A couple of weekends ago Ann and I finally made it to the Portland Japanese Garden, in part to photograph and in part to see a joint exhibit of Michael Kenna’s photographs and Japanese Viewing Stones being held at the Garden.  With no winter snow storm warning in the forecast this time, we got up nice and early and made the drive up to Portland so we would arrive right as the garden opened for members hours.  That gave us two hours to photograph before the crowds started arriving.  And, it gave Ann an opportunity to make one of the more unusual Shooting the Shooter images she’s made.

You would be excused for wondering if we actually photographed any redwoods during our Redwoods trip.  Well, we did, of course, but not because the world made it easy on us.  As I’d hinted at previously, the Newton B.  Drury Scenic Parkway (the main parkway to access many of the redwood sites) was closed due to downfall from the winter storms that had recently passed through.  And our trip to Stout Grove in the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park to the north ran into complications when the backroads route into the park had a locked gate (we later found out because . . . of downfall from the recent winter storms  [are you noticing a pattern here?]), which required us to backtrack and go around through Crescent City and try to approach Stout Grove from the NE.  Fortunately, that route had been cleared a couple of days earlier, which leads us to our next segment of shooting the shooter.

This is a bad paraphrasing of a story, but someone once asked Alberto Giacometti why he always sketched people.  Giacometti’s response was because it was impossible to sketch a tree.  If he could sketch a tree, then he’d be really good.  But until he could do that, he would have to settle for people.  Charlie Waite recently had a blog post about photographers’ (including him) fascination with trees.  He’s right, at least for me.  And while we were frequently immersed in forests during our trip to the Redwoods and surrounding area, it was all too often the individual tree that grabbed my attention. 

It must have looked hilarious, Ann and me on the Beach that morning in Bandon.  Well, that is if someone had been watching from a distance.  Fortunately, it was about 6:30 in the morning, and in winter, that means it was still a half-hour before sunrise.  So it was still dark.  I doubt anyone was watching.  We knew we wanted to photograph one of Bandon’s well known rock formations and had tromped directly from the parking area steps the quarter mile or so to the spires.  We had stayed on the upland side of the shore, not wanting to make footprints in the sand, smooth from the receding tide.  As we approached the rocks, we both stopped to give a good look around, and then the comedy began.

We ended our February excursion at one of our go-to photo locations - Bandon.  We knew another storm was heading our way and the forecast seemed to change daily - rain, no rain, rain, clear, partly cloudy - but we decided to spend the night and hope for the best.  While it wound up not presenting ideal conditions - the clouds did some really funky things that morning - it was a lovely morning of photographing.  And best of all, Ann made one of her shooting-the-shooter photographs that make for an easy blog post.  Except this time, it was an accident!

I should be writing about our recent trip that took advantage of the President’s Day holiday.  But events have overwhelmed us since we returned, so I’ve decided to start with our chaotic week and work backwards in my posts.  I knew it was going to be a hectic one upon our return, given I had an oral argument at LUBA on Tuesday.  Little did I know snow storms would hit before and after my trip up to Salem.

The other night Ann and I were (I thought) unwinding on the couch after a long day’s work.  I think we were watching the Daily Show, or Grand Tour - something fairly light and entertaining.  What was on TV had my attention, and Ann was sitting there with her feet up on the couch, playing with her iPad and periodically laughing at what was on the screen.  At the end of the show, Ann hands me her iPad and says, “What do you think of that?”

We’ve had a crazy schedule these past few weeks with a lot on our plates, ending with a winter storm fouling up our plans to see Michael Kenna at the Portland Japanese Gardens last Saturday.  So what do you do when events try their best to stop your photography - you print!  So on Sunday we warmed up the Canon and made some prints!

As I mentioned in the “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” blog post, I was hoping to use the importing into Capture One process as an opportunity to revisit some of my images.  And while I haven’t really been able to take the time to review the images as they’re being imported, images have occasionally caught my eye and I’ve flagged them for future development.  Earlier this week, as I opened up Capture One to get images for another blog post I was writing, the 2016 catalog came up and I couldn’t turn away from the image that was displayed on my monitor.  So I decided to work on it.  Not once, but twice!

This past weekend Ann and I pretty much had to get out and do some photography - we were going stir-crazy.  Even if we have been working a lot on images lately, developing images (and the whole import into Capture One thing) is not the same as photographing.  It had been way too long since we’d been out to photograph.  Thinking about where we could go for a quick excursion led us to one of our usuals - Brice Creek!  

It was about time to run prints through the printer again . . . while it sometimes interrupts with other plans, needing to print to keep the printer operational in top efficiency has its advantages - it gets me up off my butt to think about printing.  There is something lovely about having a tangible print in your hands that gives a very different feeling to  one’s images.  And since we’ve been making the effort to become familiar with Capture One, it was time to go through the printing settings and variables with a bit of forethought to see if they all make sense (not totally).  So I chose a couple of images to first, develop them from scratch in Capture One, and then to print them.