Micro 4/3 Around town ... (PART 2)

Location
Talent, Oregon (far from the madding crowd)
Name
Miguel Tejada-Flores
Moving inside city limits, the town still feels more like an old farming town and less like a modern suburb. There are a lot of trees, and many evergreens still shed their leaves, branches … and pine cones.

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Pine Cone
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

Some streets are unpaved; many feature vehicles that seem more at home on the back 40 than downtown.

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Dodge pickup with camper shell
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

And, seemingly, everyone still has a functional pickup truck. Many of which date back half a century and more. And are still running, in spit of half a century of rust.

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Ford 100
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

In the cold rainbelt of the Pacific Northwest, rust is a daily occurrence, a fact of life. But some ancient warhorses keep on truckin’, and the closer you come, the more majestic they seem.

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Ford 100 Pickup
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

Closer still, you can see that like ancient metal-clad knights of yore, they carry their insignia on a shield.

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Ford pickup hood
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

And moving even closer, one can only speculate on the original generation of engineers whose coat-of-arms seems both retro and surprisingly modern.

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Hood ornament
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

Continuing on my around town stroll, I come upon some folk art, on a fence.

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Fence Face: android folk sculpture
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

And then more homegrown small-town art, on a mailbox.

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203 (in Talent, Oregon)
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

A radical French artist of the last century once insisted that the purpose of art is to “épater la bourgeoisie”, which translates more or less as to shock ordinary folks. This next piece of art, a ‘found object’ installation/sculpture that I spotted atop the antenna of a parked car, does exactly that -

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Car antenna baby head
par MiguelATF, on ipernity

Yes. There are just as many eccentric and strange people in small towns as there are in large, complicated metropolises (or is it metropoli?). But - and I didn’t realize it when I set out - this about-town-stroll seems to have acquired a decidedly mechanical if not outright automotive slant. Old towns, in Oregon at least, seem to have a lot of old cars. Some, like this retro Chevy, stand out for their good looks -

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Old Ford
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

And others for their charmingly bug-eyed ugliness like this ancient Dodge -

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Old vans never die
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

Moving closer, though, it grows on you.

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Bug-eyed Van
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

Almost at the end of my stroll, returning homeward on the rural lane which separates town from country, I have to stop, once again, to admire the neighbors’ mechanically-themed mailbox -

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Motorcycle Mailbox
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

And that, is, literally, the end of this trip around town. All good things must come to an end, and when one gets there, there’s really only one thing left to do. And, thanks to the tiny fixed f/8 fisheye Olympus BCL, or Body-Cap-Lens, I can
do
just
that
and...

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Suburban STOP
by MiguelATF, on ipernity

...STOP
 

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Great series Miguel. I am not sure why but I liked partII better.
Taken as a whole the images add up to something beautiful. I feel I would like to visit your neighborhood.
 
Great stuff Miguel. Every town, large or small, has lots of little details and tucked away spots that you have to live there a while to start to notice, or at least to appreciate. You obviously have a keen appreciation for your town and a real artist's eye for portraying it. I was particularly struck by the seemingly incongruous BLM sign off to the side of the second shot in this second set. The OTHER BLM is what I'd expect to see a lot more of in rural southern Oregon, but I was happy see this one. I'd think that neither BLM would be particularly popular around there, but the exceptions are what make the rule...

-Ray
 
Great series Miguel. I am not sure why but I liked partII better.
Taken as a whole the images add up to something beautiful. I feel I would like to visit your neighborhood.

Thank you very much, Don. Actually, to tell the truth, I originally tried to put all of the images in ONE post - but apparently the website software has a limitation on the number of photos or photo attachments that can be included in any single post. So after repeated attempts and error messages to do it all together, I wound up splitting them into Part 1 & Part 2, because it seemed like the only workable option ; - )
 
Great stuff Miguel. Every town, large or small, has lots of little details and tucked away spots that you have to live there a while to start to notice, or at least to appreciate. You obviously have a keen appreciation for your town and a real artist's eye for portraying it. I was particularly struck by the seemingly incongruous BLM sign off to the side of the second shot in this second set. The OTHER BLM is what I'd expect to see a lot more of in rural southern Oregon, but I was happy see this one. I'd think that neither BLM would be particularly popular around there, but the exceptions are what make the rule...

-Ray

Thank you, Ray. As a minor note, though I do live in a small town which still has quite a rural feel to it, it is something of an anomaly among small rural towns - its population skews towards eccentric and lliberal, so BLM signs are not that unusual. There has also been a large outpouring of community support, from most sectors of the community, for the uncertainty and potential danger which many immigrants currently find themselves in. These are troubling times, and it is heartening to see people stand up and try to support not just their friends, but people they don't know.
 
I just love the colour and mood of the pine cone shot. I visited your Ipernity and found that it was a GM5+20mm... I was expecting a Leica. Just goes to show you that in the right hands, a camera can do anything.

Lovely Miguel... now somehow I missed Part1, so off to see that now
 
I just love the colour and mood of the pine cone shot. I visited your Ipernity and found that it was a GM5+20mm... I was expecting a Leica. Just goes to show you that in the right hands, a camera can do anything.

Lovely Miguel... now somehow I missed Part1, so off to see that now

Thank you so much, Sue. The pine cone is one of my favorites in the whole series. Which, btw, was taken totally on the diminutive GM5 which is an underrated camera in my opinion. On second thought, the GM5 has its partisans, and in spite of its tiny footprint, has quite a good sensor. And plenty of praises have been sung about the tiny 20mm mu 4/3 pancake lens which more than rivals, optically and in that indefinable area of image quality, pedigreed lenses costing significantly more. Much of the time it lives on the GM5 body, though lately I've been exploring the range of the even more diminutive 12-32mm Lumix zoom. And your comment about a Leica made me smile: decades ago my first camera ever was an ancient Leica IIIf that I semi-inherited from my father and, though it may be sacrilegious to say, let alone think, the GM5 + 20mm comes close to me in this new millenia for having many of the qualities I used to love about my former IIIf: small size, simple unobtrusive controls, and a certain je ne sais quoi that made (and still makes) me want to take the camera with me everywhere.
 
Lovely series. Miguel. Over here you'd have a hard time finding anything with rust spots on it or vehicles that are older than 10 years - you can guess the rest (zzz :sleep: ).
 
I'm not sure whether your town has more than its fair share of quirky bits and pieces or whether you're just really good at spotting and capturing these interesting objects and connections. Probably a bit of both. It's a very enjoyable set of images anyway and I like the colours a lot.

-R
 
Miguel, I love both series, although I must admit I'm a fan of your photography in general.

I think that too often, I am guilty of just scrolling through photos and saying "Like, like it, love it, not for me, like it. With these, I really took my time. I made special note of your compositions and reminded myself that I ought to try a little harder in general....and specificly with regard to "filling the frame". I see too many photos (my own included) that suffer from "worrying about leaving something out". In many of your photos, we see a clear subject that fills the frame....even when you leave enough room for context and other elements.

I hope that some of this finds its' way into my own photos. Even without your wonderful writing, the photos have a clear narrative.

Thanks for sharing and keep up the great work!
 
Really enjoyed the two sets of photos, Miguel. How do you find the GM5 in handling? One of the reasons I got out of Micro 4/3 was the cameras (and buttons) could be too small and hard to work, but a camera like the GM5 looks like it would make a good pairing for the Panasonic 14mm/2.5. I know there were some things I liked about the LX100 when I rented one some months ago.
 
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