In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Both of our cars are getting up there in years, and while they have low miles for their age, I’ve started thinking about what we should do when it comes time to replace them. I haven’t paid attention to the car scene in well over a decade, so my wife and I went to the Portland Auto Show a while back to get acclimated to the current state of the automobile. I had done a little research beforehand and so much since that sometimes I feel like I both know a lot more and a lot less than when I started.

The problem is that the car I want doesn’t exist. If you could take Toyota’s hybrid system and merge it with the new Subaru Impreza, you’d have my ideal car. I’d have a nice quiet car for Ridgefield to minimize the disturbance to my favorite subjects like this lovely great blue heron. Plus good gas mileage for commuting to work, with enough power for the ascent up the Sunset Highway, and Subaru’s lovely all-wheel drive system for when the weather turns wet or white. Not to mention the safety improvements compared to our current lineup.

Alas Subaru is keeping mum on any plans for hybrids so my dream car remains a dream. Not that we’ll do anything in the short term since no car made a clear claim to the crown, but at least I have an idea of what we might do if we had to replace one of the cars in a hurry.

The Impreza in hatchback form is still the frontrunner to replace my Civic, and perhaps even the Outback, but a handful of other contenders caught my eye at the show. Will this Impreza one day grace our driveway? Or will it be the …

All the men of the house have loved this chair.

We got it for my office after we moved to Portland and it has been the place I sit most ever since. Templeton liked it too in his day, and now Sam in his. I sat in it a lot the past couple of months as I recuperated from a twisted ankle. The worst part is, I don’t even know how I injured it.

When I explained to Ellie that hedgehogging was temporarily on hold, I expected her to be crestfallen, but instead she got strangely excited and her eyes grew wide. “Put him in the cage!” she shouted to the cats. “Put him in the cage!” they cried. “Put him in the cage!” they shouted as they circled round me.

I escaped incarceration from my would-be jailers with a heavy bribe of belly rubs and head scratches and was able to serve my time under general house arrest.

The puzzle of how I hurt my ankle remains. Late at night during story time Scout offered up her theory that I had been bitten by the legendary Sammish spider, a giant arachnid ten pounds in weight, if you can believe it, with orange fur growing out from its monstrous carapace. “Sleep with one eye open,” she urged, “if ever you see such a creature lurking in the shadows.”

“Never mind the shadows,” I cried, “for such a creature sleeps on me even now!” Twenty tiny daggers pierced my flesh. “I was talking about you little one,” I said as I gently pried the paws of a frightened Sam from off my legs.

“Oh but how you startled me!” he said as he relaxed and retracted his claws.

I studied him as he curled up again on my lap. “Have you ever heard of Jekyll & Hyde?” I asked at last.

“The ones who sang Muskrat Love?”

“That’s Captain & Tennille.”

“Well then no. Why do you ask?”

“Oh no reason, no reason. Say, would you mind if I put you in the cat carrier before we go to sleep tonight?”

“Yes I would.”

“On a scale of 1 to we’re-going-to-the-vet, how much would you mind?”

“Oh we’d be way past going-to-the-vet.” The claws were out again.

I looked down at the red scars running down my arms in the pattern of his claws, a remembrance of his last visit to the vet.

I took my chances with the spider.

We have three heated cat beds in my office, one for each of the cats, but Scout has one she considers hers and spends much of the day sleeping in it. The other cats pay their obeisance to the queen and leave the bed for her, mostly, but Sam does occasionally go through moods where he claims it for his own. I don’t think it’s a power play, partially because that’s not his personality, partially because sometimes he tries to climb in with Scout. They are both small cats but it’s a small bed too, not a bed for a small two.

If Sam takes the bed while Scout’s away, when she returns she sits beside the bed and gives him the evil eye while he pretends not to see her. When the evil eye doesn’t work, and it never does, Scout comes over to me and starts giving me the business until I go and evict him.

When we discovered her bed was no longer heating up, I struggled with whether or not I should switch it for one of the others. Scout more than any of our cats living or past is a slave to her routine. One night I decided to try an experiment and switched her bed with one a few feet away on the desk. I knew she wouldn’t like it at first but I figured with a little time the electric warmth would overcome her objections.

