Portland held a very strong allure for me when I first moved out west for school. I've always liked big cities, and Portland in particular possesses a certain quirkiness that gives it an intriguing personality. As I've made more trips over to Portland some of the novelty has worn off, but it is still a city I would like to explore more. I'll be living near(er) to the city this summer; hopefully I will take advantage of the opportunities this presents.


My friend Fishy has an uncanny ability to sense when a camera's pointed at her. Granted I am not the most inconspicuous, what with the big bulky SLR and the 97 seconds of focusing and light-metering before each shot, but Fishy will still catch me trying to photograph her from across the room at a crowded party and look up at the last second, pulling on The Face. It is a face-tugging-off-to-side sort of look, and I hate it, mostly because of how many of my photos it has ruined. When this happens I have two options (besides just giving in and photographing The Face): making an amusing/frustrated comment about The Face that will get a giggle out of Fishy (giving me a smiling photo instead of a Face photo), or sighing and dropping my camera, hoping that next time I will prove faster or Fishy will prove slower/less motivated, and I'll be able to avoid The Face. Looking back on this photo with my previous Fishy experience in mind, I realize that it's probably one of the only ones I have where she's not making the face I hate. I think here she was just tired and incredibly not in the mood to be photographed, and so just sort of stood there with the spacey look she has.




Portland likes to keep itself weird.

Back when it was still fairly winter-y around no one took any amount of sunlight for granted, so when March offered a couple of warm sunny days, people took advantage.


This kid (the one on the right) was already up in the tree when we got there. He has a book and a paper cup of tea in the tree with him. I still can't imagine being patient enough to bring tea into a tree.


This is a photo taken of my by someone unfamiliar with the workings of a manual-focus SLR, but I like it nonetheless.

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The building in the distance is one of the most iconic and overly-photographed buildings on campus.


Someone was growing a bunch of cacti on this windowsill in the Microbiology/Wildlife building.

This is the materials research cleanroom at the university. I would like to be able to say more about the stuff in here, but I don't know very much about most of it.


This is The Tang. It's a sputtering system.

Many of the older buildings on campus happen to house the engineering/science labs. The building that this lab is in was completed in 1949 or 1950. Many parts of the labs bare obvious signs of having been in use in the 50s, 60s and 70s.




Everything is lit with these fluorescent bulbs that wreak havoc on the color balance of my negatives. I usually have a pretty hard time getting it back to something decent (and honestly I don't think it quite makes it most of the time...).



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This is one of the places where I work on campus. On his first visit a friend of mine described it as a grown-up's kindergarten. "Look, you've even got little cubbies," he said.



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I'm always at least somewhat amused to consider the impact that my mood has on the photography I post online. What is worthy of posting, where (what goes on my blog, what goes on my flickr, what is omitted from each), how much editing and poking is required before a photo is good enough... all are heavily mood-dependent. It can get kind of interesting going back to things I've uploaded before, under a different mood, and wonder what the hell I was thinking.