Category Archives: personal

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally

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This is not the rally that I remember

As a frequent visitor to the Tetons and Yellowstone, I often travel along Interstate 90 through Wyoming and South Dakota to reach these national parks. More than a few times I’ve passed through western South Dakota near the small town of Sturgis. Coincidentally the iconic Sturgis Motorcycle Rally that takes place each year in early August.

Leaving the national parks we passed and were passed by dozens (maybe hundreds) of motorcycle riders, pickup trucks and motorhomes towing trailers of motorcycles of all types and styles.
Here’s what I learned about the rally after talking to some of this year’s attendees.

One motorcyclist told me: “Attendance is way down”. This gentlemen, a senior about my age, tells me he’s been to the rally many time since the 1980s. The Dakota News Now (television station) said that attendance has been dropping steadily since 2015 when it was a record 740,000.

This year estimated attendance to be about 500,000 according to rally organizers. They attribute the drop to inflation, fuel cost, weather and aging demographic.

A group of motorcyclists were at the same hotel as we were staying. I mentioned to one of them that in the 1980s I used to see tents on the hills of Sturgis where motorcyclists would camp. He said that since then, so many attendees have become financially well off. His days of camping were long past and he pointed out his motor home saying that he drags his bike behind in a trailer from North Carolina and then drives his bike from the nearby RV park into Sturgis.
One of Sturgis’ nearby attractions is Mt. Rushmore National Monument. During our visit there we couldn’t help but notice the hundreds of rally attendees also at Mt. Rushmore. Here they were having an impromptu meeting to show their support and loyalty to our country’s veterans.
The city of Sturgis have been targeting younger attendees. They say that its efforts are paying off. A survey last year showed the average age of attendees was 50.8 years old compared with 53.5 years old in 2017. Most of the motorcyclists that I talked to were older than this 50.8 year average.

This same survey noted that 40% of rally goers in 2022 had household incomes of more than $100,000 a year. With the price of a road motorcycle hovering at the $20,000 mark, motorcycling most likely requires a decent income.

Written by:

Arnie Lee
 
 

Red Star Line Museum

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Emigration to America

A couple of years ago while visiting friends in Belgium we drove a short distance from Brussels to the nearby port city of Antwerp.

Antwerp is Belgium’s second largest city. It’s situated along the Schedt River which empties into the North Sea which is turn connects to the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the world’s biggest ports, Antwerp handles more cargo than any other port in Europe except nearby Rotterdam. Seeing the inviting waterfront surrounding us, we took a very pleasant sightseeing boat ride on the Sheldt.
After our sightseeing excursion, we explored the streets of Antwerp and stumbled upon the Red Star Line Museum.

The Red Star Line was a shipping company that operated between Antwerp and the eastern seaboard of the USA and Canada. Throughout Europe they advertised their routes and from 1873 to 1934 – sixty years – Antwerp was a center for emigration from the continent. Emigrants from Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, France, Italy and other countries traveled to Antwerp to board the ships bound for North America.
More than two million Europeans were passengers on the Red Star Line steamships from Antwerp to America’s large metropolitan centers – New York, Philadelphia, Boston. Paintings and displays in the museum depict the many travelers in Antwerp’s streets preparing for the long and challenging journey across the ocean to a destination that promised them a new, brighter future.
On display are curated personal belongings – clothing, suitcases, diaries, photographs, jewelry, toys – that punctuate the stories of individuals and families who decided to leave their homeland hoping for a better life.

For me, the Red Star Line Museum highlighted the overwhelming struggle that millions of individuals experienced reaching for a better future by having to brave the unknowns of emigrating to America.

If you’re interested in learning more, here’s the link to the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp.

How Dye Transfer Works

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A Simplified Expanation

If you got here by accident, you can read about my experience with dye transfer by going here.

NOTE: One of the overriding requirement for making a dye transfer print is to keep the three component colors (sometimes four if you add black for deep saturation) in perfect alignment. This is referred to as “registration”.

Color Separations Depending on the size of the transparency we use a 4″x5″ enlarger such as the one to the right or a larger 8″x10″ model. The original transparency is placed into the enlarger and projected through a red filter to make a negative on the monochrome film. Next the image is projected through a green filter to make a second negative and finally through a blue filter to make a third negative. Between exposures the enlarger is held totally immovable to maintain registration. Ahead of time the film is “punched” (similar to a paper punch) and placed onto an immoveable film holder so that all three exposures are in exact alignment. The three negatives are developed using conventional black and white chemicals.
To adjust the brilliance of the print a set of highlight negatives are similarly made. Here the exposures are quite short to produce a faint mask of only the brightest areas of the image – one each for the red, green and blue spectrum of the original. As its name suggests, this mask reduces the amount of exposure to the the image highlights.

A transparency has a very wide range of light values (brightness to shadow). Since it’s not possible to reproduce such a wide range, we have to make a set of contrast reducing negatives – again through red, green and blue filters.

The next step is to expose the gelatin coated mats. The thickness of the gelatin depends on the amount of exposure it receives. Each color negative is sandwiched with the corresponding contrast reducing and highlight masks and projected onto the mat material. Three mats are exposed one using the red filter negative, one using the green filter negative and the third using the blue filter negative. The mats are developed in a special tanning developer and when washed in hot water leaves a dye-absorbing gelatin surface.

The red filter mat is soaked in a cyan dye, the green filter mat in a magenta dye and the blue filter mat in a yellow dye. The amount of dye each mat absorbs depends on the thickness (and therefore exposure) of the gelatin. The mats are successively rolled onto the white photo surface using familiar registration techniques with the cyan, magenta and yellow dyes. The result is the dye transfer image.

You’ll find more detailed information about the dye transfer process than I am able to provide by clicking here.