The Narrows, El Malpais

[View Larger Map] <0>A few old photos from El Malpais National Monument in western New Mexico, just south of the town of Grants. Much of the monument consists of an enormous, rugged lava flow (hence the name), and these photos were taken from the Narrows viewpoint, looking out over the dark expanse.

I realize giant lava flows aren't everyone's cup of tea, and it's not like there's a shortage of dramatic scenery in this corner of the world, but it's still kind of a remarkable sight. So I'm always a bit surprised when people inevitably say they've never heard of the place. Well, now you have.

Pololū Valley

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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.

empire state building, july 2000

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.

ʻAkaka Falls, Fall 2000

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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.

tanner springs, october 2012 (vi)

tanner springs, october 2012 (v)

tanner springs, october 2012 (iv)

tanner springs, october 2012 (iii)

tanner springs, october 2012 (ii)

tanner springs, october 2012 (i)

waterfront flowers (red)

waterfront flowers (purple)

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.

Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach

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.

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uncooperative cat photos

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....