A walk round Portland, Oregon with a Leica M3 and Voigtländer 21/4 Color-Skopar

The city of Portland, Oregon straddles the Willamette River and has 12 bridges from south to north crossing the Willamette before it joins the Columbia River. I thought I’d try to capture a few of the iconic sites using my recently acquired Voigtländer 21/4 Color-Skopar to see how the mismatch between what I’d see in the viewfinder would be vs. what the lens would capture on either side. Turns out it wasn’t too difficult. I’ve left the included images as they were scanned although I’ve reduced their size from 7968 x 5320 pixels to 1800 x 1202. I also intentionally did minimal other tweaks in post other than removing haze (in the past I’ve fiddled with included images using Silver eFex Pro 2).

The day wasn’t really sunny and I use a TTArtisan shoe-mount meter on the M3. All of these were developed in Cinesill Df96 monobath for 6 seconds and then scanned using my Sony a7R3 combined with a 50/2.8 macro lens. I shot the scans on Aperture priority at f8 which made the shutter speed 1/50 making the scan 42.4mp.

Portland suburbs extend approximately 15 miles to both the east and west and the city has a light rail system. The light rail uses the Steel bridge to enter the city from the east. The light rail uses the upper desk while automobiles and pedestrians use the lower deck.

All of Portland’s bridges allow for river traffic and they either function as a draw bridge or the deck levers open. The Burnside bridge span opens between the two towers with the east and west sides opening to approximately 80 degrees. The stability of the bridge has been called into question due to the probability of damage from the likely Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake (which could happen at any time, or so they say). Plans are being drawn up, but the replacement costs of an earthquake-proof bridge remain steep.

Another local “attraction” is Voodoo Donuts, known for all sorts of strange donut concoctions. A classic being a person shaped donut with facial decorations and stabbed through the red heart decoration with a pretzel stick. The tall building in the background is the US Bank tower (where my wife once worked for many years).

Another Portland icon is Powell’s City of Books, which claims to be the world’s largest independent book seller with over 68,000 square feet. Powell’s sells new and used books as well as magazines, cards, odds-n-ends and antique books.

After shooting the main entrance and wandering around inside for an hour or so, I stopped next door at a Starbucks for a coffee. I decided that I needed to shoot the Powell’s entrance located at 11th and Couch to see how much of the building to the north I could get with the 21mm lens. Seems like I got it all.

I didn’t completely use the 24 exposures of Tri-X on my morning walk around the city. The last couple of shots were taken a few days later and I developed and scanned the film yesterday (24 August).

Despite not having frame lines for the 21mm lens, it seems that I was still able to frame the shots I wanted.

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