Category Archives: Landscapes

Scenic views of the beautiful outdoors.

Austin Shutterbug Club Picnic at Emma Long Park

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Last Saturday, July 13, 2013, the Austin Shutterbug Club had a picnic at the Emma Long Park in west Austin.

You get to the Emma Long Park by going west on RM 2222, for about a 1/2 of a mile west of Loop 360, and then turning south on City Park Road. Stay on this windy, scenic road for about 7 miles to get to the park, which is on the north shores of Lake Austin. Now Lake Austin isn’t really a lake, it’s really the Colorado River immediately downstream of Mansfield Dam (which creates Lake Travis) and the Tom Miller Dam in west Austin (West Lake Hills) near the Hula Hut restaurant.

This was not an actual club “photography outing”, but rather an actual, old-fashioned picnic, as seen in the opening photo. (Only half of the members even brought a camera with them.)

I got there right at 9:00 AM, and after spending about 45 minutes socializing with the other club members who had also arrived, I grabbed my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, with my “usual” Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 lens, headed across the street and over to the water.

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The photo above is the root of a bald cypress tree. They grow right along the shores of the rivers here in central Texas, and extend their roots right into the water at the shore. Here’s a photo of the leaves and branch structure of this tree.

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Here’s a photo looking across Lake Austin to the south shore.

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With drought-stricken Lake Travis so low, there are no longer any public boat ramps still open (they don’t go down low enough to get to the current water level), many weekend boat owners have taken to using Lake Austin instead.

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As this is a dammed-up river, there really aren’t any waves, except for the ones created by the ski boats!

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While standing around talking to a few other club members who had brought their cameras and had come down to join me at the water, this tree seemed to catch my attention.

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A couple of the ladies in had even waded into the water, looking for interesting and different photographic opportunities.

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Linda, the lady on the left, had a Canon 5D Mark II, with the EF 70 – 200mm f/2.8 L II lens on it. She was not happy with the focusing of her camera, even after Canon had examined it.

After less than 10 minutes at the water’s edge, I decided to head back up to the rest of the group under the large oak shade tree. On the way, I passed this unused cooking grill.

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It will remain unused for the time being; due to the severe drought, there is a burn ban, even in the parks.

Even at 10:00 AM, in mid-July, the cloudless Texas sky is very hard and contrasty. There isn’t much you can do about it, other than just not take any photos for about 10 hours of the day….

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Or you can just try to make the best of it.

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Here’s a photo taken from the position of that rusty grill, looking back toward the water, and the other club members under the tree on the left.

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Looking for pretty much anything interesting to take a picture of, I spent a minute playing around with the colorful balloons that Brian had tied to the light stand that he had set up to let the arriving members that this was our spot.

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Not wanting to immediately sit down, I wandered around the picnic site for a few minutes, while listening in on the various conversations taking place around me. While doing that, I noticed this unusual axe head (someone had brought it to drive the stakes into the ground for the horseshoe game).

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And now to the point of being silly, here is the webbing on the back of the lawn chair that I had brought. 🙂

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About 10:15 AM, I headed off to the restroom, which was a clean, but steaming hot outhouse. The temperature was certainly close to 90 degrees (32 C) by now. On the way back, I noticed this tiny little flower, so even though it was in direct, mid-day Texas summer sun, I put my lens into macro mode, flipped out my rear LCD panel, held my camera about a foot (30 cm) off the ground, and snapped this photo.

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Since we weren’t going to eat until about noon, I still had plenty of time to wander around and take some more photos before it really got hot.

I headed back down to the water’s edge and just waited for some “interesting” waves to roll in.

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Even in the summer sun, you can still slow down the shutter to 1/80th of a second (f/7.1 and ISO 200) to get some motion blur to make these tiny waves appear to be much more active than they really are….

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Even though my “kit lens” only zooms out to 100mm equivalent (on a full frame camera), it still had enough of a reach to get a few photos of the passing boats. This next photo was cropped to show about 2/3 of the original image’s length and height.

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It was now close to 10:30 AM, and the temperature was certainly above 90 degrees, so I decided to head back to the picnic area (again) and put away my little camera and be more social than I had been.

And I’ll let this photo be my closing photo (as the boat goes away into the distance).

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We had a very, very nice picnic lunch, and I enjoyed the conversations that flowed around the group. There was a gentle breeze blowing under our large shade tree, which made it surprisingly pleasant – as long as you didn’t move around too much. When we packed up the cars to leave at 1:00 PM, the temperature had already risen to 104 degrees (40 C).

Thank you for stopping by and visiting my blog today.

Six Months for a Bradford Pear Tree

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Something very unusual is happening in Austin lately. Yesterday, nearly 4 inches (10cm) of rain fell in downtown Austin, and the weatherman said that it would all be gone by sundown. When we awoke this morning, it was raining gently, and continued to do so for over the next 3 hours. We are so grateful for the rain, that we don’t even mind that it’s during the weekend!

Anyway, I spent the morning getting all caught up on post-processing my photos. I had some unfinished work still from several months ago. As I was going back through the last several months of photos, I noticed that I had several photos of the Bradford Pear tree in our backyard. I decided to show some of them here. I’m going to keep the words to a minimum, but I will mention the date that each of the photos was taken.

The photo above was taken on December 1, 2012. I took the photo to show the beginning of the fall colors. If you look into the shadows underneath the tree, I hope that you can see all 4 of the deer that were staring at me while I took the photo.

It wasn’t until February 3, 2013 before I find another photo of this tree.

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Several varieties of trees in Austin keep their leaves all year long.

I took this next photo on the morning of February 21st, to capture the clouds as a weather front passed by our house.

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Just two days later, on Feb. 23, I took these next three photos, because the Bradford Pear tree was showing signs of budding out new leaves.

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Let’s get a little closer to see what’s happening here.

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And let’s get even closer…

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Three days later, on Feb. 26, I went out to see how things were progressing along.

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Five days later, on March 03, the tree was finally starting to blossom.

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Five days after that, on a drizzly March 8, it had lots of leaves, but not as many white blossoms as in a normal year. I think that is because we are about 2 and a half years into a severe draught in Texas.

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Since New Year’s we have had a normal amount of rainfall for our area, but the two years of draught prior to that have left Lake Travis about 52 feet (16m) below its full level, and many of the plants have been negatively affected as well.

Two days later, on March 10, I took these next three photos.

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It’s nice to see the clear blue sky again! Note that the old Cedar Elm tree that I use to frame the Bradford Pear tree hasn’t started to leaf out yet.

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On a few of the lower branches, there were a few blossoms.

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During most years, the entire tree is covered with these brilliant white blossoms – but not this year.

Ok, so fast forward about 4 weeks to April 7th. Spring has finally sprung!

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The yard is greening-up, and even the old Cedar Elm tree has leafed-out.

I went underneath the Bradford Pear tree and took this photo looking up into its branches.

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A week later, on April 13, not much has changed.

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But now fast forward until just 2 days ago on May 23rd.

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It’s amazing what a little yard fertilizer, a little rain, a weekly watering from the sprinkler system, and the mild temperatures that we’ve had this spring can do for a yard. That is the greenest that our yard has been in at least three years. And that photo was taken before the 4 inches (10cm) of rainfall that we’ve had in the last 24 hours!

I know that this blog post is quite a bit different than my normal posts. I didn’t really need to say anything. It would have been interesting to see what sort of comments people would have left, if I had simply shown the date underneath each photo – and not said anything else in this post…

Thank you for visiting my blog!

Bare Trees

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It’s been a long winter here in Austin. We haven’t had any snow or ice, but we have had several mornings where the temperature has dipped well below the freezing mark. I guess what makes it seem so long to me is that I rarely get outside between mid-December and early February.

It’s not because we have cold winter temperatures here, but it is because of what the local Austinites know as “cedar fever“. It is during this time of year that some of our trees pollinate, and it causes many Austinites to suffer.

This is actually a misnamed phenomenon. It is not really a fever, and the trees that pollinate are not actually cedar trees, but rather a type of juniper tree. They are the trees that appear green year-round, and you can see they come right up to our backyard.

20130203_Bare_Trees_001When I first moved to Austin in 1972, I was 17 years old. When I first heard about “cedar fever” I simply thought that these Texans were just a bunch of genetically deficient bunch of wimps. I arrogantly probably continued to think that for the next 14 or 15 years – until I also began to suffer from this allergy.

This year hasn’t been a particularly bad year for cedar fever, but I’m not one to go out and taunt Mother Nature.

Even though my blog post activities have dropped considerably, I have managed to stay pretty active with my photography. Last Thursday I took the day off of work to attend a Lightroom 4 seminar, where the presenter was Matt Kloskowski (one of Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Guys). Except for the January 9th rain, all of my photography has been indoors…

20130201_Evening_at_Home_002Now that the juniper trees are at the tail end of their pollinating season, it’s time to crawl out from the winter cave and enjoy the warm temperatures that have been prevailing here in Austin for the past month or so. It seems like every weekend in January, while the temperatures might have been very favorable, the constant gray clouds have pretty much killed any desires that I might have had to take a walk with my camera. It seems like all of the “pretty days” have been for me to observe from my office window, while I’ve been at work.

This is another view off of our patio. The bare tree on the right is a Bradford Pear tree. That is a fruitless variety, with magnificent white blossoms in the spring, and vibrant red leaves in the fall. As you can see, right now it is in “winter mode”, just like our yard grass.

20130203_Bare_Trees_003-2From a photography compositional perspective, I like this next view looking to the northeast the best.

20130203_Bare_Trees_005Here’s a view looking due north.

20130203_Bare_Trees_004That giant willow tree in my neighbor’s back yard doesn’t seem to ever shed its dead leaves until the week right before it puts out the new ones in the spring. The photo above made the giant willow tree the center of attention, but I thought it had too much of the pretty blue sky, so I took this next one aimed a bit lower.

20130203_Bare_Trees_006That photo seems to summarize the state of the trees in Austin right now. The trees are all bare, except for the green cedar (juniper) trees. At least those cedar trees are no longer heavily laden with their rust colored pollen!

The Super Bowl is going to start in about 3 hours. We haven’t turned our TV on yet, and we don’t want to until 30 minutes before the kick-off. There is only so much pre-game hype that I can tolerate. No, instead, I’m going to head outside and take my 3 mile fitness walk and enjoy the beautiful day that we have today in Austin. To hell with the cedar fever!

Thank you for visiting my blog.

Niagara Falls from a Hotel Room

Things at work are getting pretty busy again, and I haven’t been anywhere near a camera for a week now. So, I don’t have anything recent to share with you, so I went digging around in my archives and decided to show a series of photos of Niagara Falls.

Barb won a round-trip pair of airline tickets at the Alereon Holiday (Christmas) Party in December of 2008. We had a year to “cash them in”. We couldn’t think of anywhere that we really wanted to go, so we waited, and waited, and waited. Sometime during 2009, Barb’s friend Pam told us about a trip that she and her husband Bill had taken to Niagara Falls. Evidently they had a hotel room with a fantastic view of Niagara Falls.

That sounded like a great photographic opportunity to us, so a week before our airline tickets expired, we made reservations for June 2010 to fly to Buffalo, NY. We made the reservations over 6 months before we wanted to travel. We decided to go the week of June 22nd, 2010 because we knew that the days would have the maximum number of hours of daylight.

We made our reservation for the Niagara Falls Marriot, which is on the Canadian side of the falls in Ontario. We asked for a room on the upper floors, so that we could have a good view of the falls. We were told that we were guaranteed to get a room in the upper 6 floors (of the 23 total).

Zoom ahead in time to June 22nd, 2010. We had flown into Buffalo, rented a car for a week, and drove into Canada. We had not seen the falls, or any of the Great Lakes. Looking at the map showed that we should be very close, but we had not seen any water of any kind before we arrived at the hotel. When we checked in, I asked the clerk where the heck the Niagara Falls were actually located, and she said that they were right out back, and we should see them when we got to our room. So we hauled all of our luggage up to our room and opened the drapes. This is what we saw:

Holy cow! What a sight!

The shot above was taken right after we returned from dinner – right at 6:31 PM. The last photo in this post was taken at 10:03 PM, a span of only 3 and ½ hours.

The first photo to at the top of this post is shown again here. It is a panoramic, that is composed of 5 individual photos stitched together using an older version of Photoshop.

Niagara Falls is composed of two separate waterfalls. In the photos above, the falls on the left are called the American Falls, because the land on both sides of that waterfall is in the United States (in New York state). The falls on the right span across the international boundary with Canada, and are known as Horseshoe Falls, because of its U-shape.

The most significant thing that I want to bring your attention to is that every single photo in this post was taken from the exact same location, and that was from our room, and through a window that I really had to hunt for an acceptably clean spot to photograph through.

Both of the previous photo used my 24-105mm lens, zoomed all the way out to 24mm. I was using my 2 month old Canon 5D Mark II, which is a full-frame sensor camera. The next photo, of Horseshoe Falls, was taken with the lens zoomed to 50mm.

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I switched to my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, zoomed it to 173mm, and took this photo.

The method that I used to reduce unwanted reflections in the window was developed on the spot. At first I could see the white reflections of the curtains on the right and left sides of the photo, so I pulled them as wide open as they would go (and away from the camera). I did use a hood on the end of each lens. I positioned my tripod as close to the window as possible, but the heater/air-conditioner unit was directly under the window, which complicated that a bit. With my longer 70-200mm lens, I could have let the lens hood actually touch the window, but I did not want the vibrations from the air-conditioner, which were travelling up the window, to be transmitted to the lens, and therefore to the camera. So I left a 0.25 inch (6mm) gap between the lens and the window pane. Lastly, I got a large towel from the bathroom, folded it neatly lengthwise, and draped it over the end of my lens, and bridging the gap between the lens hood and the window pane. That sealed off any extraneous light from coming in from the sides, reflecting off of the glass window, and reducing the contrast in the photo. Lastly, we turned off all of the lights in the hotel room, except for the light in the bathroom, which was a long way behind us. (We needed some light in the room so that we could pour our wine…)

This photo was of the American Falls, using the 70-200mm lens zoomed all the way out to 200mm. This was taken at 6:45 PM, and there was still plenty of daylight, so the shutter was 1/640 of a second and the aperture was f/7.1. Every photo in this blog post was shot in Aperture Priority and had the ISO set to 200.

That photo was using the “longest” lens that I had. I then decided to switch to my “shortest” lens, a 16-35mm f/2.8 II lens. The next photo used that lens zoomed to 22mm, and shows a nice rainbow from the mist of Horseshoe Falls.

Back to the telephoto zoom to get a closer view of that rainbow in the mist.

The little boat just boat in front of American Falls is the Maid of the Mist.

There are actually several of these little boats, but they all seem to share that name. People board the Maid of the Mist on the Canadian side of the river, just past the American Falls. Once on board, they get you up close as they pass by the American Falls, and then take you deep into the mist at the base of Horseshoe Falls. We did take that boat ride a few days later, and I HIGHLY recommend it!

Putting my wide-angle 16-35mm zoom lens back on, I rotated the camera as far to the left as I could, and took this 1 second exposure with the lens zoomed to 19mm. This is our hotel (Marriot) and a few others lined up along this spectacular view.

You can see the reflection of our curtains along the left edge of the photo, but that was the best that I could do at the time….

We drank a glass of wine, relaxed, and waited for the sun to go down.

This next photo was taken at 9:19 PM. Even on the longest day of the year it would have been dark for 30 minutes by now back home in Texas!

The lens was at 19mm and the exposure was a 1.6 second shutter, f/6.3 aperture, and +2/3 stop exposure compensation.

Just 10 minutes later, at 9:29 PM, the sky had quickly turned to twilight. The next photo was taken at that time, with the lens zoomed out to 173mm, but the shutter was now open for 5 seconds.

Less than 2 minutes later, the color of the water seemed to change. What the heck? Using the exact same camera and lens settings, I quickly took this photo.

Within a couple more minutes, the color of the water had changed a couple of more times! It became apparent that this was a man-made phenomenon, but we had no idea how on earth they were doing it.

I was thrilled! I thought my photography was over for the evening, but it was far from over. The scene before us was simply becoming more spectacular with each passing minute!

This next photo was taken at 9:35 PM. The exposure settings were an 8 second shutter, f/6.3 aperture, + 1/3 stop exposure compensation.

Only three minutes later, I took this next photo, but I changed the lens from 35mm to 50mm focal length. I also used all the same exposure settings, except the shutter was now open for 13 seconds.

The change of colors was spectacular to see!  A couple days later, while walking along the river, we saw the large spot lights that they use to illuminate the falls with color. The lights were on the Canadian side, and they shine them across the river to paint the falls with colored light. We never saw the “light beams” cross the river, and I do not see them in these photos right now, either. Very clever!

As it got darker, I had to keep increasing the amount of time that the shutter would stay open. I was now up to 15 seconds.

And at 10:01 PM, I was up to a 20 second exposure.

The longer I kept the shutter open, the more amount of mist would be in the air, scattering the light, and obscuring the beautiful pastel colors of the falls.

This next shot was my last shot of the evening. It was taken at 10:03 PM, and the shutter was open for 25 seconds. It pretty much had to be my last shot, as the camera has a limit of 30 seconds for the shutter speed (in Aperture Priority mode), and the mist was really overtaking the falls.

So there you have it. Yet another sequence of photos, depicting a thin slice of time, where I had my camera with me, and was willing to experiment with it. Niagara Falls is certainly a site to see!

Austin Sunset Sequence

The photo above was taken on 2/3/2009 at 6:43:57 PM.

Here’s the sequence of photos that were taken before and after that photo. I had my tripod set up right next to the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue, and the camera was pointed towards the northeast. These photos were taken with a camera that I no longer have; my trusty old Canon 5D. For all of these photos, the ISO was set to 100, the aperture stayed at f/11, and only the shutter times were varied. Focal length of the 24-105mm zoom lens was set at 40mm.

The official sunset in Austin that particular day was 6:10 PM.

2/3/2009, 5:37:19 PM

2/3/2009, 5:53:47 PM

2/3/2009, 5:59:47 PM

2/3/2009, 6:08:52 PM

Official Sunset is 6:10 PM

2/3/2009, 6:17:13 PM

2/3/2009, 6:23:04 PM

2/3/2009, 6:30:12 PM

2/3/2009, 6:37:27 PM

2/3/2009, 6:42:58 PM

2/3/2009, 6:49:20 PM

2/3/2009, 6:55:17 PM

2/3/2009, 6:59:24 PM

Good night, and I hope you enjoyed the show.  I hope that you will click on the “Leave a Reply” link below and let me know if you like this type of post. Thanks!