Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

April 16, 2023

Take a break from politics, do what I did: go someplace different if you can

 By Hal Brown

It was a fortuitous accident that friends who had rented a house for a week in the resort destination of Black Butte Ranch had a couple leave unexpectedly so they offered me their bedroom for a few days.

I've lived in a suburb of Portland (Oregon) for about 10 years but had never ventured to the central part of the state where this resort community is. 

Getting there is not particularly easy because once you drive south on an expressway for an hour you turn east and head into the Cascade Mountains and up, up, up from sea level to 3,300 feet. The road is very curvy and you have to pay close attention to your driving. Fortunately there are many pull-off areas where you can stop to take photos.

I had a few days with minimal discussion of politics among my liberal friends and I even wrote a blog yesterday before anyone in the house had gotten up. Mostly though we just escaped thinking depressing thoughts.

I glanced at the news  online when I got home this morning at 8 AM (I left there at five) and nothing struck me as worth writing about, meaning I had no original thoughts. 

What I do have to share are the photos I took on the trip. The first two are political. I sneakily took the photo below of the man with the Trump 45 hat.

It was a reminder of the vast political divide in this country to see this man with a Trump hat in the book section of a thrift store in the town of Sisters which is liberal leaning. This was made up for seeing the man below in the same town. Two men with beards and they couldn't have more opposite politics.
These are the photos I took on the drive there:













Then when I got home I tuned into MSNBC and saw this:
Ugh! What is there to say, one day it's Tennessee and then it's Alabama.

I was gong to watch an old Jame Bond movie but thought better of this idea and am now watching this which got horrible critical reviews but which the audience really liked:

January 2, 2023

A shirtless guy on a Honda bike with pink sneakers and a tattooed man with a "What Part of Fuck Off Is Confusing to You?" t-shirt.

 A shirtless guy on a Honda bike with pink sneakers and a tattooed man with a "What Part of Fuck Off Is Confusing to You?" t-shirt.

By Hal Brown

To my loyal daily readers: Thank you for checking in today. I haven't posted a new blog because I've been diagnosed with pneumonia and am being treat with two antibiotics. I had it in late October and it may not have been treated aggressively enough so this may be a relapse.

Archive on bottom of page


Click any image to enlarge

I took this photo from my car when I pulled up behind this motorcyclist in Milwaukie, Oregon. It wasn't until I got home and looked closely at it that I found it more interesting than just merely a man riding a motorcycle shirtless with his white t-shirt wrapped around his arm on a warm day.

He's not riding a Harley lowrider, but his jeans are riding low. They are Calvin Klein's. Taking a closer look I see something I can't identify:


What is this white band that appears to be plastic which is wrapped tightly around the jeans? It seems to be holding something in the front. It isn't the back of a jockstrap. The many I looked at all have wide elastic bands in the back. So what the hell is it?

Not only are the jeans maroon but his footwear stands out.


They are old fashioned high-top basketball sneakers but in pink.  They seem to be Adidas Matchcourt sneakers. 

By coincidence or not pink sneakers and maroon underpants kind of go together. Maybe he was trying to make a fashion statement.

You can also see on his elbow that it looks like he has a skin condition like psoriasis or a healed wound which could have been from a motorcycle accident. If the latter it means he might have suffered from not wearing a leather jacket, though you rarely see anyone who isn't a Harley biker wearing them around Portland.

Another unknown is what this is on his back:
It could be a healed wound. I'm not a doctor but it could be the exit wound caused by being shot by a hollow point bullet.

 We have a lot of shootings in Portland. Most of them are gang related. I wonder if there is a pink sneaker gang.

I hazard a guess that the motorcyclist is about as far removed from being a MAGA cultist as anyone would be. 

And then there this man:
I have no idea what the politics of this Portland area denizen might be. He clearly doesn't want anyone to inquire about it. He was at the very crowded Milwaukie Farmers Market. He was making a very public statement. I wish I had had the courage to interview him. That would have made an interesting story.

Never let it be said that I don't dig deeply into the backstory of what I write about. I tried to find out the model and year of the Honda motorcycle but couldn't based on the photo of the rear.  I did find out what the hat the Fuck Off man is wearing was.




