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!

Experimenting with Outdoor Macro Photography Using Flash

20130510_Flash_Macro_089We haven’t been working very late into the Friday afternoons at the office lately. So, last Friday (May 10, 2013) I headed home about 2:00 PM. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, even though the temperature was above average – it was going approaching 90 degrees (32 C). I didn’t want to just sit around in the house surfing the web… I wanted to go out and make some photos!

The sky was a clear blue, with virtually no clouds. I thought that might help make some great downtown photos, but I didn’t want to deal with the hour long Friday afternoon rush hour traffic to get home. It was fairly breezy, so I didn’t want to try and do some macro photography of flowers wagging madly in that wind. Or did I?

Earlier in the week, I had attended Syl Arena’s Speedliter’s Intensive Workshop that he held here in Austin. Syl is universally recognized as the world’s renown guru on Canon Speedlite flash photography. If you are a Canon shooter, you simply must buy, read, and re-read his Speedliter’s Handbook.

Now I certainly wasn’t in the mood to be walking around my neighborhood with my heavy Canon 5D Mark II camera, the 100mm (non-IS) macro lens, and a 580EX II Speedlite. I was however, willing to try something new with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera. I thought I’d go out and try to stop the flowers in their tracks by using flash….

Now the rest of this blog is aimed toward my photography-oriented friends. If that’s not you, then feel free to stop reading right here and just scroll down through the photos. I’m about to describe the gear and the technique that I used to make these photos….

Since it was nearly 2:30 PM, with the sun high in the sky and no clouds in site, I doubted that I would need the f/2.8 aperture of my new Olympus 60mm macro lens. Instead, I decided that I would take my more versatile Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 lens, which also has a macro mode. (When in macro mode, the focal length is fixed at 43mm; 86mm equivalent on a full frame sensor camera.) On top of that, since it was so dang bright, I put a circular polarizer filter onto it.

Using a low ISO of 200, a small aperture opening (higher f-stop number), and a circular polarizer would normally require the shutter to stay open much longer than one would normally want – if their goal was to stop the motion of a flower wagging in the wind.

I intended to find out if using the very short duration burst of light that a portable flash emits could be used to stop that motion. I grabbed my Olympus FL-600R Wireless Electronic Flash and strapped a Small ExpoImaging Rogue FlashBenders reflector onto the top of the flash unit.

Since I didn’t want to use the flash while it was mounted in the hot shoe on top of the camera, I also grabbed my Canon OC-E3 Off-Camera Shoe Cord. One end of the cord attaches to the hot shoe of the camera, while the other end attaches to the base of the FL-600R flash unit. And yes, the Canon cord works perfectly with the Olympus camera and portable flash.

(I also have a virtually identical cord; the Vello OCS-C6, which is about half the price of the Canon cord. I keep the two cords together in identical zip-lock baggies, and I just happened to pick up the Canon cord.)

I put a spare camera battery into my right pants pocket, and 4 spare AA batteries in a holder into my left pants pocket.

OK, so that was my gear. My camera settings were to operate the camera in manual mode. I wanted the lowest ISO, which is 200 on this camera. I wanted the highest shutter speed, while not exceeding the sync speed of the camera, so I set it to 1/200th of a second. (The sync speed of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 is actually 1/250th of a second, but I couldn’t remember that, so I played it safe and set the shutter speed to 1/200th of a second.)

OK, so ISO was 200. Shutter speed was 1/200th of a second. What was my aperture? That was the variable that I played with!  I adjusted the aperture until the meter reading in the electronic viewfinder indicated anything from -1/3 stop down to -2 full stops below a proper exposure. In other words, I was simply underexposing the photo – until I got the flash involved. (Yes, I suppose I could have operated the camera in shutter priority mode and just dialed-in some negative exposure compensation.)

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Before heading out into my neighborhood, I went out our back door, onto our deck (patio) and set a custom white balance in the camera. I thought that the direct sunlight would have the same color temperature as the flash, and that they would be about 5500 degrees Kelvin. My WhiBal card indicated differently, and later Lightroom agreed with the camera that there was no color cast with the Temp slider at 5950 and the Tint slider at +3. That’s where I left the white balance on all of the photos that I took later, except for the ones with bright yellow petals. On those, I cooled down the temperature to 5350 degrees Kelvin.

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You can see in the photo above how dark (underexposed) the background is. That is what I was trying to do. I was intentionally adjusting the aperture so that the background would be slightly underexposed like that.

