Seongsang Ilchulbong, at the other end of the island, to try and catch a sunrise above the famed crater.

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Frequent visitors to terragalleria.com may have noticed unusual, repeated periods of downtime over the past month, as well as a gap in updates. The quick explanation is that the server hosting the site was hacked. Sure, this has happened several times in the past, but each time I had been able to figure out which vulnerability the hackers had used, which (criminal) activities they had planned, and shut them out. Not this time, which opened to door to multiple, escalating attacks which eventually forced me to decommission the server and rebuild a new one. To get a sense of the aggravation I faced, read on the long explanation.

Let’s begin by addressing the most obvious concern. There isn’t much to steal on the server. For safety reasons, we do not store credit card numbers, simply passing them to our gateway. High-resolution digital files are valuable, by only if you can license them, a task which is nowadays quite difficult even for legitimate image creators. To the hacker’s credit, they did not vandalize the site contents. They seemed to be interested in the server only as a platform to try and compromise other systems and get access to them.

It started about a month ago. A reader reported to me that his anti-virus software had flagged the terragalleria.com website. An investigation based on time-stamps (to look at recently modified files) quickly showed that in one of the files containing Javascript utilities, the following code was appended (I’ve included it as an image because as text it is harmful !):

If this sounds like Hebrew to you, rest assured that it was the same for me until someone on G+ pointed me to the following page, which explains everything. The code was obfuscated to make it difficult to understand what it does: it creates a iframe – a special invisible frame around the webpage – which points to a website that tries to infect visitors with malware, which I can only assume (I didn’t download it, and nor should you ever download software with no clear purpose) allows them to take control of the victim’s computer.

Although getting rid of this particular code was easy, finding out how the hackers were able to plant it remained an unsolved challenge, as there are so many different security flaws which can be exploited to gain control over a computer. Even systems from the US Department of Defense are not immune to hacking. Since I didn’t know the extent to which the server was compromised, the safest thing to do was to rebuild the site. However, I was going to travel the following week, so I didn’t have time to do much. I also hoped that the intrusion was limited – as had been the case in the past. I left for Alaska.

In search of the Aurora, we drove north of Fairbanks on the Dalton Highway, passing the Arctic Circle. Although there were absolutely no services of any kind on the 240 mile stretch of road until Coldfoot -making it the most remote in North America – the nearby village of Wiseman (pop 13), has two B&Bs open year-round. Because our rental car was marginally equipped to deal with -30F weather, instead of camping further north, we stayed there. Unexpectedly, they provided for a few hours per day satellite-based internet.

That’s when I learned that my server woes were getting worse. The hackers were trying to use the compromised server to hack into other machines on the network, using what is called a “brute force attack” which consists of automatically trying to log on by trying thousands of different passwords (the reason you shouldn’t use simple passwords). As a result, the hosting company took the server offline after I had failed to respond to their warnings. Back in Fairbanks, we huddled in the public library to benefit from a reliable internet connection. At first we found themselves locked out from the system, but after assistance from the data center technicians, we had the main (root) password reset so we could do administrative tasks. My friend then found one of the backdoors they left and removed it.

All was (almost) quiet for a few days, but the following week they tried again to do brute force attacks against other computers. I was not able to locate the script nor the security hole, but at least I was able to stop the activity by disabling some system utilities.

A few days later, I discovered that they were back to trying to propagate malware using an iframe. But this time, they used more sophisticated methods. They had covered more carefully their tracks, since a time-stamp based search didn’t yield anything interesting. Instead of just modifying a single text file, they managed to get the webserver to append a malicious iframe for all web pages and all the domains hosted on the server. Protecting our visitors is the priority, so upon discovering that the server was trying to spread malware, I immediately shut down all web services.

