Wy'East, Blue And Cloud-capped

3696This post is dedicated to one Brenda Balin, who's always loved specifically the pictures of mighty Wy'east that I've been taking.

It's kind of funny that I never bothered or took the time to figure out how to emerge on NE Shaver Street pointing the direction that I wanted to. I, after all, have the Portland street grid down cold, but maybe just about 99 per cent of that after all.

While the viewpoint of Wy'east from NE 122nd and Shaver, in front of and alongside the legendary Rossi Farm, is without compare, parking the car to get those snaps have become increasingly complex over the years. In the beginning, I could just park along 122nd in front of the Rossi barn and cross the street. Then they made 122nd no parking from Shaver all the way south to Fremont. Now, you can park on Shaver, but no closer than about 200 feet west or east of 122nd.

It's just as well, though. I could use the walk. Now, the best way to get there is east on Shaver from 102nd, south on 112th (that's a right at Senn's Dairy Park, an adorable pocket park that I'll pict sometime soon) to Shaver, and then east on Shaver to a point more or less in front of the entrance to the Parkrose High School parking lot. And you can tell it's late spring; the garden on the south side of Shaver there has been mown and has not yet been sown, and looks just kind of like a bit of lawn itself.

But it did get me pointing the right way. Today's mountain needed a picture, because it was so stormily cloudcapped. Hard to believe that in two days it's supposed to be mid-80s and sunny, but one thing that remains the same regardless of the vicissitudes of climate change is the chaotic nature of Oregon weather.

And this was the berobed:

The replacement for the late, lamented Canon PowerShot S100, my PowerShot SX 230 HS, is working out surprisingly well. It's got a different dimension of sensor but is still the same 12.1 MPx the S100 was and while it doesn't have the same things in exactly the same places it does boast 14x optical zoom whereas the S100 only could promise me 5x. For my point and shoot purposes it's quite the stand-up replacement.

For instance, I note the the above picture seems to have crisper detail than the S100 did. How good can I get it? I went to max zoom -- all 14x optical plus 4x digital, and here's what the summit looked like this day:

I could do search and rescue with this baby.

The view from the car, about 200 feet back from the corner I like to pict from, introduces a good number of human artifacts and these, as they do, tell a different, and differently-compelling story. I like it as much, but for other reasons. I leave those reasons up to the viewer, and invite them to make up their own.