I was in Portland for a couple days this past week, and nearly stayed much longer than planned.  I was supposed to leave the hotel at 6am on Thursday to head out on an 8am flight back to Dallas, but my wallet was nowhere to be found.  Those of you that know me or have been following the blog long enough are shocked this could happen to me, I'm sure.  I tore my room apart looking for it, but nada.  Nil.  Zilch.  I told the people I was supposed to ride to the airport with to go on with out me, and plan B went into effect.  Checked with the hotel restaurant we ate at the night before to see if they had my wallet.  Nope.  At that point I was out of ideas because I literally hadn't used my wallet the whole trip except to get my room key out of it every time I went back to my room.  Many phone calls to my travel agent, American Airlines, credit card companies, Kylie and the police landed me down at the Portland Police Central Precinct where an incredibly helpful lady at the station met me outside to give me a copy - at no charge - of the police report I'd filed.  Normally it's a $25 charge to get a copy, but she bent the rules and went out of her way to help me out (considering I had no money to pay for the report anyway).  Oregonians rock.  Seriously.  Several people offered to help with anything I needed, including Portland  photographer Candy Newby.  (Thanks, Candy!) Anywho, to make a long and potentially over-hyped, over-dramatacized story short, while I was in the cab on the way to the airport to try my chances with police report in hand to go standby on a flight later in the day, the hotel called to tell me that the restaurant had found my wallet.  Whew.  Apparently it must have somehow fallen out of my back pocket when I was getting up from the table.  In any case, I turned the cab around and went back and got it and life returned to some resemblance of normality.  Anyone else bored with this story yet?  Man, I am.  So, I'll get right to the photos because I'm tired of hearing me talk.  I only had about 90 minutes to get out and do some personal photography while I was there, but Portland's such a cool city with a ton of character.  I kinda wished I woulda got stuck there a little longer to explore more of the city, but teh following is a sample of Portland's awesomeness.

Lots of wicked-awesome architectural character in Portland.

A quick way to create an interesting look to an otherwise ordinary image: -  Desaturate the image layer in Photoshop and change the blend mode to overlay -  Create a new layer underneath the image layer and fill it with a color (I chose a steel blue color for this image) -  Presto. You're done. I do find this method works well particularly with high contrast images.