BRIAN LIBBY

Flickr top 10

A few weeks ago I started posting photos on Flickr in earnest, and by now there are 931 pictures and counting on my account.

One of the fun things about having your photos on this site compared to other photo hosting & printing websites I've used like Shutterfly is being able to see statistics on which of one's shots other people click on. There's much more of a public viewing aspect to Flickr, it seems. I don't necessarily put a lot of stock in the relative quality of the shots chosen versus others on view, because a lot of this is based on people clicking thumbnail images; what's compelling in a thumbnail might not always be the most compelling photograph overall.

That said, it's still fun to sift through the photos according to clicks. Although the numbers are changing all the time, following are the top 10 shots from my Flickr account.

#1: "Coliseum & parade 001A"

This was a shot I took in June of this year inside Memorial Coliseum at the Rose Parade. I wasn't interested in the parade so much as the opportunity to see the Coliseum with its curtain open, exposing the view through glass-enclosed building to the skyline of Portland outside.

#2: "Memorial Coliseum (1)"

This is another shot of Memorial Coliseum, taken in April of this year just after an open house with mayor Sam Adams in which Coliseum supporters loudly roared their support for the building, a turning point against the plan to demolish the building.

#3: "China Part 1 (83)"

One of numerous shots I took inside the Forbidden City in Beijing while visiting the city in November 2007 on a press tour for a new art museum opening, the Ullens Center.

#4: "SoWa 1"

I wouldn't have necessarily thought of this as a standout photo, or enough of one to be the 4th rated among over 900. Perhaps the people who find and recognize my name on Flickr, or who otherwise come to my page there through various Twitter/Facebook postings I've sometimes made about new photos being added, are skewed more towards Portlanders. Besides, South Waterfront is also rather interesting, I think, as a new urban neighborhood that began from scratch on a brownfield site just a few years ago, at the height of the real estate boom, and now are struggling to stitch together a sense of community and fill out the empty units there.

#5 "Manhattan From Brooklyn Heights (1A)"

This is one of several photo prints I scanned recently from the thousands of pre-digital camera photos I have in albums. I have lots of negatives, but only a fraction of the overall collection. This picture was taken on a very special day in October of 1996. It's taken from a promenade in Brooklyn Heights, where I was on a stroll with Valarie and her parents, who were visiting from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania that day. (Valarie and I lived in New York at the time.) Not only can you see the World Trade Center prominently in the background, but later that night after this shot was taken, I was at Yankee Stadium to see Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Wade Boggs, Paul O'Neill and company win the World Series.

#6 "China Part 1 (175)"

This was taken in Beijing on the same 2007 trip as the above shot of the Forbidden City. The picture was shot from the entrance to the China Today art museum.

#7 "Tokyo 112 Akakusa tour guides"

While on my first trip to Japan in 2004, I encountered this pair of good-natured tour guides at a Shinto shrine in the Tokyo district of Asakusa.

#8 "Japan 273 Tokyo"

This is a shot of the Prada store in Tokyo's exclusive Omotesando shopping area. It was designed by one of my favorite architecture firms in the world, Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland. They also designed the Bird's Nest olympic stadium in Beijing and Tate Modern museum in London.

#9: "Thompson & WTC (1A)"

Another one of my pre-digital camera photos, this is a scan of a print taken in about 1995, when I was finishing up my studies at New York University. As you can see, the World Trade Center is again visible in the background. And as it happens, Valarie used to live on this block, which is particularly a coincidence because when I took the picture we hadn't yet met.

#10 "Coliseum & Parade 43A"

This is another shot taken inside Memorial Coliseum during June's Rose Parade. One of the compelling features of the building is how the seating bowl sits completely free standing from the rest of the building, although some extra structural bracing was added in an ill-advised restoration.

Again, I don't necessarily think these are my 10 best photos. Not at all. The exterior shot of the Coliseum is a little bit blurry, and I think the Prada store shot is only interesting because the building is interesting, not because of any expert photography. Even so, it's fun to see what people have been clicking on.

