Kevin's Weblog

First tulip spotting of the year. Unfortunately, I only had my crappy camera phone with me, so apologies for the poor quality.

I love tulips. This is the first of what promises to be many in our yard.

76) Visit Portland Chinese Garden

We went to the Portland Chinese Garden on one of the nice afternoons last week. It was pleasantly uncrowded, and with most of the trees and plants bare for the winter, it had a nice, sparse, architectural feel.

It is a difficult place to photograph well, and I wasn’t particularly happy with most of the photos I took. Partially, this was because I’m still learning how to use all the features of this camera, and some things didn’t work out how I wanted. Partially, it’s the sort of place you need to spend some time just experiencing before you can understand how to capture in photographs. I’ll probably make a couple more visits before I bring the camera again.

I did get two shots I thought worth sharing. The first didn’t turn out that well in the original color, due to too much contrast. However, hitting it with a sepia filter toned it down and brought out some of the details that caught my eye.

The second is a little cliché, but I like it anyway.

We drove out to the gorge this afternoon and walked around Wahkeena and Multnomah Falls, and had brunch at the Multnomah Falls Lodge (highly recommended). One thing I wondered from previous trips to the gorge was how the pros manage to get photos of these places without any people in them. Today I learned that going during the winter is one potential answer (although this photo has obvious snow that isn’t in most photos of this waterfall).

As an aside, the visitor center at Multnomah Falls claims that 2 million people visit the falls every year. I’m a little skeptical, since I can’t figure out how the parking and other facilities could possibly handle an average of 5500 people a day. That’s one person every 15 seconds around the clock. When you consider that a weekend day in the summer probably gets several times the average, it gets really hard to believe.

A couple days before our current trip back to LA, I picked up one of these:

I’d been eyeing the D70s for a while, somewhat grudgingly. I’ve got enough Nikon lenses that it would be quite expensive to switch, although Canon clearly had the lead in bodies. So, I was quite happy when the D80 appeared, putting Nikon back on more-or-less equal footing.

One of the first things I realized was that this camera is much more complicated than either my old N60 film camera or any of the point-and-shoot digitals I’ve had. Fortunately, it’s possible to ignore a lot of that if you want, but sometime soon I’ll want to sit down with the manual and figure out what all the buttons and menus do, and experiment with different settings.

I’m also probably going to need to buy a real wide-angle lens. With the film camera, I’ve usually been happy with the low end of my 28-80mm zoom, but the smaller sensor on the digital makes that effectively 42-120mm, which doesn’t really suffice to take many pictures inside. Unfortunately, it looks like it’ll be somewhat expensive to address this, since you need what was traditionally an ultra-wide lens in order to get normal wide-angle on a digital camera. But, at least I can console myself with the fact that my $500 70-300mm lens just turned into what would have been a $5000 lens before.

So far I have not actually taken many interesting pictures with the camera, having been stuck in mostly boring parts of LA. But, I expect to do more on the drive back to Oregon, so I should be posting some of the products before long.

Sounds like something you pick up in Tijauna, but no, it’s our favorite flower. Witness the first Neomerica bloom of the year:

This year the plant has put up 5 flower stalks, and last year’s single stalk produced a dozen or more blooms, so we’re looking forward to enjoying lots of these. We were a little worried about the plant because we made the mistake of planting it in the ground in the front flower bed, and absolutely nothing grows well there. Our theory is that this is because the house has no gutters, so when it rains all the nastiness that settles on the roof runs off into the bed and basically poisons it. At any rate, we transplanted the Neomerica into a large container of fresh soil a couple months ago, and just look at it now!

We have a small native / low-water garden in front of the house with some pretty interesting plants. I think the most fascinating might be the Euphorbia, on account of the way it flowers. The flowers come in waves, spaced about 2 weeks apart, in a remarkable self-similar pattern.

Clustered primary blooms:

Secondary blooms starting to open:

Tertiary blooms:

(You’ll definitely want to click through to the full-size version of the second and third photo to see the detailed structure of the flower spikes.)

There seem to be a lot of magnolia pictures getting blogged recently. Not too surprising really, given the time of year. Here’s my contribution:

Taken in the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park in early Feb.

I haven’t posted a photo in a couple weeks, not because I didn’t have a good one, but because I have a great one and I can’t show it to you. I got my last roll of slides from the summer developed and was thrilled to find that it was possibly the best roll I’ve ever shot. There’s a series of images which are just stunning. That’s on my light table. Unfortunately, apparently my scanner sucks. It’s a Canon Pixma MP 760 if you’d like to not buy one, and it’s made gorgeous colors and textures into something flat and boring.

I’ve been stuck for a couple weeks, not posting photos because I want to show this photo, but I don’t want to show this scan. And, I’ve decided that I need to just post the damn thing and move on. But first, context...

The last day before OSCON started, I put the family on a plane back to LA and then took off to the Columbia River Gorge to hike and take some pictures. I was hoping to go by Bridal Veil Falls, but the trail was under construction. Instead, I picked, more-or-less arbitrarily, to stop at Wahkeena Falls. This was a good choice. In the Yakima language, “Wahkeena” means “most beautiful”, which is entirely accurate in my opinion.

It’s a quick walk from the parking area to the observation desk at the bottom of the falls, and that’s as far as most people go. I took a couple pictures there, but it’s hard to capture the whole falls, plus there were all these people in the way. After a few minutes, I continued up the trail, leaving almost all the crowd behind. For a bit, the trail is steep and fairly uninteresting, but it eventually gets you up above the top of the falls and follows the headwaters. Apparently, almost no one makes it to this point, though, because I was completely alone for most of the next hour or so that I spent rambling along, sitting by the side, or at one point in the middle, of the river and taking pictures.

The light was somewhat low at this point, and I was using slow film (Velvia). I seem to have gotten lucky and hit a sweet spot in the exposure times, because the effect on the water is pretty magical. At the same time, the vegetation is all that lovely, brilliant Pacific Northwest green. Neither effect comes out in the scans. So, if you are prepared to be disappointed, here’s the picture: