Hit the road for a weekend with a trip around the Olympic Peninsula. I’d been down the east side before travelling to and from Portland but hadn’t done the whole loop around the peninsula. Great trip although the weather was constantly changing, providing a number of challenges for driving and making it difficult to get all the photos I wanted. That said it was a lot of fun and I saw lots of places that I want to go back to.

Merry Christmas everyone. Hope it’s not to exhausting.

I’ve started a Tumblr blog for my Pacific Northwest project Saltwater & Rain. A visual and literary archive(ing) of the Pacific Northwest. Check it out here. Become a follower if you like what you see. In case the link isn’t working go here – http://saltwaterandrain.tumblr.com/

You have to love university students, raising money for charity with a dunk tank in December, even on the west coast it’s cold when you hit the water.

This photo was taken two weeks ago along Colquitz Creek. The youngsters were being shown a large spawned out male Coho salmon. The volunteers at the creek were ecstatic. They’d been seeing the largest returns of spawning salmon in years. Later that afternoon, an oil spill occurred sending the fluid into the creek.  The salmon have disappeared and attempts continue to try and clean the creek but it appears the triumph has turned into tragedy, an all too often occurrence now.

It’s been, for the most part, a dry fall but we’ve had a few great days like this.

Introduction to Community Newspaper Photojournalism
This course is for photographers considering a career in photojournalism, bloggers who want to improve the visual content of their sites and for the photographer who wants to explore new avenues of creativity. Participants will study the five main types of photo assignment for the community photojournalist: news, sports, feature, environmental portrait and the photo essay. You will examine the images of working photographers, learn workflow and editing techniques and be given assignments to complete between classes.

and

Documentary Photography: Creating the Personal Project
In this course you will learn how to use the techniques of documentary work to create a personal photo project. Participants will examine the work of other documentary photographers and see how and why certain ways of seeing and photographing can be applied to their work. You will learn how to organize your own projects, budget time, find out how to edit a project and discover different ways to bring that project to a larger audience.

full details here: http://www.uvcs.uvic.ca/

Thirty-Five Thousand Forty
Mike Andrew McLean
November 10 to December 10, 2011
Opening November 10 at 7:30 p.m.

Thirty-Five Thousand Forty is the physical culmination of Mike Andrew McLean’s project to shoot ninety-six photographs a day for three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days. McLean’s year of photos, now printed as 4”x6” snapshots, will tile the interior of Open Space, forming a sprawling record of the artist’s life from June 2010 to June 2011.

McLean writes “photography in the digital era is developing its own language, forging unique processes and technologies. It seems to have reached the democratic potential that George Eastman predicted one hundred years ago, when he took the process out of the studio of the trained craftsman and put it into the hands of the unskilled hobbyist.” McLean turns the idea of digital photography inside out, conferring an analogue physicality and monumentality onto a format that proliferates effortlessly, flooding websites, Facebook, memory cards and hard drives in an unimaginably deep cloak of images.

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Note the final photo posted here. Dan Milnor snaps a photo of a 2G hard drive mounted on the gallery wall. All the photos in the show are stored on that one drive.