Senior portraits

A little over five years ago I had just had my first and only photography exhibit at a gallery in Portland when I got a call from the publisher of a senior newspaper based out of Keizer, Oregon. She was looking for a new photographer to take portraits of the senior citizens, baby boomers and others profiled in the paper. Someone had reccommended me to the publisher, which I've never understood. After all, the review of my show in The Oregonian (pre-dating my being a visual arts reviewer there) made special note that there wasn't a single human being in any of the 25 photographs on display.

I took my first portraits for the paper that month. I didn't like having to drive all over the metro area to meet up with the subjects. And as I'd appear for the assignment with a tiny pocket-sized digital camera with no lighting equipment, I felt silly having to explain to the subjects that I wasn't really a professional photographer.

Even so, taking portraits for Northwest Senior News afforded me the chance to focus on portraiture (if you'll pardon the pun) in a way I never had before. I'd always wanted to take pictures of my friends and family and explore the challenges of capturing people in a flattering way, but usually resisted out of shyness. My sister Sara is the only person I've ever taken a lot of pictures of. Now, suddenly, I had people expecting to sit down with me and pose for as long as I wanted.

Many of the subjects turned out to be fascinating as well. Initially I was a bit arrogant about the journalistic content of a regional senior citizen newspaper. But they did their homework and found lots of worthy people to profile, and I relished taking their picture.

One of the first people I photographed, for example, was a longtime antiwar activist who had co-founded the Oregon Peace Institute with Elizabeth Furse, the Oregon Congresswoman in whose US Capitol office I interned in 1993. Another guy was a volunteer for Northwest Medical Teams and, once I found his house way out in Clackamas, told me stories about going to Third-World countries all over the globe.

A favorite portrait of mine was of this woman; her name I can't remember, but she is the co-owner of Flying M Ranch in Yamhill County. Growing up there, my family often headed for this rural restaurant and horse stables.

Like many, she was uncomfortable about having her picture taken, but unlike most she wasn't nervous. Beside the corduroy shirt and old-school beehive hairdo, I like her sense of disinterested self confidence in the picture. It practically feels implied that she'd call anyone "Hun". I decided not to tell her, though, of the raucous all night kegger some friends and I threw at one of Flying M's cabins to celebrate high school graduation back in 1990. Or how one of the windows was damaged when a party crasher tried to steal our keg. 

Another favorite, both in terms of the picture and the personality of the subjects, was this husband and wife from Vancouver: Jim and Tonnie.

The two regularly and proudly celebrate their Norwegian heritage, not by wearing Viking horns or inventing new and better cell phones, but by regularly dancing in the Norse Runderdanske troupe of traditional Norwegian dancers at a local church. The couple possessed not an ounce of self-consciousness when they agreed to meet me at their home in full dance costume. Jim even gave me a copy of some of their Norwegian music when I half-jokingly told him it'd make a good soundtrack for one of my short films.

Often there seem to quietly be people moving to Portland to retire from other places on the west coast, particularly California. This man I photographed in his new condo, whose name I believe was Walt, had been a TV producer and screenwriter. As we talked, he showed me a couple of his old TV screenplays. He wasn't an arrogant guy at all, but I could tell he enjoyed showing me the fruits of his labor in that galley-bound screenplay on his bookshelf. After all, as much as I long for time off, it must be hard to give up your life's calling one day, move to a condo in Portland, and have very little to do.  I'm not usually one to frequent senior centers or do a lot to reach out to others who used to be in interesting businesses, but I could have sat with Walt for hours and listened to stories about the golden age of television. I also loved the guy's ascot.

One afternoon I was also sent to a community center in Multnomah Village to take pictures of three retired magicians. The backdrop didn't offer much: just a middling interior with offices and meeting spaces. But luckily these guys each brought a magician's prop of some sort. The guy pictured here, whose name I believe was Duane, had a perfectly debonair marriage of a floral bouquet pulled from out of his sleeve and a suit to go with it. I love old men in suits, by the way, especially when they're worn by men who didn't necessarily dress so formally in their earlier years, like Allen Ginsberg.

