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.
In addition to the photography job with the Gazette, I’m also the high school sports reporter. I spent most of this past week chasing down the coaches so I could write previews of the upcoming season, but also squeezed in some photos at lacrosse practice before deadline.
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.
I timed my visit to Reliant Park so that I could check out the animals inside and still be able to roam the fairgrounds outside—at prime magic light time—before I had to go meet my friends for dinner.
I also brought out the fisheye again.
I graduated from college in 2008 (geez…). That year, and in 2009, I went back to Texas and to Houston for New Year’s Eve—because during both of those years, I had a team playing in the Texas Bowl. And I went to Texas during my spring breaks while in grad school.
But this year, I didn’t have a reason to go to the Texas Bowl…and a couple of my friends instead came to visit me in New England, which meant I didn’t make my usual New Year’s trip. So I hadn’t been to Houston in a year (this was, frankly, way too long).
Usually when I go to Houston I’m trying to pack a ton of visits and events into a couple of days, and some stuff inevitably gets left out. This year I didn’t want that to happen, and I made my stay much longer than it usually is. Which left me time to go to the rodeo (well, the livestock show part of the rodeo. but still!)!
Wow, a lot has happened since the last time I blogged. Let’s see if I can actually backpost everything in a reasonable fashion…
First and foremost, I got a full-time job! I am back with the Vineyard Gazette, the paper I freelanced for last summer, as a staff photographer and high school sports reporter (and general assignments reporter when needed). I’m so excited about the job; I loved working in that newsroom before and it’s very nice to be back. I’ve never lived in the Vineyard year-round, though, which is going to be interesting. It’s so quiet here right now (now that there are 15,000 people here instead of the 100,000+ who come in the summer), but the lack of traffic and the fact that I can always find a parking spot when I need one are definite bonuses. 
Before I moved out here to start the job, I took a longish trip to visit friends in Chicago and Houston, which was great (okay, better than great. okay, there really isn’t a word to describe this trip). Before I left, I decided to rent a fisheye lens to take along with me. I did this for one reason, really, and that was “taking photos at Beer Bike” (one of the Houston events I went to). More on this later. But I’d never used a fisheye before, and wanted to test one out just for fun. I can’t justify the cost of actually buying one and adding it to my arsenal, but the rental cost was more than worth it. This was also the first lens I’d ever tested out, and I can definitely say that the overall renting process was a breeze.
Here are some (fisheye and nonfisheye) photos from the Chicago leg of the trip.
Northwestern University
I still find Lake Michigan (and the Great Lakes in general) to be a very strange concept.
I got so distracted setting up the exposure for this photo that I then forgot about my pasta leftovers from dinner and left them at the El stop. Oh well.
At Midway Airport. Had to literally chase this picture down (my lens was a 20mm; this has been cropped), and then shoot one-handed because I had my suitcase, too. But it was worth it! So cute!
I know New England winters are far crazier than Missouri ones, but I haven’t been here through the entire season in six years and so forgot just how bonkers they can get. I’ve already blogged about the post-Christmas storm that messed up my friends’ travel plans, but December was, apparently, just a warm-up for the main event.
This January has been the snowiest month in Connecticut history. Not the snowiest January…the snowiest month. Ever. I haven’t been to the gym in months, but am nonetheless staying in shape because of my regular snow-shoveling regimen.
Last night the weathermen predicted 9-12 inches of snow overnight. My parents and I woke up at 6:45 this morning to find…eighteen inches of fluff (and fortunately, it was fluff, not the icy kind of snow) piled all around our house like a lumpy comforter.
Good morning!
There are a couple of problems posed by 18 inches of snow. The first one is that my parents had to go to work, forty minutes away in Hartford…but the car can’t get out of the garage with, well, *that* in the way. We’re also running out of places to put the snow- those piles off to the right in the above picture are the result of every other snowfall this month.
The second is that our dog O’Lio, while he is a pretty tall dog (he’s a greyhound), couldn’t ford his way through the piles on the back porch to get to our backyard and do his morning thing.
Fortunately, my parents’ office called to let everybody know they didn’t have to come in until noon, which gave us time to clear the driveway and free the car from the garage. Meanwhile, I tackled the back porch. Once I got to the bottom of the steps and the backyard, I dug out paths for O’Lio to use…it’s like his own private maze out there now. He’s happy.
I should point out that all of this shoveling was done before 9 a.m. After finishing, I immediately went back and curled up in bed for a few hours…until I had to go back out again in the afternoon to take care of the other side of the driveway.
David, Halley and I finished our tour of the Northeast in New York City, where we met up with some other friends from college for New Year’s Eve. Most of the day was actually spent going back and forth between our hotel, Manhattan, and Laguardia Airport in search of David’s suitcase, which the airline had lost a few days earlier. We still managed to fit in a short trip to the Met and Central Park, though.
It’s no big secret that I love Boston. David and Halley, my friends who came up to visit from Texas (and got delayed by the snow), already knew this, but had never actually been to the city with me; it was a ton of fun exploring all over with them. We kept ending up on the Freedom Trail, but then again, that’s not all that hard to do in Boston.
Kiddos going sledding in the Boston Common [cropped; I liked the panorama-style composition better even when taking it].
George Washington statue in the Public Garden.
