Travel – Page 19 – A Darker View

There is something going on in Portland… For some reason the leaves on many of the trees are turning yellow or red and dropping from the trees. Fallen leaves litter the streets and lawns of the cities neighborhoods. Some trees already appear to be dead, skeletal and leafless.

Local residents seem to take little notice of this ongoing environmental disaster, going about their business. They even stop and take photos of the fallen leaves. The effect is admittedly quite pretty, with striking colors.

Walking a Market

Traveling Central America offers a wide range of photographic opportunities, but few offer the concentrated view of local culture that is offered by a city market. A real market is something that has been lost in the US, long ago pushed aside by supermarkets and shopping malls. A central location, filled with small shops or simply stalls, where one can buy everything they need. These markets still exist in much of the world.

Vegetable Seller — A vegetable seller poses with her merchandise

A market brings everything together in one place, the very character of the country. The people of the region, produce and tropical fruits, the goods and services of everyday life. You can spend hours in a few city blocks, wandering and shooting, a good photo around every corner and down every dim alleyway between the stalls. From vegetable stalls to cobblers and barbers plying their trades, cell phone accessories and racks of colorful shoes, everything is on sale here.

Markets are public spaces, a place where people take little notice of the camera and seldom object to being photographed, where your wanderings will draw little attention, except perhaps from peddlers hoping to make a sale.

Continue reading “Walking a Market”

Nicaragua

Yes, Darker View has been a bit quiet lately. I have been not only off-island but out of the country for the last couple weeks. I flew to Portland to join my parents on a trip to Nicaragua.

Campesino — A Nicaraguan farmer leaning against the wall of his home in Tierra Amarilla

We spent ten days in Nicaragua, the first part of the trip helping out with El Porvenir, an NGO that does water and sanitation work with rural farming communities. The last part of the trip was spent playing tourist, traveling the Rio San Juan on the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The trip allowed me to spent a good deal of time with my parents, do more than a little photography, and visit a beautiful country.

Back at home and back online, I have a series of posts in the works to record my experiences. The trip was extraordinarily memorable, with interesting stories to share. Along the way I did a lot of photography, thus I have gigabytes of material that needs to be sorted through. The best of this will appear here on DV as I have a chance to process it. My hope is that I can preserve a bit of the experience here in blog form. Not only for you to read, but as a record that I can read many years from now to remember this wonderful trip.

South Falls

Travel Utah in 1991

Between semesters at college I loved to hit the road. The usual destination was the great parks along the Utah and Arizona borders including Zion…

The Sentinel — The sandstone pinnacles of Zion National Park

Slickrock — A slickrock hillside in the back country of Zion National Park

Footprints in the Sand — Footprints down the face of a dune at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park

Death in the Sand — A vertebra lies in the sands of Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park

Oregon in 1986

Another pick from the slides I am busily digitizing. After basic training and tech school with the USAF and before deployment to England, I took a month’s leave. Much of this was spent visiting favorite places around Portland in the late fall of 1986…

Latourell Falls in the Columbia River Gorge

Downtown Portland — The transit mall in downtown Portland

The newly completed MAX line from Gresham stops in downtown Portland

Mt. Hood Sunset — Sunset lights Mt. Hood in pastel shades

Portland Skyline — The Portland skyline at night, at least as it appeared in 1986

A nightime view looking over downtown Portland from Council Crest

Oregon in 1985

More scanning, more memories. Taking these old photos out of the boxes has been fun. So many little treasures on celluloid. Photos of myself as a teenager, photos of the neighborhood I grew up in. There is so much of my life stowed away out of reach, converted to digital they live again…

Middle North Falls in Silver Falls State Park

Silver Creek flows through Silver Falls State Park

Mt. St. Helens in 1985 — The south face Mt. St. Helens a few years after the 1980 eruption with lahars in the foreground

Lahar — A lahar (mudflow) from the lahar viewpoint on Muddy River and forest road 83

The constellation Orion taken with a simple tracking platform and Ektachrome film

Sunset from Bull Mtn — Sunset as seen from from the front porch of my childhood home on Bull Mtn.

Snowy Sunrise Lane — Sunrise Lane covered in a fresh snowfall

Jerry's Barn — Jerry’s old barn across the street from my childhood home

Frost Horse — A horse stands in a frosty winter field

Sand Dollar — A sand dollar on a Pacific Northwest beach

Dune — Storm scattered sands covers beach grass

Little Ouse

As I scan slides I find little treasures like this one. A foggy morning on the Little Ouse river near Thetford, England, a place I called home for nearly three years. Yes, there is really a river named the Little Ouse!

Traveling through Switzerland

One of the first binders of slides I grabbed for digitizing happened to be a trip through Switzerland that I took in 1987 with my family.

I was living in England at the time with the USAF. My parents and brother joined me there. We then crossed the channel from Dover to Calais, changed trains in Paris, taking a high speed train to Lausanne. From there my brother and I bounced around with some Swiss bus and rail passes until we rejoined my parents in Zermatt.

It was a memorable trip, there is so much I can remember from thirty five years ago. Going through these old slides certainly brought back memories!