What is LaneCounty360?

Welcome to LaneCounty360

LaneCounty360 is a Lane County visual journal produced by photographer & multimedia journalist Cliff Etzel.

The premise of LaneCounty360 was inspired by HoCo360, a blog created and maintained by Howard County, Maryland Photographer & Strobist lighting guru David Hobby.

The sites purpose is to provide a hyper-local visual journal, to curate images of Lane County, Oregon.

This is a personal project that intends to create moments that can be looked upon in the future to show a glimpse of what life was like in the area just as historical photographs do for us today.

Given the nature of the newspaper industry, its slow demise is reducing its ability to cover the local community to an extent that is beyond the realm of overworked and underpaid staff photo journalists.

As David Hobby states on the HoCo360 blog:

Newspapers are going away, victims of new technologies and the death of a thousand cuts. So what replaces them?

This is an experiment as a so called “photo department” of a county wide newspaper.  I’ll post images and short captions to give a sense of what the moment was like when the image was captured.  It’s an online visual journal, seeking to explore Lane County and serve up the interesting bits in quick-hit bites. Generally, one or more photos and an extended caption and you’re out the door.

The limitations are strictly geographic – ranging from Florence to the west, up to McKenzie Bridge and Oakridge to the east,  Junction City to the north and Cottage Grove to the south but how I cover Lane County will be different from how a traditional newspaper or magazine. The goal is to show you things you might otherwise miss in a county that on the surface might not seem so interesting.

I’m not sure how this side project is going to pan out, but I believe that it’s important to document the area for future generations.

I hope you find this site enjoyable and valuable resource.


I’m always happy if you stop by the site for a visit. But you can easily set up LaneCounty360 to be automatically pushed to you via RSS, email or Twitter by using the links at the bottom of any page.

And if you’re on Twitter, please follow me. It’s a very low-impact stream. I’ll let you know whenever a new entry goes up, but won’t subject you to endless retweets and Twitter memes. More important, I can always use another set of eyes in the field to let me know about items of interest.

And your retweets and Facebook “Likes” are greatly appreciated. That’s pretty much the only way others will find out about the site.

Lastly, thanks for plugging in. The more people know about their community, the better it is for everyone.

Cliff Etzel – Photographer

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