Capturing Haunts With Pixel and Film

Do you ever drive along a familiar road and anticipate the sight of something around the next bend you have seen a hundred times before? Maybe it's an old yellow house with a deteriorating rose arbor, an abandoned store or a rusty car like the one your grandpa use to drive. I'm always a little fearful the next time I pass that it will have vanished from the landscape a victim of time or change.
   There is a house near mine that I have photographed from the street many times.

I love the mysterious way it looks hidden in the trees.

Recently I asked the owner if I could photograph it up close.

Weather and time have not been kind to this old girl but in her years she still sparks the imagination. How old was the person who lived in this room? What did they dream as they peered out the window?

I was told she will be torn down soon, too old, too far gone for repair. It will be sad to see her leave. I will take my captured views of this haunt and store them for posterity. Because I want to remember and  because someday someone might look at the faded images and find imaginations there as well.
What are the places along your traveled road that inspire you and make you smile?
Why not consider capturing a few of your own.
      
Follow this link to my flickr site for "vintage signs" I'm collecting.

Blue Moclips By The Sea

One of the things I love the most about the beach is the color blue.
Sad to say in the Pacific Northwest a winter on the beach is often just grey.                        
You might find an occasional blue break in the clouds...

                                                               Or cute beach footwear of blue.

You can use your photo program to highlight deep blues of an approaching storm,

or just give up and supply your own color with a filter held over the lens.

Any trick is fair game when you got-to-have Blue

Moclips Washington February 3rd 2010

Beach Sillyness

The Dancing YaYa's February 2nd 2010 Moclips Wa. 

Created with gifninja.com & hosted by photobucket.com

Vintage Camera Fun

I have been collecting vintage camera for a few years now and with some exceptions they have lived happily upon my shelf collecting dust and making me smile when I pass by. Recently I have started dusting them off, loading them up, and clicking away. While most of the picture taking world has made the leap to digital, I was pleased to discover there is still a vibrant interest in film and alternative photo processes.
   A friend sent me a link to a technique called Through the Viewfinder or Ttv. This is a combo of low & high tech using a vintage camera with a top viewfinder, a tube of cardboard, and a digital camera.
   I found some great instructions here for making my own “contraption” and set to work.

My Kodak Duaflex lets call her K.D.

I think the purpose of the contraption is to give the digital camera a fixed point to focus on while keeping excess light from spoiling the view inside the vintage viewfinder.

                                                                                                    Camera dressed in her contraption

The view inside contraption

The final cropped shot

Don’t you just love the dust and stains that are a part of the internal age of a vintage camera?I have loaded up this little gem with re-spooled 120 expired b&w film so I will have a film shot to compare with the Ttv. I’ll have to post the results when I get them developed.In the meantime K.D. and her contraption dress are packed for the annual YaYa trip to Moclips on the beach.

Slept In a Wigwam Lately?

A line in a song by the Judds tells us, “There’s a blacktop road, faded center line. It can take you back to the place but it can’t take you back in time.” Most roads and most days I would have to agree. But there is one road, the “Mother Road” that could be the exception to the rule. Driving along this ribbon of asphalt the imaginative eye can peer beyond the ravages of time. For an evening I’m a child again, giddy with the possibility of sleeping in a giant concrete tee pee.

$57.75 buys us a night in #3 complete with a key that’s not a card.

Inside we are greeted by furnishings of wood, branch and formica. The tiny bath is tiled in red and white.

Even the view from the diamond window seems to look backward in time.

As I watch the new day dawn, I almost believe It is 1966. Here I stand a wide eyed five year old, ripe with excitement for what lies around the next bend of Route 66.

Wigwam Village #6 Holbrook Arizona

November 2009

A Line In The Sand

I have been thinking a lot this month about endings. It’s something that comes natural this time of year. We look back at the rows of days on the calendar and think of that arbitrary mark that is the beginning of another year. Like Anne Shirley we look toward that “fresh tomorrow with no mistakes in it.” We pack up the memories of the day past, and line up our dreams for the one that is about to dawn. 
   Today I decided to make more than a mental exercise of this time honored tradition.  So Michael and I trekked off to Westport to draw a literal line in the sand.

 

 
Dear hubby indulged me in this makeshift ceremony, and stepped across with me into 2010.

Then it was off to catch a picture of the Grey's Harbor Lighthouse

And have a bowl of amazing seafood chowder at The One Eyed Crab

Thank you Michael for a lovely start to 2010.
Thank you Lord for another year stretched out before us... new and ripe with possibility.

Of Shoes and Ships and Ceiling-Wax

As a child did you ever dream of sailing to far away lands? Did you ever fill a lazy afternoon imagining yourself rounding Cape Horn with supplies bound for Alaska, fishing off the coast of Maine, or Captain of a Caribbean pirate ship ? I did, I suppose most children do.
A block or so from Grandma Brumbaugh's house in Marysville there was an old fishing boat. Long past the day when its keel felt the cool touch of Puget Sound, it sailed a field of blackberry and broom.
I would dream as I walked by that my hand was upon the wheel, wind in my hair not a single cloud on a blue horizon. I can still smell it, the musky scent of rotting wood and yesterdays rainwater pooled upon the deck. Even as an adult I thrill at the sight of these forgotten hulks. Less common now, they are victims of time and tide, yet ready to sail in my memory.
Here are a few salty haunts I have collected.

The schooner Wawona at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle May 1985
When restoration efforts proved too expensive she was dismantled in March 2009.

Great Uncle Gene Sapp’s fishing boat on his farm in Sequim, Washington July 1990.

The Tugboat Mary D. Hume near the Rouge River Bridge in Gold Beach, Oregon June 2005.
I think every child needs a boat to sail away on so this mommy built one of plywood, Velcro and pipe insulation.
Darren & Morgan sailing the fields of King Rd. May 1995