I’m catching up blogging on a few adventures from this summer, now that the rainy season has come. In April we decided to take our new Dodge Challenger for a little road trip, and headed east to something I have had on my to-do list for a long time, but never quite got around to – Fort Rock, Oregon.

We drove out over Mt Hood, and onto the dry side of the state. It is amazing how different the East side of Oregon is from the damp, green West side.

Story clouds made for some dramatic lighting.

Fort Rock museum had some historic buildings that had been saved from around the area and relocated to the museum.

Although the museum’s General Store faced Fort Rock, I thought it made a more dramatic piece to put them together.

Driving out to the Rock, we started to get a real feeling for how HUGE it was.

We parked in the little parking lot at the base and hiked up into it. (Dave included for scale)

There were lots of neat rock formations up inside the Fort.

And some man-made formations.

I’ve been told this whole area was a vast inland sea eons ago, which is why the rocks have this water-worn look to them.

From the back wall of the Fort, we could look across the formation and out onto the plains.

Everything is so big and vast, and the living things here seem to have quite a struggle on their hands. We found lots of rabbit carcasses among the sagebrush.

It feels like you could just walk forever and not run into anything.

In these days when it seems like everybody is out for themselves, it does my heart good to read about farmer/conservationists who loved the land enough to set it aside and preserve it for future generations to enjoy. Thank you, Long family.

After Fort Rock we headed for Hole in the Ground, another nearby geographic oddity. I grabbed a bag of chips we had bought at the beginning of our journey and discovered they had blown up like a balloon, almost to bursting! That’s beacuse we had bought them at sea level, and brought them up into the high desert, and the difference in air pressure caused them to expand. Crazy science!

We drove through this singed pine forest.

Then we arrived at Hole In The Ground, A HUGE depression. I believe it was volcanic. In Oregon and Washington, when someone asks if a geographic feature is volcanic, the answer is almost always Yes.

Our beautiful new Challenger made the trip effortlessly. What a nice, comfortable, modern car! I hope we enjoy many more road trips in it.

I started out this year with a weekly photo project, but at about the same time I discovered, thanks to another photographer I follow, The Daily Texture. The Daily Texture is a site made by a lady named Jai in Tennessee, who paints beautiful backgrounds and then scans them in and sells them for use in creating other digital artworks. I hadn’t really thought of doing anything like this before, in fact I was barely getting a grip on Photoshop layers and masking, when I decided to give it a go with one of her sample background sets.

I had taken this picture of Navi in the snow, and it was a nice picture of her (which is hard to get because she never sits still), but it had all that crap in the background. Just another nice snap, but certainly nothing I would put on the wall.

Wow! For my first try, in about ten minutes, I was pretty impressed!

So I ordered several of her background collections, and have since ordered a few more, in fact it’s kind of addicting every time she comes out with a new set, I think of something I’d like to do with them. Her hand-painted backgrounds, combined with my photos, turns pictures that were ok, into something amazing.

So this lighthouse, which I thought was nice before:

So, I have this plaster cast of David Duchovny’s face…yes, I realize that’s a little weird. When I show this to people they usually say ‘Where did you get that?’ when I think the real question is ‘Why the hell do you HAVE that?!’

In my defense, this was part of the decor around our XF Pinball machine back at the old house. The machines (We had XF, Star Wars, and Elvira) sat in a nook off the living room, and I had the face and some other memorabilia decorating the nook. We sold the pins back in 2003 and put the money into the Airstream, and so ‘Mulder’ has been kicking around ever since. Hung on my office wall for a long time, eventually got stuck in a drawer I rarely used, so every year or so when I went to look for something in the drawer I’d open it up and be momentarily shocked to find a head in it!

I got the idea that maybe I could turn him into a cool piece of art that I would want back on my wall. I contacted Tonette and Cindy, a couple multi-media artists I know from photo club. We discussed all the things we could do to him, but I kind of wanted to be non-destructive. Back when XF was big, it cost me like $20 tops, and they were plentiful. I looked up on eBay to see if I could get another one in case we broke it, and nobody sells them anymore, so I held off on the project because I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally destroy him.

The following month we got a new assignment for photo club – take an object and photograph it everywhere you go for a month. Photograph it in every way you can think of. Free yourself to find new ways to see things. Tonette immediately encouraged me to use Mulder. ‘I can’t do that’, I said, ‘people will think I’m crazy and my husband will kill me if I drag this around with me everywhere!’

But really, it was for the best…

Just to see if the idea would work, I took Mulder outside and buried him in the leaves in the backyard. Right off I got my favorite shot of the whole project!

 

  

The only rule is you can’t get plaster wet, otherwise I would have dipped him in water and played around with reflections and distortions. But, I can do that in photoshop.

 And maybe a star chart would be a nice background, because, you know, it’s Mulder.
 

And let’s try projecting something onto the face. Like maybe the XF logo, or a classic shot…

Well, you can’t expect everything to work, but it’s fun to try.

By now Dave was enjoying this ridiculous project as well, and we were going on vacation to the Olympics, so Mulder came along with us! Here’s Dave trying to find places to pose Mulder in the forest.

