Lower Macleay Trail, Portland

One of my favorite short hikes in Portland is the Lower Macleay Trail which starts at at the end of NW Upshur. This hike exudes tranquillity despite the many visitors it gets on a weekend afternoon. I started out in mid-afternoon on March 15th. The trail hugs Balch Creek, gradually ascending up Balch Canyon. The waters were rushing along that day although the creek itself was not nearly as full as it undoubtedly was after some of the heavier rains later this month.

Lower Macleay Trail

Balch Creek

One of the visual pleasures of hiking the Lower Macleay is the tangle of mossy branches and the ubiquitous ferns. This particular fern, below, seems to be 'jumping the falls.'

Fern o'er the falls

Eventually, I reached the end of the trail along the creek and followed the switchbacks to the park near Cornell Road and the Audubon Society of Portland's headquarters. There I was treated to the beautiful site of an imprinted raven that was in the care of the Audubon Society. Poor thing -- having been handled by humans before it was able to be cared for by its own mother, it now lives its life in captive, but loving, care in the Society's Care Center.

Before continuing my hike back down the Lower Macleay, I stopped for a break in the Audubon's gift shop/bookstore and was delighted to see that one of my favorite Oregonian/naturalist writers, Marcy Houle, has written a revised edition of the book that I used as a guide to Forest Park in my first few years in Portland: One City's Wilderness. If you visit Forest Park even on occasion for it's natural beauty, I can't recommend any highly a book to educate and guide you.

Starting out with a Canon EOS 70D

After reviewing cameras such as the Canon Rebel T5i, and the Nikon D7100, I decided to purchase a Canon EOS 70D with a EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens. Although the Rebel series is great for beginners, I liked the sturdiness and the enhanced feature set of the 70D. An LED on top of the camera body is just one of the nice features of this camera. It also has a Dual Pixel CMOS auto focus for video recording, a  20.2 megapixel sensor, and a touch-screen articulated LCD monitor.

My experience opening the enormous box that the 70D comes in and getting the equipment ready is what I will focus on first, since part of the purpose of this blog is for me to keep a journal of my experience with all things photography. My 70D came as part of a kit packaged by Canon. Included are a good-sized camera case, a strap, a 32-GB SanDisk SD card, software, a battery and charger. Pro Photo Supply also threw in a lens cleaning kit, a dust blower, and another 32-GB SD card.

Being someone my wife describes as clumsy, I took great care and patience weaving the strap through the camera's strap mount eyelet and getting it secure. No dropping of this camera! I followed the quick start handout in the package to give the camera a try-out.  I put the battery and an SD card right in the camera after attaching the lens and took a few pictures using the fully-automatic setting. Not bad. But then I noticed the battery light blinking in the LED, so I carefully removed the battery after shutting the camera off, and recharged it.

Charging takes 2.5 hours for a complete recharge, according to the manual, so I spent about the next hour reading through different sections of the manual to get comfortable with the many operational aspects of the camera. Although I have some experience with SLRs from my youth, it's been quite a while. I realized fairly early on that I could use a course and maybe even a good book on photography. A camera manual is great for terse explanations of each function, but it is not a great learning tool.

At B&N I found a set of books by Tom Ang and chose the Digital Photographer's Handbook, which is in its fifth edition. I also really liked his Digital Photography Master Class book but I decided to start with the handbook to get the basics down. It's not camera-specific, and in fact not even dSLR oriented, rather it is a general book about digital photography with a lot of great information from what I could see.