Panorama | A high-resolution teaser to Bay Area adventures

Click on the image, then on the next page, click it again to get a high-resolution panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge. I shot the bridge with my camera sitting on a tripod, then merged 11 photos together to make this panorama.

I wish Florida could share some humidity with California. It might make for somewhat of a pleasant atmosphere here in the Sunshine State.

But I'm back into the thick of things - including work and the rain - after a short but wicked sweet visit to San Francisco and Napa Valley. I have much to catch up on now that I've returned, so I'll have to take care of those things first.

For now, you'll have to settle for a teaser. Here's a taste of what I have in store for The Offlede. My upcoming posts will hit these highlights:

• A Segway lesson and tour of San Francisco.
• A cruise to Alcatraz Island, a wretched and oddly beautiful place.
• An exclusive tour of the deserted Mare Island Shipyard, where my friend's grandfather served as the Naval commander for five years.
• Wine tastings at three vineyards in one of the best places on Earth, Napa Valley.
• Some of the best food I have ever had.
• "Rebel" aerial photos of the Bay Area. I'll explain later.

I have said that there's no sense in visiting one place more than once. With such limited travel experience, I would like to see as many places as possible. But at the first chance I get, I'm going back to Napa Valley and probably to Sonoma County, too.

That's how good it was.

No time for blogging in San Francisco

The inside of H2O Cafe looking toward Polk Street in San Francisco.

For one of the most advanced cities in the United States, San Francisco is pretty sparse on the free Wi-Fi access. My hotel's system has been down since I arrived Thursday night, and I've been itching to update The Offlede.

But this post will be brief because I'm leaving this cafe, H20 - where I bought a 4-ounce cappuccino for 4 bucks - in a bit to do more touristy things. My friend - a reporter from New York City, whom I'm vacationing with - is a fan of the staid tourist attractions. I just like to take photos of a city's natural beauty.

We have, however, had some fun, including a Segway tour of San Francisco and a tour of Alcatraz Island, where one the country's most infamous prisons was set.

Enough jabber. More fun.

Photos | Double-barrel shuttle action at Kennedy Space Center

I created a panorama of the shuttle launch pads from the viewing platform. It's eight photos stitched together in Photoshop, but it's a poor job because I didn't have the camera on a tripod. Click on the image for a bigger version.

Shuttle Atlantis on launch pad 39A. You can just see the top of the external fuel tank and the twin solid rocket boosters.

I took advantage of NASA's salute to Brevard County residents by getting free admission to Kennedy Space Center on Sunday. Tickets are usually $38 each, so it was a good deal.

I took a bus tour of the expansive grounds and saw two shuttles on their respective launch pads. It was supposed to be the last time there would be two shuttles ready to launch. But because Atlantis' mission to the Hubble Space Telescope has been postponed, it probably will happen again in February. When servicing the Hubble, NASA needs a backup shuttle ready to go in case it needs to mount a rescue mission.

Here are some more photos from KSC.

Endeavour is on 39B to the left and Atlantis is on 39A to the right.

A view of Atlantis over the brush in front of the launch viewing complex. It would be great to witness a launch from here. It's quite difficult to get tickets, though.

The crawler that transports the shuttles from the Vehicle Assembly Building in the background to the launch pad sits near the viewing platform. A steady stream of tour buses travel the road behind it. Each cleat in the tracks of the crawler weighs a ton.

The grounds of KSC are maintained by the Interior Department. I think this airboat contains wildlife officials.

Here's a Saturn 5 rocket on display at The Apollo/Saturn V Center. It's a monstrosity, which makes me excited for the upcoming Constellation program and its large Ares rockets. They will be spectacular launches.

Visitors look for alligators in a pond near the astronaut memorial. They couldn't see the gator lurking beneath the overhang, but I could.

The rocket garden has a collection of retired rockets.

Newsday strikes a tone, but are Newman's eyes THAT blue?

Was Newsday wrong in bringing out the blue in this photo in order for it to accompany the quote? You decide.

Adobe Photoshop is used widely in the newspaper industry for the cropping and color toning of news photographs. It's also frequently used in design-heavy pages employed by most newspapers these days.

The program has legitimate uses, but it can be abused, too.

We've heard of many controversies in journalism in which photographers have doctored photos for dramatic effect. One of the more recent ones is when Reuters admitted to darkening and increasing the volume of smoke billowing over Beirut in 2006. It was a particularly poor cloning job, so it's no wonder consumers and media critics saw through it.

