Smoke Break

Salem, Oregon

Watching the Surf

Rocky Creek State Scenic Viewpoint, Oregon

Not everyone pays attention to the warning signs.

Pictures, Fences

Boiler Bay State Wayside, Oregon

FOR RENT

Centralia, Washington

Centralia used to be a thriving lumber town, and now lives on a combination of tourism (on a clear day you can see Mt. Helens, but we couldn't because of the smoke) and commercial traffic to the "Outlet Centers" that have sprung up on the edges of the town. It sits halfway between Seattle and Portland (although back when the name was coined it was halfway between two other places) with an I-5 interchange barely a mile from the center of town.

Unlike some other towns where outlet centers have invaded, the old town center seems to be doing just fine. This might have been the only vacant storefront I saw in an hour or so of hobbling up and down Main Street Wednesday evening and Thursday morning (hobbling because of a sciatic nerve flareup that just might have been encouraged by many hours jammed into an American Airlines sardine can for the cross country ticket).

Coast Overlook

Oswald West State Park, Oregon

Picture Time

Near Canon Beach, Oregon—Route 26

Out of curiosity I looked up the "picture takers" tag for the blog, and found quite a lot of entries, going back to 2009. What I was curious about was how many of the picture takers were using cell phones. The answer was, plenty, but there were quite a few more examples of people using 'real cameras' than I'd anticipated. Not this time, though,

At the Beach, Oregon Coast

Canon Beach, Oregon

Tolovana Beach Wayside, Oregon

A view into the fish ladder

Bonneville Dam, Oregon

Friday,9/7/18, we drove our rental car around the Columbia River Gorge area, seeing mostly distant hills obscured by smoke from the wildfires all around. Then we saw a sign for the Bonneville Dam, and Woody Guthrie's depression era song rang out in our heads (I'm not sure I've ever heard the original, but there's a faithful and to-the-spirit rendition in "The Essential Ramblin' Jack Elliot" album). The key line to me is "Don't like dictators not much, myself,/But I think the whole country ought to be run/By electricity!" The large park service building on the site has four floors of museum exhibits on the dam, the river, and its history, including on the bottom level several picture windows offering a view into the fish ladder.

COAST TO COAST

Centralia, Washington

If this is a brand name, I've never seen it anywhere else, which sort of brings the whole notion into question.

Mt. Hood—11,249

Panorama Point County Park, Near Gresham, Oregon

Nearly obscured by smoke and haze, 9/7/18.

Country store with a good view, except for all that smoke.

Workshop News: Leica/Platinum Workshop

On the weekend of October 13-14 I'll lead a special edition of my "digital/platinum" workshop at The Penumbra Foundation in New York, in cooperation with The Leica Akademie, USA. The workshop will be tailored to creation of platinum/palladium prints from Leica digital camera files.

(White Memorial Conservation Center, 2018—Leica MM246 with 1980s-vintage 35mm Summicron)

You don't need to own a digital Leica to attend—in fact the Leica folks will have a selection of Leica M and SL equipment for participants to try out. You can make some pictures in the Penumbra studios or out on the streets of mid-town Manhattan and over the next few hours produce Pt/Pd prints from them. You can experiment with the latest Leica gear, and make platinum prints the same weekend!

(Brewster, New York, 2018—Leica MM246 with 1980s-vintage 35mm Summicron)

The workshop is set to go, however there are still some spaces available.

Murals

Centralia, Washington

Pickups

Centralia, Washington

After admiring each other's trucks, these guys headed up the block to The Centerville Cafe for breakfast, and we followed.

The "short stack" of griddlecakes demonstrated why the menu had the option of ordering just one.

Pajamas

Centralia, Washington

Storefronts

Centralia, Washington

Large appliances, guns, pizza and oysters. Well rounded offerings along Main Street.

Motel, Evening and Dawn

Centralia, Washington

Motels, fast food, gas—all grouped together near the interstate highway. The center of town is pretty interesting. Centralia has quite an interesting history, too.

Prom to mom!

Centralia, Washington

When I was in high school back in the sixties in New Jersey, "Prom to Mom" was a thing to be assiduously avoided. Just sayin'.

Picking up from the previous post, my computer remained out of service for our whole time in the Pacific Northwest. Several times I took it out of the carryon bag and tried to start it up, including attempts with the magic three-keys-plus-powerkey combination, but the display did no more than issue a dim glow visible only in subdued light. No way to enter a passcode.

When we got in Saturday evening a little before ten, I did a bunch of chores, still being sort of on Pacific time, and got the MacBook Pro out, docked it to the Thunderbolt display, opened it up, and hit the power button. I wanted to see whether perhaps it would light up the external display even if the internal remained dark. Nope. It started up exactly as it should and always has until the second day of the trip. Retina display and Thunderbolt both perfectly normal. I shut the laptop and slid it under the big display, which is where it lives most of the time. Replaced the batteries in the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and everything worked normally.

Next I dismounted the external hard drives docked to the big display, put the computer to sleep, and undocked it. Opened, it lit up immediately, ready for use. OK, then. I shut it down, waited a couple minutes, then hit the power button. Utterly normal startup routine, no sign of the problem that made it useless for the past ten days.

So, looking on the bright side, my computer is working again. On the other side, there's no reason to expect it to continue to work properly. It has just failed abysmally at the task for which I hired it four years ago: to be the brains of my main computer system, able to disconnect and go on the road leaving behind only the big display and external storage. I suppose it's possible that if I take it to an Apple Store and have them hook it up to hardware diagnostics they might find something out about what happened.

WP blog on hold

I’m traveling in connection with my drive-in theater show in Portland, OR. My MacBook went down on the second day out, the display refuses to light up so I can’t even enter a passcode. Several attempts to revive it with magic startup key combinations have failed. One worked once, which I guess means the problem is in connections or software rather than the display itself, but it’s clearly not going to be fixed until I get it to Apple when I return home . I have a borrowed MacBook to run my presentation this afternoon at The Camerawork Gallery. Blogger is proving almost impossible to operate from my iPhone and I can’t access new pictures from my cameras anyway, so there won’t be any more  posts here until the computer is fixed or replaced. I will be putting up some iPhone posts on Instagram/Facebook feeds in the meantime..

Weeds and Flag

1. Torrington, Connecticut

Weeds and Fence

Torrington, Connecticut

Neither looking all that healthy.

Summer in the Park, Two

Washington, Connecticut

Shepaug River at Steep Rock Preserve, just north of the Oxbow.

Exhibit Announcement: The American Drive-in Theater

The Camerawork Gallery is presenting an exhibition of selections from my Drive-in Theater project during the month of September. The show went up yesterday, and has pictures of 16 theaters from 12 states, selected from approximately 250 theaters I've photographed since 1998. Next Saturday I'll give a slide presentation with many more theater pictures, a timeline/history of the drive-in, stories and anecdotes from my many interviews with drive-in theater owners and managers, and a Q&A period. Followed by a reception in the gallery space.

Camerawork is the oldest continuously operated fine art photography gallery in the United States, founded in 1970. The exhibition space is located at the Lorenzen Conference Center, Legacy Emanuel Medical Center Campus, 301 N. Graham Street, Portland, Oregon 97227.

We I.D.

Torrington, Connecticut

Used to be a liquor store.