Disk #4

Here are a few photos of Disk #4, a small and unassuming sculpture tucked away in a corner of NE Portland's Peninsula Park, just north of the rose garden. I can't find anything on the net about this beastie, so the plaque is all I know about it:

I don't have any strong feelings about the sculpture itself, although it has a number of attributes I admire in public art: It's relatively small, inoffensive, not in anyone's way, and the Feds paid for it instead of local taxpayers, courtesy of the Comprehensive Employment & Training Act, or CETA. From what I've heard, CETA was a large and basically unsupervised pot of money with no strings attached, and you could get funded for just about anything if you had a good grant writer. I kind of miss those 70's-era warm-n-fuzzy, overly generous government programs; now it's just bluenosed control-freak Calvinism all across the political spectrum, and your only choice these days is whether you want a red nanny state or a blue one. Feh.

During the Reagan years, CETA was replaced by something called the Job Training Partnership Act, authored by the one and only Senator J. Danforth Quayle. Which is really all you need to know about that.

In any case, I didn't stop and dally at Disk #4 because of its overall aesthetic merits, or lack thereof. Overall, I don't really have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. But like most bronze sculptures, it has an interesting surface texture. The day I took these was one of the summer's many bright overcast days, with that ugly blue-grey light you generally can't do anything with, photo-wise. That light made for some interesting reflections off the warm bronze of the sculpture, though. I think this is the first time that light's been useful for anything. And even then, it's only just useful, I wouldn't call it great or anything. I'd meant to do a post about the park as a whole, but these are the only photos I got that didn't totally suck. Seriously. Not even the roses came out ok. Bloody weather.

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Stonehenge (III) : Mt. Hood

Mt. Hood as seen from Stonehenge. Hence the title.

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.)

Stonehenge (I)

A few photos from Stonehenge, way out in the east end of the Columbia Gorge near the Maryhill Museum. I took these way back in June, right around the summer solstice, so I was kind of expecting there'd be hippies or something. No luck with that, just a few random yokels and obese tourists.

This Stonehenge was built as a World War I memorial. I'd heard that all the time, but I never understood the connection until recently. Sam Hill, the guy who built the thing, was a Quaker and a pacifist. At the time, some archaeologists claimed the original Stonehenge had been a place of human sacrifice, so Hill created this replica to point out that "humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war." Fair enough, except that the archaeologists were wrong, or at least contemporary archeologists don't believe the place was used that way. Which kind of invalidates the entire premise of the memorial. Oops. Still, the guy's heart was in the right place... I think. On the "sacrificial altar" there's a plaque which reads:

"To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country ... in the hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench."

Yikes! That doesn't sound very pacifistic, if you ask me, unless it's meant in the Stephen Colbert sense. And I tend to doubt that. The rural Northwesterners of 1931 weren't known for their subtle sense of irony. So I imagine the plaque was either a misfire, or it was someone else's idea.

assorted seasonal indicators

Fall foliage, Ankeny Park (& vicinity), downtown Portland.




A rainbow from the big storm on Saturday. It wasn't a great rainbow, so I tweaked the photo in GIMP to enhance the colors a bit. I tried to get a pic of the infrared part of the rainbow too, but that just didn't come out at all. Oh, well.




Snow on SW 8th, next to Ankeny Park & near Tugboat Brewing. It hasn't snowed here yet; a nearby snowboard shop brought it in for some kind of event on Saturday, and it's still melting a few days later.






A couple of your basic Leaves Turning Color photos.




If it's fall, it's time for a new crop of college students. Many of them honestly believe they invented the old detergent-in-the-fountain trick.




My neighborhood is full of weird little beetles around this time every year. They don't seem to do anything, they just sit around motionless for a while and eventually disappear when the weather gets really cold. I'm not sure what the point is, really, but right now they're everywhere.

the same damn acorn again

I think I may need a little more variety in my subject matter. I'd really rather be taking photos of flowers, but it's not exactly spring out there, is it? I guess I could go buy some flowers or rob someone's flowerbed or something, but it just wouldn't be the same somehow.

