Another set of old Big Island photos, this time from Pololū Valley up toward the northern tip of the island. I stopped here and hiked down to the beach, and because it was the era of film photography (and 36 shots per roll), I took exactly eight photos of this amazing place, and just one at the beach on the valley floor. I seem to recall it's a short but fairly steep hike, but it's been 12 years and I didn't take any photos on the trail, so I might be mistaken about that part.
A few photos of and from the Empire State Building, taken when I was in NYC for a trade show back in July 2000. These photos had the same color issues as the Hawaii photos in the previous post, but even more so; I imagine I had both rolls developed at the same time (I was always bad about getting film developed in a timely way), so the same junior trainee probably dinked around with both rolls. In any case, I played around a little and decided I liked these photos highly desaturated, with just a touch of the cyan shading remaining.
I have one other photo I'm not posting here. Someone else took it for me, and it shows me standing there on the Empire State Building observation deck, a goofy grin on my face, with the Twin Towers over one shoulder. Looking at it really weirds me out. Which is strange since WTC photos I'm not in don't affect me that way, but there you have it. So don't expect to see that photo anytime soon.
Today's adventure involves a trip deep into the archives, i.e shuffling through a box of old film photos I retrieved from a high shelf in a closet in the spare room. In order to explain the place these rather crappy photos were taken and what I was doing there, I need to relate a quick tale from another life in the distant past. If it's too boring, feel free to jump ahead to the last couple of paragraphs if you want.
Back in the fall of 2000, I worked at a tech company with "Dot Com" in the name. Our story was similar to most companies of that sort: We'd gone public some months earlier and were both stupidly flush with cash, and losing money at an extraordinary rate. Which led to a lot of decisions that seemed perfectly normal at the time and look bizarre in retrospect.
The company was also a little light in the new ideas department, so when I dreamed up a random concept for a new product, Marketing latched on and ran wild with it. The resulting product got marquee billing at a big trade show which I got to attend, and I got a few patents out of the adventure. The product hit some key industry buzzwords, and analysts seemed to like it, and it boosted our inexorably declining stock a bit, temporarily, and it was great fun to work on. But it also wasn't a terribly useful product, it turned out. That would've been ok if we'd had the sort of marketing people who could sell things people didn't actually need or want, but we didn't. In short, the thing made roughly zero dollars over the course of its short life.
In short, this little app of ours that had somehow escaped the lab was doomed from the start, and we knew it, and it's not like the company had any other profitable products that could subsidize ours while we waited for it to "gain traction". So it was just a question of when and how the end came.
This being, as I've noted, the Dot Com era, the only logical way to break the sad but unsurprising news to the team was to fly us all to the Big Island of Hawaii for a few all-expense-paid days of fun, and break the news to us at dinner the day before we flew back, after a few rounds of swanky drinks. It actually kind of worked; everybody just sort of shrugged at the news, and it bought a few solid weeks of apathy before the mass exodus began.
In any case, I had one of the rental cars and I'd struck out on my own that day before dinner, driving all the way across the island over to Hilo, stopping at a few points of interest along the way. In 2012 I'd be posting Instagram or Tumblr photos at each stop so friends across the globe could follow along as I had Various Exciting Adventures. But in 2000 I didn't even have a mobile phone, just a PalmPilot with a primitive CDPD wireless connection, and it turned out to be useless on the trip since the Big Island only had analog voice service back then. Truly, it was a dark and primitive time.
So this is 'Akaka Falls, a picturesque 422 foot waterfall a few miles outside of Hilo. These photos really don't do the falls justice. I knew basically nothing about photography at the time and owned a cheap fixed-focus point and shoot camera someone had given me for Christmas many years earlier. And that was compounded by my using cheap film and a cheap photo lab, such that the prints picked up a peculiar greenish-cyan tint over the years. So I scanned them earlier today and tried to fix the colors a bit, with limited success. My color correction skills aren't the best, but I really don't think there's a lot that anyone could have done to turn these into quality photos. I even tried desaturating them to see if they'd look better in black-and-white, but they really didn't.
More photos with that late 50s vintage lens I picked up the other day. As usual, the color in the title is an artsy way of saying I have no idea what sort of flowers these are.
From the archives, a few circa-2007 photos of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, OR. Not to be confused with the other Haystack Rock further south at Pacific City. Or, according to Wikipedia, a third Haystack Rock far to the south in Coos County. Curiously, Wikipedia mentions zero Haystack Rocks outside of Oregon, so apparently we're alone in using agricultural metaphors to describe large-scale seaside geology. I have no explanation for why that might be, so feel free to grab that hypothesis and run with it for your dissertation, assuming you can prove it and you think it'll help.
I haven't posted cat photos here in a while. These photos may give some idea of why his modeling career hasn't really taken off. Something about not sitting still for the camera, I think. Anyway, these are mostly test shots for a new lens I got in the mail today, a Fujita/Juplen 35mm f/2.5, made circa 1957 or so. It's an early example of a retrofocus design, and one of the earliest Japanese M42 lenses I've come across. Plus it just looks cool, and has a handy push-button lock thingy on the preset ring. You'll probably see more photos taken with this lens here in the near future. Maybe more cat photos, or maybe something that knows how to sit still for half a second, like a leaf or a statue or whatever, even if they're nowhere near as adorable as he is. D'awwwww....
Today's thrilling adventure takes us out to distant suburbia, to Aloha's Paula Jean Powerline Park. As the name suggests, it's a chunk of right-of-way under some Bonneville Power Administration transmission lines; the land wasn't buildable, so it became a long, skinny park instead. Years ago, before I started this humble blog, I used to live a few blocks away from this place. I drove past it all the time, but only walked through it once or twice. So I figured it might be interesting to revisit a place I ignored previously, take a few photos, and try to apply this humble blog's tired tried and true formula to it.
As for why I ignored the place, I absolutely don't buy into any of the various conspiracy theories about powerlines, but they do make a rather disconcerting humming noise if you're walking under them. That wasn't really my cup of tea, I have to say. I'm sure there are interesting things to take photos of, if you have time and are willing to stop and ignore the buzzing -- wildflowers, the few remnant orchard trees, moody shots of the powerlines, possibly -- but I wasn't really into photography back when I lived out there, so I didn't pick up on any of that at the time.
All of that said, the powerline right of way does create a long stretch of unbroken greenspace, so the city of Hillsboro's parks plan envisions a regional trail through here at some point. It may be some time before this happens, as the surrounding area hasn't even been officially annexed to Hillsboro yet; parks in the area previously belonged to the Tualatin Hills Parks & Recreation District but were handed over to Hillsboro in 2002 in anticipation of the city annexing the area in the near future. Ten years later that still hasn't happened, and I'm not sure why not. So right now this and several other nearby parks no longer appear on the THPRD website (understandably), but also aren't listed with the other city parks on the Hillsboro Parks website. So they're in a sort of internet limbo until the city limit issue gets sorted out.
On a related note, another proposed powerline trail a bit further east has run into some local opposition. The Bonneville Power Administration (an agency of the federal government) owns the land under the powerlines in question, but the association's been acting as if it owned the land for many years and has even posted "Private Property" signs on the land, warning all outsiders to keep away, or else. They probably don't have a leg to stand on, legally, considering that it's not their land. But as far as I know that's never stopped a homeowners' association before. Not even once, in the entire history of forever. So we'll see how that turns out, I guess.