The magic happens when I turned on the flash. By putting the flash unit into the automated TTL (Through the Lens metering) mode – instead of manual mode – the flash puts out enough light until the camera thinks it has seen enough light needed for a proper exposure at the current aperture setting. When the camera and flash working together in TTL mode seemed to underexpose or overexpose the object in the foreground, the only control that I had for me to alter the result was by dialing up or down on the Flash Exposure Compensation setting.

I also had to aim the light. In the photo above, it’s pretty easy to see that I was just learning how to deal with this technique. It appears that I was holding the light too low, which resulted in some less than ideal shadows on the petals themselves.

The flash head will automatically widen or narrow the beam of light that it emits in order to cover the field of view that is seem though the lens. The flash was being told by the camera that the focal length of the lens was set to 43mm, so the flash was auto-zooming it’s head to create the relatively narrow beam of light to cover the area that would be seen through a 43mm (86mm equivalent) lens would see. The flash unit had no way of knowing that it was not mounted into the hot shoe on top of the camera, though. I changed the setting on the flash unit to manual zoom and changed it to a much wider beam of light by changing the zoom setting to 25mm (50mm equivalent). That gave a much softer bounced light off of the FlashBender.

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This is two-handed photography. I was following a technique where Robin Wong recently described how he does his fabulous macro photography of insects in Malaysia. (Be sure to click that link to see how he does this.) Robin appears to trigger his flash wirelessly, and although the flash that I was using could also be triggered wirelessly, I was using the Canon OC-E3 cord – the camera and flash don’t know that there is a cord between them.

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With the FlashBender mounted onto the flash unit, I was bouncing the flash off of it. Just like bouncing flash off of a ceiling or a wall, which makes the light source (the flash) much larger than when aiming the flash head directly at the subject. While I do have the Large size FlashBenders, I was using the much smaller Small size. Unfolded, the Small unit measures 10” x 7” (254mm x 178mm). I had the ends curled in, but not to the point that I had made a tube, or snoot, out of it.

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I mention that for two reasons. First, the size of the white surface that I was bouncing the light off of was still about 6″ x 7″ (152mm x 178mm). When I brought it in close to the flower or bee that I was photographing, the relative size of my light was getting to be huge in comparison to the object that I was photographing. That results in very soft shadows. And remember, these photos were all taken in direct sunlight, in the middle of the day!

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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.

The second reason that I mentioned the shape and the closeness of the FlashBender is this: The shutter speed of 1/200th of a second was not what was responsible for stopping the motion of the very busy honey bee. Instead, it was the much shorter duration of the burst of light emitted by the flash that was freezing his motion. Since I was underexposing the photo between -0.7 and -1.3 stops in most of the photos, the flash only had to add enough light the bring the exposure up by about 1 stop.

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Since that flash unit was being held very close to my subject, it didn’t really have to put out much more than just a puff of light. The less light it puts out, the less time the flash tube is emitting light, and therefore the duration of the burst of light was probably only about 1/1000th of a second. That is what was freezing the motion of the very busy bees and the constantly wagging flowers!

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Again, the only two adjustments that I was making were the aperture (to get me to an underexposed ambient light exposure) and the Flash Exposure Compensation (to manually influence the automated TTL operation of the flash unit). Sometimes I significantly underexposed the background, and sometimes not so much. Sometimes I wanted the flash to put out more light, and sometimes I didn’t.

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In the photo above, I had my flash unit underneath the flower, and was bouncing the light up onto the underside of it. You can see the black Velcro edge of my FlashBender in the lower right corner of the photo. I could have removed that in Lightroom (or Photoshop), but then I wouldn’t be able to show you this “trick”!

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In this photo, this blossom was on the end of a very long, spindly stalk, and it was wagging back and forth very wildly. It was coming toward me, and then going away from me. The Olympus OM-D E-M5 was having a terrible time of trying to focus on it. I just stood there and ripped off a dozen or so photos of it, and hoped that at least one of them would look sharp on my computer monitor. (Two of them did.) So, even with an electronic flash to help freeze motion, the dang camera has to focus on what you want it to!

I also had another new to me experience with this camera while shooting this way. I could see the results of my underexposure in real time by looking into the electronic viewfinder. Obviously that made everything pretty dark, so at times it was difficult to see what was going to be in focus. But, the instant that I would push the shutter button down halfway, two things would happen. First, the image in the electronic viewfinder would instantly get amplified and lit-up by the electronics to what would appear to be a normal exposure, and then (if you were lucky) you would see the focus lock indicator blink (which I had fixed to the center of the screen).

