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Old roadtrip stuff

Started by mgk920, May 21, 2012, 02:17:30 PM

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mgk920

Just this past weekend I found, in the recesses of my wallet, an old WAL*MART/AT&T 120 minute prepaid phone card (copyright-dated 2000). These were far and away the best and most cost-effective way of making phone calls while on the road in the days before nationwide local/nationwide roaming cell-phone contracts and I made extensive use of them while on interstate roadtrips before I got my cell phone in 2004.

Are there any other little potentially iconic items that you used to take along on roadtrips that you no longer do now?

Mike


Alex

I still have a Rite-Aid prepaid phone card around here somewhere from around the same time period and for the same reason.

All of our road outings in the 90s usually involved both bringing a CB Radio and a VHS camcorder. The CB was a lot of fun and good for noting where police were setup shooting radar or sometimes for traffic.

Scott5114

For a little while I had a piece of black felt that I could velcro to the dash that would cut down on glare from the dash on the inside of the windshield. Unfortunately the summer heat melted the adhesive on the velcro, and it didn't cut down all too well on the glare anyway (now instead of vent glare, I had glare from little bits of sunlight reflecting off the felt's fibers...

I didn't bother making a new felt setup when I got my current car.
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

kphoger

Flimsy plastic cupholders that you stuck in the window.
Hard plastic box with dividers to hold cassette tapes (I still have cassette tapes in the car, though).
A Velcro cover/binder for my atlas.
An external antenna for the cell phone with a magnetic base to stick on the roof of the car.
Keep right except to pass.  Yes.  You.
Visit scenic Orleans County, NY!
Male pronouns, please.

Quote from: Philip K. DickIf you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

Alex

Quote from: kphoger on May 21, 2012, 05:14:23 PM
Hard plastic box with dividers to hold cassette tapes (I still have cassette tapes in the car, though).
A Velcro cover/binder for my atlas.
An external antenna for the cell phone with a magnetic base to stick on the roof of the car.

Had that, had that, and the external antenna was a 6' magnet-mount whip antenna for the Cobra 25 CB Radio (and later the Cobra 29 CB Radio).

hbelkins

I still have my Walmart AT&T card, and AFAIK it's still active and has minutes on it. I have used it in the recent (within the past year or so) past. It's handy for calling home from a motel where the cellphone reception isn't that great.

Walmart still sells these.


Government would be tolerable if not for politicians and bureaucrats.

Alps

For me it's the opposite, I've been gradually adding to what I have. Now I have a small tripod and a backup camera, and have started to experiment with dark materials on the dashboard to cut glare.

Scott5114

Let me know if you find the ultimate material, Steve–as mentioned above black felt didn't really help too much.
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

mgk920

Quote from: kphoger on May 21, 2012, 05:14:23 PM
Flimsy plastic cupholders that you stuck in the window.
Hard plastic box with dividers to hold cassette tapes (I still have cassette tapes in the car, though).

Yep.
Yep.

In fact, going from cassette tapes to an iPod in 2004 saved one seat's worth of space in my car during roadtrips with a massive increase in available tunes.  On a couple of roadtrips during the early double-aughts, the lack of a tape player unit built into the car had me also bringing along a tape-playing boom box with detachable speakers (put the base unit on the front passenger seat floor with the speakers tossed onto the back seat floor) and an AC power inverter to power it - in addition to my GPS receiver (a nice Garmin GPSIII+ that I still use) and a CB radio.

And yes, that's a LOT of cords plugged into the lighter outlet!

:spin:

Mike

kphoger

I still prefer cassette tapes to CDs.  I have mix tapes that date back to the mid-90s; good luck finding a CD of mine from that time period that's not scratched beyond all recongnition.  I'm fortunate enough to have a car with both a CD player and a cassette deck built in; we just keep the CDs and a few tapes loose in the center console.

I used to keep a portable stereo in my delivery truck, because the whole stereo system didn't work at all.  I would just set it up on the dashboard, or behind a headrest.  CDs skip quite a bit, though, in a normal stereo when you drive on anything other than super-smooth pavement.

When I owned an 87 Corolla, I used a CD-man and a tape deck adapter and lighter adapter, then kept in place using that rubber kitchen drawer stuff.  That and a handheld CD, and I was really, really not cool.
Keep right except to pass.  Yes.  You.
Visit scenic Orleans County, NY!
Male pronouns, please.

Quote from: Philip K. DickIf you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

J N Winkler

Quote from: Scott5114 on May 21, 2012, 04:16:19 PMFor a little while I had a piece of black felt that I could velcro to the dash that would cut down on glare from the dash on the inside of the windshield. Unfortunately the summer heat melted the adhesive on the velcro, and it didn't cut down all too well on the glare anyway (now instead of vent glare, I had glare from little bits of sunlight reflecting off the felt's fibers...

I didn't bother making a new felt setup when I got my current car.

When taping or taking still photos while driving in bright sunshine, the only way to eliminate glare completely is to drive with the sun at your back at a time when the azimuth between the sun and the ground is less than the rake of your windshield.  Even if glare were not a consideration, I would suggest that this is still the best time and orientation for high-quality video because it ensures that signs are evenly illuminated while the light is still bright enough to allow a relatively narrow aperture to be used (thus increasing depth of field and sharpness of detail).
"It is necessary to spend a hundred lire now to save a thousand lire later."--Piero Puricelli, explaining the need for a first-class road system to Benito Mussolini

Scott5114

Quote from: J N Winkler on May 23, 2012, 04:37:44 PM
Quote from: Scott5114 on May 21, 2012, 04:16:19 PMFor a little while I had a piece of black felt that I could velcro to the dash that would cut down on glare from the dash on the inside of the windshield. Unfortunately the summer heat melted the adhesive on the velcro, and it didn't cut down all too well on the glare anyway (now instead of vent glare, I had glare from little bits of sunlight reflecting off the felt's fibers...

I didn't bother making a new felt setup when I got my current car.

When taping or taking still photos while driving in bright sunshine, the only way to eliminate glare completely is to drive with the sun at your back at a time when the azimuth between the sun and the ground is less than the rake of your windshield.  Even if glare were not a consideration, I would suggest that this is still the best time and orientation for high-quality video because it ensures that signs are evenly illuminated while the light is still bright enough to allow a relatively narrow aperture to be used (thus increasing depth of field and sharpness of detail).

Of course. But it is often difficult or impossible to create a route that visits the locations you wish to visit and allows ideal sun placement. If you want to do a daytrip to visit locales to the east of your starting point, you might well be driving into the sun on both the way out and the way back.
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

J N Winkler

Quote from: Scott5114 on May 23, 2012, 06:45:48 PMOf course. But it is often difficult or impossible to create a route that visits the locations you wish to visit and allows ideal sun placement. If you want to do a daytrip to visit locales to the east of your starting point, you might well be driving into the sun on both the way out and the way back.

My experience has generally been that fighting bad lighting leads to Pyrrhic victories.  Flash can be used for fill lighting, flat black surfaces can be used to limit glare, extreme underexposure can be used to suppress highlight blow-out, etc., but all of these remedies have technical limitations which are reached very quickly.

Back when I was still actively taking sign photos, my favorite remedy for shooting-in-the-sun situations was to park the car, take the picture on foot, and use flash for fill lighting (bouncing it off the sign sheeting) with enough exposure compensation (downward) to get blue sky.  This allowed me to get a satisfactory picture of the Spanish-language version of the New Mexico bat sign near Lordsburg despite extreme backlighting (sign faced north and sun was straight out of the south since it was winter).  But the scope for this particular technique is getting narrower because the newer microprismatic sheetings do not respond to flash illumination in a nicely progressive way, unlike the older engineer-grade and high-intensity sheetings.  The transition between dark sign and total washout is very sharp, which makes the sweet spot hard to hit.
"It is necessary to spend a hundred lire now to save a thousand lire later."--Piero Puricelli, explaining the need for a first-class road system to Benito Mussolini

Scott5114

I suppose how much you care about the sun being in a bad place is a direct function of how well-versed in photography you are, and how much you can tolerate a bad photograph. I typically am not too bothered by blown highlights as long as I can get good composition, the shot is not blurry (I hate it when the camera wants to focus on some spot on the windshield), and, of course, the sign is legible. As long as I have something interesting to show the other roadgeeks, any sort of great photography I manage to pull is just icing on the cake.
uncontrollable freak sardine salad chef

J N Winkler

This debate between good versus good enough is a very old one in roadgeek circles:  "A thing worth doing at all is worth doing well" can always be answered with "Excess effort is superfluous," and so on.  In my case I go for quality because (a) I was a serious amateur landscape and natural-light photographer long before I became a roadgeek, and (b) I have never really done road and sign pictures primarily for peer approval from my fellow roadgeeks--largely because I realized long ago that if roadgeeks draw enjoyment from any pictures I take, it will be for reasons completely different from why I like them.

This latter point was driven home to me by the most popular "roadgeek" picture I ever took, which was not even my own creative work, but rather a very low-quality camera copy (visible halftone screen and all) of the 80 MPH sign on the Kansas Turnpike, taken from the KTA annual report for the year that the 80 MPH limit was introduced.  For this mere copy, which anyone else could have gotten for the modest effort of going to the nearest reasonably well-stocked university library, I was feted for three days on MTR.

As a consumer of roadgeek photos and still videos, however, I still believe there is value in aiming for a certain minimum level of quality, just to ensure that you don't narrow your audience by excluding the people who are put off by things like bug splatter, badly blown-out highlights, handheld camera jitter, and the like.  The standard to be aimed for is not that of an art museum or picture gallery, but rather the kind of photographic reportage that state DOTs compile as part of their inventorying, recording, and inspection functions.  In other words, exposures can be noticeably off by up to (say) two-thirds of a full stop, but distracting and extraneous features (dead bugs, windshield headliner tint, pretty girl holding up the survey stick, etc.) are kept to a minimum, and the feature being documented is shown clearly under illumination as close to even as is reasonably practicable.
"It is necessary to spend a hundred lire now to save a thousand lire later."--Piero Puricelli, explaining the need for a first-class road system to Benito Mussolini

formulanone

#15
I think sometimes action or on-the-spot photography lends itself to a few more errors than the artist who has everything narrowed down to perfection and excludes all outside issues. I "permit" a certain bit of latitude because many of us shoot from a moving vehicle in occassionally less-than perfect conditions, compared to ability to stop and take time to make serious photographs, or has everything modeled and away from all outside influences (and probably has a tremendous budget for doing so!) This goes for things that are also outside the sphere of roading and travel...but quality also counts for something.

Sometimes I'd rather see one or two great pictures than 500 blurry, tilted, and uncomposed shots with absolutely no description. I probably take hundreds of photos on a day trip, but savor only about a quarter to a tenth of them when it's all said and done. Sometimes, the sun and conditions work in your favor, and sometimes nothing seems to come out right. Photography is an art, and we can be totally subjective about most of it.

Hey, on-topic...I found my WalMart phone card from about 2002 or so. Was home and cleared out some junk. Still think it would be useful, rather than carrying a silly spare Tracphone around on my travels.

Takumi

I think, looking at a lot of my pictures, you can tell for the most part when I was trying to take a photo of the setting and when I was just saying "well, you can see the sign" and moved on (which, to be fair, was 99% of them). This week I've been working on better picture quality, reading books on photography and working with different camera settings (as well as different cameras) so in the future my photos will hopefully be better quality.

And I think the only thing I have from old road trips is an old cup holder that I used in my vehicles that didn't have one originally.
Quote from: Rothman on July 15, 2021, 07:52:59 AM
Olive Garden must be stopped.  I must stop them.

Don't @ me. Seriously.

agentsteel53

I used to take horrid photos, but now I try to get at least reasonably decent ones.  for a sign worth stopping for, I will definitely try to make a composition that is at least slightly artistically sound.

this shot, from Dec '06, is about the first time I tried doing such a thing.



sometimes, if the lighting is impossible to work with in a traditional manner, I don't even try.



this one has always been one of my favorites, regardless of the mediocre shield styles.




live from sunny San Diego.

http://shields.aaroads.com

jake@aaroads.com

mgk920

Quote from: formulanone on May 25, 2012, 07:13:24 AMHey, on-topic...I found my WalMart phone card from about 2002 or so. Was home and cleared out some junk. Still think it would be useful, rather than carrying a silly spare Tracphone around on my travels.

Hmmmmm, could we all, perhaps, consider those WAL*MART/AT&T phone cards as being, sort of, 'Roadgeek™ licenses'?

:hmmm:

:nod:

Mike

formulanone

You talked me into it...


nexus73

@agentsteele: Slightly artistic?  You do very well with your pix!  The SR 14/US 97 scene is stunning BTW.  My strat for taking pix is take lots and then sort the wheat from the chaff later on.  I figure if I bat .500, it was an average day!  Even if I did worse, who's gonna miss all those 1's and O's anyway?

Rick
US 101 is THE backbone of the Pacific coast from Bandon OR to Willits CA.  Industry, tourism and local traffic would be gone or severely crippled without it being in functioning condition in BOTH states.

huskeroadgeek

I have an old leather briefcase that I used to carry my maps and other travel info in that I retired because it was starting to come apart in places. I've left it mostly undisturbed as sort of a monument to many roadtrips I took in the late 90s and early 2000s. It's filled with circa 2000 state highway maps, old map printouts from the early days of online maps(mostly from the long-defunct MapBlast), national park guides and maps, and some old Greyhound itineraries.



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