Category: Portland

Portland Pearl Aurora

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This is more than a vibrant, glowing, living moment of late-night city life from the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon; this picture is the first I’ve ever processed with a new piece of software, Aurora HDR. It was processed only with Aurora, with no other fiddling in other programs. (As you may know, I’m typically a die-hard Photomatix+Photoshop workflow guy.) I’m not sure what place Aurora will have in my workflow long-term, but I have to at least say this: its noise reduction algorithms are by far the best I’ve ever seen. (Noise is the main enemy of good HDR shots.) I’ll bring you a longer report when I’ve had more seat time with it.

Portland Pearl Aurora

Chrome Tower with Breakfast

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Portland’s Pearl District is colonized by construction like some sort of reverse-termites; shiny new buildings add to the skyline each day. As impressive as the reflections and the bridges and the gorgeous dawn sky is, I rather love the image of the man reading the paper in the bottom-right corner of the image. He’s literally on the edge of this dramatic image, but so thoroughly unfazed. Reading the paper and eating cereal has to happen sometime!

Chrome Tower with Breakfast

Contradictory Utopia

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In preparation for my upcoming travels to the West Coast next month, I was looking back at the images of Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District. It seems representative of some of the common features of West Coast cities: newer architecture that incorporates a mixture of scales (human vs. superhuman), modern interpretations of some more traditional forms (like the bridge, which resembles a traditional Japanese zig-zag bridge), and a generally utopian, “city of the future!” vibe.

Utopia: Portland

Perhaps no scene better emphasized the sometimes-contradictory nature of a growing city than this one: a yoga class in a sunny park on a summer afternoon, across the street from a shadowed construction site. Juxtapositions are rarely so literal.

Yoga and Construction

Rose Garden and Fountain in Portland

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Rose gardens are more frequently Brendan’s purview on this blog (check out this post, or this one), but my visit to Portland, Oregon this summer gave me the chance to shoot some rose gardens of my own. The dramatic sky, the far-off pavilion, the spouting fountain, the acres of roses, and the mis-matched ramp and stairs at the edges of the picture: Peninsula Park Rose Garden hits all the right fairy tale notes. I was lucky to be able to capture it at just the right heavy summer moment—though I have to wonder how it would look in the fuzzy first moments of sunrise, too.

Rose Garden and Fountain in Portland

Little Oregon Horseshoe

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A rural childhood lends itself to stretches with zero requirements: impossibly muggy summer afternoons or frigid winter nights trapped inside. I spent many of those stretches drawing maps of fantastical places, and I can’t help but wonder if my current interest in aerial photography stems from the process of projecting real scenery onto my imagined childhood maps. This meandering oxbow near the Columbia River Gorge has that feel of a place perfect for a fort, doesn’t it?

Little Oregon Horseshoe

McMenamins Corner

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I found myself wandering around McMenamins Edgefield (just outside Portland in Troutdale, Oregon) with some free time before a wedding ceremony, so I went exploring. I love the way the confluence of additions and annexes to buildings wind up producing these strange internal spaces; they do a lot to magnify the mystery of an already mysterious place.

McMenamins Corner

Portland Koi

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A photograph should “work,” should have meaning, in isolation. I suppose that really means that it should work without any context other than shared culture. Without my words, you can know that this is a Japanese Garden (though perhaps not in Oregon), know that it’s an artificial simulacrum of some elegant natural setting—but can the sense of calm in being in that place be conveyed by the image? (I suspect that this aspect might be the easiest to convey.)

Portland Koi

City of the Future!

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In the distance land of Portland, Oregon, urban renewal has transformed the rail yards of the Pearl District into galleries and shops and condos in towering new buildings. Doesn’t this scene look like a futuristic utopia? (Hopefully it’s not moments away from the shattering realization that it’s all built on some “Soylent Green”/”The Giver”/”Equilibrium”-esque lie.)

City of the Future!