Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Photo #20,000: IA 10 becomes SD 46 north of Hawarden, July 20, 2012.

The 20,000th photo stored in my archive came during a trip to northwestern Iowa, to travel IA 60 for a third time and clinch the few remaining roads in the area. It’s one in a cluster taken at the South Dakota state line where IA 10 goes north to become SD 46.

The biggest and best tool that has helped me manage my collection is iPhoto. In 2009, when I got a new computer with new iPhoto and could add locations to photos instead of just keywords, that brought new ways to sort (despite some flaws in the programming).

I have some unique crossovers in my photo-place-locations. I have both Delaware County, Iowa, and the state of Delaware; Lincoln, Iowa, and Lincoln, Nebraska; and of course Washington, DC, and a bunch of Washington Counties.

By the numbers, through Nov. 30 (about 11½ years of photos), here’s what has been categorized:

• Seven highway ceremonies under three different governors, including all the major ones except the Fort Madison bypass. Certain politicians and reporters were at multiple ceremonies as well, but none at all of them.
• 36 states, three provinces, and DC with photos, six film-only. States with the fewest pictures: Maine (1), Rhode Island (2), Massachusetts (4), Connecticut (6), and Oregon (6), all film.
• 660 photos related to US 20 (515 outside Black Hawk County)
• 975 photos in Tama County
• Over 7,000 that are tagged as not highway- or sign-related, although my rules aren’t rigid for that.
• 11,559 in Iowa — 55% of the total — followed by Missouri (1310), Illinois (1226), and Texas (!) (700).

Here’s what the iPhoto map of Iowa looks like. Since pins disappear as you zoom out, a US map wouldn’t look as intimidating.

Photo #7500: Parliament Building in Ottawa, June 26, 2007

The second half of the 2000s was my most prolific photographic period, evidenced by my racking up 5000 photos in 26 months — doubling the collection. This included my second and third trips to Canada before the rule requiring passports was initiated. I also got to all 99 counties in Iowa and took some short but intense road trips in the Midwest.

Photo #10,000: Early morning in Richmond, Virginia, on a three-state day, July 13, 2008

Perhaps my most ambitious trip was going halfway across the country to the Hampton Roads area in July 2008, covering dozens of counties and all of I-64 east of central Illinois.

Photo #15,000: US 177 over the Washta River, southern Oklahoma, Aug. 6, 2010. Photo #17,500 is one of those “blurry but can’t throw it away” shots, so I’ll skip that.

This decade, things have not gone as well. Personal issues and soaring gas prices have slowed down my travels, as well as the fact that it takes a lot longer to get to new places.

(Part 3 coming up.)

My family got a relatively early start on the digital camera age. There are 900×1200 photos taken from 2000 and 2001, although we mostly used film at the time.

The first photos I took specifically for a website date to June 2001, and are also film. This was concurrent with learning that Wal-Mart had an option to order CDs with digital versions of the film rolls. The first digital pictures came a few months later. I was able to use one of our film cards to take about 75 pictures during the Independence Bowl trip — my first digital pictures outside Iowa.

This July, I took my 20,000th picture for the archive. With this being 11 years since I began Iowa Highway Ends, it’s time to take a look back. Below are scaled versions of the original photos taken at numerical milestones.

Photo #1000: County Road C47 (old IA 72) at I-35, Sept. 13, 2002

Photo #2500: Beeds Lake State Park (end of old IA 134), Sept. 5, 2003. This is from the “bad camera” era.

In 2004, I got a laptop with iPhoto on it. The keyword function alone made importing my by-now-thousands of photos worth it. My homemade version of folder numbering and dating was not quite obsolete, though, as it would make a good repository for originals I didn’t want to destroy, but didn’t want to put “into the system.” So really, the number in the title is the number I’ve kept, and doesn’t include out-of-focus versions or duplicates. (Unfortunately, it seems that I keep taking more and more shots that are just enough out of focus to notice, but not enough to trash.)

Photo #5000: County Road F20 (old IA 301) at I-29, May 7, 2006

(To be continued later)