I looked all day long at various configuration files, yet remained stumped. Because I hold a PhD in Computer Science, it is sometimes assumed that I am a wizard with computers. But in fact, I was mostly a mathematician studying the geometry of visual perception of three-dimensional space. I learned very little about system administration in grad school – there was no world wide web yet. I decided to simply abandon the server. This was the right decision, as in the following week, the situation degrated further. Not content with changing all the server passwords, they reconfigured the server so that even after reseting the root password it was not possible for me nor the data center technicians to log on. In the while, I received complaints from system administrators of large, well-known companies, into which they tried to hack using the server. I eventually put an end to this activity by wiping out all server contents with an OS reload.

Upon returning home from Alaska, I had already begun to plan for a new replacement server – kind of like burning your house to the ground and rebuilding it to get rid of vermin. I was looking at more complex solutions involving virtualization and cloud computing. However the server was now down, and every such day costs us quite a bit in lost business, so I decided to rebuid again a simple and cost-effective dedicated server. I rent a box running Linux on a brand new Quad Core Xeon 1270 – 3.40GHz (Sandy Bridge), 1 x 8MB cache w/HT, 2 GB DDR3 1333 RAM, 2x 750GB SATA II HDD with a 100 Mbps uplink port and a 3TB monthly data transfer allowance.

Besides the hardware upgrade – which greatly accelerate searches and dynamic loads – the main difference is that unlike on my previous servers, decided to forego a control panel (I used Plesk before), mostly for security reasons. The data center technicians had pointed out to specific Plesk-related vulnerabilities. A control panel provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to all services on your server. Without one, you administer your server by editing text files and typing commands.

I found out during installation that while a control panel makes configuration simpler and more foolproof (no messing all your web services because of a single missing directive or a mistyped command), its main benefit is that it provides web-ready software. In my case, all the installation went smoothly until I noticed that PHP (an active component of web pages) would not communicate with MySQL (the database). Since they are such basic and popular building blocks, you’d think that they would work right out of the box in a distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, but this wasn’t the case at all. After trying many things, I re-installed PHP from source, but in the process this happened to break httpd. At this point I got fed up with fiddling around without real understanding. I hired the services of a server administration company.

They fixed the problem promptly, and I was happy to get the site up again, first in an emergency instance without many functions. However, as I began to set-up my backup software, I found out that the hard drives were not configured properly. I had ordered the server with two hard drives, with the intention to use the second one for backup. However, the hosting company set up the drives as an LVM (Logical Volume Manager) volume group, which defeated the purpose. They recommended that I reload the OS and restart from scratch, although there exists a risky procedure to remove a drive from the LVM. As it had taken me more than a day to get to that point, I wasn’t too keen on doing it over again, so I asked my system administrator to try the procedure. Sure enough, it failed, leaving the server in a state where it wouldn’t even boot.

It quickly became clear that I had no choice but to reload the OS. I thought that I might as well upgrade to version 6 of RHEL as older versions sometimes lack critical security updates. It turned out to be even worse than RHEL 5. PHP didn’t even work properly. After trying to fix it without success, the system administrator recommended that instead I reload CentOS 5. I was surprised, since CentOS is the free – and supposedly functionally identical – version of the licensed RHEL, but indeed PHP and MySQL worked out of the box. This doesn’t mean that all my scripts worked, since software upgrades forced me to update my scripts, but at least the basics were there.

Acting as system administrator for two weeks was more than I cared for, but thanks to backups I didn’t loose any data. I just wished hackers would be more considerate in choosing their targets. Many companies who run websites with less traffic than terragalleria.com have full-time system administrators, but this is essentially a one-person operation. I have found that one of the main difficulties – and sometimes source of frustration – in running a small photography business is that one has to wear so many hats. Over the years, terragalleria.com has grown to become, amongst other things, a fully-featured stock photography website and digital wallpaper subscription site. That it needed to run on its own server, which was at the root of last month’s troubles, is something I suppose I should be grateful for, as it had provided me my own path to full-time photography.

