Six new Alaska license plates await Governor's approval

Alaska House Bill 19, authorizing the Alaska DMV to create six new license plates, has headed to the Governor for approval.

The proposed new Alaskan license plates are all "special request" plates, and include:

* United States flag "In God We Trust" plates.
* Lao veteran plates (for US military service in Laos from February 28, 1961, and May 15, 1975).
* Plates commemorating the National Rifle Association.
* Breast cancer awareness plates.
* "Choose Life" plates.
* "Pro-Family, Pro-Choice" plates.

(via Alaska Business Monthly)

August 2010 ADN vanity plate article

Yes, I saw that today, the Anchorage Daily News ran a piece about vetting Alaskan vanity plates.

No real surprises, though I was pleased to see that there is a variety of people who review submissions.

Always good to see Alaskan plates in the press.

Plate of the week: SOLDIT

This is Charles Blalock, an Alaskan real estate agent.

I don't know him personally; I spotted this shot in the local newspaper. But anybody who includes their license plate in their professional portrait photo is OK in my book. :-)

Plate of the week: HOTH

Thinkgeek has posted what they believe to be the best Alaskan license plate ever. I did get a chuckle out of it when it clicked.

For those of you not acquainted with Star Wars lore: Hoth (Wikipedia).

Come along now - my joints are freezing up.

Plate of the Week: LETSRL

Speaks for itself today.

Statehood photomosaic poster

Photo credit: Craig Bauer

I have been taking photos of Alaskan license plates since 1996. People send me photos they took, or photos of their collection. I also save photos that I find on eBay and the Internet. My Alaska photo archive currently contains over 19,000 photos, representing 15,000+ unique Alaskan plate serial numbers and vanity strings (not counting pairs).

"Why?" seems to be a common question (way up there with "Are you crazy?" or "What the heck are you doing to the back of my car?") The main reason is that the more photos you have, the more you can tell about when various features of plates changed, etc. Partly for historical research, partly for collector information. But I've always wanted do something more.

A couple of years ago, I had the idea to make a photomosaic. After a long search for software that would handle license plate photos properly (see below), here are my dad and I holding the results of my first attempt!

How it was made

To create a photomosaic, you first collect a large pool of photos to use as tiles, and select a single photo to use as the base. The pool of photos are resized to match the tile size needed. The software then divides the single base photo into a grid of smaller sections, analyzing each section for color and brightness. Finally, the software analyzes each of the smaller photos for the best match on color and brightness, and assembles the final image.

Here's a close-up of the top-left corner of the image. You can click on it to see more detail.



The full image took seven hours to generate (on one core of an AMD Athlon X2 dual-core 2.4GHz processor running Ubuntu Linux). The software I used is a free, open-source package called Metapixel, for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. (For Windows, I recommend the free AndreaMosaic, which lacked a key feature.)

I used Metapixel because it had the right features for the right price. Most importantly, it lets you specify the dimensions of the tiles. Most photomosaic software assumes a photograph's dimensions (3 by 5, etc.), but most plates are 6" x 12", so the photos come out stretched and the plates look wrong. Also, Metapixel is open source, and I'm a big fan of unencumbered software.

I had the resulting image printed as a 3' x 6' poster at the Kinko's in Grand Junction. (They were extremely helpful and friendly!) And thanks to my family for waiting in the car while I explained in great detail what I wanted to accomplish to the Kinko's folks!

Where it's been

I made the poster while I was home in Grand Junction because I was headed from there to the 2008 Convention of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association in Salt Lake City. The poster drew a comment or two, though most of the license plate folks are there to see license plates, not derivative artwork thereof. ;-) We weren't allowed to hang anything on the walls at the convention center, so I wrapped it around a column instead:


And here the poster's current home: in the hallway of the Benson Boulevard office of the Alaska DMV!


If you're at the Benson office and have a few minutes to kill (and who doesn't?), it's down the hallway to your right as you enter the building. Just turn right past the written driver test area.

So ... have enough photos now?

Nope!

So this is one of the things I'm doing with the photos. I have other plans in the works. The more photos that I have (both for making mosaics, and for historical purposes), the better. I don't care if it's a 1921 or a vanilla blue-on-gold; I don't care if it's mint, covered in road tar, or half rusted through. Send me your photos!

Update 10:29pm: A couple of folks asked me how many individual images were in the poster. 115 plates wide by 119 plates high = 13,685 total license plate photos!

Update 9/10 7:09am: I can't believe that I forgot to thank the many people who made this possible! So many folks helped by sending me photos, giving me permission to use their photos, and letting me take photos of their plates at garage sales, at meets, in private collections, at the Museum, and on their cars. I couldn't have done it without you!

Palin's license plate in the ADN

The Anchorage Daily News recently ran a photo of this 1980s-era vanity plate in the paper (starting around Sep 3, 2008) and also in this thread, in which they report the plate as registered to Sarah and Todd Palin.

Photo source: Anchorage Daily News

"FE K9" is a reference to the Iron Dog, a famous snow machine race from Wasilla to Nome to Fairbanks. Todd Palin is a competitive snowmachiner.

Using the periodic table abbreviations are a clever way to get a larger word in fewer letters, and so great for vanity plate. In a state with a rich mining history, I've seen gold (AU) and silver (AG) on a number of plates, including:

AKAU4U
AU FVR
HIHOAG

What other elements would make a good Alaska plate?

Reported by Sean Morris of Alaskan Nomad. Thanks, Sean!

No CHICKEN in Cooper Landing

Improper Evidence of Registration and Title

"COOPER LANDING: On July 18 at approximately 7:40 p.m., Troopers observed a Green pickup towing a white cargo trailer traveling North at Mile 40 of the Sterling Highway. The trailer license plate was a decorative facsimile of an Alaska Centennial license plate, which read “CHICKEN.” Troopers contacted the driver Robert G. Johnson, age 52 of Chugiak. An investigation revealed that there was no record of the license plate and that the trailer had not been properly registered. Johnson was summoned to the Seward court for Improper Evidence of Registration or Title."

No investigation was needed to find record of that plate: "CHICKEN" has seven letters, and all Alaskan vanity plates have a maximum of six.

Here's another example: obviously not valid (seven letters), and clearly ill-advised for the purposes of staying under the Trooper radar:

Also a bad idea.
Photo courtesy Mike Wiener of bestplates.com

A cautionary tale for us all. Via the Turnagain Times.