If you have my 2012 CowParade Austin calendar, or if you are a regular visitor to my blog, you probably flipped the calendar over to December and saw the image above.
This cow, named Flamencow, was created by Elizabeth C. Sullivan. Flamencow was on public display at the corner of East 5th Street and Neches Street, which is the northwest corner of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Austin.
Elizabeth was also the artist that created the cow named Cowjunto Music, which I used as “Miss April” in my CowParade Austin 2012 calendar. You can check out Elizabeth’s web site here.
Elizabeth also has a very nice web page that shows her two cows at the various stages of her creating them, and you should check that out here.
Reminder: You can always view any photo at a larger size by just clicking on it. You will then need to use your browser’s “Back Button” to return to my story.
I don’t really have much of a story to accompany these photos, other than the difficulty that Dad and I had in hunting this particular cow down so that we could shoot it.
We had originally mapped out our route to photograph this cow a few weeks earlier. The directions that we had said that it was located at 500 East 4th Street. That would be south entrance to the Hilton, nearest The Austin Convention Center. There was no cow there. We circled the hotel, and did not find any cows there.
We asked the bell hops outside the main entrance on the west side, and asked if they knew of any CowParade cows, or any other cows that were residing in the area. One of them seemed to remember seeing one recently, but couldn’t remember where. We went inside and asked the concierge if he knew anything about any cows on display in the area.
Well, yes, he had. They had taken inside to a storage area, and were waiting for the artist to come get it. We were somewhat taken aback by that answer, and asked why it wasn’t on public display.
It seems that late the night before, some drunks returning from a late night of partying on 6th Street decided to rock the cow back and forth until they succeeded in tipping it over onto its side. Apparently one of its ears was severely damaged, and the artist was coming to get it and attempt to repair it.
Dad and I were completely disgusted that someone in our town would do something like that. I don’t care how drunk they were. It wasn’t like they stumbled into the cow and just happened to knock it over. No, they rocked it back and forth until it toppled over. Probably laughed loudly as they stumbled off afterwards, too (purely conjecture on my part).
We came back a week or two later, and still the cow was not on display. We returned again on September 17, 2011, and there she was! Flamencow was all decked out in drag! (Is that possible, since it was a “she”?) That was one smokin’ hot…. no, make that one flaming, cow. I love the fishnet hose, the garters, and the hair net! I’m not quite sure what to think about those nipple rings, though (ouch!)
It was an overcast morning, so I didn’t have to deal with any direct sunlight issues. I did not use any fill flash on any of these photos of Flamencow. The only thing I remember trying to do was to get a view with the least distracting background. I simply circled this cow, waited for several pedestrians and cars to “get out of my way”, and snapped off these 5 photos of Flamencow in just over 6 minutes.
I knew right from the start that I was going to include this cow in my CowParade Austin 2012 calendar, and in the end, it was the red and green Christmas color scheme that made it an easy choice for “Miss December”.
This is the last month of my CowParade Austin 2012 calendar, but there were s few photos of other cows (inside front and back covers, and on the back, etc.) that I might tell about sometime in the future. Right now I’m getting tired of writing a story at the beginning of every month for something that happened well over a year ago. When I look at these photos, I think that they are “pretty good”, but can’t help but think that maybe I could do a little better now. But then I remember that for all of these cows, we simply had to photograph them wherever we found them, under whatever lighting conditions that existed at the time that we were there.
You can always find all 72 of the CowParade Austin cows here on my website by going back up to the top of my home page, and directly under the banner with the 3 thumbnail images of Austin scenery, clicking on the link for “Photo Gallery” and selecting CowParade Austin 2011. Or you can just click here.
Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog!
Just when you think you’ve seen them all you get something like this. What a grand lady with some nice detail by the artist.
Public art is tough to shoot and each object is different. I would maybe try at sunset and and drag a kid along with me to point a softbox. You really need to watch the framing closely on stuff like this too. I have had my share of background blunders with one woman walking by flipping me the bird and one act of public urination. Yes, people are strange indeed!