watching the west hills (mostly)

I. morning moon:

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II. snow:

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III. ultraviolet at dusk, featuring a very shiny construction crane:







The above photo shows the fun half-open window trick yet again. I've never seen anyone else use the half-open window trick to create funky UV photos. Surely I didn't invent the thing, did I?

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IV. morning mist:

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V. other (not the west hills at all):



Powell Grove pioneer cemetery, around NE 122nd & Sandy




Winter sunset in the Hollywood District, fwiw.






More morning sky, from (I think) Milwaukie.

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.

Winter at Dalton Falls

A few photos of icy Dalton Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge, taken earlier this morning. If you've never heard of Dalton Falls (and most people haven't), you might want to check out an earlier post of mine here, which is where I keep my slim supply of useful info about the place.

Driving out there this morning was only a moderately bad idea, as it turns out. It's not true, strictly speaking, that many Bothans died to bring you this information. There was a bit of sleet coming down now and then, but mostly it was just very cold rain, so that was ok, I guess. I came across the site of an earlier accident on the Gorge highway, but the tow truck had it cleared within minutes of when I got there, and I didn't have to wait long. So that was ok too, or at least it was for me. And the falls were running for once and properly iced up, just as I'd hoped, and some of the photos turned out reasonably ok, or at least semi-fixable in GIMP. (I took a few more with the old Spotmatic, so we'll see how those come out when I have the film developed.) After taking these pics, I then had to scurry back into town for an important meeting with the PHBs. I almost missed it, but didn't, so that was ok as well -- although all things considered, I think I'd rather take "semi-fixable in GIMP" photos in 33-degree sleet than talk to a bunch of clueless PHBs again. All in all, nothing terrible happened this time around. Although I should point out before anyone else does that deliberately driving out to the Gorge while a winter storm watch is in effect is really sort of sub-brilliant. And the drive wasn't my idea of a good time, exactly. Wasn't much fun at all, actually. Yech.

Now that I'm here in my nice, toasty cubicle, with nice, toasty interweb access, I see that oil now costs over $100/barrel. I'm not even going to speculate about a dollar value on this morning's little foray, but under the circumstances I probably won't make a weekly habit of it.

There's another recent photo of the falls (albeit without ice) in this OregonHikers thread. One commenter actually links to my Dalton Falls post as a source of good info, which just goes to show how scarce authoritative info is about the place.

For future reference, the falls are just uphill from milepost 31 (above) on the old Columbia Gorge highway. If you find the milepost and don't see a waterfall directly uphill, the waterfall's gone dry and you'll need to come back some other time.

Above & below, a couple of variations on a "wintry grimness" theme, at the mini-parking lot for the falls. You'd almost think I'd been to art school or something.

The falls from inside a nice, warm car.

assorted sunrises & sunsets

Yet another batch of photos from my ongoing geek-out over old cameras. It's kind of an inconvenient time of year to take up a new hobby, since you can only take so many photos of dark-n-gloomy winter stuff before it gets prohibitively depressing. At least the sun still rises and sets, and occasionally it's even visible.

Not a big fan of winter, I have to say.


So more than anything these photos are test shots, just to see what my various bits and pieces and widgets can do. But I figured, hey, they turned out ok, so I might as well share a few of them. I mention this mostly in case you're wondering why I took so many photos of the same thing. Ok, I was also trying to use up various rolls of film so I could get them processed. Once you're in digital-land, you forget what a pain film can be. And that's before we get to the cost of film, developing, and scanning. In the long run it's probably cheaper to just shell out and get a DSLR and use the lenses on it instead. I'm sure I'll do that eventually, but right now I'm waiting until the end of January to see what goodies arrive at the big PMA 2008 trade show.

Updated: This isn't my first batch of sunrise photos, by any means. It just occurred to me to go rifle through the archives, and -- surprise, surprise -- I was stuck doing sunrise photos last December, just like I am now. Earlier, in October '06, I posted some photos from the preceding January. More recently, here are sunrises from March and October of this year. I never seem to end up with any during the summer, mostly because I'd have to get up too damn early, and in the summer there are lots of other things to take photos of that don't require you to be awake at such an unnatural hour.

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So first, here's a recent sunrise, taken with a Pentax Spotmatic SP + Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 135/3.5. Mostly Mt. Scott, with bits of Mt. Talbert and the South Waterfront district.

