So I broke down and bought a Holga...

If you read this blog religiously, which I admit isn't all that likely, you might remember this post from a few months ago where I was playing with a toy digital camera, and swore, cross-my-heart-sorta, that I wasn't going to touch film cameras ever again, although I used the phrase "Holga envy" at one point to describe what I was up to. Well, it's a few months later and here I am with an ever-growing pile of old film cameras. And all that envying must've taken a toll, because I recently became the proud owner of a brand new Holga 120N. So here are a few photos from my very first ever roll with a Holga.

Incidentally it's not my first-ever roll of 120 film I've ever taken. I picked up an old box camera a while back and tried to trim a roll of 120 down so it'd fit in a 620 camera, because I read somewhere on the Interwebs that you could do it at home and not have to pay anyone to trim or respool your film for you. Well, um, that didn't go so well, as it turns out. But I did learn how to load 120 film properly, which is something.

Ok, so the top photo is from Mt. Tabor Park, looking towards downtown Portland. I think this one turned out rather well, even apart from the whole Holga thing. It's got the vignetting stuff, naturally, since you can't really get away from that so long as you've got the usual Holga lens on the camera. But other than that, it's really not all that crappy. Which is fine with me, actually. I hadn't originally planned on buying a Holga at all, and spent a while scavenging around town looking for cheap yet non-toy medium format cameras, but I just didn't find anything that was interesting and in good condition. After searching for a while, I was on Amazon one night after a couple of beers and though, hey, what the hell, I'll just buy a friggin' Holga and see what all the fuss is about. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it seemed like a good idea at the time, and there were extenuating circumstances.



And here's my old friend Leland One, a.k.a. "Rusting Chunks No. 5". C'mon, you didn't really think I'd get a new camera and not use it on the Rusting Chunks, did you? Oh, and the moon's in there too, if you look closely.

Before we go too much further, i.e. before I bore you to tears, let me point out that if you'd like to see some pics from people who really know their way around a Holga (and I mean that in a good way, honest!), there's no shortage on Flickr.



A bit of downtown Portland.




O'Bryant Square, downtown.




Tanner Springs, one of my other favorite subjects. What you see here aren't light leaks or other camera defects, actually. This was taken from a moving streetcar, and those are reflections on the window.




Yes, I'm afraid I recently wandered around First Thursday with a Holga. How artsy-fartsy is that, I ask you? Possibly I should've just gotten myself a t-shirt with "Dilettante" in big letters and wandered around wearing that instead. Although I'm not sure that would've been any cheaper.

This photo is seriously underexposed. I thought I had it in its so-called "bulb mode", but I forgot to check, and it turns out I didn't. You wouldn't think there'd be anything to get the hang of with a Holga, but the evidence suggests otherwise.




And here we are back at Mt. Tabor again. This one didn't come out so well. I was more or less facing the sun this time, and the Holga doesn't seem to be so keen on that. It took a bit of GIMP work to get it to where it is now, and I still can't say I'm entirely pleased with the results. But hey, it's a Holga, you were expecting what exactly?

Godless Communism at Tanner Springs

A few more photos from Tanner Springs Park, once again taken with that "antique" film camera I bought a while back. This time around I used an old Soviet Helios-44 lens, complete with "Made in USSR" stamped on the side. The lens actually came on a Zenit-EM camera, a special edition complete with MOSKVA 1980 Olympic rings. How cool is that? The Zenit needs a little TLC though, so I unscrewed the lens and used it on my main M42 camera instead. Whatever else you say about the Soviets, they did rather well in the optics department. Ok, ok, technically the Helios-44's a clone of an earlier Zeiss Biotar, but hey. It's a good cloning job, at least.

A newer version of the Helios-44 is still in production, it turns out, and the manufacturer will sell you a shiny new one for just $43 plus shipping from Russia. Or if you'd just like to see more of what this baby can do, Flickr's got a pile of pix here.

Pics: Starvation Creek

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More pics from Starvation Creek State Park. I mentioned the place briefly here, and I don't really have much to add to that. So relax and enjoy the photos, or not.

First a few of the falls themselves:

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And a few of the forest and surrounding area, mostly in infrared.

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And a couple of the Columbia Gorge, looking west from the Starvation Creek parking lot.

Pics: Shepperd's Dell

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A few more photos of Young's Creek Falls, better known as Shepperd's Dell. I've already discussed the place at semi-length here so I won't bore you with that again. No, instead I'll bore you briefly with a rant about apostrophes. The apostrophes in "Young's" and "Shepperd's" are possessives and thus are grammatically correct. This usage is not geographically correct, though, as the USGS folks who handle these matters discourage the use of apostrophes. They even admit even they aren't sure why this is Federal policy, but it's been that way since 1890 and there's no sign they're planning to change it anytime soon. So in this post I've elected to use the names according to proper English, and in the previous post I used them the way they legally, officially are. I suppose I'm splitting the difference, just in case.

I realize I'm being amazingly pedantic here, but apostrophe abuse pisses me off. I'm sorry, I can't help it, it just does. Dropping the apostrophe in a possessive is possibly ok on Australian wine labels (i.e. "Penfolds"), but nowhere else. I'm sorry, but them's the rules.

Now that we've resolved that particular nitpick, here are the rest of the photos. Enjoy!

ivywall

No Infrared Rainbow

So here's the result of an experiment that didn't turn out at all. I tried to take an infrared photo of a rainbow during a recent storm, but it just isn't visible.

