Joan of Arc & Her Sisters

So here are a few photos of Portland's very own Joan of Arc statue, located in the traffic circle at NE 39th & Glisan up in Laurelhurst. I don't get over to Laurelhurst too often, so I vaguely knew it existed, and I vaguely recalled that she'd been restored a few years ago, but that's about it. Then in July, during this year's Tour de France, I noticed the riders passing a statue that looked exactly like ours, so I made a mental note to investigate further. (The riders themselves were probably too wigged out on EPO and steroids to notice the statue, but that's neither here nor there.)

So I made a special trip to go find the statue, on behalf of this humble blog's nano-horde of Gentle Reader(s), and took a few photos. I'd intended to use a bunch of photos taken with my "new" antique store film camera, but that was one of the rolls I trashed early on, so I've only got these two pics to show for all my trouble. There are plenty of better photos of Joan out there on the interwebs if you don't like mine: Portland Ground, Portland Bridges, Waymarking, and Dreamstime.

Updated 7/29/09: It always bugged me that the two photos attached to this post were fairly substandard, since it really is a very cool statue. So I went back and took a new batch, and I like to think they're a step up from the originals. I also added the now-obligatory embedded Google Map, just to keep things modern and all. I punted the original photos to the end instead of deleting them, I guess so you can make up your own mind about the "step up" thing, if you care to. I took some infrared photos too; they didn't seem to fit here, so they got their own post.

In any case, it turns out that our Joan has eight sisters scattered around the globe. The one in Paris, four others in France, including one in Nancy and another somewhere in the Vosges region, near the Swiss border; ours; two others in the US, in Philadelphia & New Orleans; and another in Melbourne, Australia. I'm not sure where all the French ones are located. The Musee d'Orsay has an ungilded statue that might be stone or plaster. I'm not sure if it counts as one of the four or not.

It might be a fun project to travel the globe and visit all of the statues. But a word of warning, it seems that the Paris statue is revered by the French far right, and they make regular pilgrimages to it and do whatever it is that French right-wingers do. If you see a bunch of disreputable thugs (or whatever French right-wingers look like -- I really have no idea) hanging around the place, it's probably best to steer clear. Or at least bite your tongue and not mention the fact that the guy who donated the statue was Jewish. Explaining this inconvenient fact to them will just make them irritable and stabby, if they're anything like our right-wingers.

Our own statue has no unsavory associations, at least not that I'm aware of. If you want to know more about it, and how it got here, there are a few good starting points OurLaurelhurst.org, Portland Public Art, and jejune meanderings. Or if you just want the executive summary, a local businessman donated it to our fair city as a World War I memorial. The same conflict also brought us our very own Stonehenge, out in the Columbia Gorge. In contrast, our official World War II memorial is Memorial Coliseum. It's certainly much larger than Joan of Arc or Stonehenge, but the Coliseum's gone a bit shabby over the years, and these days it mostly plays host to Winter Hawks games. Meanwhile both Joan and Stonehenge have been extensively restored within the last decade or so. It's odd how these things work out.

The traffic circle is a city park ("Coe Circle Park"), although as usual the city parks department's website doesn't list it. It does show up in assorted city documents such as this one, which is also one of the only mentions of cute little Jewett Park and the Talbot Property anywhere on the interwebs. Other than this humble blog, of course. For whatever that's worth. Said document also manages to misspell "Glisan" as "Gilsen", which I understand is a deportable offense, or at least one where everyone else in the office gets to make fun of you. Since it's a park, you can technically go and wander around, or have a picnic, or at least get a closer look at the statue. I didn't, as you can tell from my two photos, because crossing the street looked dangerous, and I didn't think it'd be worth it. But here's a report at Urban Adventure League about a gaggle of cyclists riding to the park and having a picnic there en masse. So it's obviously possible to do that with nonzero odds of survival, at least if you believe stuff you read on the net. Sometimes I think this blog would be more interesting if I was just a little bit braver, and/or less antisocial. But the thought passes quickly, and I go back to my usual photos of flowers and acorns and whatnot. So it goes.

