Summer Flowers

Fireweed

I've been back in Alaska for a week now, and it has been sunny practically every single day. Every day the dogs and I have been taking short hikes up into the alpine.  One of our favorites this past week has been the Seismic trail up to a small lake where we have been going for a swim. On the way up and down I have been browsing on ripe salmonberries and taking pictures of flowers.

The fireweed is just starting to bloom. In Alaska there is a saying that summer is almost over when the fireweed blooms get to the top of their stalks.  Right now the fireweed blossoms are most definitely at the bottom of the stalks.  But they are moving up quick!

Patrick

Wild Geranium

Fireweed with a lot of blooming to go!

Invasive Foxglove

Bowing Angelica

Nootka Rose

Star Gentian

Yarrow

Sitka Burnet

Sun Valley Fun

 

These are some 'outside' pictures from my time in Sun Valley. I got there in the late afternoon Friday and left on Sunday so there was only one full day to play outside.  But we made the most of it. In the morning we hiked up a fairly substantial hill - it was maybe 1000 feet high.  Then in the afternoon we drove over a really scary pass to a little canyon on a river where you could jump off of a cliff into a deep swimming hole.

Sun Valley is pretty much a desert and practically all the plants were unfamiliar to me. The town planners have managed to keep development confined to the valley so all the mountains and hills do not have houses on them.  These makes it much more scenic.  Once you leave town, or even if you just look up - it is the wild west.

Patrick

Sun Valley

 

On my way home from Maine I made a detour to Sun Valley, Idaho for a two day reunion with my college roommates. It was supposed to be a three day reunion but I had some travel woes getting there (think cancelled flights and an 8 1/2 hour flight in the extreme back middle seat from Logan to Dulles with a pit stop in Newark). But I got to Sun Valley eventually and it was all worth the travel woes.

What we did mostly was eat really good food and reminisce. The first night we ate a REALLY good home cooked meal on the deck of our fellow roommates house.  Scott cooked the steaks on the grill. The next night we ate at a fancy French restaurant.  In between meals we recreated. We climbed a mountain, played golf (I read while they played), and leaped from a cliff into a water hole in a river. 

It was all good fun and despite everyone looking a lot older than they did in college, no one has changed.

Patrick

View from the car on the car ride from Boise to Ketchum

Some final pictures from Maine

 

Our Maine vacation is now long over but lives on in photographs and memories.  Since we got back to Alaska I finished editing all my photos and these are the last of the 'ones that got away' - the pictures that for some reason I did not post in my earlier Maine blog posts.

I noticed that a lot of the photos are of the view of the row boats at the dock and thoroughfare from our house.  It is such a good view and I can't seem to resist taking more photos of the same view. Every time the light is a little bit different or there is fog, and I think, 'this time will be better than all the others'.  Of course it is not, but all of the photos of the row boats are good - if only slightly different from each other.

So I continue to take pictures of the same view and maybe one day I'll take such a killer, iconic image of the view that I will stop taking the same picture. Maybe. .. ..

Patrick

Little Tip Toe Mountain on Vinalhaven

The view from little Tip Toe

Old photo projects

 

While I was in Maine I went through a box of all my old photos. In it were all the prints and negatives from photos I took in the 1970s when I lived in Virginia, and in the 1980's from high school and college photo classes.  

I found all the mounted prints from 3 of the photo classes I took while at Harvard. My mom is going to mail the boxes to me in Kodiak so eventually I will get them all properly scanned. But in the meanwhile I used my camera to just take pictures of all the prints in case the box gets lost in transit. 

Originally all the prints were toned and carefully exposed and printed, and a lot of this is lost in the 'pictures of pictures'. My camera did a poor job catching the subtle colors from the toning and catching the exposures (I am noticing that there is not a true white in my digitised versions). But they are still pretty cool.

I did mostly street photography capturing street scenes with people I did not know in them.  I did a final project of what it was like in Boston Logan and I remember going there to spend the night in the terminals and take pictures.  I'll post some of those in the future. I also had a project documenting my step father George, and another of just people on the streets. I found 4 final projects so maybe I took 4 and not 3 classes?

The photos in this post are from the last photo class I took while at Harvard.  It was an independent study photo class project with Elsa Dorfman (click here for her wiki page). She is famous for her HUGE polaroid posed family photos. I used to meet with her one on one at her house near my dorm. I remember she had huge nude pictures on the wall of famous people like Allan Ginsburg and Bob Dylan. And she told me some amazing stories.

Anyway, early on we decided that rather than taking my usual street photography pictures with people in them that I would concentrate on architecture and urban landscapes.  I started out with just doorways, and moved on to back alleys and buildings.  I see that there is a person in the top photo too, but in general I kept people out of the photos entirely. Elsa and me both generally like people in our photos so it was kind of a challenge to just do 'urban landscapes'.

We'd meet and drink tea and decide which pictures worked and which did not. At the end I carefully printed up a bunch of them and toned and printed them.  They actually got put on the wall of my dorm, Mather House, as sort of a mini exhibition.  Below are a few of the ones from the box in Maine.  I am only posting the ones I still like today!

Patrick