Grand Avenue Extreme Closeup!

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Zooming with my point'n'shoot Canon PowerShot is fun. 

The current tool is the PowerShot S230 SX. That SX on the end means 'super zoom', and it does the trick: at the end of the zoom, which goes from optical to digital zoom, I get a 56x magnification. Now, I've always admired telephoto pictures, the way they make things look much closer than they are and create a new world based on a point of perspective. I can't exactly do that, but if I choose my POV and perspective just-so and then zoom the hell in, I get a nice effect in-camera. 

I did it to the shot of the viaduct when I realized I was looking straight down SE Grand Avenue, and here's what I got:

 

Now, Grand Avenue isn't known for its hills ... but there, it looks like a street in San Francisco. And it kind of tells a different story.

Southeast Ash And Grand, 2017

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Just an inner-eastisde street scent, Southeast Grand at Ash, looking west. The big building is, of course, Big Pink; one block away, on the right there, a Salvation Army building; visible along the left side of the frame, that old architecture which gave East Portland (and this is part of the original city of East Portland, when there was such a thing) its charm and continues to inform it in a low, slow tone.

 

Also visible in the picture that you don't see so often now: parked cars and people.

[art] The Mural Of Surreal Toys

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There is a building I've just heard of here in the anytime-now-to-be-formerly industrial central east side of Portland called Kidd's Toy Museum. It's at the corner of SE Grand Ave and Main Street, and, accessable from Grand just south of Main is a small pocket-parking lot, and in that lot, if you're looking quite quickly, you'll see this:

It's rather beautiful, isn't it? It's like Dali by way of Maurice Sendak via Picasso's 'blue' period. The icy blue monotone makes it all a rather sere dream scene, and seeing as the Kidd's Toy Museum bills itself on Google as exhibiting toys through the first third of the 20th century, it has the feel of a forlorn, yet happy dream. My wife was looking sharp, else we wouldn't have seen it at all, and really wanted the picture, and that much I owed it to her; after all, she'd been sherpaing me around the outer southeast in Sellwood. It was the least I could do.