Inessential Stuff

I love driving through the Columbia River Gorge.  I love the river.  I love the trains.  I love the sky.  And I love stopping at Multnomah Falls.

It’s difficult to photograph, because it’s so tall.  With a conventional lens, it’s impossible to get both the upper and lower falls in the same shot.  So I decided to take my wide-angle lens this last trip through Gorge see what I could get.  It was kind of fun, though there is some distortion, but I was pleased to get the old highway bridge and the falls in the same frame.  And it’s such a great place.

Just a couple pictures from colorful back-to-back fashion sessions with Kim.

When I was in Portland, my good friend Michele (that’s her to the right.  Yes, she’s that cool) took me to a little farmers market.  It was a sensory delight: colors, smells, tastes, textures.  I didn’t buy anything (though I sampled some mighty fine vinegars), but I did take some photographs, a few of which you can see here.

Facebook is pretty cool (friend me there, if you haven’t already) in its ability to reconnect old friends.  It allowed me to reconnect with Jennifer, for example, with whom I hadn’t been in touch since college.

Not long after we reconnected, she was diagnosed with lymphoma, a type of cancer of the immune cells, and she started chemotherapy.  One day, on her facebook page, she mentioned that she was thinking of getting some pictures done, because even though she hated having no hair, and hated having to undergo chemo, and dealing with cancer, she thought, many years from now, there might be a time in her life when she’d want to look back on her chemo days.

I let her know that if she was serious, I’d be glad to drive to Portland and do those pictures.

It worked out that May 1 provided an opportunity to do the photoshoot.  Since I have very little knowledge of the Portland area, Jennifer picked Laurelhurst Park as the location, which was perfect, and the weather was outstanding, considering how grumpy this spring has been (and that rain was in the forecast).  It wasn’t too chilly, and there were even some moments of sun, but the possibility of bad weather meant we had the park mostly to ourselves.  So we just walked around the park taking pictures, among some early flowers and a few people walking their dogs and a few joggers.  I got to see Jennifer in person for the first time in *mumble-mumble* years, and I got to meet her fine husband Victor and her good friend Sunshine.  And I got to take some pictures.

And I got something else, too.  I’ve tried to articulate this before, but it really is an honor to be given the opportunity to take someone’s portrait.  It marks a moment in a person’s life, and often an important one:  the time a couple gets engaged, or the time someone graduates from high school, for instance.  Or even a time in life undergoing chemotherapy.  To be invited to take part in something that important, to be entrusted to capture who a person is at a moment in one’s life, and to therefore contribute to one’s memories of oneself, well, it is a humbling experience.

And as for Jennifer, in spite of natural misgivings and understandable insecurities, she was absolutely radiant.

Jennifer is the kind of person that one might say is beautiful inside and out, but Jennifer hates clichés, so she might smack you if you tried such a thing.  She’s also a talented writer and pretty damn funny.  You can follow her adventures on her blog,”stuff jen says“.