This example, which I believe is exclusive to The Offlede, is less egregious.

It would appear that a newspaper has adjusted the colors of a photo for the sake of design. Newsday's Sept. 28 cover about the death of Paul Newman also included a quote of actress Eva Marie Saint saying "Yes, his eyes were that blue and beautiful." It seems that the blue hues in the photo were enriched to make the quote work.

The Daily News in New York City used the same photo on its cover, but it looks quite different. Newman's eyes are more gray than blue, and the background similarly isn't as colorful in the Daily News version.

In the original, which The Associated Press ran on its wires, the hues are grayish-blue.

On the Newsday cover, the most telling indicator is Newman's hair. The highlights are gray in the original, but in the Newsday photo, they are blue.

Toning a photo so that it corresponds with a text element, such as Saint's quote, is a questionable practice. I asked a co-worker, and she agreed that Newsday was walking a fine line with this cover. We both said Newman's eyes are the same aqua marine of the Atlantic Ocean here in Central Florida.

What do you think?

When the news is the same, the headlines are the same

I thought this headline was original when I wrote it. Six hours later, I saw the first copy of USA Today, and my jaw dropped to the floor.

Since President Bush's televised address about the economy Wednesday night, The Associated Press has been referring to the White House summit he arranged as an "extraordinary" event.

So it's no wonder that most newspapers treated it as such Friday morning, when they printed stories about the meeting and negotiations on Capitol Hill for a $700 billion economic bailout package.

And the headlines that those news outlets used to describe what was happening also were quite in agreement. Sixteen newspapers used "Deal or no deal?" to express how political leaders led the public to believe they were close to a deal, but later on, said the talks had collapsed. Four of those were Florida papers in Miami, Orlando, Ocala and Melbourne. Some papers had variations on the headline. The Rocky Mountain News inserted a handy comma after the first "deal," creating a natural pause. But, interestingly, the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., omitted the question mark. I would think it's necessary in such a headline.

But 41 newspapers, according to my survey of front pages on display on the Newseum's Web site, used some form of "breakdown," "break down" or "breaks down" as their headline for the bailout package.

What this sameness indicates to me is a sameness in today's news reporting. For the past several years, newspapers have been eliminating their bureaus in Washington, D.C. So, with most newspapers depending on their corporate wire services - such as Gannett News Service or McClatchy Tribune Information Services - along with the AP, many stories coming out of this summit were the same and, naturally, a similar headline came from the copy editors reading the stories. Relying on a single news service eliminates the likelihood that off-beat stories and more unique headlines would arise from this historic occasion.

FLORIDA TODAY was not immune to this, of course. We've been relying on the AP for much of our copy throughout this economic debacle. During late-breaking news situations, the AP is especially good at running stories early so we can make deadline.

I was charged with designing the front page for the bailout summit package. Usually, I would design around the art, but the photos coming from Washington have been particularly ho-hum during this crisis. Bush, Nancy Pelosi and Roy Blunt aren't very high on the sexiness meter. So, with this package, I first thought of a headline that came naturally from the story, which had this lede: "A Republican revolt stalled urgent efforts to lash together a national economic rescue plan Thursday, a chaotic turnaround on a day that had seemed headed for a success that President Bush, both political parties and their presidential candidates could celebrate at an extraordinary White House meeting." And I had it on the page early: 6:30 p.m., about five hours before deadline.

After a scurry toward the finish (deadline), I took a sigh of relief that the page was sent to the press. But about an hour later, my heart jumped again. That's when one of the pre-press workers came out with a copy of FLORIDA TODAY and an edition of USA Today, which is printed in Melbourne, too. Both had the same headline.

Does this mean that both newspapers covered the news the way it should have been - straightforwardly? Or does it mean that all media are blending into one giant entity, creating little need to pay attention to more than one news source? It used to be that you could read two different newspapers about the same topic and get two antithetical stories. Is that a bygone era?

If I could do it all again, I still would probably choose the "Deal or no deal?" headline. It's more engaging for the reader than "Bailout breaks down" or "Bailout stalls," another word used widely Friday.

Update: Executive Editor Bob Stover writes a column that mentions the headline issue and asks similar questions: Cliche? Appropriate?






I created a few galleries with the 16 and 41 headlines.

"Deal or no deal?"




"Breaks down" or "breakdown"