Category: Photos

Found a brief breath of free time to go out to the (Columbia River) Gorge this weekend to see some friends at their very, very nifty place in Lyle, Washington. Blustery and dramatic weather. Wildflowers. It was a good time. Except, perhaps, for poor John, who had to endure such torture!

It was Sunday today and I went for a hike with David and my mother-in-law, Cathy, to Oso Flaco Lake and then on to the seashore here on the Central Coast of California. Oso Flaco Lake is spring-fed and outflows in a robust channel to the ocean. The stream-channel-outflow-thing has tremendous velocity and changes course in front of your eyes, eroding micro-cliffs of sand and curving tighter and then looser again.

The Daily Shoot assignment for March 17: Grab your camera and walk 2 minutes in any direction. Stop. Find a photo worth making from where you stopped and post it.

This was challenging. The place I ended up two minutes into my morning foot commute to work that day was wretched: the low brick wall near an abandoned, grimy building owned by the city. An area rife with graffiti and trash, but without any of the strange intrigue that such areas sometimes have. Just ugly.

I tried photographing it to capture the bleakness. But it just looked like a sad dirty wall and some sad dirty sidewalk. I tried looking up, but just got, yawn, some bare tree branches and telephone wires. Again, yawn.

It wasn’t until I kneeled next to the wall, crawled in close, and really looked that I saw that there were small plant-lings growing here. Unfurling. Happily being plants. And I was satisfied.

I think that this is a great exercise. The timed, pseudo-random photographing. Dadaism would be proud.

Everyone knows that there is weird scummy stuff on the beach. Sometimes it gets opalescent and piles up in a way that looks like it might make a good desktop background for one’s computer.

My goddaughter, Kea and daddy Kes at the beach (well, indoors) last weekend. Kea is old enough to be extraordinarily into the beach. “BEEECH? BEEEEEACH, P’LEASE?!” She grew gravely concerned when it grew dark. Where was the beach? It was sleeping.

I don’t like to use the word “pussywillows”, but it would have been appropriate here. Chasing tsunamis, spending time at the coast with nice people.

Still feeling peculiar, dispirited. But so as the earth awakens for something springlike, so shall I, ultimately, get my stripe of inspiration back. Here is a photo of a tree, emphasizing negative space. I had to adjust my route to work to find something new. So I did.

Winter in the high desert. Juniper trees don’t get berries every year, but when they get them, they are tenacious little guys. Cute and blue-purple, I like the way they smell. Taken at Arnold Ice Cave, Central Oregon.

Life is more interesting because of things like this. The surreal name of this restaurant was an amusing mystery in Southeast Portland until the Portland Tribune tracked down exactly how this strip mall restaurant on SE Powell Blvd got its strange moniker.

My Dailyshoot contribution for Friday, February 5, 2010 (#ds82): More fun on a Friday: Make a photo that goes with the title of a movie you’ve seen, interpreted any way you like! This is my take on Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window.