friday flowers+etc. (for old times' sake?)

You probably won't believe this (or, more likely, won't care), but I haven't done one of these flower photo posts since June 11th. That's got to be a record or something, although I haven't actually checked.

I'm still not done with the mini-roadtrip photos, but sorting through them is more work than you might expect, and I'm feeling a bit surly and unmotivated right now. The weather sucks, work is utterly boring, and... well, that's the whole list actually, but it's enough.

So first off, here are a few from Tanner Springs, taken wayyy back when the sun used to shine in the summertime...










A couple from O'Bryant Square:






I'm not sure where these two were taken:






This was in a planter at Lovejoy Fountain Plaza:






And here's the "etc." portion of the post:

Astoria Column, then & now

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Here are a few pics of, and from, the Astoria Column out in (you guessed it) Astoria. Some were taken on my mini-roadtrip last month, and others are from the only other time I've been there, wayyy back in February 1979.

Regarding the 1979 pics, the originals actually look better than what you see here. The scanner I used on these is about a decade old. It doesn't do an overly professional job of figuring out colors, and its dynamic range is pretty limited, so if you have a photo with light parts and dark parts, you can get one or the other to come out somewhat decently. But not both. And it puts ugly vertical bands on everything it scans. And square objects come out a tad on the rectangular side, like photo #2 above. On the other hand, the scanner was free, and Ubuntu's default install includes a driver for it. So that's something, I guess.

The first couple of photos in the slideshow are more or less the same view of downtown Astoria, taken 28 years apart. The two roughly squarish photos were taken with a 126 camera, which you basically can't even find film for anymore. I'm not 100% sure whether I took those or not, since my own camera was a little 110 just like this one.

Here are a few of the column itself.

The old photos show the column was looking quite ramshackle in 1979. Just like everything else in Astoria back then, if memory serves. I'm afraid we have to thank the rich Californians for the city's recent revival... but don't tell them I said so. They're plenty smug enough already, the bastards.

The recent one (top one, silly) really isn't that great, I admit. I was mostly taking shots of the view from the column, but as an afterthought I decided I needed at least one photo of the column itself and took a quick snap of it. (If you want to see better photos of it, there's no shortage of them out on the interwebs. There are even a couple VR panoramas, which are less vertigo-inducing than you might expect.)

The column doesn't actually lean like that, in case you're wondering. Although that would make the trip up the stairs even more exciting than it already is. It's a dark, winding, narrow, rickety, alarming little staircase, with lots of tiny little oddly-shaped spiral steps.

If I'd taken a better recent pic, you could see how the city completely renovated the exterior a couple of years ago. There wasn't much they could do with the stairs, though. It's not like they could've made them any wider or anything.

In my defense, photographically speaking, the camera wasn't shaking in these shots. It was me that was shaking. Oh, and the stairs were shaking, too. I didn't remember the stairs being that scary in 1979.

Several kids ran past me on the stairs going both directions. Who knows, maybe they'll come back 30 years from now and they'll wonder if it was always that scary. Or they'll just float up to the top with their antigravity boots, sneering at all the poor chumps of decades past who had to worry about stuff like "stairs" and "exercise".

So anyway, here's the very top of the column, taken from the balcony.

A few grain ships on the Columbia. Ships tend to park in Astoria temporarily on their way to Portland. I don't know if it's due to the tide, or they're waiting in line for a river pilot, or the Astoria visitor's bureau pays them to create some nautical ambience, or what it is, exactly.

Looking south, here's Saddle Mountain and (I think) the Lewis and Clark River.

Just across the parking lot from the column, and steps from the gift shop, is this odd memorial to a local Indian chief who befriended Lewis & Clark while they were here, 200-odd years ago.

The memorial only dates to 1961, and was put together by people claiming to be descendants of the aforementioned chief. Which is a nice touch, certainly, although I don't know how you'd ever be able to prove a claim like that. If you're running a cash-strapped city parks department, and someone comes along wanting to give you something for free, most likely you don't ask a lot of tough questions. They could say grandpa was the Shah of Atlantis, for all you care, so long as their checks clear. But hey, I'm always a cynic, in case you hadn't noticed.

Fort Rock Cemetery

Some photos from the cemetery next to Fort Rock, out in eastern Oregon.

I sort of fixated on the "flags and headstones in the remote desert" angle, and it just didn't occur to me to get a closer look at any of the headstones. Believe it or not. Someone else did exactly that, though, and put together a fascinating Flickr photoset about it. A few more photos of the cemetery appear in this Waymarking gallery. All those photos make me wish I'd taken the time to look around more. Although if I had, I probably wouldn't have had the time to drop by Hole-in-the-Ground. In hindsight, that may be what I ought to have done. Oh, well. You live and learn.

More VuPoint fun

More photos taken with that $14.99 digital camera I picked up a while ago. The top photo and the last two were taken through that infrared filter I cobbled together. It's odd how IR photos taken with my usual camera come out in a range of pink, lilac, and orange tones, while with the VuPoint they come out sort of black and white.

If nothing else, the photos show that the camera's viewfinder image is a very, very rough approximation of what the end result is going to look like. You never know what you're going to get. It's like a box of chocolates, or whatever.

Meanwhile, I was at the antique store earlier today and picked up another new toy. Cute, huh? There are also some larger pics of the flash version. The thing uses 620 film, which can be tricky to come by. There's a camera store in town that does 120 -> 620 film conversions, so maybe that'll work for this lil' beastie and maybe it won't. I mostly got it as a shelf curio, but I just might take it out for a spin some time. I realize I've said repeatedly I have no interest in dealing with film cameras ever again, but I might make an exception now and then. Purity is so uninteresting, after all...







