Over the weekend I spent several hours scanning some of the hundreds of photos I have in about 15 albums down in the basement. What I really should be doing, of course, is scanning the negatives rather than the prints. But my cheap scanner doesn't do that, and I was eager to start playing around with the images before the prints have a chance to deteriorate further; besides, I have some corresponding negatives, but probably not nearly all of them. Meanwhile, the edges of the album pages are getting pretty yellow.
I thought I'd be jumping around between albums a lot, but I didn't get that far. Most of what I have scanned now comes from two albums, one made in 2000 and the other in 1998. During that time, Valarie would often take weekend trips to either Newport on the coast or to Bend and the high desert area of Central Oregon.
This first shot was taken in Newport at a state-park beach just south of the Yaquina Bay Bridge. During those years we'd always stay at the Nye Beach Hotel, a delightful little place that's now closed. Most of the time we'd just walk there along Nye Beach, but this time we drove over to this new spot, which had, as it turned out much harder-packed sand for easier walking. Funnily enough, I also wound up shooting at this beach some footage on super-8 that would be part of my first film, Western Travelogue #1. But that came about three years later than this photo, which was taken in 2000.
This shot of a cow was taken in 1998 on the drive to Bend for a weekend trip. Instead of the more direct route, by way of Salem and the Santiam Pass through the Cascades via Detroit Lake, we drove east to Hood River, then over the mountains and down south to Bend by way of Madras and the Warm Springs reservation. We pulled over the car (a light green '73 Plymouth Valiant that originally belonged to my grandparents) after seeing several cows hanging out by the road, but this shot was the only one that seemed to come out OK.
Another photo, from a 2000 Bend trip, attracted me even though it was overexposed and almost even hard to make out at first. It was taken at Todd Lake, a stunningly pretty little glacially-fed lake in the shadow of the Three Sisters and Mount Bachelor. Of course most of my shots were of the mountains and the lake, the latter of which we walked all the way around, getting our feet soaked by the little stream that had spread out to soak a broad field of wildflowers.
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