Category Archives: Austin

My First Photo Walk in Downtown Austin – Part 1

I thought that things were supposed to slow down during the summer months. That’s definitely not the case for me. Things at work have really gotten pretty busy for me. And in the evenings, I’ve been watching the Olympics. They’ve been exciting, but I’m glad that tonight is the closing ceremony.

At any rate, I hadn’t been out with my camera in well over a week, and I was really getting the desire to go out and shoot something – anything. For quite a while I’ve been wanting to go wander around downtown Austin and just photograph whatever caught my attention. So this Saturday morning, that is exactly what I did.

Now I’ve lived in Austin for 40 years (and 2 weeks!), but I’ve never just wandered around downtown with a camera. I’ve been downtown with my camera and tripod several times before, but I always had a specific reason for doing so. In 2007, Dad and photographed all of the GuitarTown 10 foot tall painted guitars spread around downtown Austin (and out at the airport). Just last year, in August and September of 2011, during the hottest summer ever on record here in Austin, we hunted down and shot every single cow on location for CowParade Austin. You can see all of the guitars and cows here on my web site, by clicking on the “Photo Gallery” tab under the banner at the top of my web page.

This time there would be no map to tell me where the items that I needed to photograph would be located. No agenda, no time requirement, no plan.

Even though we have an Austin address, and reside in the City of Austin, it still takes 25 minutes to drive to downtown Austin – and that’s on a Saturday morning with virtually no traffic to slow you down. (During a Friday afternoon rush-hour can easily be an hour drive.) Living in Austin has a lot of very nice attributes, but traffic is definitely not one of them….

Anyway, I left the house at exactly 7:33 AM yesterday morning, and got to 1st and Congress a couple of minutes before 8:00. Due to road construction, I couldn’t park where I thought I would – just east of Congress Avenue and 2nd Street. I had to detour around that and ended up parking my blue Honda CR-V about 2 blocks east of there – at P. F. Chang’s at 2nd and San Jacinto Blvd.

About two years ago, the Austin City Council renamed 2nd Street in the downtown area to become Willie Nelson Blvd, for one of our celebrity citizens. If you look carefully, you can see that on the street sign in the photo above.

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I had brought my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, my four lenses, and a flash in my little Domke camera bag (just in case I ran into Kirk Tuck; I didn’t want to be caught with a Lowepro bag…..).  I also had my lightweight Gitzo tripod in a nice, compact bag that you carry on your shoulder, the same way an archer would carry his quiver of arrows. But once I got out of my car, put the camera strap around my neck, my Domke camera bag over my shoulder, and my tripod bag over my other shoulder, I felt rather ridiculous, and certainly not very nimble. No, the tripod was going to have to stay in the car on this initial downtown visit.

I started walking west, as the morning sunlight was doing a beautiful job of softly lighting the east side of the buildings. Just a block east of where I started, at Brazos Street (and Willie Nelson Blvd.) I came to one of Austin’s iconic office buildings.

All of these photos were taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera with the Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-5.3 zoom lens and a circular polarizer on it. I certainly had better quality lenses in my camera bag, but since this was my first time at this game, I wanted the versatility that the zoom lens would offer. My thought process had me put on the circular polarizer (sunglasses) on the lens would be to minimize the reflections in all of the windows that I envisioned I would be dealing with.

The photo above had the zoom lens adjusted to as wide-angle as it could go, which is 12mm (24mm equivalent on a full-frame camera). One problem with a wide angle lens is that when it is not parallel to the surface that you are photographing, you get some very noticeable distortion – which you can see in the photo above. Just look at the edge of the office building on the left side. Heck, look at the right side of that photo and the building appears to be leaning at a very significant angle from vertical!  (I do have a 24mm tilt-shift lens for my Canon camera which eliminates this “falling over” effect, but I am not aware of any such lens for this Olympus Micro Four Thirds format camera.)

I kept the center peak of the building in the center of my viewfinder, so at least the center of the building wouldn’t be leaning to one side.

Up ahead another block, just across Congress Avenue is the current tallest building in Austin. It is named The Austonian, which is 683 feet (208 m) tall with 56 floors.

Another block west on Willie Nelson Blvd. is the Austin Children’s Museum, and along the wall on the outside is this wavey, curvey handrail that is only about 30 inches above the sidewalk.

I am not used to being around tall buildings, so they definitely had my attention.