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A couple of Sears TLS photos, the first with the standard 55/1.4 lens, and the second with a monstrous Vivitar 75-260mm zoom lens I found at Goodwill. I'd be exaggerating if I said it weighs a ton, but I wouldn't be exaggerating by all that much.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the construction crane photo. Everybody badmouths old zoom lenses all the time. I'm sure technology's improved and so forth, and a present-day equivalent would certainly be a lot lighter and smaller. But this particular lens, or at least this particular photo, seems reasonably sharp. Sharp enough to use on the interwebs, at any rate.

After buying the lens, I was surprised to discover it's a T4-mount lens. I was playing with it and twisted a ring at the base, and the M42 bits at the end came off in my hand. WTF!? Turns out that was actually a good thing, since the lens's aperture mechanism wasn't working correctly, which might be why I got such a good deal on it. Turns out flaky aperture stuff is a congenital defect among T4 lenses, but the problem area is inside the body-to-T4 adapter, not in the lens itself. So buying a new adapter makes everything peachy keen again.

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A batch of sunrise photos, this time with a Mamiya 1000 DTL + Vivitar 135/2.8 telephoto lens. These are from a few minutes later than the Spotmatic+Takumar pics, so already the sky's a bit different. Note to self: If you want to compare & contrast two similar lenses, try taking photos of something that generally stays the same. Sunrises and clouds don't count.

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More pics from the Mamiya, this time with the stock Auto Sekor 55/1.8 lens.

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And last but not least, a couple of Argus C3 photos.

happy holiday(s)

I'm a little late with this, as usual. Umm, Boxing Day's still a holiday, right? Technically?

This humblest of humble blogs is a bit over two years old now. One of the very few things I've learned over the last two years is the importance of lightening up a little. I think I've learned that. Either that or I've merely gotten two years older and lazier and I just can't be bothered to care quite as much anymore. I'm not entirely sure.

To illustrate, briefly, here are two posts from Christmas(ish) 2005, and another from Christmas(esque) 2006. Two things strike me immediately. First, I seemed to be rather grumpy and peevish much of the time, especially in the early days. I like to think I've gotten that out of my system, for the most part. Being outraged all the time rapidly gets freakin' exhausting. Second thing, I was quite wordy. Where did I get the free time to write so much? I don't remember having copious stretches of free time then, and I certainly don't now, so I don't see how I managed it. Did I write faster and more coherently two years ago? Are my mental faculties in decline? Or am I just wringing my hands because I have a birthday coming up? That might have something to do with it. At least it's not the big four-zero mark quite yet... although I think I can smell it from here. The thought did occur to me recently that my newfound fascination with old cameras seems a touch... middle-aged, somehow. I mean, it's not like I'm filling a garage with Harleys or Corvettes or anything, and I only buy gadgets I plan to use, but still... I don't want to wake up in a few years or a decade or a month or so and realize I've become just another pathetic and tragically unhip middle-aged white guy. That would be deeply unpleasant. Oh, and did I mention I found a gray eyebrow hair a couple of months back? Did I mention I found it attached to me? Eeek!

Um... so anyway, happy holiday(s) from me to whoever. Or not. Or whatever. Like I care, or not.



Oh, and in case anyone's curious, this photo was taken with my old late-60's Mamiya 1000 DTL using the stock Auto Sekor 55/1.8 lens. I'd include the aperture & shutter info too, except that I didn't write it down, and now I've forgotten. Oh, well. Whatever. Or not.

riding the tram with an old camera

So I rode the tram again the other day. The thing's about a year old now, and the novelty's worn off. Normally I wouldn't have bothered to ride it, much less post photos of it, but I was taking another old vintage camera for a spin, and the real point of this is to show off the results. So let's just agree we've all done the obligatory collective eye roll about the tram, and another eye roll about the whole South Waterfront thing.



The camera I used is an old Argus C3 Matchmatic, which was made between 1958 and 1966. If you've never seen one, you'll want to go look at the photo. There really isn't anything else quite like it. Two-tone leatherette and a bunch of shiny gears, and shaped almost exactly like a brick. Some people call it ugly, but I can't agree. As soon as I saw one on the antique store shelf, I went "ooh, cool" and decided I had to have it. I basically got it because it looked cool, and because it's a bit of vintage Americana. I'm no chest-thumping flag-waving patriot type, of course, but in the camera world, buying American is a form of rooting for the underdog. As is buying anything that isn't Japanese, German, or Russian, come to think of it. In addition, Arguses are cheap and plentiful, and (supposedly) relatively easy to fix if they break, and they don't break all that often. That's a desirable trait in a 40-50 year old camera.



