Photos: June-July

I’ve really been diving back in to photography lately, as I’d previously mentioned. Turns out having a creative outlet is a lot of fun! Who knew?

While I post things fairly regularly on my Glass profile (and wow, I hadn’t actually looked at their web UI, beautiful layout there, well done them), the only acknowledgement of it I’ve had here is occasionally, silently, adding new things to my list of available prints. You can tell it’s not intended as my primary source of income by the way I am absolutely terrible at promoting it.

(Guy who has next to no social media presence and just quietly blogs into the void doesn’t like self-aggrandizement; more at eleven.)

That said, in the same way I do my monthly playlists, I’m going to try to do the occasional “here’s the latest photos” post on here, as well. In the interest of not needing to shuffle around my far-too-deep queue of book review posts, I’m just going to throw ’em out whenever, rather than fit into my usual Saturday-morning schedule.

Without further ado, some of the photos I’ve taken lately that I enjoyed:

Ape Caves

Hiking through Ape Caves! It’s a very cool (literally – underground is a pretty constant temperature regardless of what’s happening outside, so it was a bit chilly down there) hike to do. Also a great change to play around with the settings on your camera, and figure out how to do long exposures. (Long exposures: pretty easy. Getting the auto-focus to stop screwing things up: shockingly difficult. I miss the ‘auto/manual’ switch on the T3i.)

And, to do some cross-promotion, my favorite photo from that whole expedition, which is available as a print.

Cave

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Willamette River

I mentioned that selling prints isn’t my day job, yes? My actual day job had a summer “picnic” on the Portland Spirit. I wasn’t the only one who brought a camera along, nor was I the only one who quite enjoyed looking at all the bridges — programmers are a certain sort of person, after all. From the water was a different angle than I usually get, though, which made it quite fun.

Marquam

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Olympia

… was what I called this trip in my mind, but I never actually got up to Olympia, it was just the Olympia area.

While hiking around Mima Falls, I wound up stumbling into doing some approximately-macro photography! Not something I’ve really tried before, at all, so I had a lot of fun trying it in a few different places along the hike.

Turns out foxglove is a very pretty flower! Just don’t, y’know, ingest any. Unless like you like cardiac arrest.

While I’m normally not a huge fan of graffiti, it is an art form, and sometimes the results are deeply touching, even when they’re very simple.

I Did

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Also went up to Tumwater Falls, which is along the secret, second Deschutes River in the Pacific Northwest! (It’s not really a secret, I just didn’t know about it.)

An absolutely beautiful park, this, built around some old industrial works that were, of course, built around the falls. Get enough water dropping enough distance, and someone will have used it to drive machinery.

Pacific City

The Oregon Coast is a beautiful place, and Pacific City is no exception. This was a group trip with friends, and we got there well before sunset, but it was the sunset colors that really caught my eyes as I was going through the (couple hundred — I’m a “storage is cheap” sort of photographer) photos I took over the course of the day.

Towards the end of the day, the wind and chill were getting to be enough, and we decided to put out our fire and head home. One of the steps of this was grabbing a driftwood log that hadn’t been in the fire, but had been near enough to start smoldering, and getting rid of that fire hazard by… tossing it in the water.

I couldn’t help but call this a “viking burial”, in my mind, because what else would I call it? It’s a piece of wood, being launched out to see at sunset, spewing smoke (well, steam, but close enough) as it drifts away.

Viking

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That’s it for my recent photography. I’ll probably do another of these in a month or two — this write-up has taken me a surprising amount of time, and even with the effort put in, it still feels quite odd to mix in all those ‘add to cart’ buttons.

(And, as an aside, which doesn’t at all help with that feeling: if any of the photos above that don’t have an ‘add to cart’ button are one that you think should, let me know – I do, in fact, read the comments here.)

Thanks for bearing with me, and I hope you enjoyed coming along on these various outings.