a good day for infrared

Since we're in day two of what the media insists is a Killer Heat Wave of Doom, I figured it was a good time to post some more infrared photos. I'd just like to point out I only learned how to do this about a week ago, so any non-constructive criticism will be cheerfully ignored.

If you really want to split hairs about it, the near-IR light digital cameras can see is not the same thing as thermal infrared, which requires a dedicated and vastly more expensive camera. So the "heat wave" hook is sort of tenuous, I admit. I should also point out that the colors you see here aren't "real", and are just the result of the camera trying valiantly to interpret the bizarro light it's detecting as a color photo. If I was going to be a purist about it, I ought to be taking the photos in B+W mode, but I rather like the effect here.

Top photo's from 10th & Burnside, downtown, showing the sculpture everyone calls "Satan's Testicle". It's actual name is "Pod", and it's by the sculptor Pete Beeman. FYI.

Below, a couple of shots from SW Ankeny near Broadway. Big Pink is very pink, just like everything else.





Above, looking west on Ankeny. The tree you see is part of Ankeny Park, just around the corner up ahead. That sun looks unbearably hot, doesn't it? Luckily I was standing right outside the door of Tugboat Brewing when I took this. Mmmm..... Beeeeer.....



This one's from about a block west of the last one, looking east this time. Trees around Burnside, the North Park Blocks, and Ankeny Park.

IR photos work best if you use a tripod, since you've filtered out most of the light and you need to go with longer exposures. But honestly, who wants to carry a freakin' tripod around all the time, just in case? Not me. At least usually not.

Oh, well. Like I said, this is all experimental so far as I'm concerned. And I kind of like the blur of passing cars in the photo. Everyone knows blurry passing cars are Art with a capital A.



More from the North Park Blocks. You've got to love the way foliage practically glows in IR.

The Talbot Property

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Recently I've made a minor hobby out of tracking down & taking pics of Portland's tiny, obscure city parks, and here's yet another one. This is the "Talbot Property", a small sloping wedge of land up in Portland's West Hills, at the crazy-quilt semi-intersection of SW Broadway (a.k.a. Patton Road), Vista Ave., and Talbot Road [map].

There isn't a lot on the net about the place other than passing mentions in a few docs from the city, although (as usual) the parks bureau's list of parks doesn't mention the place, and (as usual) there's no official city park sign here. A doc titled "West District Profile" lists the city parks on the westside, and says the Talbot Property was acquired in 1932, and totals a measly 0.04 acres, or 1742 square feet. That's far too small to hold a house in the West Hills, which I suppose is why there's a mini-park here instead. These days they might protect it due to the park's four old Douglas fir trees, but that wasn't much of a civic priority back then.

The city's PortlandMaps.com service lists the place as property #R326839, listing it not as a park, but merely as "vacant land" zoned for recreational purposes.

Another doc concerning a proposed parks levy merely mentions that the park sits at the intersection of SW Talbot & Patton. The triangular park is bordered by Patton on one side, Talbot on another, and on the remaining side by a short flight of stairs.

The park also appears prominently on the city's SW Portland Walking Map, with an icon saying there's drinking water here. I don't know whether this counts as a Benson Bubbler or not, but if so it's one of very few outside of downtown. In fact the only other one that comes to mind is one that used to be at the corner of SE Milwaukie and Powell, and it hasn't been there for years and years and years.

The other "feature" of the park is a bus shelter, served by the #51 heading from Council Crest to downtown Portland. The area around the bus shelter is marked off by an old stone wall, which may date back to the 1930s when the park was created. In those days Council Crest was served by a streetcar instead of city buses, so I suspect this place was built as a streetcar stop way back when.

It took a while for the bus to come, and I was fortunate the bus shelter was here, as several intermittent cloudbursts drenched the area while I was waiting. On the bright side, that made for some good Water Droplets On Stuff macro photos. There's really not much to do here except look at the landscaping anyway, and rain makes it just that much more interesting.

Across the Columbia on the "Wahkiakum"

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Once upon a time, the only way across the Columbia River was by ferry. Over the years, virtually all of the ferries have been replaced with bridges, with a handful of highly obscure exceptions. This post is about one of them.

The Wahkiakum County Ferry runs between Washington's Puget Island, and tiny Westport, Oregon. As you can see on this map, the ferry crosses the main channel of the river, and then there's a bridge from Puget Island to the town of Cathlamet on the mainland:

Building a bridge the rest of the way would've been expensive, since it'd have to be quite high to accomodate Portland shipping traffic. I imagine the numbers just didn't pencil out; the town of Westport is just a block or two of old houses on one street near the ferry landing, and Wahkiakum County is the smallest in Washington by size, and among the smallest by population, so I suspect there just isn't sufficient demand to justify building a bridge. Which is fine, if you ask me. The car ferry's kind of fun in a retro sort of way. When the ferry arrives, you drive down the ramp and onto the boat. The attendant will drop by and you pay the $3 toll, and then you just wait until the boat sails. During the 10 minute ride, you can just sit back and watch the river. Contrast that with the Astoria bridge, for example. I don't know about you, but no matter how many times I drive across that bridge, and no matter what the weather's like, for me it's always white knuckle time the whole way across, every single time.

As this history page notes, there's been a ferry here since 1925, and the current vessel (imaginatively dubbed the Wahkiakum) dates to 1962. The county public works department operates it, and their page about the ferry is here, with info on the tolls, current schedule, etc.

The Wahkiakum is the only ferry on the lower Columbia, but there are two others in remote Eastern Washington, as the river comes down from Canada.