We took him to the beach and buried him in the rocks.

I like it when you don’t see him right away.

By the time we got back from vacation and it was photo club time again, so the project was over. I called it Mulder Dreams, since he looks like he’s sleeping, and it was very well received, but I’m not sure I’m done. It was so much fun, I have a few other ideas I’d like to try on him. I warned them, they probably have not seen the last of Mulder.

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Dave took me on a tour of places downtown he thought I could get nice pictures of the city from. These were my favorites.

Downtown from under the Marquam, near OMSI.

Downtown looking East from the Vista St Overpass.

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As I have gotten more advanced in my photography – I have a regular paying gig shooting the plays at Magenta, and I have my own website where I can sell prints, I’m getting ready to do another gallery show with the photo club, and I have been working on my portrait skills – I have been feeling like my Nikon is just not doing it for me. I have not been happy with my D5100 since I bought it. It just hasn’t been as easy to use as my previous Nikon was, and the picture quality has been very hit n’ miss. I switched to shooting in RAW about a year ago so I would have more control in post, and on the last trip we took I shot entirely in manual because I felt like it gave me more control to get the shots the way I wanted them. But I have not been very happy with the camera overall, and I have not been buying any lenses for it because I wasn’t sure I would stick with Nikon at all.

Yesterday, after much research, I decided to quit while I was ahead, and bought a Sony Alpha a6000. This is a mirrorless camera, so it is much smaller than the bulky D5100.

Excuse the crappy camera phone pic, but since both cameras were the subject…

Much smaller, much lighter, and yet a sensor that is just as big, and has more megapixels.The kit lenses are even equivalent – 18-55 on the Nikon, 16 -50 on the Sony, but look at the huge difference in size!

Most important is the controls and programming. Dave is always teasing that if Bigfoot ran by us on a hike, I’d have the D5100 ready to shoot sometime after he crested the next hill and disappeared! And sometimes when you push the shutter button the D5100 just second guesses you and refuses to shoot at all! So far the Sony is fast and has a fabulous auto-focus system that is quick to lock on and get the shot.

Navi with a muddy nose…

Some of my favorite test shots today have been in the aquariums. It’s usually so hard to get shots of the fish since they are constantly moving.

These are not bad for snapshots. I have shot off 15 or 20 aquarium shots with the Nikon and not gotten one worth keeping. So far the hit rate for the Sony is far superior. And I haven’t even turned on all the features yet!

I’m really excited to get to know this new camera! I’m feeling confident it will be the tool I need as I progress in building my skills towards being a pro.

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Back in , oh, 1997 or 1998 I started a website to document my restoration efforts of my first 68 Mustang, Old Bloo. Back then I was a geek, no one had ever heard of ‘blogging’ yet, and making a website for fun seemed like the thing to do. And it was cool. I met a lot of great people, helped folks with their restorations, and made some friends. I also had a lasting scrapbook of pictures and descriptions of what I’d done, some of which surprises me even today.

But, it’s been hosted all this time on the same server space as our business website, which we shut down a few years ago, and we finally decided to shut it down entirely. Eventually I want to move the info over to a blog, just to keep it available, but it doesn’t seem as important now. Back then it was hard to find stuff about restoring cars on the web, now there’s tons of info. And nobody really has personal websites anymore, at least without them being leveraged for advertising space and stuff like that. This was just a plain old, here’s my stuff, write and say hi, kind of website.

So, goodbye (for now, anyway) to stephanies-mustang.com.

Oh Man, that was ugly even for 1998…and the last update was in ’09. Yeah, probably time to let it go. But the adventures of Old Bloo and Deja Bloo will be documented again somewhere, someday…

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Everything in our backyard is a surprise. It’s fun watching to see what pops up as spring turns to summer.

While enjoying the backyard we accidently scared this little guy out of the grass, and he took refuge on the chain link fence.

I found that when I moved from one side of him to the other, he would stick out his tongue briefly, so I tried to capture that.

What amazing color on his tongue! Also I was surprised to see his eyes were brown.

What a treat to get a chance to photograph him up close!

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Ten years ago (I actually missed it by a couple days, it was April 20th, 2003) I brought home a camping trailer. After months of researching online, and hunting through ads, and never getting to actually see an Airstream in person, I placed a wanted ad in the paper, and got a call from a gentleman in Oregon who had one to sell. It wasn’t the Argosy with the big front windows I was looking for, but it did the trick just fine. It was beautiful and everything in it (sort of) worked.

We took it camping regularly, replaced the axle, replaced part of the floor, replaced most of the appliances over the years, and never missed a single camping trip. It’s been the catalyst for making many friendships all over the country and especially here in the NW with friends we regularly camp with. We’ve been through many ups and downs, and it is still our favorite toy, and the best money we ever spent on anything that rolls. It’s not just a vehicle, it’s like family.

Posts about the Airstream

Happy 10th Anniversary to our 1968 Caravel, which also turns 45 years old this year! I hope we’ll be traveling in it for many years to come! I guess I could also say happy Anniversary to the mighty van, which was purchased immediately after the Airstream to tow it, and has set a record for us as the longest we’ve ever owned a vehicle.

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