I had to almost force myself to look down, as I was sure that there would be all sorts of interesting things to see, if I would just pay attention.

Another block west, and you come to Lavaca Avenue. On the southwest corner is the Austin City Hall. Just north of that, across Willie Nelson Blvd. is the W Hotel, and connected to that is The Moody Theater, where they film the Austin City Limits TV show.

At the base of the stairs that take you up to The Moody Theater, sits the statue of Willie Nelson himself.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Austin City Limits TV show:

 Austin City Limits (often abbreviated as ACL) is an American public television music program recorded live in Austin, Texas by Public Broadcast Service(PBS) Public television member station KLRU, and broadcast on many PBS stations around the United States. The show helped Austin to become widely known as the “Live Music Capital of the World,” and is the only television show to receive the National Medal of Arts, which it was awarded in 2003.

You can read more here.

They show Austin City Limits on TV in Austin at 7:00 PM on Saturday evenings, and I record most of them, so that I can play them when we have guests over for dinner parties.

Moving on, and trying to look somewhere else but at the buildings in the sky. Here are some chairs and tables stacked up on the sidewalk for an outdoor cafe.

I thought this sign was cool, but I don’t know anything about the establishment. I took 2 shots of that sign, as the shutter speed was 1/5th of a second, and I was hoping at least one of them would not be blurry. As it turns out they were both OK. The in-body image stabilization of this little Olympus camera continues to amaze me! 

I turned north onto Guadalupe and quickly came upon this 3D sign.

And this window washer, busy doing his job before it got hot on this Saturday morning.

This is the view looking west of Guadalupe, between 3rd and 4th Streets.

Between 4th and 5th Streets, in an empty block, there is a Farmers Market every Saturday morning. (This is a different one from the one at Lakeline Mall that I recently posted on.)  This Farmers Market appeared to be MUCH larger and organized, too.

It was 8:38 AM, so the sunlight was still rather soft, and it seemed to make some of the vegetables glow.

I would definitely have to tell Barb about this Farmers Market!  I could easily see myself spending a couple of hours photographing all sorts of stuff here, but that was not on my agenda for today.

I thought I’d take a just a couple of photos, like this local honey vendor.

No, my mission was to figure out how far of a walk it was to Lamar Blvd., so I turned around to take this photo of the Farmers Market between 4th and 5th on Guadalupe before I headed further west.

To be continued….!

Farmers Market at Lakeline Mall

Things at work have really gotten pretty hectic lately, and it has been taking more of my attention than photography. It is also the hottest time of the year right now, and being outside for any length of time can only occur early in the morning, or after dinner in the evening. I really intended to get out and shoot something – anything – this weekend, but I simply found myself driving around and not even getting my camera out of the car.

I stayed up very late last night to watch the live NASA coverage on the internet of the landing of the Curiosity on Mars. What an exciting thing to watch!  As a result, though, I am very tired this evening.

No shooting this weekend, and dog tired from work and from Martian activity, but I felt like should put up a new post at least every 5 days or so (most bloggers update every day, and sometimes multiple times in a day). I suppose I should update my blog more often, but really, this is just a placeholder for something more “professional” when I eventually retire from engineering. In the meantime, my web site is simply a method for me to post the photos that I choose to share – kind of like an online scrapbook.

We had friends over to our house for a Dinner Party on Saturday evening, and I had my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera out, and I did get photos of everyone, and not all them are simple “snapshots”. I thought I might put them here, but now I’ve changed my mind.

Anyway, here are a few photos that I took when Barb and I went to the Farmer’s Market at Lakeline Mall on Saturday morning, July 7, 2012.

All of these photos were taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera with the Panasonic Leica 25mm f/1.4 lens. I shot all of these in Aperture Priority mode.

Shiny Jalapeno Peppers

Zucchini and Squash

Colorful Peppers

Red Tomatoes, Green Tomatoes

Doggie in a Buggy

Food Truck

Vendor with Colorful Jars

CowParade Austin Calendar – August – Got Color?

For the 45 of you that have my 2012 CowParade Austin calendar, today you probably flipped it over to the month of August and saw the photo above and then thought that you’d head over to my web site to find out more about “Miss August”.

This cow is named “Got Color?”, the artist is Robert R. (Bob) Jones, and the financial sponsor was Milton Verret. Got Color? was on public display in east Austin on Angelina St. (approx. 6 blocks east of I-35) between East 11th St. and East 12th St. at the George Washington Carver Museum.

I wish that I could tell you more about this cow, or about Bob Jones, but my investigations have pretty much come up empty-handed. Even at the CowParade Austin website, which is still up and running, hovering your mouse over the “About” link, and the selecting “Artists” from the resultant drop-down menu, doesn’t help much. It lists Bob’s website as www.artfor.org, but that site seems to be a placeholder for future use. Google and Bing searches do not turn up anything, either. It’s almost as if he doesn’t really exist….

That’s too bad, as I really wanted to give Bob credit for his beautiful artwork. Of all 74 CowParade Austin cows, this one is probably my favorite!

Dad and I had a list of several cows that we wanted to hunt down and shoot that day, and this was the 5th one that we got to late in the morning of August 20, 2011. It was 10:55 AM, and I did my usual custom white balance setting in the camera (using a neutral gray card), and then taking a photo of the ColorChecker Passport – just to make sure the colors were correct in post processing.

Obviously, with a cow named Got Color?, I knew that I had to get them all displayed correctly!

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As you can see by the hard shadow, the sun was almost directly above us, with the left side of the cow in direct sunlight, and the right side of the cow in shadows. The cow was positioned in the middle of a large area of stark concrete walkway. I think that helped the lighting on the cow, as the sidewalk was acting like a giant bounce card!

All of these photos were taken with the camera on my sturdy Gitzo tripod. I was shooting in Aperture Priority mode, the ISO was set to 100, and I was using the 24-105mm f/4.0 lens with a circular polarizer.

I really liked how the cow’s tail was a paint brush. Check out that rainbow udder!

Since the right side of the cow was the shady side, I did use my 580 EX II speedlite on the camera (oh no!) as a fill flash.

The fill flash did cause a hotspot reflection on the shoulder of the cow in the above photo.

OK, now that I had circled the cow once, it was time to get “artistic”, so I got down low, zoomed the lens to 35mm, and took my favorite shot of the series.

To get the maximum depth of field (front to back in focus), I set the aperture to f/22, which resulted in a rather slow shutter of 1/15th of a second, even in the bright summer sunlight. That was fine with me, since I was using a tripod.

The photo above is the one that I chose to put in my calendar. Since it was near the end of the month of August when I took the photo, and for no other reason, that’s why she ended up as “Miss August”.

There were a few smaller details on this cow that I thought were particularly clever, so I moved in closer to photograph them. I kept the aperture at f/22 for the next two shots.

Behind the cow’s left ear, was a crayon sharpener!

And behind the cow’s right ear was another type, which looks like an old pencil sharpener – with a razor blade to shave the pencil to a point.

Lastly, I took the requisite photo of the cow’s name plate at 11:08 AM, just 14 minutes after arriving at the museum.

I don’t have much else to add, other than to state once again that this was one of my favorite cows of the entire heard!

Plants and Patterns

This morning, I went out for my usual Saturday morning 3 mile walk through my neighborhood, but this time I brought my camera along.

This is only the 2nd time in the 11 years that we’ve lived in this house that I’ve brought my camera with me. I wrote about my first time, in my blog post that I published on June 4th.

On that walk, I took my brand new Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera with the Olympus 45mm f/1.8 lens. Today, I took the same camera, but I brought the Panasonic Leica 25mm ƒ/1.4 DG Summilux lens, with a B+W circular polarizer on the front of it.

Before I left the house, I performed a Custom White Balance to the camera, set the ISO to 200, and put the camera into Aperture Priority Mode. I did not change any of these three settings for the rest of my walk.

I’m going to try something new with this post. I’m going to keep the number of words to a bare minimum, and just present you with the pictures. I’m going to do it “Robin Wong style”, where I’ll add a two or three word “title” underneath each photo, that attempts to give a little insight into either what I saw, or what I was thinking.  If you like this format, (or if you don’t), please leave a comment (or send me an email using the “Contact Gregg” button under the banner at the top of this page) to let me know that.

Enough words. Here are my photos.

Honey Bee

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Clay Pot

Playground Tunnel

Circular Jungle Gym

Stairs and Handrail

Steel Mesh Stairs

Ford Mustang

Gate Hinge

Low Cactus

View @ Halfway

Prickless Prickly Pear Cactus

Cactus Flower Buds

A Red One

Big Grass

For Libby

Red and Orange Flowers

Pink Flowers

Miniature American Flag

Rusty Fire Hydrant

Ivy Ground Cover

Limestone Wall

My Front Door

Maybe someday soon I will get up the nerve to do some real Street Photography in downtown Austin. Plants and patterns are interesting to me, but I would like to include some architecture and some candid people photos, too.

Who knows, I might even get lucky and bump into Kirk Tuck…

CowParade Austin Calendar – July – Udderly Austin

August 27th, 2011 was the 2nd hottest day, of the hottest year ever on record here in Austin. We were also smack-dab in the middle of one of the very worst droughts ever experienced in Central Texas.

Dad and I still had to hunt down a few dozen of the 72 CowParade Austin cows.  The weather reports told us that is was going to be very hot, so we got started early that Saturday morning, and we were photographing our first cow by 9:00 AM.

This is a short story about our encounter with our 10th cow we photographed that morning. “Udderly Austin” was painted by Patti Schermerhorn, and was sponsored by Schlotzsky’s. Patti has a very nice web page showing the art projects that she has done for charities. She even has a photo of Jay Leno auctioning off Udderly Austin. [here]

Even though we had moved quickly and photographed 9 cows in just over two hours, we were already starting to suffer, as the temperature was already well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m not going to go into great detail in creating a story about just how brutal it was, but I was genuinely concerned about Dad’s ability to deal with this kind of heat – because I was also suffering from the stress of being out on the streets and sidewalks that were too hot to touch.

Udderly Austin was on the northeast corner of the Schlotzsky’s at the corner of South Lamar Blvd. and Toomey Road. This is adjacent to Zachary Scott Theater, just south of the Colorado River in downtown Austin.

As you can see by the shadow underneath this very colorful cow, the sun was almost directly over us at 11:15 AM that morning.

The scene painted onto this side of the cow is the view of downtown Austin that you would have if you simply walked a block to the northeast of where we were standing. That’s the Texas State Capitol Building on the face of Udderly Austin.

It was hot. Very hot. The sun was blazing. The heat radiating off of the sidewalk was cooking my sneakers. This was going to be done quickly, or someone was going to be taken to the hospital. I was going to circle this cow once, take a few photos, and get the hell out of there.

This was the photo that I used in my CowParade Austin calendar.

As I finished photographing the left side of Udderly Austin, I noticed that Dad had taken shelter in the shade of a nearby tree – and he didn’t look good.

I went around to the other side of the cow. This is the view that those inside of the Schlotzsky’s restaurant had of the cow. To me, it looked like a completely different cow than I had seen from the other side. Also, this side was in the shade, and background was nothing but blinding glare from the sidewalk street, and concrete pad that the cow was standing on. I popped my flash unit on top of my Canon 5D Mark II, and took this one photo.

You can see the reflections of the flash, and I knew that under different circumstances that I could have done much better. I also knew that we quickly needed to seek shelter somewhere, so there wasn’t time to dilly-dally. I walked up next to the cow and took a photo of the plaque underneath her.

It was too dang hot to even think about walking across Lamar Blvd. and the half block to our car. I suggested that we go inside of Schlotzky’s and get a iced soft drink. Dad would rarely ever go for such a suggestion, but this time he quickly agreed.

We spent nearly 30 minutes inside the air conditioned restaurant, and had nearly finished our second iced soft drink, before our body temperature returned to something near normal.  We had come dangerously close to heat exhaustion.

After we walked back to the car, we turned on the radio, where we learned that it was already 108 degrees (at only 12:00 PM). Now we have lived in Austin for 40 years, and we have seen our share of hot weather, but rarely does it ever got THAT hot here. I’m sure that we could count the number of times that it has been 108 or hotter on one single hand….

We did stop and photograph 3 more cows before we returned home, but I was able to park the car within 50 feet (16 meters) of each one, and the car’s air conditioner did its best to attempt to blow cool air on us between each stop. By the time that we got home, the temperature had reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

The record highest temperature ever recorded in Austin, TX is 112 degees. It has reached that mark twice. The 1st time was Sept. 5, 2000. The 2nd time it did so was the day after we photographed Udderly Austin (July 28, 2011).

I associate this cow with the incredible summertime heat. That is why she appears as “Miss July” in my CowParade Austin 2012 calendar.