photography

This past Memorial Weekend the Great Prognosticators of Weather had predicted partly sunny days, which is the same as partly cloudy in parts of the country where it doesn’t rain as much as it does here. You see the allusion, it rains SO MUCH that when the clouds finally do part, it’s partly sunny. There’s no point in calling it partly cloudy when fully cloudy is the default behavior.

Not that it mattered, the Weather Prognosticators were WRONG WRONG WRONG. It stayed fully cloudy all that weekend and into that Monday, but by Sunday, after a hundred or so years of the clouds and rain, we decided to bid a hearty “Fuck You” to the weather and the oh so smug Weather Prognosticators and GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.

So we did. I’ve been to the Oregon Zoo, briefly, and wasn’t too impressed. It a zoo, after all, and unless you have a hard on for listless African beasts laying around in enclosures faked to look like natural habitat, once you seen one zoo, you’ve seen them all. The cool thing about the Oregon Zoo, though, is where it’s at, namely Washington Park, which has a lot of other cool places to visit, too.

So we went to the Japanese Gardens.

Maybe it was the cloudy weather laying down a mellow atmosphere, maybe it was the fact that we drove a mile or so into Washington Park on a winding road through some beautiful, primeval forest, thereby losing, or at least temporarily suspending, our connection to the modern, hectic, world, but the vibe at the gardens was one of peace and tranquility.

Where the city is one big knot of humanity moving as fast as possible, as loud as possible, the gardens were still and silent. The moment I stepped through the gates, I felt all my tension and stress leave my body. There is just no way a person can be angry, or sustain any negative emotions for any length of time while in the gardens. The beauty of the place just overwhelms you and makes you happy to know such a jewel can exist in the middle of a major metropolitan area.

My photos do not do the place justice, but I am inspired to improve so that I can better convey the awesomeness of it.

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The intention was a double exposure, since the fish eye has a cool switch which allows for that, but alas, the effect was less than stunning.

Benson Bubblers

An incredibly ugly piece of public ‘art’ in a small square between 6th and Broadway. In the afternoons, a group of local skater boi (s) make it their bitch.

Last Father’s Day, the Fetching Mrs. Bixby gives me a fisheye camera 2 from Lomography, a company which started out selling cheap Eastern European fixed lens cameras to young, urban, hipsters, thereby elevating grainy and poorly composed snapshots into an art form. Looking at their online store now I see they’ve upped the quality a bit and have increased their offerings, but you can still get cheap fixed lens cameras in case you need to scratch your Young, Hipster Art itch.

I like my fish eye. It came with a roll of cheap ISO100 film so I loaded that bad boy up and lived the Lomography motto, “Don’t think, just shoot.” I burned through that first roll pretty quickly and it ends up in a drawer for six months until this morning, when on a whim I decide to get it developed.

The results are to be expected. Only half of the roll came out, I suspect because I thought the roll was over and rewound the film too early. I really don’t remember now. Of the images that did come out, about 4 are even close to the right exposure to be seen by the naked eye. I present to you now the three that have some compositional interest.

Enjoy.

It took me a while to get this next one. It’s a shot of the dash of my Mustang.