We’re back from our four trips north

Americana, Travel
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Photo by Michele with zombi 5D

OK, maybe that is not an accurate title, but it did seem like four different trips. We started at Mike and Linda’s oasis in Northern Nevada,

Oregon trip-1831then we spent a couple of days wandering around the entirely new area – for us – of Southeastern Oregon.

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Of course, the whole point of this trip was to go to Jason and Rachel’s wedding and it was a lovely, sweet, wedding in an outside cathedral.

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The next day, we started home with detour through the Willamette Wine Country and a detour on the detour with a visit to The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.

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Now we are home and we each have dozens of bug-bites to help us remember the trip (details to follow).

Complainin’ AND braggin’

Photography

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My camera – the very same camera that I have been so nice to and raised from a pup -tried to commit hari kari yesterday. The – formerly – trusty camera is a Canon 5D is SLR which means that it has a little mirror inside that directs the image from the lens up to the viewfinder, when I take a picture, that little mirror flips up out of the way so that the image travels directly from the lens to the sensor. The mirror weighs, probably, less than a 1/10th of an ounce and is a beautiful piece of engineering, or was until it fell off the flipper. Now I don’t have a viewfinder. Or a lightmeter, because the lightmeter is somehow dependent on the mirror.

When I was in Basic Training at Fort Ord, a typical retort to a complaint like They made us run all the way to the rifle range, was Are you braggin’ or complainin’? Of course it was a little of both and – of course – that is what I am doing about my broken mirror. Not having a viewfinder or a lightmeter is a huge pain in the ass, but there are work-arounds. Sort of.

I first started using a camera before they had built in lightmeters so, to look official, we would carry a separate lightmeter (usually tethered to us by a cord hanging around our necks). Using the lightmeter was cumbersome and we would take a meter reading for the scene, put the setting in the camera, and then shoot the whole series at the same setting. An even easier way was to use the Sunny Sixteen Rule. The Sunny Sixteen Rule was to set the lens aperture at f16 and the shutter speed to match the film speed on a typical Sunny day. It actually works pretty good as the pic below shows.

IMG_2380 Fortunately, the LCD monitor on the back of the camera still works and the 5D has all sorts of additional exposure feedback, so I can point the camera in the approximate direction, take a picture, and then adjust which is what I did in the shot at the top and the shot of the dinosaurs below.

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So far, so good. Of course the only other choice that I have is to start screaming at the camera, but I am afraid that, if I start screaming, I might throw the stupid %&$#@ across the room and then I would be even more frustrated.

A thought from the road, Everyplace is different

Americana

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In the deep American Outback, Labor is cheap and Stuff –  material – is expensive. A custom cooked meal comes on plates and we drink our homemade ice tea out of glass glasses. In civilization – using the term very loosely – Labor is expensive. In Civilization – again, using the term very loosely – the further down the economic scale we go, the more Material replaces Labor. In our Holiday Inn Express, everything is prepackaged, one serving size;  we drink out of wrapped plastic or paper cups and eat our complimentary breakfast off of paper plates.

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It is only when we get to the elegant Bistro PETIT OISEAU, in Portland that we get back to reusable – stuff valuable enough for somebody to wash – glasses and best of all custom cooked food. Very delicious custom cooked food.

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We are going to Portland for our nephew Jason’s wedding

Around home, Travel

Eastern Oregon -But first we are going to the Smoke Creek to see Mike Moore. The we will wander around the Eastern Oregon desert – drylands? – for a couple of days (we really don’t have much of an idea of what the area is like except that it is in the rain shadow of the Oregon Cascades). We will be back a week from Tuesday.