It is a clothing brand which was started in the city of Bridgewater which abuts the city of Middleboro where I lived before moving to Portland. Below from Wikipedia.

Formed in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, Metal Mulisha T-shirts were fashionable among youth in the 2000s. The shirts often feature existential slogans or quotes that tout the virtues of extreme sports.

In 2010, the Murrieta Valley Unified School District banned Metal Mulisha clothing at its schools, due to graphics resembling Nazisymbols and iconography. Some graphics appearing on Metal Mulisha's clothing line include a skull wearing a helmet resembling one worn by German soldiers in World War II, while on the company's logo, the "S" in "Mulisha" is represented graphically by a lightning bolt that resembles the double lightning bolts insignia Runic "ᛋᛋ" of the Nazi major paramilitary organization Schutzstaffel, LAB or SS.

Rabbi Barry Ulrych, of the B'nai Chaim of Murrieta synagogue, regarding the images appearing on Metal Mulisha products, stated "People say it's just a fashion—it's more than that—it's an identity ... These symbols are not as neutral as one might think. Symbols can hurt, and some symbols are intimidating ... With this symbolism, they are glorifying the Nazi past. You can't go through life being ignorant of symbols."

In a letter, the company countered with the statement "Metal Mulisha founders and riders are devout Christians, espousing those values prized in the religious community."


He appears to be wearing not inexpensive Dolce & Gabbana glasses:




Recent blog posts:





December 17, 2022

Pictures that say 1000 words

Pictures That Say 1000 Words

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >


Background from InPixio, Hal Brown

Updated Dec. 19: 

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump compete for headlines with their self-defeating bizarre behavior I watch how editors decide to illustrate their stories. Today I found a opening page story for  Elon Musk Posts Twitter Poll Asking If He Should Step Down As CEO on HUFFPOST. It is no longer the top of the page story so you can't the it online the way I did.

It fits right in with the theme of the following story. Of all the photos of Musk they could have used they found one where his gaze was directed upward as if he was looking at the headline. For posterity, here it is:

Click above to enlarge

The symbolism of this above photo was lost when the story moved down the page because while his gave was up the title was under the much smaller photo. It happens to be to the left of another Musk article which happens to be about Mastodon which is the platform I now am active on.



Below is my original blog story:

This was the top story on the HUFFPOST website this morning linking to this article:


I don't know whether it was an actual photograph of was photoshopped and made into a dark silhouette. 

I did a Google Image search and found the photo was used several times before:

Click above to enlarge

It is credited to Justin Sullivan of Getty Images. It was used in this article among others:

Whether it was photoshopped or not I think the black background was added because most people who are photographed have a background behind them.

As I write this the top of the site article on HUFFPOST is about Trump's malevolent doppelgänger Elon Musk for this article. It isn't nearly as dramatic as the Trump illustration:

I would guess that the black background  was also added to replace whatever was in the background of the photograph to make it more dramatic but I can't prove it.

I would characterize the photo of Musk as not particularly flattering but not appearing as obnoxious as he does in some of the photos published of him.

When the Musk article was no longer the lead story and moved down the page this is the Photoshopped image HUFFPOST used which shows him as looking ominous:


A Google Image search shows the first photo being credited to Jim Watson of Getty Images. It has been used frequently:

For example, it was used to illustrate a New York Times June 9, 2022 article.
There are so many photos of Trump and Musk showing such a range of emotions for editors to choose from to illustrate articles. Editors do not decide which to use by accident. 

Generally the photos we see of people in the public eye come with some kind of copyright protection and there is a legal gray area about how they can be republished. On this blog I often use the amazing Photoshop manipulated images made by DonkeyHotey since they are free to use as long as you give him his well deserved credit.

I used two of them in this blog story:


I took the photo HUFFPOST used and with BeFunky made it look like this:

With InPixo I made this with Jan van Eyck's Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych from Wikipedia as a background.





Which Trump will America get? Will it be the forgiving benevolent Trump or the revenge fueled monster? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

  Perchance Photo AI can give us images of who Trump will turn out to be, but it can't predict.  No ifs, ands, or buts, and no what'...