Upon arriving in Gyeongju, I headed towards the Hanjin Hostel, conveniently situated a few blocks from the bus station. When traveling overseas solo, I prefer to stay at hostels because the management is usually a useful resource, and speaks English, a big plus in a country with a strange script. I’ve found that hostels often provide services that normal hotel don’t, and that their owners are generally friendly and welcoming to independent travelers.

That was certainly the case of “Master” Kwon Clint. Granted, Mr. Kwon has created a nice map of Gyeongju that he gives free to each guest, together with some tour advice, but his quiet generosity and availability goes beyond that. Since I don’t plan much in advance, I wanted to make sure I had a flight reserved for Jeju Island before heading out to explore Gyeongju. After spending half an hour on my iPad, I couldn’t get the website of Jeju Air – a smaller airline with cheaper fares than the mainstream carriers Koran Air and Asiana Airlines – to work for me: I kept getting an error message in Korean. I asked Mr. Kwon to refer me to a travel agent, but he told me that I wouldn’t be able to book such a flight through them, and instead offered to help me. When he figured out that the error was caused by the Jeju Air website refusing a foreign credit card, he offered to use his own to complete the transaction.

Mr. Kwon’s family also opened their home and life. I happened to be there on the day when Korean people prepare their staple kim-chi for the winter in the yard. Even before stepping out of the hostel, I had a look at one of the most interesting traditions I saw on my trip.

Upon learning of my plans to stay only two days in Gyeongju before flying to Jeju Island, Mr. Kwon mentioned that Gyeongju was the most interesting place in Korea. Based on what I saw during my whirlwind trip, I’d have to agree. Right in the middle of the town, I found an impressive complex of tumuli.

A short bus ride outside of town, Bulguksa temple is a masterpiece of the golden age of Buddhist art in the Silla kingdom, centered in Gyeongju, which lasted for the first millennium and ruled most of the Korean Peninsula between the 7th and 9th centuries

Bulguksa is linked to the sacred Seokguram Grotto by a winding path.

I read that the Seokguram Grotto is a popular place to watch the sun rise over the distant sea. On that rainy day, there was no view, but I enjoyed even more the atmosphere created by the mist.

Fall foliage was past peak in Seoul, but on Nov 18th, it was still brilliant in Gyeongju.

Gyeongju is often referred to as “the museum without walls” because of the exceptionally large number of historical sites spread in and around.

Hundreds of them – ruined temples, stone statues, pagodas, and lanterns – are scattered on Mount Namsan, a mountain that was held sacred by the Silla people, and still continues to draw pilgrims – and hikers.

More images of Gyeongju.

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The rest of the World Heritage sites are scattered around the country. My schedule was made possible by two factors. South Korea is a country of compact size – an hour by plane from north to south. The transportation infrastructure is very efficient and quite inexpensive.

In the morning, I took a high-speed train from Seoul to Deagu (South Korea’s fourth largest city) with free Wi-Fi on board. Upon arriving, I left my backpack at an automated locker – activated by fingerprint recognition.

After obtaining all the travel information at the tourist kiosk (the only place where one is sure to get questions answered in English) in front of the station, I hoped onto the Daegu subway.

Since I had a bit of extra time, I checked out the traditional medicine market which was on the way.

I went to the city terminal to catch a bus to a remote mountain outpost.

After a 2 km hike in the forest, I arrived at the Haeinsa Temple temple, one of the most important and remarkable in the country, around 3pm.

Haeinsa is one of the Three Jewel Temples (three principal Buddhist temples) of Korea and represents Dharma or the Buddha’s teachings (the two others represents the Buddha, and the sangha or Buddhist community). As such, Haeinsa is most noted for holding the Tripitaka Koreana, the whole of the Buddhist Scriptures carved onto 81,350 wooden printing blocks. The 14th century building holding the blocks at Haeinsa was so ingeniously designed that it surpassed modern preservation techniques. When test woodblocks were moved to a modern storage complex, they developed mildew, so the intended move was canceled and the woodblocks remained at Haeinsa.

