Tag Archives: Austin

My First Photo Walk in Downtown Austin – Part 2

This is the continuation of my story of my first time to visit downtown Austin, with my camera, with the intention of simply walking around and taking photos of whatever seemed to catch my eye.  I had no agenda, no time requirement, and no plan.

I was walking with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, my four lenses, and a flash in my little Domke camera bag, but I had left my small Gitzo Traveller tripod back at the car. I had the Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 zoom lens with a circular polarizer on. This was my first time at this game, and I wanted the versatility that the zoom lens would offer.

During Part 1 of my story, which you can read here, I had travelled the route shown here:

I had just made it through the Farmers Market in the park between 4th and 5th streets, just west of Guadalupe, and was heading toward the corner of San Antonio and West 6th Street. This entire post is only going to take me west on 6th Street to Lamar Blvd., as shown on this map:

It was still before 9:00 AM, but the sun had been up for 2 and ½ hours already. The summer haziness in the air was still keeping a “warm glow” to the morning sunlight – but I knew that would quickly end.

Now moving west, I had the sun coming up from behind me. Just a half a block east of San Antonio St, I passed  the Austin Wine Merchant store.

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Across the street, looking to the south, you can see the 44 story 360 Building with the 360 Condominiums.

At the next corner, which is Nueces Street, sits the Star Bar.

While standing in the exact same location, I turned around to look back toward the buildings that I had walked beneath earlier (in Part 1). That’s the 56 story Austonian on the left.

Moving just 100 feet or so west past Nueces St, and looking toward the southwest, I zoomed my 12-50mm lens all the way out to 50mm (100mm equivalent on a full-frame camera) to compress this view of the 29 story tall Monarch Apartments above Walton’s and The Hoffbrau steak house.

The next intersection would be Rio Grande Street, on the northeast corner, sits Katz’s Deli, whose slogan is Katz’s Never Kloses. The only problem is that they went out of business a couple of years ago! That’s too bad, as it was a very popular place to go after the bars on East 6th Street had closed. I believe a lot of people got sober enough to drive home after eating some great New York style deli food at 3:00 AM.

From that same intersection, I crossed 6th Street to walk on the south side of the street, and as soon as I got across the street, I saw this unusual scene.

That is the Monarch Apartment building towering over Gatti’s Pizza. I wanted to get the tennis shoes in the previous photo, but I liked the composition of the next photo much more, so here it is, too.

Now, just behind Gatti’s Pizza on 6th Street, I came upon this faded set of stairs, complete with graffiti, a ripped poster, and littered with plastic drinking bottles. I intentionally put my shadow right where you see it in this next photo.

No, that’s not a cowboy hat. It’s an Australian Barmah Canvas Drover hat, which I bought from a street vendor at The Pecan Street Festival way back in May of 2007. It has served me very well, and I could tell lots of photography-related stories about that hat, but not in this blog post!

Standing in virtually the very same spot, I simply turned around to see this magnificent little mural on a concrete wall that is only about 6 feet tall (2m).

I don’t believe that I had ever seen that piece of art before, simply because the traffic on 6th Street is one-way going west, and you have to look to the east to see it.

Just a half a block ahead is West Avenue, and one lot south of 6th Street on West Avenue is Frank & Angie’s Pizzeria. I’ve never eaten there, but I liked the way the still early sunlight was illuminating the colorful sign, and the shadows of the non-lit neon tubes.

Back onto 6th Street, a half block ahead, just before Shoal Creek is the historic Hut’s Hamburgers. I’ve heard about this place for decades, but I’ve never been there….  and probably won’t for quite some time, given that Barb and I rarely eat red meat anymore.

It was now 9:00 AM. Every photo in this post so far had been taken in 11 and ½ minutes (and I had been walking for exactly one hour now). I am not bringing this up to impress anyone, other than to reveal just how much there is to see in this crazy town in just 3 and ½ blocks on one street – and not even in the heart of the city. I have shown 12 of the 24 photos that I had taken in that brief time, and 17 of them are worth keeping.

It is worth mentioning right here that this is not “art photography”. At least I don’t consider it that. If I was attempting to create art, I would not be buzzing about like a bee, jumping from one flower to the next in rapid succession. The vast majority of the time, I use a sturdy, bulky tripod when I photograph. I use it not just to keep the camera rock steady, but by using it, it forces me to slow down and be much more deliberate in my approach. This handheld flitting-about was something relatively new to me, but I was having a very fun time doing it!

Even though I wasn’t thinking of “creating art”, I was trying to create somewhat pleasing compositions, and proper exposures. My real goal was just to get a feel for what it’s like to shoot in an urban setting, and get to know the lay of the land. I was definitely a tourist in my own town!

Just past Shoal Creek and the next intersection, which is Wood Street, is GSD&M. This is a local Advertising and Marketing firm which is known internationally.

Checking out the GSD&M web site reveals a very impressive array of clients!

And here’s their front entrance.

Directly across 6th Street from GSD&M, on the south side of the street is the world headquarters of Whole Food Market.

Whole Food Market occupies and entire city block, bounded between 5th and 6th streets, Bowie Street on the east, and Lamar Blvd on the west.

Barb and I have only bought our weekly groceries here one time. It was quite an experience! We came on a Saturday morning, and parked under ground in their parking lot. It was very enjoyable, and the food is great, but this is a 25 minute drive from our house, and there is another one of their stores up in “our neck of the woods” in northwest Austin. Even so, we only shop there for very special occasions, like when we have a dinner party.

Walking a half block west, toward Lamar Blvd, I came to these stairs which take you up to the front surface parking lot. I thought the ironwork was interesting, so I tried to make an interesting composition that included it.

And just before 6th Street and Lamar Blvd, at the northwest corner of the entire block that Whole Foods Market sits on, there was this beautiful Pride of Barbados plant (thanks Diane!). Even though it was in direct sun, and I knew that would “wash out” some of the color of its very vivid flowers, I still thought it was worth photographing.

Across the street is one of Barb’s favorite stores, although she rarely makes it to this downtown location. (For the very same reason why we don’t come to this Whole Foods Market.)

Standing at the corner of 6th and Lamar, and looking northwest, there are two other businesses that are iconic to Austin: Waterloo Records and Amy’s Ice Cream.

Yes, we have an honest-to-god record store here in Austin, although I’m sure that they sell many more CDs than they do vinyl records. Everyone who lives in Austin has heard of Amy’s Ice Cream, and it is very highly regarded by all proper citizens. 🙂

Walking about 50 feet south on Lamar Blvd, and looking to the southeast, you get a very nice view of the 41 story Spring Condos building. It’s nice to see the construction cranes rising into the Austin sky again.

This was as far from my car as I knew that I was going to get. I had been walking for only 1 hour and 10 minutes. I had been using the same 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 lens, with a circular polarizer, for the entire walk so far. I had been carrying my small bag with 3 other lenses in it, and there was a reason that I had brought them with me. So it was here that I sat on a little bench and put on a different lens.

To be continued…

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…