Downtown Austin skyline, 4 April 2024. Olympus XA/Kodak ColorPlus 200 From April 3 through 11th, Emee and I were in Texas, with the majority of that time spent in Austin. This is the third time I’ve visited the state’s capital. The first was in 2005, right after spending part of the winter in Tucson. The second was in 2018, when Emee, her kids, and I visited during Thanksgiving. I’ve been interested in Austin since the first time I heard about it back in the nineties when it came on the radar as a “cool” city. This “90s Austin” was portrayed in movies like Richard Linklater’s Slacker.1 On top ..read more

Well, look at that: A vintage rangefinder with a fancy leather bag. So…urban. On my birthday last August, Emee gifted me a Yashica YF rangefinder. It needed some TLC before I could really go to town with it, so I dropped it off at Advance Camera and picked it up after I got back from Tokyo in January. The Yashica YF is a pretty rare circa 1959 machine that uses interchangeable lenses with the Leica Thread Mount, or L39. I had owned four rangefinders up to that point, but they were the consumer-level fixed-lens machines popular in the 60’s and 70’s. So this was a different beast, one that takes ..read more

Hey all, just got back from Texas. Yesterday was brutal: We were supposed to catch an 8:30 AM (CDT) flight out of Austin, connect at San Diego, and then get into Portland around 1 PM PDT. But that flight leaving Austin got delayed by seven hours, necessitating two reschedules of the connecting flight. We didn’t get into Portland until 11 PM! Add to that waiting for an hour for baggage that never came (it’s showing up today), making for a very long travel day. (Did I mention that I don’t like flying?) Anyways, I’m home and sorting it all out. There’s film to be developed and a longer blog post ..read more

Hello, folks. I’m currently in Austin. Emee and I came down here late last week. While Emee always has an excuse to visit this Texas town, as she lived here before moving to Portland and still has friends here, this time we came here specifically because of the eclipse. While Portland was just outside the totality portion of the 2017 eclipse, I was stuck at work, only catching 97%. While this is still cool, I was very frustrated that I couldn’t see the whole thing. I’ve been fascinated by eclipses since being a young astronomy nerd. This frustration was one of the factors that I quit the host ..read more

Well, this is embarrassing: There now seems to be a pattern where every year my Raleigh Superbe is out of commission for three or four months. In 2022, I snapped the rear axle, last year it was a broken spoke. This year (or technically last year) it was a flat I got on my December 23, 2023 ride I did after Coffee Outside. When I noticed that the rear wheel was losing air, the light was dim and I was just a mile from the MAX, so I wheeled the bike to transit and put it aside when I got home. When I finally got around to tending to the flat, I noticed that the rear wheel had two nasty gashes on ..read more

Self-Portrait, 25 March 2024. Minolta Freedom Zoom 125/Aqua 400 Time does fly. On this day 23 years ago, April 4, 2001, I landed in Portland. I had only been here once before, in June of 2000. This was an era before the Rose City was a known quantity to anyone outside of the Northwest, so all I knew about it was that there were a lot of zine kids/cartoonists here (including a few friends), the rent was reasonable, and the urban environment looked nice. After a failed eight-month Bay Area experiment, I was ready to give another place a chance before conceding defeat and heading back to Connecti ..read more

Knobs and flowers. Mount Tabor, 21 March 2024. Olympus OM-1n, OM Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, Karmir 160 film Over the past couple weeks, two stalwarts of my camera stable have found new homes: My Minolta SR-T 101, my first SLR, and the Olympus Pen EES-2, my half-frame. These were cameras that I used and loved for over three years, but the time had come to move on. The SR-T 101 epitomizes the solid, overbuilt, chunky mechanical single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras from the 1960’s. It was a nice feeling camera with a satisfying winder and shutter. But it was a big beast, and that size did matter. Even slappin ..read more

Ride Westside takes the Fanno Creek Trail, 23 March 2024. Olympus OM-1n, OM Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, Kodak Ultramax 400 So I decided to cancel the Dead Freeways Ride scheduled for Saturday the 23rd. The weather forecast looked pretty meh, and after 20 years of leading bicycle rides, I’m not excited about leading “meh” rides anymore. Believe me you, I used to feel “The show must go on!” and lead rides even if the weather sucked, like my Palm Tree Ride in 2015, which happened to be on a day that saw 1.7 inches of rain. Within a block, everyone’s shoes were sloshing with water. There is always the chanc ..read more

I don’t really define myself as a minimalist. I mean, I don’t make a list of all the items I own or decide that an arbitrary number like 57 is the “natural limit” of things. Nor do I pretend things I share with others aren’t mine. I’m pretty much a moderatist, in between the ascetic desires of minimalists and the “as much as possible” approach of maximalists. But there’s one area I try to go for light, small, minimal, and that’s in the realm of everyday carry, or EDC. I want the stuff in my day backpack or bike bag to be as minimal as possible, whether a pocket knife, first aid kit, or notebo ..read more

Sakura (cherry blossoms) at Waterfront Park, 19 March 2024. Ricohflex Dia/Kodak Ektar 100 Ever since I got back into film four years ago, my “big” camera, the one that I usually strap around my shoulders, is usually loaded with black and white film. Part of this could be pretentiousness, as black and white is “serious” photography. The other part is simply because I like it, as it makes you look at the world differently. With black and white you are thinking more about texture and contrast. But there are a few times of year when I switch and the big camera is loaded with color. This is because ..read more