I stayed until dark. In the solitude of the now deserted temple, the chants of the monks in the main hall were magical, but I had to be sure not to miss the last bus back to Daegu.

Despite the late hour, the main shopping areas of Daegu, where I went to look for dinner, were still busy. I had yet another Bibimbap, a signature Korean dish – and the only one suitable for a vegetarian.

I checked in a motel. Despite their name, those establishments have little in common with the motels in the US, besides maybe an affordable rate. My room had designer interior decor and lights (all remotely controlled), a huge flat screen TV, fridge, microwave, computer – fast connection, but no wifi, so much for Facetime – all for less than $50.

Motels are in fact “love hotels”. The bathroom had a huge bathtub which can easily accommodate two. A light which varied continuously in color illuminated the etching in the glass between the bathroom and the bedroom.

I got up before daybreak and took a long-distance bus to Andong. From there, after another local bus ride, I arrived in Hahoe Folk Village, a authentic traditional village dating back from the Joseon Dynasty in the 16th century.

Hahoe Folk Village is home to old architectural styles that have been lost elsewhere because of the rapid modernization in South Korea, including Aristocratic tile-roofed residences and thatched-roof servants homes.

Back to Andong, I boarded another bus to Gyeongju.

See more images of Haeinsa
See more images of Hahoe Folk Village

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In what is shaping up as a series of posts about image internet sharing practices, I’ve explained why and how to watermark. In this piece, I will explain why I have chosen to share images at a modest resolution.

There are a number of factors to be considered when choosing an image size for displaying and sharing on the internet. The gamut of image sizes varies from large thumbnails to full-resolution files. Smaller images load faster, are more easily displayed and shared. Larger images offer more detail to see and can be used in a variety of ways, such as filling up entire large screens or producing printed materials. The downside of that versatility is an increased number of people using your image for free, possibly in an un-authorized way, instead of licensing the image or buying a print from you.

A popular school of thought advances that one should not worry about that risk, and go all the way to sharing full-resolution files, because the increased exposure that is brought by sharing those larger images will more than make up for the inevitable loss of revenue from people not acquiring those from you.

I personally think that the benefits of sharing at large sizes are largely exaggerated.

When it comes to “sharing”, what do people mostly do with images available on the internet ? They view them on web browser, occasionally upload them to other websites – which results in the same- or email them to others, in which case the image is viewed in a mail reader.

Although there is a larger variety of big screens on the market than ever before, in 2011 desktops accounted for only 27% (source) of US computer sales. Notebook screens are not large. This is confirmed by Google Analytics records of terragalleria.com visits in the past 30 days as seen below:

Not only most computer users use a notebook rather than a desktop, but also many people rely on a mobile device rather than a computer as their primary means to access the internet. Those come with screens that are even smaller than notebooks – although the “New iPad” and its breathen will change that. It will be interesting to see what kind of design is required for a photography site to look the best on the high-res tablets. As far as I can guess, most people who use a desktop 2000+x1600 screen do not open their browser windows full-screen, yet full-screen appears to be the only mode of operation of the iPad. Do you have an idea of how this will work out ?

The dimensions above are for screen sizes, but the browser window – the portion of screen real estate actually available to display your images – is quite a bit smaller, because of the operating system and browser’s tasks bars. To visualize browser window sizes aggregated over all Google visits (not just terragalleria.com visits), use Google Browser Size, an extremely valuable tool recently released by Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger. That’s surprisingly few vertical pixels.

On this screen capture, you can see that in spite of my modest image size (576×416 including the border and watermark) and very economical header, only 70% of users can see the image and caption without scrolling, and only 50% of users can see the “action buttons”.

For vertical images, this gets more tight – even though the height of my vertical images is less than the width of my horizontal images. Now only 70% of users can even see the entire image without scrolling, and only 50% of them can see the image and caption. Try it with your website !

The conclusion of this is that modest image sizes would seem to work better for most viewers. In the past ten years that terragalleria.com has been online, I have received numerous emails of appreciation, some even mentioning an eye-opening or life-changing experience – a few have also written in the guestbook how deeply they were moved. Apparently, the fact that my standard web image size is only 4%-10% of the original didn’t get that much in the way of their experience.

Despite them being a minority, I have large screen users covered as well, with a full screen slideshow which uses images designed to fill a 1680×1050 screen with a bit of navigation space. They will available in a non-slideshow display when I update my 10-year old website design. But that is larger than necessary. The Boston Globe has gained a wide acclaim and following for their Big Picture feature (so much that the Atlantic has poached its creator Alan Taylor to run In Focus). Both sites use 1000 pixel wide images. That’s big on the internet for you. The highly praised Google Plus lightbox (and its Facebook promptly deployed copy) displays images smaller than that.

The only reasons users would want bigger would not be for sharing, but rather personal use. The two primary uses I can see are making prints and displaying on a big screen (computer monitor or TV). In spite of some trying to dance around the subject, my opinion is that if you offer limited edition prints, out of respect for your collectors – not to mention laws – you cannot allow everyone to make their own prints. Some photographers may think that there is no market for computer wallpapers, and instead chose to give them freely, but there are quite a few companies that are in the business of selling screensavers. By just selling wallpaper image downloads, Ryan Bliss has been able to support his family for more than a decade.

I respect photographers who choose to grant free personal use of their high-resolution files, but I have the feeling that most of them do not support themselves primarily through the sale and licensing of their photographs. Despite the “free for all” culture, I think most people understand that it is reasonable for someone who does so to charge for higher-resolution files. Hence it is unnecessarily – and counterproductive if you are trying to make a living at it- to give them away.

What do you think ? What is your standard image size for sharing on the internet ?

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When traveling to a country for the first time, I often select places to visit based on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The international program lists and helps preserve sites of outstanding cultural or natural importance to the common heritage of humanity. What makes it significant is that although listing of a site is approved by UNESCO, the sites are nominated by the countries themselves, so the list represent what each country views as their most valuable assets. I view it as an extension of the National Parks idea.

On this trip, I planned within 10 days to visit all 10 of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in South Korea. There are 3 of them in Seoul and 2 within day-trip distance from Seoul. On the first day, I checked out Royal Tombs Of The Joseon Dynasty in the morning, and then Changdeokgung Palace Complex in the afternoon.

The next day, I spent some time in Bukchon Hanok, a village-like low-profile area of traditional houses, early in the morning, while waiting for the Jongmyo Shrine to open.

As I had spent lots of time watching the spectacle of change of the Gate Guard at Gyeongbokgung palace afterwards, I arrived at the Hwaseong Fortress only shortly before sunset.

Fortunately the fortress was illuminated at night, the whole path along it well lit. After walking it in freezing temperatures – made colder by the wind, I was glad to warm up in the hour and half train ride to Seoul.

The third day didn’t go so well, as I missed the dolmen sites on Ganghwa-Do island. I tried to find the express bus station as indicated on the Lonely Planet book, but nothing was there. Locals were friendly and tried to help. One shopkeeper went on the internet to get directions. But as most of them didn’t speak English, I kept being sent from one address to another without understanding why. Eventually, tired and frustrated of going in circles, I boarded a taxi, hoping that the driver would be able to get more information than I did after I showed him the words “Ganghwa-Do bus”. He did not speak English, but after more circling around, traffic jams, and many calls, he connected me to a help line where they explained that the express bus service had recently been discontinued and the old terminal demolished. Things change fast ! They suggested alternative – the slower buses the locals have been trying to steer me to – but by then I thought it was too late in the day for such a long trip. For my last evening in Seoul I decided instead to climb the sacred shamanistic Inwangsan mountain, and start early the next day to have plenty of time to visit a remote temple, in mountains hundreds of kilometers away from Seoul.

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