There are also a few remaining on the Willamette, at Canby, Wheatland, and Buena Vista. The ghosts of others live on in Portland-area street names: Taylors Ferry, Boones Ferry, Scholls Ferry, Bakers Ferry (out in Clackamas County, in the Carver/Barton area), etc. In the unlikely event that you really want to geek out on this stuff, here's more info on local ferries past and (possibly) future. FWIW.

In any case, here are more photos from the voyage. If you don't like mine, there's more photos of the ferry here, and there's even a VR panorama from on board the ferry here.

First, a not-exactly-thrilling video clip from onboard the ferry.

The Puget Island ferry dock, sans ferry. There was a bald eagle flying over the river just a moment before I took this. Stupid *!?%#?& digicam lag.

Detail of the ferry dock. The pilings appear to have been here a long, long time. I wonder if they're original?

A bit of Puget Island scenery at the ferry dock. The island is basically flat and agricultural, sort of like Sauvie Island. I understand it's popular with cyclists. And yes, you can take you bike on the ferry, or I suppose you could just board as a pedestrian.

The ferry has rather spartan accommodations for passengers without vehicles. I suppose it's better than nothing if it's stormy outside.

Onboard the ferry, looking toward the Oregon side. The Westport dock is in a side channel of the river, behind an island, so you don't see it until you're almost there. Until then, the ferry appears to be heading off into the wilderness.

A nice view of Mt. St. Helens from mid-river. You can't see the mountain from either bank, just from the middle of the river.

The dock at Westport.

...wherein I gain a superpower...

When I was a kid, I thought being able to see infrared and ultraviolet would be a great superpower. X-ray vision, not so much, because it'd be all skeletons all the time, and I've never been goth enough to find that appealing. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to learn that my camera detects near-IR light. Which got me wondering if there was a way to make it only see infrared. Hopefully without having to spend a lot of money or disassemble anything.

Turns out there's an extremely simple way to do just that. I rifled through my dusty old box of film photos, and looked through my negatives until I found a couple of unexposed end bits. Layer them together and add some tape to hold them in place, and you've got a homemade IR filter. If you try to look through it you'll notice that almost no visible light makes it through, so anything the camera sees has to be something else.

So here are a few preliminary attempts at taking IR photos.

The thing that really stands out in IR is foliage, and fortunately my general neighborhood is full of foliage. Leaves appear to glow, while the sky comes out rather dark. Here's that damn Leland One / Rusting Chunks No. 5 sculpture again. The trees in direct sunlight just then came out way overexposed. If I hadn't done that, I'm not sure the rest of the scene would've been visible.



Here are some subsequent and better attempts.







Here are a few pages with tons of info about IR photos, if you're interested, at Rochester Institute of Technology, dpfwiw, Photo tidbits, CoCam, and PhotoNotes.org


A funny thing about IR with digital cameras is that the more you spend, generally speaking, the less useful the camera is. Infrared is Considered Harmful for general camera usage, so you see IR-blocking filters fixed over cameras' image sensors. The more you spend, the "better" IR filtering you get. I think even mine does it to some degree, so you've got IR and anti-IR filters fighting each other, and you're detecting what little light makes it through both of those.

My dinky little $14.99 VuPoint camera, however, doesn't seem to do any IR-blocking at all, based on the experimenting I've done so far. I didn't bring the right cable with me so I can't pull today's photos off of it right now, but here are a couple of silly ones from earlier. First, my alter ego in mid-transmogrification into IR superhero mode, film sprocket holes and everything:



The completed transformation, FWIW:



Incidentally, I've noticed the VuPoint is better suited to talking to Macs than it is to Windows, which is kind of surprising. The desktop software on Windows is clunky and cartoonish, while on OSX it just talks to iPhoto like a good camera should. The resulting images are BMP files on OSX, but JPG on Windows, even though BMP is a Windows-centric format. I figure that means BMP is the camera's "RAW" format, or the closest thing to it. Apparently if you leave compression off on the camera, the desktop software applies it on that end, so there's really no advantage to turning it off in that case. I don't really see the point of that; the BMP files come out at around 360k instead of the ~50k compressed size. 360k is still pretty tiny, so I'm not sure why they went to the trouble.

Waterfront Fireworks

Here are a few photos of last night's fireworks, in case you went to bed early or whatever. I like to think these compare favorably with last year's attempt. I like to think this means I learned at least one thing over the last year -- although the real difference comes from buying an el cheapo tripod this time around, and tinkering with manual, and counterintuitive, camera settings instead of trusting what it calls "fireworks mode". I don't want to totally nerd out on you here, so if you're really curious about how this stuff works, your favorite search engine is just keystrokes away. Or check out the photos' EXIF data, if you prefer (and if Flickr preserves it; I haven't actually checked).

As you might've noticed, much of last year's post is a rant about Dubya & friends. I haven't done a lot of that recently, and I keep speculating about why I haven't felt the need of late. I think I know what it is now. Ever since the 2006 election, what I feel about those guys isn't so much anger as impatience. I've written off everything until January 2009 as a total loss, politically speaking. Bush & cronies are going to run wild until then, and nobody's going to stop them. On the bright side, their hourglass is running short on sand, and if we can just avoid getting tricked into any more wars for the next year and a half, we just may be OK. Eventually.

So anyway, enjoy the photos, or whatever.

Saddle Mountain: Flowers, etc.

Gentle Reader(s), I recently semi-promised you more photos of Saddle Mountain, but of flowers and other small stuff this time around. I semi-promise lots of stuff, and a number of those semi-promises are still in the, uh, pending category, but this time you're in luck.

I didn't do my usual search of the library's Oregonian database for the previous post. As you might expect, the O does a story about the place every few years, letting people know it's a good day hike reasonably close to town. For example, here are the 1993 and 1998 versions of the story. The place doesn't really change much, so either story still makes a good introduction to the place.

Anyway, here's more of those photos I mentioned: