waterfront rainstorm

So here are a few pics from Waterfront Park, taken right in the middle of Tuesday's horrendous, drenching rain. Unless you read this blog regularly, you might be wondering why I'd do a stupid thing like that. Actually I had several reasons. None of them are especially good reasons, but hey.

• I happened to have my (non-)trusty Holga along that day, and it even had black & white film in it. So it seemed like ideal subject matter.
• Hey, it's a Holga, it's not like it would rust if it got a little wet, or the precision optics would get messed up somehow.
• I've never actually had a proper case of pneumonia, and therefore haven't yet learned not to do this.
• I had another roll of 120 plus a roll of 35mm I wanted to get developed that day, so I figured I'd use up the rest of the current roll and do all 3 at once, to be thrifty or frugal or something.
• I wasn't sure any part of the roll would turn out, anyway. I'd forgotten to tape up the Holga this time, and a couple of days earlier I had the back pop right off. Which I understand happens to everyone sooner or later, so it's sort of a Holga rite of passage. I wasn't sure if any part of the roll was still good, so I figured this wasn't a roll to keep around for special occasions and precious moments and whatnot. Might as well use it up and see what's salvageable. In the end I think I only lost about whole two photos, plus half of the next one. If you look closely, you can see part of the word "KODAK" that somehow ended up on the film.
• I've been a bit short on blog material lately, and I figured if I got some really grim, wintry photos, I'd get a post out of it, at least. That, or pneumonia.
• I've spent a lot of time lately whining about the lack of proper photo subject matter. So I got to thinking, if it's going to be all wet and wintry and bleak for months anyway, regardless of how I feel about it, I might as well give in and just wallow in it for a while. Not literally, of course. That just leads to hypothermia, not creative fulfillment. Unlike pneumonia, I have had hypothermia before, and I'm not wild about a repeat.
• I was also feeling kind of surly and unmotivated and undervalued that day, and only partly because of the hangover. That's one thing I've had before and haven't yet learned to avoid 100% of the time. That, and trying peculiar food after a few drinks. This time it was sushi filled with sea urchin innards. The previous time there were deep-fried pickles, if I recall correctly.
• I honestly didn't have a better idea. I seriously couldn't think of anything else to do just then. Photo-wise, I mean.

The aforementioned half-a-photo.

watching the west hills (mostly)

I. morning moon:

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II. snow:

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III. ultraviolet at dusk, featuring a very shiny construction crane:







The above photo shows the fun half-open window trick yet again. I've never seen anyone else use the half-open window trick to create funky UV photos. Surely I didn't invent the thing, did I?

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IV. morning mist:

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V. other (not the west hills at all):



Powell Grove pioneer cemetery, around NE 122nd & Sandy




Winter sunset in the Hollywood District, fwiw.






More morning sky, from (I think) Milwaukie.

a brief january sunbreak

It's no secret that the weather's been getting me down lately. Read the last few posts here, and you'll notice I've blabbed on and on about it for some time now -- unless you get bored first and depart to a more fascinating corner of the interwebs, which I suppose would be understandable.

So the sun came out today, and it was great. I left the office and wandered around outside for a few hours, enjoying a world with actual colors other than gray for once. It's gone now, of course, but it was fun while it lasted. I think I even saw my shadow. Although here in Portland seeing your shadow in January means another six months of winter. And not seeing your shadow in January means precisely the same thing.

I realize I ought to say a few words about the Iowa caucuses or something, and I realize most people would rather read that than read about my wintry angst, but I can't bring myself to do it. Oregon's primary isn't until May, and the nomination's bound to be decided by then. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping Edwards pulls it out, but I realize the odds are against that. We'll probably nominate another middle-of-the-road, voted-for-it-before-I-voted-against-it, didn't-inhale, Hollywood-friendly no-hoper instead, like we usually do. So I'm also crossing my fingers and hoping the R's nominate Huckabee or one of the other Bible-thumping nutjobs, because the D nominee is going to need all the help s/he can get.

In any case, I took a couple of photos of today's sunbreak, just to prove it really happened, and here they are. I didn't colorize them in GIMP or anything, the sky really was blue, just briefly.

I think I need a long vacation. Somewhere very, very warm. With fruity tropical drinks with parasols and whatnot, and no email, or at least no corporate email. And parrots. And broadband.

Winter at Dalton Falls

A few photos of icy Dalton Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge, taken earlier this morning. If you've never heard of Dalton Falls (and most people haven't), you might want to check out an earlier post of mine here, which is where I keep my slim supply of useful info about the place.