I don’t normally have the Autofocus Assist Beam turned on, but it was about this time on this walk that I decided to turn it on. It didn’t seem to help much… with my setting the autofocus to Single Shot Autofocus, it just didn’t help much with quickly moving objects – and with a macro lens, everything seems to move rather quickly. I seemed to have the most trouble focusing on red colored flowers.

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Just to play around with the flash in a different way, I set it to FP TTL Auto mode, which is what Canon calls High Speed Sync flash. The photo above was taken with a shutter speed of 1/320th of a second, and the next one was taken with a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second.

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In FP TTL Auto mode, the flash unit turns into a very high frequency strobe light. I don’t know how fast the Olympus FL-600R pulses, but the Canon 580EX II pulses at 30,000 times a second! That effectively turns your little flash unit into a strobe that starts flashing before the first curtain of the shutter opens, and continues flashing until after the second curtain has completely closed. Of course, the flash unit cannot pump out its maximum intensity of light while it is doing that, but like I said before, I had my light so close to my subject that I just needed it to put out a puff of light anyway.

You can tell in the previous photo that my light was just outside of the left side of the photo. The Inverse Square Law is definitely in effect here!

That last photo, the flower of the plumbago plant was just 6 inches (15cm) off of the ground. This is when I was really glad that I didn’t have to get down on my knees, bend over and look through the viewfinder while holding the camera in my right hand and the flash in my left hand. Instead, I tilted the rear LCD (it’s really an OLED panel) up, let the camera strap around my neck hold the camera at the desired height, and used my right thumb on the shutter button.

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OK, so the FP TTL Auto works just fine, but I didn’t really need to use it, so I set the shutter speed back down to 1/200th of a second. As the photo above shows, even at f/11, and on a Four-Thirds sensor, you just don’t get a lot of Depth of Field when using a macro lens at close range.

The one thing that I really need to improve upon is my composition. Almost all of these photos have the subject in the center of the frame. In self-defense, there are two factors that also lead me down this monotonous path…. First, I set my autofocus point to be the one in the center of the  frame. If I didn’t do that, the camera would tend to focus on the part of the flower that was closest to the camera. In general that would be OK, but that makes it virtually impossible to focus on a bee, or other object that is not the front object. The second factor is that these flowers, and bees, were almost in constant motion. It doesn’t take much movement, when shooting at these close distances, to have 1/3 or more of the flower end up being cut-off as the wind quickly accelerates the flower from where it just was. There were several flowers that I tried to photograph that afternoon, where I was not successful in getting the entire flower into the picture – so centered in the frame is what I usually walked away with.

Now this next photo is unusual to me. A cloud came over us, dimming amount of sunlight. To get my ambient exposure down to about -1 stop, the aperture was f/10 and the shutter was a relatively long 1/50th of a second.

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As soon as I took the photo, the review image that shows up in the electronic viewfinder showed violet flower in an electric, iridescent color. I don’t know if the slower shutter speed had any effect on that or not. It seems that the white balance contribution between the ambient and the flash was the same as all of the other photos, but something was making the flash turn these flowers into something psychedelic. Maybe I had spent too much time photographing the poppies down the street….

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This is the yellow flower of the prickly pear cactus, and they look like they are going to put on a spectacular showing this year. Cactus flowers are easy to photograph, simply because they don’t move very much when the wind blows!

Not knowing what the heck was going on with the colors (all of a sudden), I bounced the shutter speed back up to 1/250th of a second to capture this trio of lantanas.

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I was almost home, so just to get familiar with the modes of the flash, I set the shutter speed to 1/500th of a second (aperture f/6.3), and had the flash in FP Auto TTL mode for this single lantana bloom.

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It is worth repeating this: these photos were taken in the middle of the day, under what is considered to be extremely hard lighting conditions. Look again at the photo directly above, and see if you can spot the hard edge of the shadows. I can’t.

I was pleased to see that I had found a way to freeze the motion of the wagging flowers, without having to take a dozen photos and the toss out the blurry ones later. As long as the camera would achieve focus and then snap the shutter before the flower (or bee) had moved out of the range of focus (depth of field), the flash would freeze them in place for me.

I would like to mention that this was the very first time that I have ever wished that I had a more substantial grip area on the camera. I’m sure it was because I had been shooting for nearly two hours by holding the camera in only my right hand. My hand was beginning to get stiff and somewhat sore. I had been holding the camera with two fingers and a thumb – while my third finger was on the shutter button and my pinky finger was curled into my palm underneath the camera body.

Next time I will attach my Really Right Stuff BOEM5 base plate for the Olympus OM-D E-M5. Maybe it will be enough extra area to hold on to.

Just three houses from my home, I spotted this “camo lizard” on my neighbor’s driveway. I popped my lens out of its macro mode zoomed it all the way out to 50mm and walked as close as I thought I could get to this little guy and snapped this photo. Even the soft sound of the shutter on this mirrorless camera was all that it took to have him scurry off to safety under their car.

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The last thing that I would like to mention here is about my batteries. I took over 340 photos in under 2 hours. All but about 5 of those photos were flash photos. I never had to change the battery in my camera, or the AA batteries in the FL-600R flash unit. I never would have predicted that! It just goes to prove that you can overpower the mid-day sun with little puffs of light.

Thank you for visiting my blog!

Capturing Spring with the Olympus 60mm Macro Lens

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Less than 48 hours after we went on the tour of Circuit of the Americas race track here in Austin, TX, I went for my second walk around my neighborhood with my new Olympus M.Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 lens. I had it on my trusty little Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera. The LH-49 lens hood had finally come in to Precision Camera, and I had it on my lens for this flower hunting excursion.

Spingtime has been in full swing here for over a month now, and I really wanted to get out and photograph some of the beautiful flowers while they were still out in full force.

So, on Saturday April 27, 2013 I went for a 3 and a half hour walk before lunch.

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Single

 

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Double

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.

Fortunately, the sunlight was diffused by an overcast sky full of clouds. There was only a mild breeze when I started out, but it did get progressively stronger as I went along. Also, the clouds dissipated over the course of the morning, and by the time I got home, the direct sunlight was really making this type of photography a real challenge.

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View from Above

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Same Flower from Below

I was determined to try and do a better job of catching the flowers at a standstill this time out. Even in a mild breeze they seem to wag around continuously, and never come to a complete standstill for more than a fraction of a second. As a result, I always took multiple photos of the same flower.

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About to Bloom

 

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Honey Bee

 

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Oleander Blossom

Even though the lens is a macro lens, it can also be used as a standard mild telephoto lens (120mm equivalent on a full frame camera).

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Yard Bunnies

 

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Purple Iris with Wary Insect

 

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Wasp

 

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Busy Bee

 

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Bee in a Poppy

 

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Poppy Seeds and Poppy Flower

 

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Ants on an Orange Lantana Blossom

 

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The size of this very small Prickly Pear bud is about 1/2 inch (1 cm) across!

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This photo of a Texas Bluebonnet was cropped from a landscape orientation to this portrait orientation.

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Multiple colors

 

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Garden Bunny with Yellow Rose

 

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This little flower had a bug on it (at the top) and several water droplets still on it from the lawn sprinkler.

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This photo shows just how breezy it had become. Besides, I like our US flag!

At this point I had been gone for just over 2 and a half hours and I noticed that my low battery indicator was starting to flash. That was over 575 photos with a single battery! I didn’t wait for it to die on me, so I changed it out with the spare one I had in my pocket.

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Yellow Flower

 

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With light colored flowers like this, I add from +2/3 to +1 stop of exposure compensation. It is very easy to see that this is needed, due to the excellent electronic viewfinder built into this Olympus OM-D camera.

Now on the very same plant as the flowers in that previous photo, was this tiny little lizard. I don’t know who was more surprised to see the other, but he didn’t move more than 6 inches (15 cm) while he watched me take 15 photos of him!

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Little Lizard

And this next photo seemed to be a fitting analogy to my morning. Just like this busy little bee was covered in pollen, he was still hard at work. Similarly, even though I had several hundred photos already on my memory card, I was still hunting intently for more of God’s beautiful creations to photograph up close!

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I had a lot of fun walking around with my new macro lens. With the breezy conditions, I was intently focused on trying to capture some sharper photos than I did on my previous outing with this lens. I believe that I accomplished that, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

After reviewing several hundred photos from this outing, one thing that quickly becomes obvious is that I need to get the center of attention away from dead center in the frame.

I hope that you enjoyed seeing this set of macro photos, and I thank you for visiting my blog!