The reason I'm writing about these photographs now is that after five years I've decided to finally give up my monthly photography gig with the paper. Lately it's felt like every photo assignment I go to is rushed: speeding there to make the appointment, trying to get the shots without dragging the subject through tons of angles, trying to Photoshop a bad photo into being a serviceable one. Even so, I cherish the time I had taking the pictures, and if Trude were to call me in a jam, with some octogenarian ready for his or her close up and nobody to take the shot, it's not out of the question that I'd reach for my camera again.

Mom's graduation

Last Sunday we had my parents over for Easter dinner and enjoyed a nice roast pork with rosemary, polenta, brussel sprouts and a simple tomato-avocado-corn salad in vinaigrette. Afterward, my mom took out a Ziploc bag full of old photographs of my grandma's; they were duplicates that she was giving to me.

Divided into two stacks of photos, one of me and one of my sister, there were shots from virtually every period of my life. My grandma was always a very prolific and enthusiastic picture taker, and there are whole albums at her house that say, "Brian 1973", "Brian 1974" and so on. The pictures of my sister, who was born when I was 12, show my awkward teenage years well documented as well. Mustaches seem to come and go from our dad's face, and my mom's hairstyles vary as well with the times.

My favorite shot, though, may be this one of my mom's college graduation in 1978 -- thirty years ago this spring. After leaving college at University of Oregon after her junior year to marry my dad in 1968, initially she'd been a stay-at-home mom when I was born in '72. But by the time I was headed to school, mom was pretty bored and wanted to develop a career. She enrolled herself at Linfield College in McMinnville, where we lived, on the same day she signed me up for kindergarten at Newby Elementary. A year later, she graduated with an accounting degree and a 4.0 GPA after initially being an English major. For two years she worked as an accountant at a helicopter company, but she's since been working at the same steel mill in McMinnville for something like 28 years.

I like this photo in part for nostalgic reasons, in part because it has a simple composition. Most of all, though, I like how this documents a key transitional moment for all three of us. (My sister would come six years later.) My dad had just quit managing a chain restaurant, where he was burdened by horribly long hours and a trough-like dining environment, to buy a small cafe in McMinnville that's still going strong today. My mom, although born into a conservative, patriarchal rural family where the women were expected to stay at home, embraced the times and entered the workforce - dependent on no one. I remember for years in her office my mom had some quote from a women's suffragist that said, "Make policy, not coffee." All this from a woman voting with the GOP. Meanwhile, I was in this picture a first grader, ending the early years at home with just mom and Sesame Street most of the time. There would be 16 years of school ahead, and that was just the start of things.

It was tortuous of me at the time to put on a shirt, tie and, worst of all, dark socks. But I enjoy so much now, these three decades later, seeing the three of us dressed up and ready to move on, together.

Grandpa's hats

Last week when I was in Eugene for a reading, I stopped by to see my grandma, who wanted me to pick out some of my grandpa's clothes to take home (he passed away several weeks ago). I'm not very fond of wearing hats, and really only do so for sun protection while I'm walking. But I love collecting objects with special personal meaning, and I'm very glad to have the four or five hats I picked up of Grandpa's.

One of the hats I actually got on the day of his graveside service. The family had met at Grandma's house to drive there together, and it was sunnier than expected. I'd forgotten to bring a hat, and even if I'd remembered, it's not like I was gonna wear one of my baseball caps with a suit during my grandfather's funeral. (He got the most impressive 21-gun military salute and flag-draped coffin for his WWII service.) I'm reminded of a "Sopranos" episode when Tony approached another diner in that friend's Italian restaurant they always go to because the diner was wearing a cap at the table. "They took the bleachers out two years ago," Tony told him, veins popping out of his head with agitation. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one with that pet-peeve. But luckily Grandma let me wear an old houndstooth-fedora of Grandpa's that went well with the suit and saved my scalp from sunburn.