Driving out there this morning was only a moderately bad idea, as it turns out. It's not true, strictly speaking, that many Bothans died to bring you this information. There was a bit of sleet coming down now and then, but mostly it was just very cold rain, so that was ok, I guess. I came across the site of an earlier accident on the Gorge highway, but the tow truck had it cleared within minutes of when I got there, and I didn't have to wait long. So that was ok too, or at least it was for me. And the falls were running for once and properly iced up, just as I'd hoped, and some of the photos turned out reasonably ok, or at least semi-fixable in GIMP. (I took a few more with the old Spotmatic, so we'll see how those come out when I have the film developed.) After taking these pics, I then had to scurry back into town for an important meeting with the PHBs. I almost missed it, but didn't, so that was ok as well -- although all things considered, I think I'd rather take "semi-fixable in GIMP" photos in 33-degree sleet than talk to a bunch of clueless PHBs again. All in all, nothing terrible happened this time around. Although I should point out before anyone else does that deliberately driving out to the Gorge while a winter storm watch is in effect is really sort of sub-brilliant. And the drive wasn't my idea of a good time, exactly. Wasn't much fun at all, actually. Yech.

Now that I'm here in my nice, toasty cubicle, with nice, toasty interweb access, I see that oil now costs over $100/barrel. I'm not even going to speculate about a dollar value on this morning's little foray, but under the circumstances I probably won't make a weekly habit of it.

There's another recent photo of the falls (albeit without ice) in this OregonHikers thread. One commenter actually links to my Dalton Falls post as a source of good info, which just goes to show how scarce authoritative info is about the place.

For future reference, the falls are just uphill from milepost 31 (above) on the old Columbia Gorge highway. If you find the milepost and don't see a waterfall directly uphill, the waterfall's gone dry and you'll need to come back some other time.

Above & below, a couple of variations on a "wintry grimness" theme, at the mini-parking lot for the falls. You'd almost think I'd been to art school or something.

The falls from inside a nice, warm car.

assorted sunrises & sunsets

Yet another batch of photos from my ongoing geek-out over old cameras. It's kind of an inconvenient time of year to take up a new hobby, since you can only take so many photos of dark-n-gloomy winter stuff before it gets prohibitively depressing. At least the sun still rises and sets, and occasionally it's even visible.

Not a big fan of winter, I have to say.


So more than anything these photos are test shots, just to see what my various bits and pieces and widgets can do. But I figured, hey, they turned out ok, so I might as well share a few of them. I mention this mostly in case you're wondering why I took so many photos of the same thing. Ok, I was also trying to use up various rolls of film so I could get them processed. Once you're in digital-land, you forget what a pain film can be. And that's before we get to the cost of film, developing, and scanning. In the long run it's probably cheaper to just shell out and get a DSLR and use the lenses on it instead. I'm sure I'll do that eventually, but right now I'm waiting until the end of January to see what goodies arrive at the big PMA 2008 trade show.

Updated: This isn't my first batch of sunrise photos, by any means. It just occurred to me to go rifle through the archives, and -- surprise, surprise -- I was stuck doing sunrise photos last December, just like I am now. Earlier, in October '06, I posted some photos from the preceding January. More recently, here are sunrises from March and October of this year. I never seem to end up with any during the summer, mostly because I'd have to get up too damn early, and in the summer there are lots of other things to take photos of that don't require you to be awake at such an unnatural hour.

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So first, here's a recent sunrise, taken with a Pentax Spotmatic SP + Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 135/3.5. Mostly Mt. Scott, with bits of Mt. Talbert and the South Waterfront district.

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A couple of Sears TLS photos, the first with the standard 55/1.4 lens, and the second with a monstrous Vivitar 75-260mm zoom lens I found at Goodwill. I'd be exaggerating if I said it weighs a ton, but I wouldn't be exaggerating by all that much.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the construction crane photo. Everybody badmouths old zoom lenses all the time. I'm sure technology's improved and so forth, and a present-day equivalent would certainly be a lot lighter and smaller. But this particular lens, or at least this particular photo, seems reasonably sharp. Sharp enough to use on the interwebs, at any rate.

After buying the lens, I was surprised to discover it's a T4-mount lens. I was playing with it and twisted a ring at the base, and the M42 bits at the end came off in my hand. WTF!? Turns out that was actually a good thing, since the lens's aperture mechanism wasn't working correctly, which might be why I got such a good deal on it. Turns out flaky aperture stuff is a congenital defect among T4 lenses, but the problem area is inside the body-to-T4 adapter, not in the lens itself. So buying a new adapter makes everything peachy keen again.

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A batch of sunrise photos, this time with a Mamiya 1000 DTL + Vivitar 135/2.8 telephoto lens. These are from a few minutes later than the Spotmatic+Takumar pics, so already the sky's a bit different. Note to self: If you want to compare & contrast two similar lenses, try taking photos of something that generally stays the same. Sunrises and clouds don't count.

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More pics from the Mamiya, this time with the stock Auto Sekor 55/1.8 lens.

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And last but not least, a couple of Argus C3 photos.