The weather forecast called for some dry days in late December (2025)! This was too good to miss, so I took a road trip south to the Columbia River. My first stop was the city of Kelso, which is on the east side of the Cowlitz River across from Longview. Here are some views around town.
Central Kelso
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Downtown Kelso from Cowlitz Way (WA-4) bridge (Kodak Ektar 100, Zeiss Ikon ZM camera, 50mm ƒ/2 Summicron lens at ƒ/2.8) |
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| BNSF tracks under Cowlitz Way bridge (50mm ƒ/2 Jupiter-8 lens) |
The Cowlitz River flows between Kelso and Longview. After Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, an immense amount of mud and ash flushed down the Toutle Rivers and into the Cowlitz. Ultimately, about 65 million cubic yards of sediment dropped into the lower Cowlitz and Columbia Rivers (from Robert I., Topinka, L, Swanson, D. (1990). "Eruptions of Mount St. Helens: Past, Present, and Future". U.S. Geological Survey Special Interest Publication).
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| Bingo at the FOE club, S. Pacific Avenue |
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| Clock shop, 514 S. Pacific Avenue |
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| 300 1st Avenue (50mm ƒ/2 Jupiter-8 lens) |
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| 407 N. Pacific Ave |
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| 103 Crawford Street (50mm Jupiter-8 lens) |
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| 406 1st Avenue (50mm Jupiter-8 lens) |
North Kelso
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| Family Daily Store (50mm ƒ/2 Summicron lens) |
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| Taqueria, 1009 N. Pacific Avenue (50mm Summicron lens) |
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| Skeleton man on patrol duty, 305 N. Kelso Avenue |
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| 620 M 3rd. Avenue |
S. River Road and S. Pacific Avenue
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| 1400 S. Pacific Avenue |
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| Mobile home off S. River Road |
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| 514 S. Pacific Avenue |
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| Near the south end town, Douglas Street (50mm Summicron lens) |
This ends a quick look at the City of Kelso. I was pleased to see many mid-20th century houses, many with Arts and Crafts architectural details. Some of the city look pretty good, but some of it is rough.
I took these pictures on Kodak Ektar 100 film with a Zeiss Ikon ZM rangefinder camera and various lenses. Some frames were with my 1962 Soviet 50mm ƒ/2 Jupiter-8 lens. Stopped down to ƒ/4 or ƒ/5.6, it does remarkably well. On internet scale, of course, it is difficult to see if one lens is "better" or "sharper" than another. The Zeiss Ikon camera has a large, clear viewfinder and an amazingly accurate auto exposure function.
Northeast Photographic in Bath, Maine, developed the film and scanned it with a Noritsu system. The Noritsu extracts impressive resolution from the negatives, and the files are clean. I assume there must be an infrared dust/scratch function that cleans blemishes. The Noritsu files have an odd warm tone, but I corrected them with the auto color function in Photoshop Elements 2024. (Note: Elements will let you crop, rotate, change color, and do some other adjustments on 16-bit TIFF files. But many functions require you to convert to 8-bit color, so Elements is limited if you want to retain your original 16-bit files.)
This is a continuation of my irregular series on Washington towns and cities. I will expand the series to include Oregon cities.