The above photo was taken through an especially wavy wine bottle. It's not camera distortion, though that would be a reasonable guess.







Here's those IR photos I mentioned...

two storms, long ago

I recently ended up with a free flatbed scanner, and I thought I'd try my hand at scanning some old photos I took as a kid. The scanner is about 9 years old and has some highly original notions about color fidelity, so here are a couple that looked good in greyscale. I took both of these with a little 110 camera I got for Christmas one year, if I remember right.

I'm not entirely sure when or where the first photo was taken. It was in an old photo album, and the other photos were of a family vacation to Yellowstone back in the early 1980s. (circa 1984, I'm guessing.) In any case, I assume it's from that trip since it's in that album, but I'm not 100% sure, and there's not a lot of context to be had from the photo itself. I never got into the habit of writing on the backs of photos, so no clues there either. I rather like the photo though. I'd be happy with this one if I took it today.

Second photo is a storm over the Pacific back in February 1979. I know the month and year because we were driving down the coast on another family vacation, and the weather was like this the whole time, which meant that I missed the big solar eclipse on Feb. 26th, 1979. So this would've been a few days before the eclipse, I expect.

Back in the present day, getting the scanner working under Ubuntu was a mildly irritating challenge. At first I was pleased to learn that Ubuntu came with SANE, an open-source scanner package that plays much the same role TWAIN does on Windows. It even had a driver for my particular scanner, and initially I couldn't believe my luck. And then it just wouldn't detect the scanner. It just refused to see it. After a great deal of searching about, I finally hit on the problem. The scanner's one of those old parallel port jobs, and the problem wasn't that SANE didn't see the scanner, it's that it didn't see the parallel port. Seems that if the kernel module for the parallel port device isn't loaded, and it isn't by default on Ubuntu, you have to modprobe ppdev as root to get the damn thing into the kernel. That causes /dev/parport0 to magically appear in /dev, but the device only grants access to root by default. I suppose you could run xsane as root if you wanted to, although it screams bloody murder when you do that (and rightly so). Or you could make the SANE backend suid root, but that's bad news too. Changing the permissions on the device seems like the least bad approach, or at least that's what I've been doing so far. Then there's xsane's peculiar gui to puzzle out. And I'm still not sure how to make colors come out correctly. Whoever designed the scanner was clearly a huge fan of blue-green. Other colors, not so much.

Honestly, I don't know how we ever got by without digital photos.

It occurred to me recently that it ought to be feasible to pack the innards of a digital camera into a 110 or 126 film cartridge. You could haul that mid-60's Instamatic out of mom's closet, brush off the dust, and start taking digital photos. The cartridge would need an image sensor (obviously), memory, a small battery, some support circuitry, and probably a USB connector somewhere. Everything else -- optics, shutter, flash, etc. -- would be provided by the surrounding vintage camera. It'd be a cool, geeky retrotech thing to have, but actually making something like this would be far beyond my measly skills with a soldering iron, and selling it would be far beyond my even measlier marketing/PR skills. Volunteers, anyone?

Fort Rock

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More mini-roadtrip pics, this time from Fort Rock [map], a bizarro volcanic structure just off Hwy 31 southeast of Bend. Fort Rock's just a few miles east of Hole-in-the-Ground, and shares a similar origin, but it's much more photogenic. I took quite a few photos of the place, and uploaded a bunch of them to Flickr. Then I realized this post would be wayyyy too bulky if I included all of them -- so the full set is here in case you're interested.

Some links about the geology of the area, from the USGS, OregonGeology.com (brought to you by Oregon's Department of Geology & Mineral Industries), and Volcano World (brought to you by OSU and the University of North Dakota). And the U. of O. has a page about the 9000 year old sandals discovered nearby, which was a major archeological find by Oregon standards. Hey, it's what we've got. It's not like we have pyramids. Not that I find much to admire about societies that spend all their time and energy building pyramids, mind you. Or Gothic cathedrals. Or tacky suburban megachurches for that matter. But I digress.

If Fort Rock was near Hollywood, just imagine all the westerns that would've been filmed here. It's a real missed opportunity if you ask me, and I'm not a rabid fan of westerns. And just imagine Captain Kirk fistfighting a shambling alien baddie here. I know I'd watch that.

If Fort Rock was in Europe, or anywhere else with a substantial population, it probably would've been used as a fortress or a castle some time in its long history. There would be historic buildings, and tour buses, and trinket shops with t-shirts, and there'd be one of those tacky nighttime laser shows they do. There'd be minivans full of harried parents and screaming kids. A McDonalds every 10 feet. Talented pickpockets working the crowd. Senior tour groups from Texas complaining loudly about all the "foreigners" and their horrible foreign ways. Groups of pasty white Brits on holiday, loudly binge-drinking on the local rotgut at 9 am. Flocks of Japanese tourists with expensive cameras. Obese German nudists lounging around looking smug.

But you'll find none of that here. Fort Rock was once used as a livestock pen, no doubt a very excellent one, until the owner donated it to the state parks department. There's a small (and never full) parking lot, a few basic interpretive signs, some picnic tables and restrooms. Several trails meander around within the rock walls. The tiny town of Fort Rock lies in the distance some miles away. But for the birds nesting in the rocks, and the constant desert wind, all is silence....