Updated 7/29/09: For the new batch of photos, I did cross the street and get a closer look. Does that mean I'm braver, or at least more determined, than I used to be? It's fun to think so, although getting across to the statue wasn't actually a big deal. I just used the old "wait for a gap in traffic" trick, and voila. Yay for me, or whatever.

an acorn and an old camera

So a week or so ago I picked up a 60's-era film SLR camera at a local antique shop. I paid peanuts for it, because nobody wants to shoot film anymore, and nobody wants to tweak all those confusing exposure settings by hand. A couple of days later I picked up a macro bellows at a different local antique shop. I paid even fewer peanuts for it, since nobody even knows what a macro bellows is these days. I gather they're deeply unfashionable devices even in photo-geek circles. And I'll grant it's a rather awkward device to work with, even when you're just sitting at the kitchen table taking photos of an acorn.

I really ought to have kept notes about what I was doing in each photo, but I didn't. I think the first two shots were with the bellows plus a 2x teleconverter I tracked down at a third antique shop (and paid peanuts for), and with the bellows only extended a short ways. I think that's what I was up to, but I'm not 100% sure now. The next photo is basically the same as the first. I know I must've done something differently, maybe used a different shutter speed, perhaps, but I can't recall what I did now.



Since I'm new to this, I wasn't 100% certain of what exposure settings to use. I've been using my digital point-n-shoot to estimate other situations, but that wasn't possible once I started connecting macro widgetry, so I had to guess instead. I still need to track down a PX625-ish battery for the camera's meter. Although that might not be 100% reliable, since the camera really wants a mercury battery, ancient politically-incorrect beastie that it is. More about that fun situation and what to do about it here if you're interested.

So my big concern was whether I had enough light or not. The bellows came with a little chart explaining just how much longer your exposure needed to be at various bellows extensions. So to be on the safe side I cranked the aperture all the way up to 1.4 to let as much light in as possible, and set the shutter as slow as I figured I could do and still handhold the whole contraption. Putting it on a tripod just didn't occur to me. So setting it at 1.4 means you've got very shallow depth of focus, which to me is kind of cool. I've never had anything with a lens that fast before, so it's still a bit of a novelty for me. This setup is going to come in handy when there are flowers out again, several dark & rainy months from now.

I should point out that in this next photo there's also a fair amount of motion blur, which isn't anywhere near as l33t. Like I said, I'm new to all of this stuff.



Oh, and for the sake of completeness, I picked up the acorn at the MAX stop near Lloyd Center. I just picked it up and paid zero peanuts for it. I have no idea what the peanut-acorn exchange rate is like these days, come to think of it.



Now here we go. Holy narrow depth of field, Batman.



Oh, and here's my super-elaborate "studio", with the acorn ready for its closeup:

an unusual sunrise, fwiw

Or, Additional Adventures in the Blogo-Doldrums.

I happened to be up at dawn the other day, something I usually go to great lengths to avoid. The sunrise looked a little odd, so I took a few photos, and here they are. Are sunrises always like this? I ask, because I don't see them very often, and when I do, generally the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet. I'm curious now, but not quite curious enough to get up early on a regular basis, so I was hoping maybe someone out there on the interwebs knows. And then I can just say I'm sure it's true, because I saw it on the interwebs. Or something.

I also took a few photos with the "antique" film SLR I bought recently. But you won't see those photos here because I managed to ruin my second roll of film in a row. Last time I just didn't know how to thread the film into the sprockets properly so it didn't advance. The second time, I forgot it was 24 exposures, not 36, and tried to advance the film anyway, and it broke clean off. I blame both mini-calamities on bad habits I picked up with my last film camera, an 80's era fixed-focus point-n-shoot. It's not a great camera, by any means, but it did protect you from shooting yourself in the foot, which is something, I guess.

I did manage to get a third roll exposed and rewound without incident, and it's at the photo shop as I write this. I'm curious how it turned out, and I suppose a bit nervous too. I really shouldn't be nervous, since M42 SLR gear is extremely inexpensive these days. I'm having the pics put on a CD too (a medium only slightly less obsolete than film itself, if you ask me) so if they don't completely suck I'll post a few when I get 'em back. I might post a few even if they do suck, just for kicks.

I figured I'd post the sunrise pics anyway, since I'm kind of short on material at the moment. I do have one batch of mini-roadtrip photos I still haven't posted from way back in June, and I've seen a few bad movies recently, so I might write about those. But overall things are in something of a rut right now, both blogwise and otherwise. I'm not sure what sort of action is called for, however. Maybe we'll move overseas for a while or something. That would certainly shake things up a bit. This humble blog might even become interesting again, if I'm lucky.

