More VuPoint fun

More photos taken with that $14.99 digital camera I picked up a while ago. The top photo and the last two were taken through that infrared filter I cobbled together. It's odd how IR photos taken with my usual camera come out in a range of pink, lilac, and orange tones, while with the VuPoint they come out sort of black and white.

If nothing else, the photos show that the camera's viewfinder image is a very, very rough approximation of what the end result is going to look like. You never know what you're going to get. It's like a box of chocolates, or whatever.

Meanwhile, I was at the antique store earlier today and picked up another new toy. Cute, huh? There are also some larger pics of the flash version. The thing uses 620 film, which can be tricky to come by. There's a camera store in town that does 120 -> 620 film conversions, so maybe that'll work for this lil' beastie and maybe it won't. I mostly got it as a shelf curio, but I just might take it out for a spin some time. I realize I've said repeatedly I have no interest in dealing with film cameras ever again, but I might make an exception now and then. Purity is so uninteresting, after all...







The above photo was taken through an especially wavy wine bottle. It's not camera distortion, though that would be a reasonable guess.







Here's those IR photos I mentioned...

two storms, long ago

I recently ended up with a free flatbed scanner, and I thought I'd try my hand at scanning some old photos I took as a kid. The scanner is about 9 years old and has some highly original notions about color fidelity, so here are a couple that looked good in greyscale. I took both of these with a little 110 camera I got for Christmas one year, if I remember right.

I'm not entirely sure when or where the first photo was taken. It was in an old photo album, and the other photos were of a family vacation to Yellowstone back in the early 1980s. (circa 1984, I'm guessing.) In any case, I assume it's from that trip since it's in that album, but I'm not 100% sure, and there's not a lot of context to be had from the photo itself. I never got into the habit of writing on the backs of photos, so no clues there either. I rather like the photo though. I'd be happy with this one if I took it today.

Second photo is a storm over the Pacific back in February 1979. I know the month and year because we were driving down the coast on another family vacation, and the weather was like this the whole time, which meant that I missed the big solar eclipse on Feb. 26th, 1979. So this would've been a few days before the eclipse, I expect.

Back in the present day, getting the scanner working under Ubuntu was a mildly irritating challenge. At first I was pleased to learn that Ubuntu came with SANE, an open-source scanner package that plays much the same role TWAIN does on Windows. It even had a driver for my particular scanner, and initially I couldn't believe my luck. And then it just wouldn't detect the scanner. It just refused to see it. After a great deal of searching about, I finally hit on the problem. The scanner's one of those old parallel port jobs, and the problem wasn't that SANE didn't see the scanner, it's that it didn't see the parallel port. Seems that if the kernel module for the parallel port device isn't loaded, and it isn't by default on Ubuntu, you have to modprobe ppdev as root to get the damn thing into the kernel. That causes /dev/parport0 to magically appear in /dev, but the device only grants access to root by default. I suppose you could run xsane as root if you wanted to, although it screams bloody murder when you do that (and rightly so). Or you could make the SANE backend suid root, but that's bad news too. Changing the permissions on the device seems like the least bad approach, or at least that's what I've been doing so far. Then there's xsane's peculiar gui to puzzle out. And I'm still not sure how to make colors come out correctly. Whoever designed the scanner was clearly a huge fan of blue-green. Other colors, not so much.

Honestly, I don't know how we ever got by without digital photos.

It occurred to me recently that it ought to be feasible to pack the innards of a digital camera into a 110 or 126 film cartridge. You could haul that mid-60's Instamatic out of mom's closet, brush off the dust, and start taking digital photos. The cartridge would need an image sensor (obviously), memory, a small battery, some support circuitry, and probably a USB connector somewhere. Everything else -- optics, shutter, flash, etc. -- would be provided by the surrounding vintage camera. It'd be a cool, geeky retrotech thing to have, but actually making something like this would be far beyond my measly skills with a soldering iron, and selling it would be far beyond my even measlier marketing/PR skills. Volunteers, anyone?

Fort Rock

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More mini-roadtrip pics, this time from Fort Rock [map], a bizarro volcanic structure just off Hwy 31 southeast of Bend. Fort Rock's just a few miles east of Hole-in-the-Ground, and shares a similar origin, but it's much more photogenic. I took quite a few photos of the place, and uploaded a bunch of them to Flickr. Then I realized this post would be wayyyy too bulky if I included all of them -- so the full set is here in case you're interested.

Some links about the geology of the area, from the USGS, OregonGeology.com (brought to you by Oregon's Department of Geology & Mineral Industries), and Volcano World (brought to you by OSU and the University of North Dakota). And the U. of O. has a page about the 9000 year old sandals discovered nearby, which was a major archeological find by Oregon standards. Hey, it's what we've got. It's not like we have pyramids. Not that I find much to admire about societies that spend all their time and energy building pyramids, mind you. Or Gothic cathedrals. Or tacky suburban megachurches for that matter. But I digress.