It is, in fact, possible to get pics of the infrared part of a rainbow. See here and here for a couple of good examples. So I suppose I'll just have to try again next time. That is, if I happen to have the right gear available the next time a rainbow appears. So don't expect immediate results, I guess is what I'm trying to say here.



I assume one could do the same with ultraviolet rainbows as well, but I haven't run across any examples so far, or even any serious discussions about the subject. Well, there's this thread, but none of the posters seem all that clued in. Oh well. Sounds like something to try if can I ever cobble together a UV setup.

river legend

They'll probably send me to Guantanamo for posting this. These pics are of a large sculpture in downtown Portland called "River Legend", which you've probably never seen or heard of before. This is because it's cleverly hidden around the back (2nd Avenue) side of the ultra-70's-ugly Green/Wyatt Federal Building, which faces the Plaza Blocks. The sculpture's on a raised landing behind a row of trees, and you can only see the very tip of it from the street. To see more you have to climb a steep flight of stairs, or walk around the building from the 3rd Ave. side.

Naturally, being a federal building, there are cameras everywhere. The area around the sculpture looks like it might be the designated smoking area, so that might explain what seems like an excessive number of cameras even by federal standards. I can easily see some wingnut Bush crony deciding smokers are extra-sinful and need close monitoring. Or maybe they're just worried about skateboarders. Who knows? In any case, they're bound to have video of me taking photos of the sculpture, and modern face recognition software could easily pair that up with my driver's license photo, and from there it'd be a trivial step to discover that I'm a registered Democrat and I always vote. Even though taking photos, and being a Democrat, and voting are all still legal, technically, it wouldn't surprise me if I'm now flagged as an evildoer in some shadowy government database. Even though -- and I'd just like to emphasize this -- my interest was strictly in the sculpture itself. The building appears in a couple of photos, but that's sort of unavoidable from certain interesting camera angles.

But enough about me and my probable Kafkaesque legal future. "River Legend" dates to 1976, and was created by the sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, whose website offers another photo of it. He seems to specialize in themes inspired by Greek mythology, but in this interview he indicates "River Legend" was inspired by the Indian tale of the Bridge of the Gods (the original one, not today's rather scary toll bridge). So, ok, that explains the name and the basic shape, although it looks like there's still a lot of Greek influence going on there. Well, that's what I'm getting out of it. Casual passersby, or smokers, probably just see yet another big blob of modern art. More than likely it barely registers, as it's not obviously anything in particular. Not too many people would be curious enough to check the interwebs for more info, and doing so turns out to be a bit of a chore, since the sculpture isn't even marked with its name, at least not that I saw anywhere. This little bit engraved toward the base was all I had to go on. What all those initials stand for is anyone's guess.

I can't really blame people for not being curious about the sculpture. Our fair city has more than its share of chunky 70's public art, and it all looks about the same, quite honestly. Regardless of the inspiration, or the materials used, back then everything came out big, brown, and slabby. I don't know if there's an official art world term for it, but there was definitely a look, or a movement, or school of thought at work.

So you might be wondering why I was curious. Well, as I mentioned, you can see the tip of something over all the bushes, and that bit looked sort of chunky and art-like, but tucked away in an obscure and rather forbidding location. I can't resist stuff like that, even if I'll probably pay for it later. So I suppose it isn't a very good reason, under the circumstances. Once they're waterboarding me down in Gitmo, I'll patiently explain it to them again for the umpteenth time, and they'll just assume I'm hiding my true purpose and break out the electrodes or something.

It's not entirely accurate to call "River Legend" big, brown, and slabby. Big and slabby, definitely, but its exact color is giving me trouble. The thing's made of basalt, the same volcanic stuff most of our fair state is made of, and I've always sort of thought of basalt as a flat dark grey color, but the more I look at it, the less sure I am. I spent a great deal of time in GIMP tweaking these photos, compensating for my digital camera's auto-overexposure misfeature, bringing out colors, etc., which turns out to be harder than you might think. At this point I'm not entirely sure what color it is, or if it has any particular color at all, or it all depends on the quality and angle of light you've got at the moment. So I just sort of tried to use my best judgment and hope the outcome doesn't look too cartoony or amateurish. Personally I'm inclined to blame the rock, for making things far more difficult than they needed to be. Maybe I should've just bailed on the color business and converted the pics to black & white or something. Hmm. I wish I'd thought of that before.

Whatever color or colors the thing is, it does have an interesting texture in parts, and a little Unsharp Mask action really brings it out.

No "dig a little deeper" post of mine would be complete without a pseudorandom fact dump. So here are a few tidbits related to the sculpture:

• The Smithsonian owns a maquette for "River Legend".
• A gallery shows a small version of the sculpture here.
• Hadzi's other commission for the GSA is located in Alabama.
• Locally, he's also got a piece in Eugene.
• Hadzi also created monumental doors for a Protestant church in Italy, a fact which gets a quick mention in an interesting recent obit out of Seattle.

So, ok, those aren't the most enthralling bits of trivia I've ever come up with, but unless you want me to start simply making stuff up, it'll have to do. I suppose I could try to start a legend that walking under it is good luck, or possibly bad luck, or maybe a bit of both, or not. It's not a very good legend, is it? Oh, well. I tried.