Anyway, about that sunrise: It started out innocently enough...













As the sun came up a bit more, it got weird:











At the time, I was sort of thinking these might be mammatus clouds, but they weren't quite that dramatic, and we didn't get any severe weather afterwards. Unless you think 50 degrees and drizzly is severe. Which I sometimes do, if we get it day after day for weeks on end.







Things eventually tapered off...






... and ending in a perfectly unremarkable October weekday. Sigh....

assorted forays & follies

Or, further adventures in the blogo-doldrums. Today's post is an assortment of pics I took for posts that didn't pan out. Either I didn't have enough material for a post, or I just couldn't get excited enough to do the research, or the universe failed to cooperate. Seems like it's always something these days.

So the first 3 pics are of Wahkeena Falls, out in the Gorge. I suppose these are fine so far as they go, but I was out there because I just bought a new toy and wanted to try it out. My "new" toy is an old film SLR camera from the late 1960s, all-manual, all-mechanical, no handholding of any kind. I need to track down a battery for its light meter (which I understand is a bit rudimentary anyway) so I was using my lil' digital camera to make exposure guesstimates: Set the ISO to match the film you're using, and zoom a little so the field of view is more or less the same as the camera's 50mm lens. Then tinker with aperture & shutter speed until you get a photo that looks ok, and transfer those settings to the old SLR and take the same shot with it. Lather, rinse, repeat. It sounds kind of tedious, but I'm just trying to learn how to use this new toy right now. I don't expect miraculous results, and I don't expect any results quickly.

That last bit is something I've been telling myself a lot lately, because it turns out I hadn't threaded the film properly the first time around. I was doing all that work and not actually taking useful photos. Dammit. I think I've got it figured out now, so I ought to have something to share here sooner or later. I'd intended to post these waterfall pics along with their film versions, and that's obviously not going to happen. Oh, well.

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One recent morning I made a trip up to Smith Lake in North Portland. The lake is part of the Smith & Bybee Lakes wildlife area, a large wetland preserve right in the middle of a heavy industrial part of town, and next door to the former St. Johns Landfill. With neighbors like those, the lakes don't get a lot of public attention, even though they're huge and right on the city's doorstep. So I thought I'd do a post about the place, but I'm convinced you can't properly do that without at least one nice photo of a bird or two, being a wetland area and all.

So as soon as I showed up, all the birds relocated to the far side of the lake. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.

At least the moon was out. That's something, I guess.





So the photo below is the best bird I came away with, and I'm sure you'll agree it ain't much. This was taken at maximum zoom + max "digital zoom", and then a heavy-duty bit of unsharp mask to make the thing halfway presentable.

Obviously I just didn't show up with the right gear for the job.









Ok, there were a few things here and there I could take closeups of, at least. Nothing too spectacular, just the usual flowers and Raindrops On Stuff, but my little camera does a creditable job of it, at least when the flower isn't whipping back and forth in the wind, which it was.

The path to the lake had this sign up, which might explain why nobody else was there. Jeepers! West Nile virus! I haven't had any flulike symptoms lately, so I'm probably ok, but still. Freakin' West Nile virus! Yow!



Ok, here's the gross part, which I barely managed to avoid stepping on/in. I'm not a zoological CSI type (if such a thing exists) but I'd bet a heron did this. Every time I visit Smith Lake, I run across something like this, something that indicates this place is the real deal. Sometimes it's just various animal prints in the mud. A few years ago I ran across a tree freshly felled by beavers.

I thought about posting these frog pics separately, and titling it something like "'What's Grosser Than Gross?' Edition", but that seemed a little crass and juvenile. Ok, so I still posted the photos, but I didn't make them the main event. That counts for something, right?

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Ok, returning within the bounds of good taste, here are a couple of fall foliage photos from downtown Portland. These are taken from the same spot, one through a pair of cheap sunglasses, and the other with the homemade infrared filter I put together a while back.





I've gone too long without any Tanner Springs photos. So here's one.



And I believe the moon requires no introduction. Had to do a bit of cleanup on this one, but I think it turned out pretty well for a handheld shot at night. In other words, it's due to luck, not skill. Story of my life, or so it seems sometimes.