Another fedora I took home the other day was even snazzier although thinner and more worn. It had a little feather built into one side of the brim. I love to imagine how he must have looked in it. Grandpa wasn't usually a flashy dresser - he favored short sleeves for his oxford shirts, like a NASA engineer at Mission Control. But these were different times, and the average man walking down the street was sporting a suit and hat that would seem like the height of dress-up today. Back when I was working at temp agencies in DC and New York in the early/mid-90s, I got really sick of having an uncomfortable tie, shirt, slacks and loafers on. But when I see a guy wearing jeans and a Cosby sweater to the symphony, I'm almost ready to pull a Tony moment of my own.

  That said, I also took three baseball caps of Grandpa's. One I'd never seen before, but I loved the vintage-style graphics of "Hawaii" written in cursive like the name of a little league team. Another had a white foam front with a drawing of a woodpecker. Who wears a baseball hat with a drawing of a woodpecker? I do remember it hanging on Grandpa and Grandma's hallway hat rack for many a decade, though.

Same goes for a Nebraska Cornhuskers cap I took home that I remember Grandpa wearing a time or two. No matter how much my dad and I worshiped the Oregon Ducks, Grandpa was never that into football or other sports. But since he was born and raised in a small Nebraska town, this cap remained in the house as various TVs, dining room tables and chairs were changed in and out.

Incidentally, it only now just occurred to me that all these caps are red and white. Must be kind of like how about two-thirds of my wardrobe is blue.

The hat of Grandpa's that I've actually worn regularly is a more casual brimmed job, kind of like Gilligan wore on Gilligan's Island. Or perhaps it's actually more like Truman Capote's. Anyway, it's perfect for wearing on my summertime walks, covering my ears and my neck better than the standard baseball cap. I also dig the brown and orange stripes going around the hat. I was actually about to order a similar one from the J.Crew sale catalog when Grandma gave me this one. Who knew Grandpa had such style? I loved the guy, but I was more used to a pocket protector and polyester pants. I'd love to have known the younger man in the fedora, or even the Gilligan hat.

Scanning the years (Part Two)

In about 1994, while a junior at NYU, I went for a walk with my camera in SoHo. I took this shot looking down Thompson street at the World Trade Center. Of course I didn't know then that the towers would be gone within seven years. But the kind of contrast you see in this photo, between the smaller-scaled brownstones and tenements of SoHo with the soaring WTC skyscrapers, is one you'd often find walking in lower Manhattan. The Trade Center towered above everything, and was a constant presence.

What's also crazy about this photo is that it actually shows to the left on Thompson the apartment building that Valarie was living in at the time. We were still about a year away from meeting.

Another recent print I scanned from an old album, like the WTC/Thompson shot above, is this one from Nye Beach in Newport in 2000. It's a little postcard-like, I'll admit: picturesque, but just a little too cliche. However, since I was actually there at the time experiencing the real thing, it's a nice keepsake.

One of the photos I meant to include in my previous post about scanning old albums was this one from a 1998 trip to the Bend area. I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember and can't tell if this is Mt. Bachelor or Broken top, which are right across from each other. The upper portion of the frame is a bit over-exposed, but I like how the frame is comprised of several different layers or portions of the frame: water, then grass and a few scattered small evergreen trees, then the more solid timberline behind that, and finally the mountain peak and sky.

Two other shots from that same 1998 Bend and Bachelor trip I liked are of smaller details. Both were taken beside a creek flowing out of Todd Lake (itself fed by glaciers from the Three Sisters) with a strong current in the place I stopped. One photo is of a small little plant beside the white water, and the other is of the water a few feet away going over a log. Did I mention that Valarie and I find Todd Lake to be one of our favorite and most beautiful, peaceful places on the planet? I haven't been there for years, actually, but looking at these photos makes me yearn to go back. I've got a book reading tentatively set for late August in Bend, and I'm hoping we can scoot over to Todd Lake the next morning before heading home.

