People keep telling me that I’m at That Age when friends start to get married seemingly right and left. I’ve only been to three so far, which doesn’t seem like that many (we’ll see what happens next summer, when the season rolls around again). I hadn’t been IN a friend’s wedding until last month, though, when I was part of the bridal party for my college roommate Kim’s wedding.
Rice ring! Yay!
They get their own post, because they are so darn cute.
There is a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats (I don’t have a clue what free-tailed means) that lives underneath the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin.
More than a million bats live under said bridge, and they all come out at dusk go to find dinner. This sounded like something that would be interesting (by interesting, I mean AWESOME) to photograph, so on my last night in Austin, we went down to the river to see what was up.
We weren’t the only ones.
From a photographic standpoint, I was a little disappointed to find out that most (but not all) of the bats fly east to find their food. And I felt ridiculously hampered by the 50mm, but it was still, as expected, AWESOME. If you’re ever in Austin between May and September, definitely go check it out.
Alex’s sunglasses. No bats in this one (darn it), but you can see the Austin skyline!
Alex and Emre live on Duval Street, which is mostly residential and very colorful. It also has the biggest concentration of porch swings per capita that I’ve ever seen on one street.
After I went to Houston for a weekend, I took the bus up to Austin for a few days.
The bus ride went right through the corridor of Texas that’s been having all the wildfires. Just a wee bit scary…
I was staying with my friends Alex and Emre, who are both at UT and in classes most of the day, which meant I had a whole lot of time to just wander around downtown Austin. Since I’d never actually been to Austin before, this worked out perfectly.
That said, I don’t think Sixth Street by day is quite the same as Sixth Street by night:
I also went to the Capitol building. Twice. The first day, I just walked over to see what all the fuss was about. The second day, I decided to go inside to check things out, and walked in right as a tour was starting. Hooray!
Almost backed into the street trying to make the whole building fit into the scope of a 50mm.
My friend David moved to the Heights a few months ago, which is a part of Houston I know nothing about (considering I lived in Houston for four years I know alarmingly little about the city, because I didn’t have a car when I was there). David said the neighborhood was ripe for photo safari-ing, so we went roaming around at magic light time.
I’m not very good at taking scenic shots (coincidentally, I have another friend named David who IS very good at this, and you should look at his work), so it was nice to practice without worrying about whether there was an actual assignment riding on the photos.
SOMEBODY hasn’t posted his pictures yet (ahem), but whenever they’re up they’ll be at http://djance.blogspot.com.
I’m a month behind on these posts. Better late than never!
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I celebrated my 6-month anniversary with the Gazette by taking a vacation (isn’t that always the way of things?).
The main reason for the vacation was to attend my college roommate’s wedding in Waco, but it’s hard for me to go to Texas and not, well, visit everybody else I know there, so I made a couple of other stops along the way (Houston and Austin).
I brought one lens with me: my 50mm. Push comes to shove, I’d have picked the 20mm over the 50 any day, but that lens is still broken.
Logan Airport, surprisingly empty for a Friday afternoon…
When I went to Houston in March, I decided to try shooting an alphabet (a lá Chelsea Sektnan). It took me forever to actually get the collage part done, mostly because I didn’t have Photoshop for a while, but I finally (four months later…) finished! Hooray!
I wish there were more things in here that were more obviously “Houston,” but oh well.
I mentioned in the previous post that I’ve photographed Beer Bike for seven years.
And while it is certainly true that the key to good event coverage is always looking for the contextual and visual surprises…it’s also true that sometimes, you just want to try out a different lens. Like a fisheye.
When I rented the fisheye for this trip, I essentially did it for one reason. Everything else, every other picture I took, was just icing on the cake as far as I was concerned.
I wanted this picture:
This is not a groundbreaking, earth-shattering photo by any means, but I like it for two reasons. The first is that I’ve never seen this picture made before (oh, CPOY, you’ve taught me so much!). The second is that, like I said, this is almost exactly the shot I wanted…I wanted an aerial overview of the whole event (when I was deciding on whether to rent or not, Chris very correctly pointed out that the aerial was almost necessary to justify using a fisheye in the first place). This very rarely happens; it’s not often that I have an idea for a photo and then it actually works out as planned.
I thought at first I would just go up to the first level of the football stadium, where there are always some spectators, and see what I could see.
I took a few shots there, but they weren’t right at all. The curve of the horizon wasn’t prominent enough (nor was I high enough to get a convex curve), and the distortion wasn’t working with me.
(This is how not to shoot fisheye photos. Womp.)
So I went higher, to the top of the stadium. It was also the first time I’d ever thought to shoot from this vantage point (I know, I know…), which turned out well for some other photos as well (see previous post).
And from there, it worked. Thanks, fisheye!
Most of the time I’m not sure if it’s Texas that I miss so much, or just the people who live there (or who used to live there, back when I did). It’s probably some sort of combination of the two; I have yet to figure out the proportions.
Anyway, part of the reason my pre-job vacation was as fantastic as it was was the simple fact that I got to see said people…some of whom I hadn’t seen in almost three years (see: Anishka, first photo). Reunions are the best. [note: these are not ALL of the wonderful people I visited. that would make for a very, very long blog post…]
Not a portrait per se, but I like this picture a whole lot.
