Marigold Tank

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A few more park photos, this time from Portland's "Marigold HydroPark" [map]. A "HydroPark" (the trendy BiCapitalization is theirs, not mine) is a chunk of land around a city water facility, open to the public as a park. They started doing this a couple of years ago to great, ok, moderate fanfare, around the same time they reopened Reservoir 3 to the public. I was a little curious about this, but none of the HydroParks were close enough for an idle excursion. Then I stumbled across one while on my way back from Marshall Park.

Well, "stumbled across" isn't quite accurate. I saw the big water tower, figured there just might be a park attached, and went to check it out. And sure enough, chance favored the prepared mind for once. Anyway, I took a few photos, and here they are.

It's not that I think water tanks are terribly fascinating, but there were some interesting shapes and angles and such going on, and there's not all that much else there to take pics of. It's a small parcel, sloping grassy lawn, some trees and shrubs, and a gigantic million gallon water tank. The city calls it "Marigold Tank", which incidentally would be a great name for a band.

I realize these things are perfectly safe and all that, but when you count the zeros on the sign and realize you're standing under up to a million gallons of water, you can't help but take a couple of steps back and look nervously upward. Then you go "ok, so that's what a million gallons looks like. Cool." Well, that was my reaction. Your mileage may vary.

Incidentally, the company that build the thing is still around. Here's their corporate history page, with lots of photos, although this particular tank doesn't get a mention.

Ok, I snuck a flower photo in on you there, so sorry. But they were right there, bright yellow and everything. I couldn't help it.

The tank is kind of interesting in B+W; the shapes and shadows are more interesting without all those distracting colors, etc.:

Oh, and I had to try a few infrared pics while I was there. Most didn't turn out that great, but you can at least tell where you are in this one:

friday flowers+etc. (for old times' sake?)

You probably won't believe this (or, more likely, won't care), but I haven't done one of these flower photo posts since June 11th. That's got to be a record or something, although I haven't actually checked.

I'm still not done with the mini-roadtrip photos, but sorting through them is more work than you might expect, and I'm feeling a bit surly and unmotivated right now. The weather sucks, work is utterly boring, and... well, that's the whole list actually, but it's enough.

So first off, here are a few from Tanner Springs, taken wayyy back when the sun used to shine in the summertime...










A couple from O'Bryant Square:






I'm not sure where these two were taken:






This was in a planter at Lovejoy Fountain Plaza:






And here's the "etc." portion of the post:

Astoria Column, then & now

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Here are a few pics of, and from, the Astoria Column out in (you guessed it) Astoria. Some were taken on my mini-roadtrip last month, and others are from the only other time I've been there, wayyy back in February 1979.

Regarding the 1979 pics, the originals actually look better than what you see here. The scanner I used on these is about a decade old. It doesn't do an overly professional job of figuring out colors, and its dynamic range is pretty limited, so if you have a photo with light parts and dark parts, you can get one or the other to come out somewhat decently. But not both. And it puts ugly vertical bands on everything it scans. And square objects come out a tad on the rectangular side, like photo #2 above. On the other hand, the scanner was free, and Ubuntu's default install includes a driver for it. So that's something, I guess.

The first couple of photos in the slideshow are more or less the same view of downtown Astoria, taken 28 years apart. The two roughly squarish photos were taken with a 126 camera, which you basically can't even find film for anymore. I'm not 100% sure whether I took those or not, since my own camera was a little 110 just like this one.

Here are a few of the column itself.

The old photos show the column was looking quite ramshackle in 1979. Just like everything else in Astoria back then, if memory serves. I'm afraid we have to thank the rich Californians for the city's recent revival... but don't tell them I said so. They're plenty smug enough already, the bastards.

The recent one (top one, silly) really isn't that great, I admit. I was mostly taking shots of the view from the column, but as an afterthought I decided I needed at least one photo of the column itself and took a quick snap of it. (If you want to see better photos of it, there's no shortage of them out on the interwebs. There are even a couple VR panoramas, which are less vertigo-inducing than you might expect.)

The column doesn't actually lean like that, in case you're wondering. Although that would make the trip up the stairs even more exciting than it already is. It's a dark, winding, narrow, rickety, alarming little staircase, with lots of tiny little oddly-shaped spiral steps.

If I'd taken a better recent pic, you could see how the city completely renovated the exterior a couple of years ago. There wasn't much they could do with the stairs, though. It's not like they could've made them any wider or anything.

In my defense, photographically speaking, the camera wasn't shaking in these shots. It was me that was shaking. Oh, and the stairs were shaking, too. I didn't remember the stairs being that scary in 1979.

Several kids ran past me on the stairs going both directions. Who knows, maybe they'll come back 30 years from now and they'll wonder if it was always that scary. Or they'll just float up to the top with their antigravity boots, sneering at all the poor chumps of decades past who had to worry about stuff like "stairs" and "exercise".

So anyway, here's the very top of the column, taken from the balcony.

A few grain ships on the Columbia. Ships tend to park in Astoria temporarily on their way to Portland. I don't know if it's due to the tide, or they're waiting in line for a river pilot, or the Astoria visitor's bureau pays them to create some nautical ambience, or what it is, exactly.

Looking south, here's Saddle Mountain and (I think) the Lewis and Clark River.

Just across the parking lot from the column, and steps from the gift shop, is this odd memorial to a local Indian chief who befriended Lewis & Clark while they were here, 200-odd years ago.

The memorial only dates to 1961, and was put together by people claiming to be descendants of the aforementioned chief. Which is a nice touch, certainly, although I don't know how you'd ever be able to prove a claim like that. If you're running a cash-strapped city parks department, and someone comes along wanting to give you something for free, most likely you don't ask a lot of tough questions. They could say grandpa was the Shah of Atlantis, for all you care, so long as their checks clear. But hey, I'm always a cynic, in case you hadn't noticed.

Fort Rock Cemetery

Some photos from the cemetery next to Fort Rock, out in eastern Oregon.

I sort of fixated on the "flags and headstones in the remote desert" angle, and it just didn't occur to me to get a closer look at any of the headstones. Believe it or not. Someone else did exactly that, though, and put together a fascinating Flickr photoset about it. A few more photos of the cemetery appear in this Waymarking gallery. All those photos make me wish I'd taken the time to look around more. Although if I had, I probably wouldn't have had the time to drop by Hole-in-the-Ground. In hindsight, that may be what I ought to have done. Oh, well. You live and learn.

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?