How wrong I was!

I made the switch in the early evening and immediately Scout started haranguing and harassing me, sometimes vocally, sometimes by repeatedly head butting me and walking across my laptop. Hour after hour I resisted but she broke me in the wee hours of the morning and I switched the beds back. Before I could even sit down she had hopped in and curled up to sleep.

At last we both had our rest.

For many years I’ve dreamed of having location data attached to my images so that I could see where I took my favorite pictures at my favorite places. Unfortunately none of my cameras have had GPS either built-in or as an attachment. My iPhone has the ability to do it but sadly it wasn’t until recently that I figured out how. I decided to take advantage of my recent renaissance and assigned myself the task of learning how to do it while visiting a super secret location over the Christmas break.

And so on a visit to Ridgefield (oh what a giveaway!) I fired up MotionX-GPS on the phone and had it keep a running tally of my travels around the refuge, then emailed the data file to my laptop. It took me a couple more weeks before I sat down to learn how to import that data into Aperture, and it’s a bit fussier than I hoped, so I also learned how to do it with a little command line utility called exiftool. Photo Mechanic can also do it, and did it quickly, but the locations weren’t right so I have a little more learning there.

I do wish my camera could do this natively, not just because of the extra steps required to add the data later, but because it requires that I remember to start and stop the GPS tracking. And anything that requires that I remember to do something, well …

This screenshot shows an example of how the GPS data looks when imported directly into Aperture, in this case it was my visit to Ridgefield on January 15th. The purple trace shows where I drove around the auto tour, the pins where I stopped and took pictures. Currently selected is a spot beside Rest Lake where I photographed a coyote hunting voles as the snow fell gently down.

On the map you can see the Columbia River running to the left of the refuge, and a little offshoot that comes by it on the right, plus the numerous sloughs that run through the refuge. Lewis & Clark visited Ridgefield but apparently Clark wasn’t quite as impressed with this blessed little place as I am, for he wrote,

“Opposit to our camp on a Small Sandy Island the brant & geese make Such a noise that it will be impossible for me to sleap.”

His prediction proved true, as the following morning he added,

“rained all the after part of the last night…I slept but verry little last night for the noise Kept up dureing the whole of the night by the Swans, Geese, white & Grey Brant Ducks & c. on a Small Sand Island they were emensely noumerous, and their noise horid…”

I’ve not seen brant at Ridgefield but the rain and swans and geese and ducks, those I know quite well, although in much smaller numbers it seems than William Clark once saw (and heard).

A long-standing but unfulfilled desire of mine is a small portable camera, an always-with-you camera, the camera that captures those quick fleeting moments that as pictures are more important than they are great, the slices that over time tell the little stories of your life. The iPhone 4 fills this roll for me at the moment, not because I think it’s well-suited to the task but because it’s what I have.

The four pictures from the previous two posts of a snuggling Sam on my lap were taken with my iPhone because I had it near at hand. My Canon 7D wasn’t that far away but out of arms reach and besides had the big lens attached, so I had to choose between getting the camera and getting the picture.

The two pictures here of a slumbering Sam were taken with the 7D. I started out photographing him with the iPhone but in this case I was able to get and setup the bigger camera, as instead of my lap he was snuggled up either in his warm bed or my chair. Much better image quality with the big camera, but the best camera is the camera you have with you, and thus I keep casting my eyes about for a small camera that strikes the right balance between portability and quality. And within the past few months a whole slew of interesting models have come to market.

I don’t know if I’ll get a smaller camera or make do with what I have, but perhaps I shouldn’t delay my decision too long. I’ve been watching this documentary that chronicles a traveling time lord who takes people on grand adventures across time and space. Maybe I’ll get to go back in time and photograph Templeton when he was a kitten!

I am beginning to despair that he will show up on my doorstep, however, as I’ve noticed that he prefers young English women as his companions, and I fail on all three counts.

Come on, Doctor!

The next motivational carrot is my computer setup. Which is a bit strange because my 15″ MacBook Pro combined with my 27″ Thunderbolt display is hands down my favorite setup of all time. But the carrot isn’t upgrading the computer itself.

It’s the iPad.

I don’t have an iPad but after playing around with my wife’s iPad 2, for as much guff as he took for saying it, I side with Jobs in calling it magical. If the rumored iPad 3 launches with the rumored retina display, rumor has it I will buy one. This would motivate me to update my web site and probably the blog as I suspect they are hard to navigate with fingers. It’s a bit embarrassing but I write them largely for myself and am by far their most voracious reader, so I would adapt their design to whatever I’m reading them on. And if I’m doing a major update, I might as well add in some much needed features (for example you can search the blog but not the main site, understandable when I launched it in the 90′s but rather shameful in this day and age).

An iPad would also be useful on the MAX, where lately it has been harder and harder to get a seat where I can use a laptop, but my MAX riding is likely to falloff steeply this year. My real motivation is to try it out for home use, as I think I’d frequently use it when I’m not at my desk, freeing up the laptop to spend most of its time hooked up to the big display for photo editing but still able to tag along with me when I need it.

There’s another motivational aspect to all of this, which is that with my current office setup I can’t work on that big beautiful display and watch TV at the same time. Plus the big desks, built when dinosaurs and giant CRT’s roamed the earth, limit what furniture I can put in my little office. Currently I have a recliner that I love, but while the cats can sleep atop me, there’s no room for Ellie to get in on the snuggling. I’m hoping a smaller desk and love seat would remedy the situation, but I’m not sure I can make it work.

Regardless of what I do or don’t do, the Great Snuggler has staked his claim to his semi-permanent position on my lap.

After the success of using Yellowstone as motivational carrot to to accomplish long-delayed car and hiking tasks, I turned my eyes toward the mess that had become my office. Stacks of unread mail and magazines threatened to topple over onto Scout in her heated bed. My pictures were scattered haphazardly across multiple hard drives, most with no backups. Most of the furniture no longer met my needs, and hadn’t for some time.

The second carrot? I bought a new TV. Perhaps I should explain.

I didn’t think to take before and after pictures, but the top picture gives a little view into the way things were. The picture is a quick snap of Sam with my iPhone, he normally ignores the TV but is rather obsessed with wolves and sits transfixed at my feet whenever they are on.

The TV is a 20″ CRT that I bought my junior year in college so it’s well over twenty years old. I felt the urge to upgrade to HDTV whenever the NFL season rolled around, the photographer in me loves loves loves high-resolution imagery, but I couldn’t justify the cost given the amount of TV I watch.

Below the TV sits the tape and CD players I got as high school graduation presents, putting them at over 25 years old. I haven’t used them in years, not since Mr. Steve Jobs and the good folks at Apple forever changed the way I listen to music with iTunes and the iPod. Below the stereo gear sits the digital-to-analog converter that converts the digital cable signal into an analog signal the old TV understands. Below that (and out of frame) lies the slowly dying TiVo that I inherited from my wife, while beneath them all sits the receiver I got my first year of grad school a touch over 20 years ago. So long ago that my address on the box it was shipped in was hand written by the mail order company I ordered it from.

The stand is a metal serving cart that my grandmother gave me when she learned I had nowhere to put the TV. To the right is an old printer stand that now holds DVD’s and magazines and mostly serves as a bird viewing platform for the cats when the window is open. To give you an idea of it’s age, the middle area was designed to hold a big ream of tractor-feed paper that fed into my dot matrix printer (that, at least, I no longer have).

To the left is a VCR tape cabinet even though I haven’t had a VCR for years. On top of it an original XBox that I used only briefly since the small TV wasn’t much fun to play games on. I used to use it as a DVD player but had long since stopped both because of the noisy fan and because I had to keep switching the connection to the sole input at the back of the TV with the TiVo, and that got old pretty quickly.

Off to the left and out of frame is a long and wide desk originally designed for the massive CRT’s we used way-back-when for picture editing, which also houses the aforementioned towering stacks of unread mail and a few cat beds and a scattered array of hard drives and computer gear.

In the middle of the room, and from whence I took the picture, sits my reclining chair which I dearly love. At only a decade old it’s one of the newer pieces of gear in my office and hopefully will last for years to come. It’s small and thin and fits well in my little office with plenty of room for me and Snuggle One and Snuggle Two (aka Scout and Sam), but not so much for the 65 pounds of Snuggle Three (aka Ellie).

In late October, Amazon put a nice 42″ Panasonic LED HDTV on a special one-day sale for a crazy low price. Two days later, a friendly UPS man brought it to my door. It’s not the TV you see in the picture below, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The new TV was too wide to fit on my grandmother’s old serving cart so it was finally retired from duty, and with it went all of the gear it I wasn’t using, plus its neighbors the printer stand and VCR tape cabinet. In its place, as shown in this picture (another quick iPhone snap, this time Sam and I enjoying a show about birds on the new gear), went an Ikea TV stand. Plus a new TiVo Premiere that can record in HD, and a Playstation 3 that serves up both high-def games and Blu-ray movies. Hidden out of sight is an 8-port gigabit router that feeds Internet connections to everything.

But this TV isn’t the one I bought from Amazon. My wife fell in love with that one so, when we saw Best Buy had a similar 42″ Panasonic plasma on sale for a good price, we picked one up while getting TV stands at the next-door Ikea. The plasma went into my office while the LED replaced the old CRT in hers.

I also took a good whack at the unread mail, I haven’t quite got through it all but Scout no longer fears for her life. The pictures on the hard drives are mostly organized and mostly backed up, the hard drives themselves now neatly arranged as well. Next up is to test out my old film scanner to see if it still works, if not the old PC I keep just to talk to it will walk the plank as well.

Then I’ll look for a new desk that better fits my small office, and then if I can work it out perhaps a small love seat or couch that will meet all the snuggling needs. Then it will be time to tackle the bookshelf and finally the Closet of Doom.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I can’t wait to see my first Super Bowl in HD, the NFL really does look amazing on these TV’s. I’m sorry I waited so long to start putting my office and life in better order, but better late than never.

The past few years at work have been productive but stressful and the last year in particular left me worn down and burned out. I hadn’t taken much vacation time but we either use-it-or-lose-it at the end of the year, so I was trying to decide if I should take most of the month of December off, or if I should take my normal fall hiking trip and then take a few weeks off at the end of the year. While the idea of a month away from work was very appealing, I decided to split up the vacation and take the hiking trip instead.

I realized that as a reaction to the stress I had settled into a funk and wasn’t getting things done that needed to be done. Needing either carrot or stick to get back on track, I settled on carrots with Yellowstone & the Tetons as Carrot Number One. Planning for the weeklong trip of hiking and photography forced me into action.

My contacts had long since run out and while I had been wearing my glasses instead, I prefer to photograph in contacts so I finally scheduled my overdue eye exam and got new contacts. And since it often rains during my fall hiking trips, I picked up some waterproof hiking shoes to replace my worn out pair, a small army of hiking socks to replace my threadbare contingent, and a couple pairs of waterproof gloves. All of which guaranteed a week of unusually hot and sunny weather during my week in Wyoming, but the wet weather gear has been put to good use ever since with the return of the rainy season to the Northwest.

Since I would be taking our much loved but aging Subaru Outback, I took her in for everything from routine maintenance to replacing a broken sensor and leaking head gasket and especially the broken cargo cover that left all my gear exposed to prying eyes. I also fired up iTunes to create some new CD mixes of recent music purchases to keep me entertained on the long drive.

Then there was an extra memory card and battery for my Canon 7D, which I’ve been meaning to order for a year or two, plus a portable hard drive for storage on the road. The hard drive was a much improved solution compared to the DVD’s I used to burn, the backups of the day’s pictures went much faster meaning I could get to sleep sooner. And while I didn’t need the new memory card for most of the trip, oh was I thankful to have it when I met this black bear eating pine cones on my way down from Mount Washburn. Yellowstone put on a show on my last day and I had taken a ton of pictures, and if not for the new card I would not have been able to photograph this wonderful creature during my last hours before heading for home. The extra card was also put to good use during my Christmas visits to Ridgefield.

There were other things too, like the car mount for the iPhone so that the little genius woman in the TomTom GPS app could guide me safely there and back again despite my notoriously poor sense of direction. Both the mount (from RAM Mounts) and the little woman worked wonderfully and the pair have kept me on the straight and narrow navigating Portland ever since.

All of which is a long way of saying that the hiking trip was not only great stress relief but also great motivation for getting things done large and small that have made life better ever since.

But I wasn’t quite finished with my carrots …

I suppose everyone thinks their dog is the best dog in the world, which is rather unfortunate, as we actually have the best dog in the world. Three years ago today, we added this wonderful girl to our family. At eight years old, the gray has spread further around her mouth and to her eyebrows as well, but Ellie is the same lovable goofball she was the day we met.

What a blessing to come home each day, met by Ellie dancing in joy!

While visiting family this summer, my return flight got canceled and when the airline rebooked me for the next day, I ended up with three legs instead of two. At first disappointed but just happy to be going home, I was rather delighted when I discovered they put me in first class for the longest leg of the flight. At the point where the flight attendant brings out the hot towels, the woman beside me leaned over and said, “To be honest, this is my favorite part of flying first class.”

I wanted to say that my favorite part was when they let you go back and kick the people in coach, but I just nodded my head. I understood what she meant, sometimes in life it’s the little things that make such a difference.

The Columbia River Gorge is home to a variety of beautiful and majestic waterfalls, including the famous Multnomah Falls, but sometimes I think tiny little Fairy Falls is my favorite of the bunch. It isn’t, Ponytail Falls (the upper part of Horsetail Falls) is probably my favorite, but I love hiking the trail and coming upon this little jewel where the water tumbles down beside you and runs underneath your feet.

What I love most is photographing the little falls within the little fall.

The dog park section of Irving Park is surrounded by old oaks and maples so a couple of weeks ago I took Ellie up for a photo shoot in the fallen leaves. One of us was a little bored by the lack of running and/or hedgehogs.

amateur |ˈamətər, -ˌtər, -ˌCHo͝or, -CHər|

noun
a person who engages in a pursuit, esp. a sport, on an unpaid basis.
• a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity: that bunch of stumbling amateurs.

adjective
engaging or engaged in without payment; nonprofessional: an amateur archaeologist | amateur athletics.
• inept or unskillful: it’s all so amateur!

DERIVATIVES
amateurism |-ˌrizəm|noun

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover,’ from amare ‘to love.’

Apple’s built-in dictionary

The term amateur has both positive and negative connotations. When it comes to photography I love being an amateur, and I love it precisely because of the origins of the term: I get to photograph what I love.

While on the way back to my hotel in Yellowstone, I came across a bunch of photographers pulled off to the side of the road to photograph a herd of elk. I took a variety of pictures (including the picture at the top of my tribute to Steve Jobs) and was about to wrap up when I noticed a young elk bull down a ways from where everyone else was. I walked down to him and realized why no one else was photographing him: his antlers were stunted.

I have a soft spot for animals who have more to overcome, so I settled in to spend the rest of the dying light photographing him.

Whether due to diet or disease or genetics, the poor thing wasn’t exactly photogenic compared not only to the dominant bull but even to the other young bulls in the herd. He was mostly grazing but occasionally raised his head and sniffed the air, so I positioned my tripod so that if he raised his head again, his face would be set against the strip of yellow plants behind him. And not only did he raise his head again, but as if on cue he even looked right at me.

You’re beautiful to me, little one.

The bull on the left seemed rather taken with this particular female. I couldn’t tell if he was in love with her or shaking her down for lunch money. There’s some nice mountains in the background too.

God bless the Tetons.

My plans for this fall’s trip to Wyoming were literally made at the last minute. I had planned to take the week off but wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. It had been a while since I had been to Yellowstone & the Tetons and I was itching to get back, but I was also worn out and not sure I was up to the drive. Then I checked the weather and it was supposed to be unusually sunny and hot, which if you’ve followed along here you know is not my favorite photography weather.

I decided to sleep on it and in the morning made my reservations for Wyoming, starting off in the Tetons and finishing up in Yellowstone, then headed out the door. And it was unusually sunny and hot during the day, despite being cold at night, so I had to deal with 40 or 50 degree temperature changes from when I started hiking in the morning to the heat of the day. While the sunny skies did provide good viewing of the Teton range at sunrise, the park staff had been doing controlled burns and a smoky haze hung around in the valley — not thick enough to be interesting, but enough to ruin the clarity of the pictures. The fall colors seemed to be late in arriving and while some of the aspens had turned, many were still green. And my chronic stomach problems flared up several times on the trip, though fortunately never on the trails despite one close call.

But the worst of it was, I wasn’t seeing much wildlife, and so while I was grateful for the chance to visit this wonderful part of the world, the trip wasn’t ranking very highly compared to some of my other visits. But then on my last night in the Tetons I discovered this male pronghorn in the evening light and things started looking up. The next morning I found the bison herd and my mood got even better.

Yellowstone was hit or miss the first few days too, but the last day turned out to be one of my favorite days in the park, ever.

A long way of saying, I’m glad I went.

Play gets a little more serious when calves grow into bulls. These two bulls were much more aggressive than the little calves I had watched at play, but it’s all relative — the old bull laying in the wallow in front of them paid them no heed. They’re all kids to him I suppose.

When you first enter the parks, rangers hand out flyers warning you to steer clear of bison, as they can turn from passive to aggressive rather quickly. I used to think that no one would really need to be told to steer clear of something this large and this horned, but sadly this is not the case. There was a small group of us watching the herd and one of the men got down into the river bed and walked right up to a calf to photograph it. He came back up onto the bank when his wife suggested it wasn’t a good idea to get between the calf and its mother. Fortunately for him it was just cows and calves in the river bed at that point, the herd got a little more testy when the bulls crossed over.

Bison calves frequently play together in ways that mimic the ways of adults, such as head-butting or one climbing onto the other. Not only was the calf on the left not as into playing as the one on the right, but it was substantially smaller to boot. Not to worry, they were playing under the watchful eye of one of the cows.

I do my best to educate the pets on affairs both present and past. After one of our study lessons covered Cleisthenes, a father of Athenian democracy, the little ones were inspired to found the Irvington Democractic Society. They meet weekly to air grievances and propose resolutions.

Here, Emma takes the podium in support of one of her proposals, “All pets should only eat the food given to them and not push others out of the way and steal their food.” Emma and Scout voted in favor, Sam and Ellie against. Oh no! What do we do in the event of a tie?

This is the reason democracies always fail.

Requirement #1: It should be well-hidden with a secret entrance that only you can fit into.

Requirement #2: It should provide good viewing of your nemesis, Mr. Squirrel.

Requirement #3: It should have enough room for entertaining friends, but not so much that they will stay too long and impinge on your personal freedoms.

We have a patch of daisies in the backyard that don’t quite get as much sun as they should, but I leave them where they are as they make a good location for taking insect pictures. I tie the daisies up after they bloom as otherwise they fall over searching for more sunlight, but an unusually heavy downpour this summer knocked them over despite my efforts.

Since we didn’t get many insects on the daisies this year, after they fell I was going to cut them down until I realized another creature had taken up residence underneath their canopy.

An attempt to combine the tight portraits of the face from the previous pictures, but also show the varying shades of brown in this bull’s fur. It’s a touch too tight in my opinion but not only did I not have time to take the teleconverter off the big lens, but it was extremely dusty and not the best place to be exposing the innards of the camera.

This is why I think the built-in teleconverter in Canon’s announced 200-400mm lens is so brilliant. Oh what a joy it would be if my 500mm had one! It would solve one of the biggest and most frustrating challenges I face, regardless of whether I’m in the Tetons or Ridgefield.