11/18/11

11/04/11

Aberdeen, WA, 09/03/11

Getting out of town is not the same as traveling.

A long-weekend trip seems to be a chance to eyeball the scenery and that is about it, especially when you're going somewhere familiar.

The place seems to get reduced down to whatever happens to be running though your mind at the time.

It's like traveling though a coloring book, for the most part the outlines are already there while the colors you can use are determined by your state of mind.

Welcome to Aberdeen, "Come As You Are"…. thats what the sign says anyway.

Having just watched "About A Son" it's difficult to do much here without imagining a young Kurt Cobain drifting around these streets, biding his time, waiting for his chance to get out.

I'm currently reading my way through an account of a Kayaker exploring the Yukon River in Alaska.

It is filled with anecdotes of frontier bravado and self-reliant fortitude.

So my own suburban existence has been called into question as my mind leads some kind of moral interrogation of my essentially suburban character.

A fist got slammed down in that interview as I found myself in Aberdeen's Walmart at 11pm shopping for the can opener and other essentials I had forgotten to pack.

And as I searched the aisles I couldn't help but think that every straggly haired kid I saw was just biding their time, waiting to get out of here, too.

Lopez Island, WA, 08/13/11

Aberdeen, WA, 07/07/11

Allies Flyer.

Delayed Flight

I was down in the San Francisco/Bay Area for a few days for the show opening of Jason Griego's sculpture at Arata Gallery.

There are some prints from our South-West road-trip last winter in the show.

Leaving for home I was stoked to find out that the flight back to Seattle was going to be leaving 45 minutes late.

That little bit of time pushed me towards some great late afternoon/ early evening light.

The almost completely cloud free weather provided the chance to see Mt Shasta, Crater Lake, Mt St Helens and Mt Rainier.

Sodo, Seattle, WA, 05/28/11

04/21/2011

Seattle 04/17/11

Broken windows. Oakland to Seattle.

Making the most of the weathered perspex window on the ride back from Oakland.

3/11/11 Cedar River Mouth. Fry Release.

Christopher Hoff, Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA 02/13/11

It has been said, by a sculptor, that all painters are frustrated they aren't sculptors, or at the least, that they want their work to be more sculptural.

With that being said, this photographer is a frustrated painter, or at the very least I want for my work to become more painterly.

Wanting my images to look more painterly is not the same as wanting to paint however, so photographing painters will for the moment have to somewhat satiate my curiosity.

At one point I also wanted to be an architect and perhaps it is that which leads me to find the work of Christopher Hoff so compelling.

His Plein-Air works capture a remarkable sense of time and place that is often lost in the techno-translation of photography. And I enjoy the negative spaces which are left void of detail, both because as a photographer it would be much simpler to edit out the elements that are distracting to the composition, as much as they remind me of my early attempts at orthographic and perspective drawings that seemingly floated on large sheets of drawing paper.

You can see Christopher's work at www.christopherhoff.com

Salmon-Redux, Marsh Creek, Brentwood, CA

With the opportunity to get back down to California's Bay Area I decided to take a look at the completed Fish-Ladder in Brentwood.

This is a project that had been conceived by the Natural Heritage Institute to enable the upper reaches of Marsh Creek to become available to spawning Chinook.

The flow of the river had been mitigated by a drop structure which featured a concrete shelf on the downstream side that prevented the migrating Salmon from being able to generate enough speed to propel themselves over.

Now with a fish ladder they will be able to make it to the shady and gravelly upper reaches of the watershed, just the kind of neighborhood a young salmon family is looking for.