While I'm waiting impatiently for the seasons to run their course, I've been taking some pics of a pinecone I had on my desk at work. I've forgotten where I originally picked it up or why, but it'll be a change from the acorn, I guess.

foliage on film, fwiw

A few more pics taken with that vintage film SLR I've been playing around with. I did a bit of GIMP tweaking on the ones with the fern, since the camera obviously doesn't have that fancy digital auto white balance business. I gather you were supposed to use different types of film depending on where you thought you might be shooting photos in the near future. Like I'd really know that in advance, or something.

I'm also still playing the exposure settings guessing game. I did find an old analog light meter dating back to the 50's or 60's, but I haven't figured out how it works quite yet. Once I do, then I'll have to figure out whether the selenium photocell still gives accurate readings these days. Oh, well. I chose this silly little hobby, didn't I?



Below are a couple more macro shots for your entertainment. I had the sense to use a tripod this time, along with a cable release I just found at a junk store, but I didn't have enough light, having forgotten to use the flashlight this time. So I did what I could to correct it in GIMP, and these are the result. I can't really regard these as high art or anything, just as documentation of my ongoing learning process.

Yet another toy camera: JamCam 2.0

Turns out that this coming Saturday (October 20th, 2007) is "World Toy Camera Day". And it just so happens that I recently added to my small but growing menagerie of toy cameras, so I figured I'd take one for a spin today. I realize that technically I ought to have waited until Saturday for this, but I didn't. Oh, well.

So today's delightful gadget is a JamCam 2.0, which is what passed for an inexpensive digital camera back during the previous century. You get 24 shots at 320x240, or 8 at 640x480. Or 48 at some godawful postage stamp resolution I can't recall at the moment.



Ignoring image quality for the moment, the JamCam has three big problems. First, the user interface is strictly from the stone axes 'n bearskins era. The $14.99 VuPoint camera I bought new a few months ago leaves the JamCam in the dust, UI-wise, and the VuPoint is nobody's idea of intuitive. It might be easier if I had a manual, but it didn't come with one, and I can't find one on the net either. Which brings us to problem #2: The camera's manufacturer has long since shuffled off to the great bit bucket in the sky, and it's tough to find drivers for current operating systems. This site claims to offer downloadable drivers and more, but first you have to register, and their registration system is either nonfunctional or remarkably slow. So making Windows talk to the JamCam is still an unsolved problem, but luckily someone's written a JamCam app for OS X. JamX only claims to work for the subsequent JamCam 3.0, but it works like a charm with the earlier camera too. Problem #3: While the ergonomics aren't bad overall, the shutter button is easy to hit by mistake. I actually used up most of my "roll" of 24 exposures when I shoved the camera into my coat pocket. I must've had the shutter depressed, because the camera silently took one dark frame after another until it ran out of memory. Niiice.

On the other hand, the camera looks cool. It's brighly colored and excitingly chunky, which counts for something. I haven't actually tried to damage it, but it looks pretty robust, at least by camera standards. It only cost six dollars, which is an important point with toy cameras. It's reportedly a good camera for infrared work, if you can live with 640x480 resolution. It has a tripod mount, believe it or not. If you can find software for it, it talks to your computer over USB, not some cheesy serial port link or SCSI cable or proprietary connector or whatever, and on top of USB is our old friend TWAIN, just like the VuPoint and every flatbed scanner in the land. And it takes a standard 9 volt battery, not some hard-to-find proprietary thing. Ok, sure, I've never seen a 9 volt battery in a camera before, and the world may never see the like again either, but every convenience store carries 9v's. So the camera ought to be usable for a long time to come, and maybe that's good and maybe it isn't.

I say "maybe it isn't", because you'll never make the cover of National Geographic taking photos with a JamCam, as you might've inferred from the photos here. And all of these except the last one were run through GIMP for a bit of brightness/contrast and color balance work. The originals were generally darker and full of dull bluish-purple tones. I just couldn't post 'em the way they came out of the camera. Sorry, purists. In my defense, mostly I was just correcting for the weather, which was dull and overcast and blue-grey everywhere.

The night pics are a bit more, er, interesting, with all sorts of exciting color artifacts. I have no freakin' idea what the third photo down from here is supposed to be. Maybe it's the inside of a coat pocket or something. I had no idea my coat pockets were so exciting.







A few words about World Toy Camera Day, in case I've piqued your interest for some reason:

• A Flickr group dedicated to the upcoming holiday.
  
• A forum thread about the event on photo.net
  
• A post on Moominstuff with more links & info.