World Wide Photo Walk Day!

Ok so a few months ago a friend talked me and some others into signing up for the Worldwide Photo Walk. I hadn't ever heard of it before and thought it could be interesting since due to the need to photograph my yarn and finished projects for use on Ravelry, I've been getting into it more. I even took a few hanks & projects to maybe photograph on things, kinda like a "yarn on the town" kind of thing.

I also brought along Diana & Holga, this was their first real trial run and I can't wait to see how the pictures come out, well if any of them really do. After the walk I took the exposed rolls to Blue Moon Camera & Machine, I got the pictures put on CD so I'm not stuck with envelopes of possibly not good pictures, plus it means I don't have to scan them and it's better for storage reasons.



To start the morning off we met up before the walk at the Stumptown in the Ace Hotel for coffee and pastries, then we walked down to the meet up spot in front of the gates into Chinatown for the group picture. I must say though it is a singularly eerie experience to walk around the downtown area in the early morning, because the streets are pretty much empty and there aren't that many cars out either. I'm so used to being down there in the evenings when everything is lit up, traffic is horrible, and there are crowds of people everywhere; to have it be pretty much still and quite was freakish.

It was a pretty big group of people that showed up, and it felt kind of weird because just about eveyone in the walk (save our mini group) had several thousand dollars worth of equipmant hanging from their necks. Here I was with 2 plastic cameras which together cost about $125 and my wonderful Canon Powershot A610 point & shoot, that is about 3 1/2 years ago.

I did have several people ask me the difference between Diana & Holga and since a true answer would have taken longer than I really wanted, I just said that one had black & white film and the other had color. Anyway after the group thing we all headed out, along this route...


View Laurie Excell's Portland Photowalk in a larger map



The first place of interest was the Classical Chinese Gardens, just wandering around the exterior provided a lot of opportunities because of all the detail work on the building. I had quite a bit of fun trying to get good pictures through the lattice work in the windows.



From there we walked down to Union Station also the site of the Night Ride last weekend. I must say that I really like style and detail work of this building. You know, I can appreiciate the cleanness, form, and functionality of modern building design but for me while it's beautiful, it just lacks a sense of warmth, class, and personality.



After wandering around the station for quite a while we started heading up towards the end walk site, I think was were all starting to get a little loopy that this point because we just started taking really random pics of each other rather than the scenery. We did eventually make it up to On Deck were I had a much needed Mojito that was really strong and I ended up pretty buzzed. The fact that I hadn't really eaten anything since morning or probably hydrated enough had nothing to do with it.

All in all it was a pretty fun day, and I'm kinda thinking about asking photographically inclined friends if they'd be interested in doing a photo walk in different parts of town once a month or so.

If you want to check out more of the pictures I posted all the digital ones on Flickr.