Less is More, Sometimes: A Slide Show

Our world can be overwhelmingly complicated. Despite the seeming simplicity of binary systems, this digital age is, except for the initiated, of mind-boggling obtuseness and sometimes depressing frustration. Then there is deep science. No matter how moving it is to hear great physicists talk about the “elegance” or the “simplicity” of this or that set [...]

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Snow Snow Snow: A Slide Show

A few days ago, Oregon coast folks skidded on slippery roads and snapped lots of pictures. A once-in-five-years snow storm blew in from the Pacific.  A couple of inches, on that boundary between slush and real snow.  A few years ago, in Albuquerque, beautiful clouds foretold a winter storm. A few inches of drier snow [...]

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Twelve Views of Humbug Mountain Beach

A monothematic photographic essay in subdued tones of an Oregon winter beach before the storm. Humbug Mountain, whose rampart is just visible in some of these photos, has a kind of Fujiama presence when viewed at a distance. In fact it is of volcanic origin. The beach was on this day mild for winter with [...]

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The Photographer’s I: Driftwood

A northwest beach is a driftwood beach, and by that I don’t mean a stray twig or coconut shell washed ashore. Northwest driftwood is a defining essence  of the beachscape, as indigenous as the windblown capes. Driftwood here means immense weathered logs, washed up like toothpicks in Pacific storms, roots, trunks, limbs all sanded, and [...]

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The Photographer’s I: Sunset Country

In extreme northwest Victoria, Australia, where the outback begins, lies a dry eucalyptus land called Sunset Country. I have never seen this place, but the name itself is its own reward.  Imagine—the evocation of the mere word sunset. What comes to mind?  Of course dazzling reds and oranges, reflected in the water or across desert [...]

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The Photographer’s I: Capturing Fog and Mists

In the old days of snapshot film photography, “fog” was a bad thing. I remember as a kid being totally discouraged by some forlorn, low contrast murky prints. Either I had grossly underexposed, or maybe I had developed the film wrongly. Whatever, my prints would not be confused with Ansel Adams’.   With digital, leaving [...]

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The Photographer’s I: Looking Around

This place we are staying on the Oregon Coast has more than generous displays of nature’s awesome face, with wild nights of Pacific wind, magnificent rolling voluptuous ocean swells, heart stopping 25 foot breakers gilded with wind-tossed foamy salt sprays, gale winds roaring and whistling through the solemn moss-padded rainforests. But in all this excitement [...]

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