I didn't get it thinking it would actually take decent photos. It doesn't exactly look like it would, does it? I figured I'd run a roll through it out of curiosity, and I suppose also on the principle that I'm a camera user, not a collector, and I don't buy things just to put in a display case or whatever. But surprisingly, I actually like the results. A while back I saw an interesting comment about this, to the effect that it's a rather inconvenient camera to use, so there must be some other reason Argus sold millions of them, and kept making them from 1939 all the way to 1966.



The standard lens on a C3 is the Coated Cintar, 50mm, f/3.5, which is what I've got. Not everyone realizes the C3 is an interchangeable lens camera. Despite its popularity, only a handful of lenses were ever marketed for it. Possibly this is because changing lenses is a bit of a chore. First you have to unscrew and remove the gear that couples the rangefinder to the lens. Then you unscrew the lens itself, and put the new lens on in its place. When putting the coupling gear back on, you have to take care that the rangefinder and lens are in sync, so that infinity on one means infinity on the other. Otherwise your focus will be all wrong, and you won't know it until you get your photos back. There's a short but apparently complete list of Argus lenses here, and photos of a couple of the more common ones here.



There's surprisingly little info on the net about the C3 lens mount, and I've never seen anyone selling an adapter to use Argus lenses on other cameras, despite the vast availability of cheap Arguses with perfectly decent lenses. So here's what I've been able to figure out. The screw thread is quite narrow -- I measured it at 34-35mm, although as a pre-WWII American design it might not be metric at all. 1 3/8" is just shy of 35mm, so that might be it. I didn't get a good read on the thread pitch, but it looked like it was greater than the usual 1mm. I've seen the lens registration distance (i.e. from the back of the lens mount to the film plane) given at 40mm, which is big for a rangefinder, but on the small side for an SLR. If 40mm is right, the only digital cameras you could use lens on and get infinity focus (assuming an adaptor existed) would be Four Thirds SLRs from Olympus, Panasonic, & friends. Oh, and a Leica M8 would probably work too, if you're made of money and actually plan to use the M8 instead of squirreling it away in a vacuum-sealed display case or something. So that might be a problem, but I noticed that the Cintar, at least, is so narrow that you can actually slide the whole back end of the lens into an M42 screw mount. So with a bit of mechanical skill (which I lack), one might be able to cook up a recessed lens adapter, hopefully without requiring mirror lock-up.

I also haven't seen adapters to put other lenses on Arguses. You'd lose rangefinder coupling, naturally, but it'd still be fun to stick a long telephoto or zoom or fisheye (for example) on the front of an Argus and see what you can do with it.



It's worth noting that next year marks the 70th birthday of the Argus C and C2, the C3's predecessors, and 2009 is the 70th birthday of the C3 itself. That'd be a great opportunity for the nice folks at Cosina Voigtlander to do one of those historical reproductions like they do. In recent years they've issued Bessa cameras in Leica screw mount, Contax & Nikon rangefinder mounts, M42 SLR mount, and most recently Leica M bayonet mount. Doing an Argus C3-mount Bessa could be a logical extension of that idea. Well, if you could convince enough people to pay a couple of hundred dollars for a new and rather more convenient camera (with a warranty) instead of an old $15 Argus. I'm not holding my breath, I just think it'd be kind of cool, that's all I'm saying.

tanner springs, winter 07

If you're a longtime reader of this humble blog (yeah, either of you), you might've noticed I post a lot of photos of Tanner Springs Park, in the Pearl District. It's not that I'm a big fan of the place -- far from it, in fact -- but it's a.) weird, and b.) conveniently located, so I tend to end up there a lot. If I've just gotten a new camera and want to take it for a spin, Tanner Springs is on the short list, along with Mt. Tabor and Leland One / "Rusting Chunks No. 5".

When I say "new", I usually mean "old". All of these pics except the next one were taken with an old 1960's Sears TLS (a.k.a. Ricoh Singlex) I've had for a couple of months now. The next one was taken with a Pentax Spotmatic SP, which I picked up just last week. I have a cabinet at home that's rapidly filling up with old cameras and lenses and whatnot. Hey, hobbies will do that sometimes.



My new hobby is entirely the fault of this humble blog, believe it or not. I never took an interest in cameras or photography until I started this thing, and began posting pics on the interwebs. Suddenly I had a reason to do it, and started to think maybe I ought to get a little better at it, and learn a little about what I was doing. It turns out there's no such thing as just wanting to learn a little or improve a little, not with me at any rate. I've learned a lot, and I occasionally convince myself I've improved somewhat too. The big downside is that much of what you learn is about what you "need" to buy next. There's just no end to it. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.