Makes an excellent Old Fashioned.

It snowed last night here in Portland. In fact, it snowed quite a lot. For Portland. This is our third winter here and, thus far, there’s been one or two “snow days” each winter. This one was incredibly beautiful. The snow blanketed everything. Flakes collected and piled high on tree branches and power lines. The forecast called for snow and temperatures around freezing all night followed by rain at 8am. Sadly, the rain came early and the snow blanket was ruined well before we got up. I’m glad I grabbed my camera to shoot what I could from the apartment around midnight. It ended up being the only opportunity I had.

These were all shot in the middle of the night with long, hand-held exposures of one to four seconds. The blur from the hand-holding plays very well with the natural effects the Lensbaby’s single glass element gives you. Also: I learned that moonlight has a strange color temperature.

I try to imagine living when this truck was new. When seeing a typeface like this (check out the letter O and the zeros) said “fresh and new and trendy!” rather than “classic.” When this truck was desirable for entirely different reasons than it is now.

Also, this truck smelled very strongly of gasoline.

What do I love? Layers and textures. Textures and layers.

This is a shot from last summer at Oui Presse here in Portland. It started as a low-resolution Instagram and I just recreated it at a higher resolution with Flare and Photoshop. Trying to duplicate the look I got with the original Instagram was a lost cause, so I just felt it out. I’m including the original “straight from camera” shot below so you can see what I started with.

This past Christmas Eve, my parents and I did a little exploring in Portland and ended up in the St. Johns neighborhood to buy wrapping paper at Safeway. Exciting!

And we saw the bridge, too.

I was just reminiscing about my time living in San Francisco. When I made my coffee a cup at a time. And couldn’t be bothered to dispose of my grounds and filters in the compost bin two flights of stairs below me. At least not until I had a tower of expended filters in danger of spilling all over the breakfast nook.

sigh

Keli has been drying out the roses from her wedding bouquet. In an effort to put off doing some development work I wasn’t really excited about doing, I took a stab at making a nice image of them as they hung from a dresser drawer handle. I think that using the single-glass element in my Lensbaby might actually work better for this subject matter and overall look. But, after a little bit of work in Aperture and Flare, I’m digging this a lot more than when I first reviewed the images on the back of my DSLR.

Oh, and head on over to this post on Kim Miller’s blog to check out the flowers when they were a little bit closer to being alive.

I don’t want to be a downer or anything, but, damn, this photo from April 2011 pretty well captures what today has felt like.