daisy, 1st avenue

twitpic'd

Updated 2/8/23: This post started out life as a gallery of Twitpic thumbnails, which (once upon a time) pointed at pages on Twitpic.com hosting the original photos. But Twitpic hasn't existed since 2014, so all the photo links I had here were broken for roughly nine years. I figured the original photos were just gone since I hadn't copied them to Flickr in time, but it seems the Wayback Machine made a sweep thru Twitpic just before they closed up shop, and if I have the original URL it's easy to find archived copies (like this one ). Unfortunately they didn't archive user profiles so I can't get a list of all my photos over there, but I was at least able to rescue the photos in this post plus a few more referenced in Twitter and Google search results, and I could probably find more photos by downloading my Twitter archives (which I've been meaning to do anyway) and searching for old twitpic links there. Anyway, I added them all to an "Ex-Twitpics" set and made a slideshow of them, mostly because recreating a table full of tiny little thumbnail images seemed tedious and dumb in this day and age. The original text of this post follows after the divider:

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So I've got this shiny new phone, and I've only just figured out how to post photos straight to Twitpic. Said photos are then tweeted automagically, which is a handy trick. I, uh, ran a little wild with that today, and here's the damage so far. As far as I know, Twitpic only gives you embeddable html for 150x150 thumbnails, but they're supposed to link to the full-sized originals. So we'll see how that turns out. (Also, here's a link to my Twitpic profile, if you want to browse 'em all for some reason.) (Oh, and my Yfrog one is here. I went back & forth between them until I had a phone that did Instagram.

I've also got an app that posts to Flickr, which is where the other few thousand of my photos live, so that's nice. What I'd really like to do, though, is post one or more photos to Flickr and have them auto-posted here. Geotags and all, if possible. And the same with YouTube videos, ideally. That's the, well, I hesitate to call it a "workflow", but it's the sequence of events I'd like to occur on my behalf. That's got to exist somewhere already, right? I don't seriously have to write a tool for that myself, do I?

phototuesday

A few more recent photos, which (except for the top photo) fall into two broad (and very familiar) categories: a.) flowers, and b.) reflections of stuff in other stuff. The "reflected stuff" photos (and the top photo) are from around Old Town & Chinatown here in Portland. I don't usually do a lot of Old Town / Chinatown photos. The area presents kind of a dilemma to me. I'm not really big on doing gritty "Ooh, look, poverty!" shots, which seems exploitative and doesn't help anyone. And if, instead, you focus on the cool old buildings and ornate architectural details and so forth, and generally make the area look attractive, it plays into the hands of the gentrifiers - the PDC and the upscale condo tower crowd - and if five years from now the place is nothing but wall to wall doggie day spas and snooty martini bars and luxury SUVs, it'll be partly your fault. And either way, taking photos there involves walking around that part of town with a very conspicuous and expensive camera, without dying. Which is not to say I don't or won't do it, it's just that there's kind of a dilemma about the whole thing.

Handwringing aside, I'm not actually out of blog material, believe it or not. Not anymore than I usually am, at any rate. There's yet another bridge post in the works (the St. Johns this time), but those always take a while to put together. So for now, enjoy the flowers. And the reflected stuff. And the top photo.

as seen on wikipedia

A great thing about the Creative Commons license is that you never know where your stuff will turn up next, or who will use it, or what they'll use it for. Case in point: I recently noticed that a couple of my photos on Flickr were getting hits from Wikipedia. After a bit of poking around, I was surprised to see photos I'd taken gracing a couple of Wikipedia pages. Which is perfectly fine with me -- Creative Commons and all that -- it's just kind of surprising. Does that mean I've finally hit the big time, after years of toiling in the dusty backwaters of blogospace (to coin a mixed metaphor)? Or is it a sign Wikipedia's in even more trouble than I thought? I really don't know what to make of it all.

So check out the articles on Mill Ends Park and O'Bryant Square. The O'Bryant Square article is poorly written and uninformative, and uses one of my Holga photos of the place, if you can believe that. I'm half-tempted to sign up and edit the article myself, but so far I've managed to avoid getting sucked into that particular vortex of the Interwebs. Once you start messing around on Wikipedia, I imagine there's no end to it. There's always another poorly-written article to clean up, or tag with the omnipresent "does not cite references" warning, and there's always a pointless interpersonal flamewar to join. In many ways, Wikipedia seems to be the Usenet of the 21st century. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, or at least not entirely in a derogatory sense.

A search on Wikimedia Commons shows that over time, over a dozen photos of mine have been uploaded by various people, although most don't appear in actual WP articles, at least that I'm aware of. (I've also added the tag 'wikipedia' to the original photos on Flickr, FWIW)

The Pool of the Winds

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A few pics of "The Pool of the Winds", a little spot out in the Gorge with a melodramatic name straight out of a cheesy fantasy novel. It's an upper segment of Rodney Falls, on the Washington side near Beacon Rock. The water's carved sort of a bowl, almost a cylinder, into the rock. The water falls in from the top, spilling around a log that somehow ended up here. The water and mist rush out of a narrow gap in one side, and the rough cylindrical shape seems to amplify the noise.

This post has been lurking in my 'drafts' pile for quite a while (as in "3 months to the day"), for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not really thrilled with these photos. The only viewpoint is right next to the pool, and my little point-n-shoot digicam isn't wide-angle enough to capture things properly. I either didn't have my handy wide-angle conversion lens with me, or I hadn't bought it yet. I don't recall clearly now, but I think it was the latter, which got me on the path of buying all sorts of photo doodads. So I guess I may have the pool to thank for that.

If you'd like to see some better photos than these, here are a few I ran across on the interwebs: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. And here's a video clip if you're interested.

Second, besides the photos, I don't really have all that much to say about the place. It's a short spur off the trail up Hamilton Mountain, so it's probably worth a quick look if you're there anyway. I saw the name "Pool of Winds" (the 'the' seems to be optional) while trolling the interwebs and decided I had to go check it out. And really the name's the best part, as it turns out. In fact, further up the trail I remembered I'd actually been to Hamilton Mountain before, years ago, and the Pool of Winds just really wasn't that memorable. Oh, well. Great name, though. It's got that, at least.

So without further ado or delay, here are a few assorted links about the place.

• A page at dwlz.com, with lots of photos.
• Info at localhikes.com
• Oregon Hikers' Field Guide has pages on Hamilton Mountain and The Pool itself.
• Waterfalls Northwest
• TrailsNW
• NWHikers.net
• A post at rainy day knits
• Oh, here's another video clip. I found it was easiest to save locally and play from there, but YMMV.

Winter at Dalton Falls

A few photos of icy Dalton Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge, taken earlier this morning. If you've never heard of Dalton Falls (and most people haven't), you might want to check out an earlier post of mine here, which is where I keep my slim supply of useful info about the place.

Driving out there this morning was only a moderately bad idea, as it turns out. It's not true, strictly speaking, that many Bothans died to bring you this information. There was a bit of sleet coming down now and then, but mostly it was just very cold rain, so that was ok, I guess. I came across the site of an earlier accident on the Gorge highway, but the tow truck had it cleared within minutes of when I got there, and I didn't have to wait long. So that was ok too, or at least it was for me. And the falls were running for once and properly iced up, just as I'd hoped, and some of the photos turned out reasonably ok, or at least semi-fixable in GIMP. (I took a few more with the old Spotmatic, so we'll see how those come out when I have the film developed.) After taking these pics, I then had to scurry back into town for an important meeting with the PHBs. I almost missed it, but didn't, so that was ok as well -- although all things considered, I think I'd rather take "semi-fixable in GIMP" photos in 33-degree sleet than talk to a bunch of clueless PHBs again. All in all, nothing terrible happened this time around. Although I should point out before anyone else does that deliberately driving out to the Gorge while a winter storm watch is in effect is really sort of sub-brilliant. And the drive wasn't my idea of a good time, exactly. Wasn't much fun at all, actually. Yech.

Now that I'm here in my nice, toasty cubicle, with nice, toasty interweb access, I see that oil now costs over $100/barrel. I'm not even going to speculate about a dollar value on this morning's little foray, but under the circumstances I probably won't make a weekly habit of it.

There's another recent photo of the falls (albeit without ice) in this OregonHikers thread. One commenter actually links to my Dalton Falls post as a source of good info, which just goes to show how scarce authoritative info is about the place.

For future reference, the falls are just uphill from milepost 31 (above) on the old Columbia Gorge highway. If you find the milepost and don't see a waterfall directly uphill, the waterfall's gone dry and you'll need to come back some other time.

Above & below, a couple of variations on a "wintry grimness" theme, at the mini-parking lot for the falls. You'd almost think I'd been to art school or something.

The falls from inside a nice, warm car.

winter trees

More winter trees, for your grim, gothic, wintry 'enjoyment'. Ok, technically they're the same trees as last time around, but I used different cameras, so it's not precisely the same thing. Or not.



The trees are next to one of the streetcar stops on Lovejoy up in NW Portland. I don't remember which one, but it's whichever one is closest to the Lucky Lab brewpub. After a couple of beers, taking lots of photos of bare trees seems like a fantastic idea.



The even-numbered pix were taken with a Pentax Spotmatic SP, circa 1964-66, with a Super Takumar 50/1.4. The odd ones were taken with a Mamiya 1000 DTL, circa 1967, with an Auto Sekor 55/1.8. They're both nice cameras, picked up at local antique stores for a pittance. Any failings you see in the photos are my fault. Or the fault of the el-cheapo drug store ASA 200 film. Or the one-hour-photo hut....




Or the weather itself, for that matter. I'd like to take this opportunity to register a formal complaint about the weather. I'd much rather post photos of flowers, or waterfalls, or colorful ethnic festivals, or basically anything besides grim winter weather. But that's what we've got at the moment, so here we are. I suppose I could still do, I dunno, food, or something, but the weather's giving me a creative block. All I see right now is bare trees and rain, everywhere, as far as the eye can see. It's not depressing, exactly, merely frustrating. I mean, these pics were taken with color film, believe it or not. The curving limbs and branches are cool and all, but the lack of color is seriously cramping my style.