shadow corridor

These two Vegas photos are from the short skybridge between the Bellagio & Vdara hotels, beneath the tram station to the Monte Carlo. Shown here are the shadows of said skybridge & tram station on the vast blank back wall of the new (as in, opening mid-December 2010) Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas hotel & casino. Not only is it a blank wall (and undecorated blank walls are awfully rare in Vegas), there's no obvious way to get to the Cosmopolitan from the skybridge, the tram, or either of the adjacent hotels. Unless you walk all the way out to the Strip, which is surprisingly far from here.



Most of the properties on the west side of the Strip are part of the MGM Mirage empire, and the Cosmopolitan is one of the rare exceptions. Its developers managed to obtain a small wedge of land and built a pair of very tall towers on it -- which were once intended to be condominiums before the condo market imploded. Complicating the matter even further, an existing building on the site (the older Jockey Club timeshare resort) wouldn't or couldn't sell, and they ended up building around it instead. The towers appear to have great views of the Bellagio fountain and the Strip that would've otherwise gone to MGM's Aria & Vdara hotels. That plus the whole blank wall, no walkway thing suggests to me that relations between neighbors here are other than cordial. I don't actually know that for a fact, but it kind of stands to reason.

september shadows

Shadows on downtown Portland's mod 60's Data Processing Building, the low & mostly windowless building attached to the Wells Fargo Center by a groovy skybridge.

This building would have originally held a ginormous mainframe computer, water cooled, with an insatiable appetite for punchcards, its every need attended to by the high priesthood of the Data Processing Department. And raw processing power dwarfed by that of a modern-day iPod. But at least they built an interesting building to hold it. That tends not to happen in the 21st century, although on the flip side modern IT departments no longer have theological aspirations. Or at least nobody outside IT buys into them anymore.

shadows, old town

shadows, burnside

A few photos from that strange parallel world where objects have colors and shadows.

Those of you who recognize the location might be wondering how I could stand there taking photos of shadows while homeless people slept in doorways just feet away. I'm kind of wondering that myself, to be honest. It generally just doesn't occur to me to take photos of people, with or without their permission. And I'm not sure I'd pull it off properly if I did. My gut feeling is that the results would come off as exploitative and kind of anthropological, like a 50's National Geographic article about a primitive Amazonian tribe, except the photos wouldn't be as good. That's my after-the-fact excuse, at any rate.

bricks, trees, shadows

palm shadows, fremont street

I suspect this photo is only interesting if you don't see palm trees every day. In my defense, this was taken while I was busy, er, researching that earlier post about Vegas brewpubs.

I believe at this point I was wandering down Fremont St. in search of a 99 cent deep fried twinkie. More about which later, probably.

shadows, sw 2nd & clay

a brief january sunbreak

It's no secret that the weather's been getting me down lately. Read the last few posts here, and you'll notice I've blabbed on and on about it for some time now -- unless you get bored first and depart to a more fascinating corner of the interwebs, which I suppose would be understandable.

So the sun came out today, and it was great. I left the office and wandered around outside for a few hours, enjoying a world with actual colors other than gray for once. It's gone now, of course, but it was fun while it lasted. I think I even saw my shadow. Although here in Portland seeing your shadow in January means another six months of winter. And not seeing your shadow in January means precisely the same thing.

I realize I ought to say a few words about the Iowa caucuses or something, and I realize most people would rather read that than read about my wintry angst, but I can't bring myself to do it. Oregon's primary isn't until May, and the nomination's bound to be decided by then. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping Edwards pulls it out, but I realize the odds are against that. We'll probably nominate another middle-of-the-road, voted-for-it-before-I-voted-against-it, didn't-inhale, Hollywood-friendly no-hoper instead, like we usually do. So I'm also crossing my fingers and hoping the R's nominate Huckabee or one of the other Bible-thumping nutjobs, because the D nominee is going to need all the help s/he can get.

In any case, I took a couple of photos of today's sunbreak, just to prove it really happened, and here they are. I didn't colorize them in GIMP or anything, the sky really was blue, just briefly.

I think I need a long vacation. Somewhere very, very warm. With fruity tropical drinks with parasols and whatnot, and no email, or at least no corporate email. And parrots. And broadband.

Stonehenge (II) : B+W

More Stonhenge pics, this time in glorious black-n-white. It's a good place to look for interesting shadows, and when you're doing that, color is not an asset.

(Okayyy, fine, before anybody gets all pedantic about it, I do realize that a b+w photo from a digital camera is actually a desaturated color photo, using a Bayer filter and interpolation and all that fun stuff. Sheesh. Get a life.)