Finally there's this shot, taken of my sister sometime in the mid-90s when she was an elementary schooler. We'd gone to the Grocery Outlet in hometown McMinnville with one of our parents, and I remember staging Sara with this ridiculously huge can of beans. Better open a window, Sara! I also like the puffy yellow-green jacket. The Grocery Outlet, as its name suggests, was quite a hilarious amalgamation of cheap foods, with lots of off-brand and generic labels, chintzy knicknacks that didn't sell at other stores, and expiration date to be mindful of.

Scanning the years (Part One)

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.

Silos, Soup Pots, Short Cuts

Yesterday, with Valarie out of town and work having slowed down for the first time in awhile, I decided to make the hour's drive down to my hometown of McMinnville to see my parents, eat at my dad's restaurant, and put my new car (new to me, that is) through its paces a bit.

The road one takes most of the way, Highway 99W, is always crowded these days. It gets particularly slow between Newberg and Dundee, the two small towns one encounters before McMinnville. People have been clamoring for years for the government to build a bypass highway so through traffic can avoid the towns; Dundee especially backs up cars, sometimes more than a half-mile outside its borders. But taxpayers are too cheap to approve the funds, and now the transportation department is talking about a toll road. Ugh. Anyway, with Yamhill County flourishing with both wine-country tourists and bedroom-community new residents, pressure on 99W is terrible and I think they should just build the damn bypass highway no matter what it costs.

Until then, though, instead of dealing with the Dundee stop-and-go, I cut off at Newberg and took an alternate route on a smaller state road between Newberg and Carlton - although I cut off from that road to Lafayette. Along the way, I stopped to snap a few pictures of the local agricultural sights. Anything big and rusty seems to attract my camera.

The Chehalem Valley Mills site was right in Newberg, just a couple blocks from the Gem 100 Ice Cream Parlor, where my friend Reese and I used to often go in high school for chili dogs on our way to the Washington Square mall in Tigard. Newberg was always McMinnville's arch rival, but I guess they had us beat on hot dog cuisine, because Reese was also exceptionally fond of the Coney Island foot-longs at the Newberg Dairy Queen down the street; come to think of it, I wish I'd photographed those places too.

After heading out into the country towards Carlton and Lafayette, my next set of shots came under duress. I'd pulled my car over to the side of the road and put the hazard lights on, but two guys in a gigantic extra-cab Dodge pickup pulling a horse trailer slowed down as if there had been an accident, and then shouted something obscene as they drove by. Lovely to mix with the local folk, isn't it? I had a great time taking the photos, though.

Downtown McMinnville was a lot busier than usual. Third Street (the town's main street) was closed for Turkey Rama, the annual three-day street fair and festival. As a kid, I had Turkey Rama circled on my calendar every year along with my birthday and Christmas. It was almost agonizing waiting, but when it finally arrived, I'd head first for the Walnut City Lions Club trailer, where they sold the best burgers. Later, I'd head to the McMinnville Jaycees for the best pronto pups, crispy and hot with a dab of mustard. That was only a warmup, however, for the Captain Funtastic carnival rides. The Scrambler and The Spider and the ferris wheel were the same here as anywhere else, but to the pint-size me they were top-drawer entertainment.

But Turkey Rama (which, incidentally, was named to honor the turkey farms dotting the agricultural landscape here, before they were largely replaced by vineyards) has changed over the years. It's arguably cleaned up a bit, but a lot of it seems pretty boring, like the local businesses (insurance, the steel mill) distributing brochures at little booths. There are still food stands, but they're just the garden-variety traveling ones that come with the carnival. I can tell they're not the real deal because they call pronto pups 'corn dogs'. The last thing I remember seeing was a local girls' dance troupe doing their act to Barry Manilow's "Copacabana".

Not eating at Turkey Rama worked out for the best, though, at least in terms of my lunch, because I'd come to eat at The Sage anyway. I love how so little has changed about this place over the years: the wheat bread, the soups, the antique wood tables, the weak coffee. Then there's the employees, some of whom have been there over two decades. Shirley, the dishwasher who still washes everything by hand without any automatic dishwasher equipment, has now been working in the steamy, cramped back room of the Sage kitchen for 28 years. Without any molecule of patronization, we've always found her longevity to be nothing short of astonishing. And Shirley never complains or seeks advancement. I struggled to do her job as a teen for a week or two in the summer, scrubbing giant soup pots with cream of broccoli soup burnt to the bottom, hundreds of pieces of silverware and glasses and plates and bowls; she's done it for four-fifths of my life.

A great benefit of being the boss's son is you can just waltz into the kitchen and make a sandwich. I always make virtually the same thing: a turkey sandwich with cheese, avocado and lettuce, butter on the bottom and mayo on top. I also managed to sneak across the street to Union Block Coffee for four peanut butter bars to take home. "Are these all for you?" the woman at the counter asked? Uh-huh. My idea was to have one or two each day, but I wound up having three last night.

Before heading back to Portland, I spent some time over at my parents' house going through boxes of stuff in my old bedroom. Three of the seven boxes I loaded into the car to take home were full of newspapers I'd saved during big world events like the fall of the Soviet Union and various presidential elections. Jokingly, I handed to my dad a New York Times front page about the end of Gulf War I. "BUSH DECLARES VICTORY", it reads, referring to our current president's father. "IRAQIS CRUSHED" As I handed the paper to my dad (a Republican, unlike me) I said, "Remember the good old days?" Funnily, though, both parts of the headline I quoted could be from today.

Perhaps best of all, after years of trudging along Highway 99 through the suburbs back to Portland, I also took a different route home from Newberg and may have found my new permanent path, right past Champoeg Park and onto the freeway right after the Shell station in beautiful Donald, Oregon, with which my dad shares a name.

Secret Life of Plant

Over the past few months a rogue plant has been growing up outside our kitchen window. I don't know what it is, but it grows very rapidly. It's already passed the roofline gutter after being nonexistent before February or so. This same plant also appeared last year, and at some point one of the handymen working on the roof killed it - or so we thought. I almost wonder if this is some sort of beanstalk. When I asked my uncle, a biology and plant expert, he only said, "Well, it's non-native."

Yesterday afternoon I was standing at the kitchen sink and happened to notice a wonderful light catching the plant, and quickly grabbed my camera to take a few shots. That quickly turned into about forty-five, but that's the great thing about digital cameras. I always learned from my grandma, a constant shutterbug all the while I was growing up, that the key to getting good pictures is the willingness to take a lot of them. And because I use a digital camera instead of a reflex like Grandma's (one of hers is sitting in my closet, and I cherish it as a photo I got jazzed about photography with as a teen), I can actually take a whole lot more of any subject than she did - except maybe grandchildren and birds. She still has thousands of those.

I printed out three or four of my favorite shots from this batch, and one thing that particularly fascinates me is to see the fractal geometry at work (I know that sounds horrendously geeky): the little cul de sac-like patterns that repeat themselves almost infinitely at a smaller and smaller scale.

And as so often happens without ever really meaning to, I continue to have a pattern of my own in seeking to isolate things with what a reviewer once called "localized scrutiny" to take patterns and textures almost or entirely out of their context. In the third of the shots I've attached here, the most close-up one, I like the idea that if you came to this photo cold, chances are you wouldn't be able to figure out right away what it was. So much of the artwork I review and like the best seems to straddle the line between representation and abstraction. And while I've never said to myself, "That's what I want to do too," it seems to be a kind of thinking without thinking that happens as I'm taking and editing pictures.

Vacation Writer’s Block and Photo Flood

Last month we returned from a 12-day vacation to London and Copenhagen, and I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since. But where do you begin? A general recounting of the narrative feels dull, and yet it’s impossible to recount all the details.

If I’ve been tongue-tied about how to talk about the trip, at least I have photos. A lot of photos. Over the course of the trip, I took about 1,3000 pictures. Each day I’d come back to the hotel and upload a couple hundred more onto my laptop. Since arriving back home, I’ve spent much of the last 40 days going through them all.

So instead of trying to recount highlights from my memory banks, maybe I’ll just talk about some of my favorite pictures.

This one was taken in London at the top of The Monument, a skinny cylindrical tower not unlike the Washington Monument, only round. The Monument in London was built to commemorate the lives lost in the Great Fire of 1666. I took a lot of pictures of the skyline, capturing nearby buildings of note like Richard Rogers’ legendary Lloyd’s of London building, Norman Foster’s new office tower unofficially dubbed ‘The Gherkin’, the Tower of London, or Foster’s City Hall. But my favorite shot, seen here, was looking through the bars of The Monument with a blurry St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background. St. Paul’s is such an icon that it’s easily identifiable even just in silhouette, and the bars have a great texture in addition to how they bisect the frame in a cool symmetrical way.

As it happens, out of those 1,300 photos another favorite shot was taken just a few seconds later – on my way down the very claustrophobic winding staircase. Anytime somebody else would pass by, one would have to practically do a spread-eagle against the wall to let them pass by. But I managed to steal a view looking straight down, which has a surreal visual effect but also, as with the bars, has a cool old material texture.

One of my other favorite shots was taken in Copenhagen. The area you see in this photo, Nyhavn, is one of the more popular and probably tourist-oriented areas in the city. But it’s such a striking scene, set upon one of Copenhagen’s Amsterdam-like canals with a host of multi-colored buildings. I also like the street lamp that shows up in the foreground. If I end up framing any of these vacation photos, so far this would be the leading candidate.

Another favorite Copenhagen picture was taken the day we flew home. It was that in-between time where we had to check out of our hotel, but had a couple hours to kill before it was time to go to the airport. So we went for a walk in a residential area nearby, and along the way came across a store that was selling all kinds of used knickknacks, including lots of silverware. I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures of storefront windows that incorporate both aspects of what you see through the glass and what’s reflected onto it.

While in London, we made a day trip to the nearby town of Richmond along the Thames and the adjacent Kew Gardens, also known as the royal botanical gardens. I’d wanted to see Kew Gardens for a few years, although ironically it was not to see the plant life so much as the massive old greenhouses there, at least one of which is an architectural world heritage site. The biggest structure, called Palm House, was my favorite, but I couldn’t get any pictures inside because the simulated tropical environment fogged up my camera lens within just a couple of seconds. And outside, somehow none of my photos did enough justice to how impressive Palm House and some of the other buildings at Kew really were.

As it happens, though, by the time we returned to Richmond to take the train back into London, the light was spectacular, and I got a couple shots of the buildings along the Thames bathed in that golden illumination.

Ironically, one of the photos from the trip that I still enjoy seeing is a totally unsuccessful one. While staying with our friends Neil and Bridget in south London’s Wandsworth Common area, one night I was lying awake in bed and noticed their motion-sensor porch light coming on constantly. I got out of bed to look, and saw it was a fox. It seemed like a major fluke at the time, but he was back the next night and the night after that. Turns out urban foxes in London are very common. Some neighbors of Neil and Bridget even had a family of them living in their garage. But to us, it was an extraordinary episode.

Watching the Waves

As I write this, I can see the ocean waves covering almost the entire beach, coming right up to the wall where the sand meets the cliff here at Cannon Beach. We had a gift certificate to a hotel here, the Stephanie Inn, that was going to run out by year's end, so we decided to spend a couple wintry days along the ocean.

It's been a bit of a bummer not to be able to walk along the ocean; even when it's not high tide the showers pour down pretty hard. But the theater of the waves is fun. If a tsunami were to happen right now, we'd be so screwed. In the meantime, though, the ceaseless but always subtly changing pattern of the waves is mesmerizing. I love that you can find great drama in the waves, the power of their crashing through, and their almost infinite scale, yet at the same time the monotony of the water hiting the land, both visually and in its white noise, is very soothing to me.

The wind is also quite dramatic. Yesterday we went to a nearby state park, winding on a thin road for miles through the giant fir trees to a vista hundreds of feet above and jutting into the ocean. The wind was so strong that I could jump up and be carried a couple feet. I saw a seagull that was just floating through the air, and the wind actually moved it sideways. Funny, but I don't think I've ever seen a bird moving sideways through the air before.

Now as I look through the screen door, a pitter-patter of rain is obstructing the view. But that's okay too. Maybe it's the art reviewing I've been doing lately, but it just feels like another layer added to the work.

It's astonishing just how frequently the weather changes here. Just since my last paragraph, for example, the rain as actually turned to hail. I've never before seen hail at the ocean. I've only been awake for about an hour and a half, but I've also already seen the sun come out a couple of times, and a previous cycle of rain hit. In fact, as the hail continues to hit our window, I can see patches of blue sky in the distance. Yesterday there was a time in the late afternoon when the sky was spectacularly orange with a winter sunset, and yet to the south the clouds were almost black. The sunset was quickly engulfed, although its fleeting nature seemed to make it all the more special. Now, by the way, the hail has stopped and the sky is brightening. By the time we check out in a few minutes, it'll probably be snowing.

Thanks to Richard Avedon

Before his death a couple weeks ago, I had never paid all that much attention to Richard Avedon outside of gazing admiringly at his portraits in The New Yorker each week. I knew he was a legendary photographer, dating back to his innovative fashion photography in the 1950s and continuing throughout a long life. But I happened to watch a series of archived interviews with Avedon by Charlie Rose on television last week, and I found the photographer’s description of his working method to be helpful with some of my own pictures.

Each month I take two or three photographs for a tiny newspaper called Northwest Senior News. I’ve been doing it for a little over a year now; they got my name somehow after I had a gallery show last summer and called. I pointed out to them that the photos in my show didn’t have a single human being in them, but for some reason that didn’t seem to matter. Nor did the fact that I don’t really consider myself a professional at all, at least from a technical perspective. My camera is a consumer-level Sony digital that fits in my pocket, and I don’t have any special lighting equipment or lenses or screens. Still, though, I liked the idea of getting paid to explore portraiture. I always liked the idea of photographing people, especially their faces. But I’ve always been shy about asking them.

Anyway, over the last few months I’d been in a bit of a rut. My editor likes me to capture the subject doing something that helps illustrate what the story is about. If the person volunteers to read to children, for example, I’d be asked to photograph him or her picking out books. But I hate the fact that those photos have to be staged. The subject wouldn’t really be picking out books. That’s just what we would set up. I preferred to just take a simple, honest, straightforward shot of them in an applicable environment but just looking at the camera.

Yet I knew the pictures needed something more—more animation, more that showed the personality behind whatever it was they were doing that got them in the paper. And that’s where Avedon comes in. Talking with Rose, the photographer described how important it was to talk at length with his subject and really get a sense conversationally who that person was. As they were talking, Avedon would begin to snap photos. I know from experience when you do that, you get a lot of terrible shots of someone talking. Chances are whatever syllable they are pronouncing when the shutter snaps will get their mouth frozen in some seemingly awkward position. So I’ve shied away from snapping as people talked.

But after listening to Avedon, I decided to give it a try. And while I’m not saying that the results were at that legendary artist’s level, I’m happy with the results and, more importantly, a believer in the process. My first subject was an 87-year-old retired doctor named Grant Hughes, who is pictured above. Sprightly and vigorous for his age, Dr. Hughes preaches the values of optimism, and I enjoyed snapping away as he talked enthusiastically. I feel like a couple of the shots I got really capture his vitality, and thus really stand for who he is. And I have to thank Richard Avedon for that.

Photography Shows

Just in case last July's "Out of Site" photo show didn't satisfy you, my pictures are showing currently at Starbucks Coffee on Southeast Hawthorne in Portland, then moving to Fife restaurant on Northeast Fremont for February and March, Georgie's restaurant at Southeast 12th and Division in May (home of some great eggs benedict and white-chocolate-chip pancakes, by the way), and Tiny's Coffee at Southeast 12th and Hawthorne in August.