Kevin's Weblog

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.

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:

This was taken in the hills above Altadena, in an attempt to capture a dramatic bit of interplay between light and space. Unfortunately, I think it really ends up displaying the limitations of consumer digital cameras when it comes to dynamic range.

(Disclosure: this photo has had mild contrast and brightness adjustments. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t produce the desired effect.)

I missed a week, so two photos this time.

One of the social events at YAPC this year was a scavenger hunt, wherein we were split into groups of 5 and sent off to procure photographic evidence of various objects around Toronto. Most of the items were one-offs, but there were a few clues where teams could collect a point for every instance of the item they found.

One of these was “anything Perl related”.

By my count, there’s 16 llamas in that shot.

Another was murals. I’m not sure exactly what this one was about, but I’m pretty sure it was my favorite one of those we discovered.

I’m somewhat amazed how little I’ve written about my travels this summer. Partly that’s because I was incredibly busy, but partly it’s because S. was using the digital camera most of the time for her classwork. As a result, I was using film and haven’t had the photos to illustrate the stories I wanted to tell until a couple days ago.

At this point, I’ve somewhat forgotten the narratives I wanted to tell, so I think I’m just going to show pictures that I took. I’ve been meaning to start a weekly photo feature here, so I’ll begin doing that now. In theory I’ll try to make this happen on Sundays, but as you can see, I’m not off to a good start on that.

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