boolie

Yin & Yang

Oh corks! Has it really been almost two months since I last posted? The spigot is getting turned back on, but it’s time for bed so for tonight just a quick pic of Snuggle Twins One and Two bringing balance to the universe.

The Road to Madness

In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Both of our cars are getting up there in years, and while they have low miles for their age, I’ve started thinking about what we should do when it comes time to replace them. I haven’t paid attention to the car scene in well over a decade, so my wife and I went to the Portland Auto Show a while back to get acclimated to the current state of the automobile. I had done a little research beforehand and so much since that sometimes I feel like I both know a lot more and a lot less than when I started.

The problem is that the car I want doesn’t exist. If you could take Toyota’s hybrid system and merge it with the new Subaru Impreza, you’d have my ideal car. I’d have a nice quiet car for Ridgefield to minimize the disturbance to my favorite subjects like this lovely great blue heron. Plus good gas mileage for commuting to work, with enough power for the ascent up the Sunset Highway, and Subaru’s lovely all-wheel drive system for when the weather turns wet or white. Not to mention the safety improvements compared to our current lineup.

Alas Subaru is keeping mum on any plans for hybrids so my dream car remains a dream. Not that we’ll do anything in the short term since no car made a clear claim to the crown, but at least I have an idea of what we might do if we had to replace one of the cars in a hurry. The Impreza in hatchback form is still the frontrunner to replace my Civic, and perhaps even the Outback, but a handful of other contenders caught my eye at the show. Will this Impreza one day grace our driveway? Or will it be the …

The Throne of Kings

All the men of the house have loved this chair.

We got it for my office after we moved to Portland and it has been the place I sit most ever since. Templeton liked it too in his day, and now Sam in his. I sat in it a lot the past couple of months as I recuperated from a twisted ankle. The worst part is, I don’t even know how I injured it.

When I explained to Ellie that hedgehogging was temporarily on hold, I expected her to be crestfallen, but instead she got strangely excited and her eyes grew wide. “Put him in the cage!” she shouted to the cats. “Put him in the cage!” they cried. “Put him in the cage!” they shouted as they circled round me. I escaped incarceration from my would-be jailers with a heavy bribe of belly rubs and head scratches and was able to serve my time under general house arrest.

The Orange Thief & the Angry Queen

We have three heated cat beds in my office, one for each of the cats, but Scout has one she considers hers and spends much of the day sleeping in it. The other cats pay their obeisance to the queen and leave the bed for her, mostly, but Sam does occasionally go through moods where he claims it for his own. I don’t think it’s a power play, partially because that’s not his personality, partially because sometimes he tries to climb in with Scout. They are both small cats but it’s a small bed too, not a bed for a small two.

If Sam takes the bed while Scout’s away, when she returns she sits beside the bed and gives him the evil eye while he pretends not to see her. When the evil eye doesn’t work, and it never does, Scout comes over to me and starts giving me the business until I go and evict him.

When we discovered her bed was no longer heating up, I struggled with whether or not I should switch it for one of the others. Scout more than any of our cats living or past is a slave to her routine. One night I decided to try an experiment and switched her bed with one a few feet away on the desk. I knew she wouldn’t like it at first but I figured with a little time the electric warmth would overcome her objections.

How wrong I was!

I made the switch in the early evening and immediately Scout started haranguing and harassing me, sometimes vocally, sometimes by repeatedly head butting me and walking across my laptop. Hour after hour I resisted but she broke me in the wee hours of the morning and I switched the beds back. Before I could even sit down she had hopped in and curled up to sleep.

At last we both had our rest.

Moving in the Right Direction

For many years I’ve dreamed of having location data attached to my images so that I could see where I took my favorite pictures at my favorite places. Unfortunately none of my cameras have had GPS either built-in or as an attachment. My iPhone has the ability to do it but sadly it wasn’t until recently that I figured out how. I decided to take advantage of my recent renaissance and assigned myself the task of learning how to do it while visiting a super secret location over the Christmas break.

And so on a visit to Ridgefield (oh what a giveaway!) I fired up MotionX-GPS on the phone and had it keep a running tally of my travels around the refuge, then emailed the data file to my laptop. It took me a couple more weeks before I sat down to learn how to import that data into Aperture, and it’s a bit fussier than I hoped, so I also learned how to do it with a little command line utility called exiftool. Photo Mechanic can also do it, and did it quickly, but the locations weren’t right so I have a little more learning there.

I do wish my camera could do this natively, not just because of the extra steps required to add the data later, but because it requires that I remember to start and stop the GPS tracking. And anything that requires that I remember to do something, well …

This screenshot shows an example of how the GPS data looks when imported directly into Aperture, in this case it was my visit to Ridgefield on January 15th. The purple trace shows where I drove around the auto tour, the pins where I stopped and took pictures. Currently selected is a spot beside Rest Lake where I photographed a coyote hunting voles as the snow fell gently down.

On the map you can see the Columbia River running to the left of the refuge, and a little offshoot that comes by it on the right, plus the numerous sloughs that run through the refuge. Lewis & Clark visited Ridgefield but apparently Clark wasn’t quite as impressed with this blessed little place as I am, for he wrote,

“Opposit to our camp on a Small Sandy Island the brant & geese make Such a noise that it will be impossible for me to sleap.”

His prediction proved true, as the following morning he added,

“rained all the after part of the last night…I slept but verry little last night for the noise Kept up dureing the whole of the night by the Swans, Geese, white & Grey Brant Ducks & c. on a Small Sand Island they were emensely noumerous, and their noise horid…”

I’ve not seen brant at Ridgefield but the rain and swans and geese and ducks, those I know quite well, although in much smaller numbers it seems than William Clark once saw (and heard).