If Fort Rock was near Hollywood, just imagine all the westerns that would've been filmed here. It's a real missed opportunity if you ask me, and I'm not a rabid fan of westerns. And just imagine Captain Kirk fistfighting a shambling alien baddie here. I know I'd watch that.

If Fort Rock was in Europe, or anywhere else with a substantial population, it probably would've been used as a fortress or a castle some time in its long history. There would be historic buildings, and tour buses, and trinket shops with t-shirts, and there'd be one of those tacky nighttime laser shows they do. There'd be minivans full of harried parents and screaming kids. A McDonalds every 10 feet. Talented pickpockets working the crowd. Senior tour groups from Texas complaining loudly about all the "foreigners" and their horrible foreign ways. Groups of pasty white Brits on holiday, loudly binge-drinking on the local rotgut at 9 am. Flocks of Japanese tourists with expensive cameras. Obese German nudists lounging around looking smug.

But you'll find none of that here. Fort Rock was once used as a livestock pen, no doubt a very excellent one, until the owner donated it to the state parks department. There's a small (and never full) parking lot, a few basic interpretive signs, some picnic tables and restrooms. Several trails meander around within the rock walls. The tiny town of Fort Rock lies in the distance some miles away. But for the birds nesting in the rocks, and the constant desert wind, all is silence....

Marshall Park excursion

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...wherein I track down and explore yet another "secret" spot around town. This time it's Marshall Park [map], 25 acres tucked away in the West Hills, just upstream of much larger and better known Tryon Creek State Park. Tryon Creek runs through Marshall Park too, although it's just a small, rushing stream at this point.

The place isn't actually that secret, compared to the places I usually track down. The city parks website mentions it, there's an official sign at the parking lot, and there are plenty of well-maintained trails through the place. Hell, the surrounding area is officially the Marshall Park Neighborhood. There's even a Friends of Marshall Park group, which organizes volunteer work parties and such. But still, I'd never been there before, and I suspect most people have never heard of the place. Also, an Oregonian article about the park says it's secret, and who am I to argue with our local paper of record?

As part of the Tryon Creek watershed, the park does get a fair bit of attention from the city, and they have a number of official docs about it scattered around their website, including a vegetation summary, a riparian habitat evaluation, and a couple of watershed reports. The latter doc uses the term "Marshall Cascades" for the strech of Tryon Creek in the park, which seems like an appropriate name.

I was interested in the place because I'd heard there was a real, live waterfall here. Which is quite appealing right now with the ~100 degree weather we've been having. Unless I missed something, I think "waterfall" is sort of overstating the case. Experts can quibble about exactly what constitutes a waterfall, but if it isn't taller than me, I don't think it qualifies. What the park really has is a stretch of Tryon Creek rushing and cascading over rocks. Which is still nice and quite photogenic; it just isn't a waterfall. So here are the Marshall Cascades:

If you'd like to see what they look like when photographed with a "real" camera, by someone who actually knows what they're doing, here's one good example.

When I located the parking lot along SW 18th Place, there weren't any other cars there, so I figured the park would be empty. But it was full of joggers, kids, and people walking dogs. I imagine they all must've been from the neighborhood and didn't need to drive to the park. Another sign the park primarily caters to neighborhood residents is that although the park's full of very well maintained trails, there aren't any maps or signs telling you where they go. I suppose you're just supposed to know that already. I didn't, of course, so I did actually get lost for a brief while. I suppose I could've asked for directions, but being temporarily lost can be kind of fun, so long as it doesn't go on too long. It gets old quickly.

I evenually got my bearings and found the car, and it was off to the office for yet another dumb meeting. Being lost in the forest was a lot better, if you ask me. Sigh...

Not Strictly a Beer Trip

During my recent mini-roadtrip, I tried to visit local brewpubs around the state whenever it was practical. That wasn't the sole or primary focus of the trip, but I managed to work a few in during the trip. My rule (ok, guideline) for the trip as a whole was to only go places I'd never been before, so I figured I'd try to apply that to the beerish portion of the excursion as well.

After my adventure at Saddle Mountain, I decided it was time for a beer. (If you read this blog regularly, you probably know I decide that quite a lot.) Luckily, in Oregon beer is never far away. So I made the jaunt over to Bill's Tavern & Brewhouse, right in the heart of Cannon Beach.



It turns out that Cannon Beach had held its annual sandcastle contest a few days earlier, so Bill's was out of everything except their Blackberry Beauty and Spruce Lager. I tend to be something of a hop bigot, and I'm sure I'd have gone with something else if the selection had been wider. But it was a hot day, I'd been out hiking, and both beers were light and refreshing. So it all turned out ok in the end. The fish and chips were pretty decent too.

Neither the blackberry nor the spruce brew hits you over the head with its namesake ingredient, which to me is a good thing.



Beervana has a review of the place, and there's more about the beers at BeerAdvocate, Beer Me!, and PubCrawler.

Pleasant as those beers were, what I really wanted was an IPA. One of their guest taps was something called "Vortex IPA", from somewhere called "Fort George Brewing". I hadn't heard of them or the beer, and although it sounded promising, I was on a mission to try the house brews. Rules (or guidelines) are rules (or guidelines).

Turns out that Ft. George Brewing is local, just up the road in Astoria. I thought about heading up there around dinnertime, since I was staying in Astoria that night, but I ended up just falling asleep instead. I left town before lunch the next day, since I had to go catch a ferry, so I haven't actually been there or tried their beer yet. But here's their building, for future reference:



My rule (ok, guideline) for the trip as a whole (not just the beer) was to focus on places I'd never been before, so I didn't drop by Astoria Brewing or the local Rogue outlet. Not because they aren't worth visiting, far from it. It's just that I usually always go to Astoria Brewing when I'm out there, and there's a Rogue outpost a short stagger from my office.


A couple of days later, I drove for hours in the hot sun to get to Crater Lake, and then I spent a couple more hours in the hot sun taking photos, so once again I decided it was time for a beer. The drive was a bit longer this time, but worth it. Klamath Falls has two brewpubs, believe it or not. I only had time for one, so I decided to visit Klamath Falls Brewing, since I knew the least about it. The other brewery, Mia's & Pia's, is primarily a pizza place and I wasn't in the mood for pizza just then, so that's how I made the call. Unscientific, I know, but that's just how it is sometimes.





Klamath Basin had their Crystal Springs IPA on tap, bless their hearts. I've since realized I've seen it as a guest tap here and there in Portland, but I'd always passed over it in favor of something else. That was a big mistake. I'd been missing out on a really great beer.

The beer menu says their most popular brew is their golden ale, and gently hints that the IPA is very hoppy and might be on the bitter side for some people. That's the sort of thing I love to see: They're making the beer they want to make, and aren't dumbing it down for the newbies. A good rule (ok, guideline) is to always order the beer the beer menu warns you about. I seem to recall the IPA ran in the 80-9O IBU range, at something like 5-6% abv. I really ought to have written it all down, but I didn't, and I'm sorry. It's loaded with nice citrusy Northwest hops, I remember that much. If you see it around town, or you find yourself in K-Falls, give it a try. And if you're in K-Falls, the grilled tri-tip sandwich is what to eat. You can't go wrong with fish on the coast, and east of the Cascades you generally can't go wrong with beef. Eating anything other than beef on that side of the mountains has really got to count as unpatriotic or something.

Yes, I'm afraid I only had time for the one beer, since I still had to head east another couple of hours to get to my hotel. Klamath Basin also had a red that sounded promising, but it'll have to wait until next time, I guess.

At the time I didn't realize the brewery runs on geothermal heat, possibly the only one in the world to do so. Is that cool, or what?

More about the place at RateBeer, Road Brewer, and GuestOnTap.

A couple of days after that, I'd spent an hour or two in the hot sun at the Painted Hills, and decided it was time for... cider. For a change. Actually I was under strict spousal orders to drop by Bad Seed Cider over in Bingen, WA, just across the bridge from Hood River. We'd run across their cider at a Spring Beer & Wine Festival a couple of years back. They don't have any distribution at all in Portland, so every now and then we have to make the trip out to Bingen to stock up. This time it was so we'd have something good to drink during the Tour de France, instead of our usual cheap French rose.

I unaccountably forgot to take a photo of the place. It's a little storefront right in downtown Bingen, and I actually missed it the first couple of times through town because their new sign now reads "North Shore Wine Cellars". They do wine in addition to cider, and wine is a much larger market, so I suppose that's an understandable decision. I mention this so a.) you can find the place, and b.) you won't be intimidated by the phrase "wine cellars".

You might've gathered by now that I'm rather fond of their cider. If you like your cider dry, you just might enjoy it too. If you don't, I really don't have any useful advice to offer you, except maybe to grow some taste buds, already.

And yes, I'd been there before, despite what the rules say. You see, there are rules (and guidelines), and then there are spousal directives, which are another matter entirely.

So as I've already said, the trip wasn't primarily about beer, and I strayed from the Path of Beer on a few occasions. So since we aren't being strict here, I might as well throw in something beery that isn't from the mini-roadtrip at all, while I'm at it.

I was out near Estacada the other day, doing a bit of exploring that I haven't posted about yet, and once again I decided it was time for a beer. This time it was really close at hand, since Estacada has its own brewpub. Seriously. You run across Fearless Brewing at a lot of the local beer festivals, always featuring their Scottish Ale. That's a good rendition of the style, I understand, but the style itself is not among my favorites. I figured I'd check the place out and see if they had something that suited my personal biases a bit better.



The IPA was pretty good. I think I may have liked the Klamath Basin one better, but it's not like I had the two to taste side by side. I mentioned this was unscientific, right?

Believe it or not, I didn't try the tater tots. Tater tots are fine, or way more than fine, usually. When you're having a bratwurst & sauerkraut, though, what you really want is a pile of onion rings on the side. But you knew that already.



You know, come to think of it, I think it's about time for a beer right now. Mmmmm...... beeeer......

a good day for infrared

Since we're in day two of what the media insists is a Killer Heat Wave of Doom, I figured it was a good time to post some more infrared photos. I'd just like to point out I only learned how to do this about a week ago, so any non-constructive criticism will be cheerfully ignored.

If you really want to split hairs about it, the near-IR light digital cameras can see is not the same thing as thermal infrared, which requires a dedicated and vastly more expensive camera. So the "heat wave" hook is sort of tenuous, I admit. I should also point out that the colors you see here aren't "real", and are just the result of the camera trying valiantly to interpret the bizarro light it's detecting as a color photo. If I was going to be a purist about it, I ought to be taking the photos in B+W mode, but I rather like the effect here.

Top photo's from 10th & Burnside, downtown, showing the sculpture everyone calls "Satan's Testicle". It's actual name is "Pod", and it's by the sculptor Pete Beeman. FYI.

Below, a couple of shots from SW Ankeny near Broadway. Big Pink is very pink, just like everything else.





Above, looking west on Ankeny. The tree you see is part of Ankeny Park, just around the corner up ahead. That sun looks unbearably hot, doesn't it? Luckily I was standing right outside the door of Tugboat Brewing when I took this. Mmmm..... Beeeeer.....



This one's from about a block west of the last one, looking east this time. Trees around Burnside, the North Park Blocks, and Ankeny Park.

IR photos work best if you use a tripod, since you've filtered out most of the light and you need to go with longer exposures. But honestly, who wants to carry a freakin' tripod around all the time, just in case? Not me. At least usually not.

Oh, well. Like I said, this is all experimental so far as I'm concerned. And I kind of like the blur of passing cars in the photo. Everyone knows blurry passing cars are Art with a capital A.



More from the North Park Blocks. You've got to love the way foliage practically glows in IR.

The Talbot Property

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Recently I've made a minor hobby out of tracking down & taking pics of Portland's tiny, obscure city parks, and here's yet another one. This is the "Talbot Property", a small sloping wedge of land up in Portland's West Hills, at the crazy-quilt semi-intersection of SW Broadway (a.k.a. Patton Road), Vista Ave., and Talbot Road [map].

There isn't a lot on the net about the place other than passing mentions in a few docs from the city, although (as usual) the parks bureau's list of parks doesn't mention the place, and (as usual) there's no official city park sign here. A doc titled "West District Profile" lists the city parks on the westside, and says the Talbot Property was acquired in 1932, and totals a measly 0.04 acres, or 1742 square feet. That's far too small to hold a house in the West Hills, which I suppose is why there's a mini-park here instead. These days they might protect it due to the park's four old Douglas fir trees, but that wasn't much of a civic priority back then.

The city's PortlandMaps.com service lists the place as property #R326839, listing it not as a park, but merely as "vacant land" zoned for recreational purposes.

Another doc concerning a proposed parks levy merely mentions that the park sits at the intersection of SW Talbot & Patton. The triangular park is bordered by Patton on one side, Talbot on another, and on the remaining side by a short flight of stairs.

The park also appears prominently on the city's SW Portland Walking Map, with an icon saying there's drinking water here. I don't know whether this counts as a Benson Bubbler or not, but if so it's one of very few outside of downtown. In fact the only other one that comes to mind is one that used to be at the corner of SE Milwaukie and Powell, and it hasn't been there for years and years and years.

The other "feature" of the park is a bus shelter, served by the #51 heading from Council Crest to downtown Portland. The area around the bus shelter is marked off by an old stone wall, which may date back to the 1930s when the park was created. In those days Council Crest was served by a streetcar instead of city buses, so I suspect this place was built as a streetcar stop way back when.

It took a while for the bus to come, and I was fortunate the bus shelter was here, as several intermittent cloudbursts drenched the area while I was waiting. On the bright side, that made for some good Water Droplets On Stuff macro photos. There's really not much to do here except look at the landscaping anyway, and rain makes it just that much more interesting.