Captured

A long-standing but unfulfilled desire of mine is a small portable camera, an always-with-you camera, the camera that captures those quick fleeting moments that as pictures are more important than they are great, the slices that over time tell the little stories of your life. The iPhone 4 fills this roll for me at the moment, not because I think it’s well-suited to the task but because it’s what I have.

The four pictures from the previous two posts of a snuggling Sam on my lap were taken with my iPhone because I had it near at hand. My Canon 7D wasn’t that far away but out of arms reach and besides had the big lens attached, so I had to choose between getting the camera and getting the picture.

The two pictures here of a slumbering Sam were taken with the 7D. I started out photographing him with the iPhone but in this case I was able to get and setup the bigger camera, as instead of my lap he was snuggled up either in his warm bed or my chair. Much better image quality with the big camera, but the best camera is the camera you have with you, and thus I keep casting my eyes about for a small camera that strikes the right balance between portability and quality. And within the past few months a whole slew of interesting models have come to market.

I don’t know if I’ll get a smaller camera or make do with what I have, but perhaps I shouldn’t delay my decision too long. I’ve been watching this documentary that chronicles a traveling time lord who takes people on grand adventures across time and space. Maybe I’ll get to go back in time and photograph Templeton when he was a kitten!

I am beginning to despair that he will show up on my doorstep, however, as I’ve noticed that he prefers young English women as his companions, and I fail on all three counts.

Come on, Doctor!

The First Carrot

The past few years at work have been productive but stressful and the last year in particular left me worn down and burned out. I hadn’t taken much vacation time but we either use-it-or-lose-it at the end of the year, so I was trying to decide if I should take most of the month of December off, or if I should take my normal fall hiking trip and then take a few weeks off at the end of the year. While the idea of a month away from work was very appealing, I decided to split up the vacation and take the hiking trip instead.

I realized that as a reaction to the stress I had settled into a funk and wasn’t getting things done that needed to be done. Needing either carrot or stick to get back on track, I settled on carrots with Yellowstone & the Tetons as Carrot Number One. Planning for the weeklong trip of hiking and photography forced me into action.

My contacts had long since run out and while I had been wearing my glasses instead, I prefer to photograph in contacts so I finally scheduled my overdue eye exam and got new contacts. And since it often rains during my fall hiking trips, I picked up some waterproof hiking shoes to replace my worn out pair, a small army of hiking socks to replace my threadbare contingent, and a couple pairs of waterproof gloves. All of which guaranteed a week of unusually hot and sunny weather during my week in Wyoming, but the wet weather gear has been put to good use ever since with the return of the rainy season to the Northwest.

Since I would be taking our much loved but aging Subaru Outback, I took her in for everything from routine maintenance to replacing a broken sensor and leaking head gasket and especially the broken cargo cover that left all my gear exposed to prying eyes. I also fired up iTunes to create some new CD mixes of recent music purchases to keep me entertained on the long drive.

Then there was an extra memory card and battery for my Canon 7D, which I’ve been meaning to order for a year or two, plus a portable hard drive for storage on the road. The hard drive was a much improved solution compared to the DVD’s I used to burn, the backups of the day’s pictures went much faster meaning I could get to sleep sooner. And while I didn’t need the new memory card for most of the trip, oh was I thankful to have it when I met this black bear eating pine cones on my way down from Mount Washburn. Yellowstone put on a show on my last day and I had taken a ton of pictures, and if not for the new card I would not have been able to photograph this wonderful creature during my last hours before heading for home. The extra card was also put to good use during my Christmas visits to Ridgefield.

There were other things too, like the car mount for the iPhone so that the little genius woman in the TomTom GPS app could guide me safely there and back again despite my notoriously poor sense of direction. Both the mount (from RAM Mounts) and the little woman worked wonderfully and the pair have kept me on the straight and narrow navigating Portland ever since.

All of which is a long way of saying that the hiking trip was not only great stress relief but also great motivation for getting things done large and small that have made life better ever since.

But I wasn’t quite finished with my carrots …

Ellie, Proud & True

I suppose everyone thinks their dog is the best dog in the world, which is rather unfortunate, as we actually have the best dog in the world. Three years ago today, we added this wonderful girl to our family. At eight years old, the gray has spread further around her mouth and to her eyebrows as well, but Ellie is the same lovable goofball she was the day we met.

What a blessing to come home each day, met by Ellie dancing in joy!

Boring!

The dog park section of Irving Park is surrounded by old oaks and maples so a couple of weeks ago I took Ellie up for a photo shoot in the fallen leaves. One of us was a little bored by the lack of running and/or hedgehogs.

Amateur

amateur |ˈamətər, -ˌtər, -ˌCHo͝or, -CHər|

noun
a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid basis.

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover,’ from amare ‘to love.’

The term amateur has both positive and negative connotations. When it comes to photography I love being an amateur, and I love it precisely because of the origins of the term: I get to photograph what I love.

While on the way back to my hotel in Yellowstone, I came across a bunch of photographers pulled off to the side of the road to photograph a herd of elk. I took a variety of pictures and was about to wrap up when I noticed a young elk bull down a ways from where everyone else was. I walked down to him and realized why no one else was photographing him: his antlers were stunted.

I have a soft spot for animals who have more to overcome, so I settled in to spend the rest of the dying light photographing him.

Whether due to diet or disease or genetics, the poor thing wasn’t exactly photogenic compared not only to the dominant bull but even to the other young bulls in the herd. He was mostly grazing but occasionally raised his head and sniffed the air, so I positioned my tripod so that if he raised his head again, his face would be set against the strip of yellow plants behind him. And not only did he raise his head again, but as if on cue he even looked right at me.

You’re beautiful to me, little one.