Tour of Circuit of The Americas – Part 2

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This is the second part of my blog posts showing the photos that I took while on a tour of Circuit of The Americas (COTA) race track in Austin, Texas on Thursday, April 25, 2013. Circuit of The Americas was recently constructed just southeast of Austin specifically to be the only Formula One (F1) racetrack in the United States. In case you missed it, you can find the first part here.

Before I get started on Part 2, I need to bring to your attention an inaccuracy that I reported in Part 1. I had stated: “The building on the right is owned by the Formula One organization, and can only be used by the Formula One organization. It therefore sits idle for 51 weeks out of the year. This building is called the paddock.”

A couple of readers pointed out that those statements simply were not true. I sent an email to COTA asking for their help in correcting this information. Here is what they told me: “The paddock building is only used by F1 during that race. It is rented out for events or used as a spectator area during other events. It is not vacant 51 weeks out of the year.”

Now that this has been taken care of, it’s back to Part 2!

I was lucky enough to be allowed to tag along with my wife, Barb, on this tour, which was organized by the UT SAGE group that she belongs to. I brought only my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, with the Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 lens.

The photo above is the same one that I showed at the end of Part 1 of my story. That is Turn 17 immediately below you in the foreground, and Turn 11 is way off in the distance, near the upper left corner of the photo.

In this blog post, I will not be showing the photos in the order that I took them. Instead, I will try to show the turns of the race track in the order that the racers encounter them.

Turn 1 is in the southeast corner of the tack, and here is what it looks like from the observation tower.

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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.

The whitish building between the seats and Turn 1 is the parking lot that we were in when I took the photos of Turn 1 (that I showed in Part 1). That is Turn 2 as the track exits the lower left corner of the photo above.

This next photo starts with the pedestrian bridge, located between Turn 2 and Turn 3, and takes you all the way out to Turn 11 in the far back left corner.

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The red, white, and blue painted areas are considered to be “off the official track”. They are more like a “warning track”. The drivers are allowed to drive on them, without any penalty for doing so, if they ended up out there as a result of losing control in the previous turn.

This next photo is basically the same view as the previous one, but I zoom in as far as my little lens will go. It shows Turn 5 (in the foreground) to Turn 11.

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At this point, the racers really get up to some very high speeds as they travel the long straight-away between Turn 11 and Turn 12. That straight away comes into this next photo from the top right corner of the photo.

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Here you see Turns 12 through 16. For a sense of scale, that is a full size water truck on the race track to the left of the pedestrian bridge. That pedestrian bridge is right at the beginning of Turn 17.

Looking straight down from the front of the observation tower (toward the east), you see the short straight-away between Turn 17 and Turn 18.

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Turn 18 is a 90 degree turn to the right, and you can see it in the lower right corner of this photo looking due south.

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When I took the photo above, I was more interested in the multiple horizontal layers: the race track, the back side of the paddock, the grandstand just beyond that, the southern parking lot (and I can see my little CR-V!), the country side view beyond that, and also Texas Toll Road 130 crossing over the horizon.

Looking back down onto the track, here’s a much better view of Turn 18.

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And finally, this next photo completes “our journey” around the track. The stars lead into Turn 19 and the furthest turn from you in this photo is the final turn – Turn 20. Right after that last turn, the racers cross the start/finish line between the paddock and the grand stands.

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So far, I’ve shown you the view from three sides of the observation tower. The fourth side is the back side of the tower, and that is towards the west. At the base of the back side of the tower is the Austin360 Amphitheater.

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The red pipes that swoop up the back side are about 5 feet (1.5 m) from the railing surrounding the platform that we were standing on. To get the previous photo, I leaned over the rail a little bit (certainly not a lot!) and extended my camera out as far as I could while keeping the camera strap around my neck, and used the Live View on the rear LCD to compose the photo.

The schedule of what bands will be performing here is most impressive, and the schedule can be found here. The evening after we were there, The Lumineers were to perform! The next scheduled concert is Jimmy Buffet, who will be there Thursday evening. Dave Matthews Band, Mumford and Sons, and Train are a few of the bands that I personally know that I would enjoy seeing.

You can take the stairs down, and I believe that I was the only one to do so. I knew that it would take the elevator at least two trips to get everyone else in our group back down to ground level. I thought that I would be down before they all got down, but I was mistaken! When I finally got to the ground, the group was nowhere around.

I stood there and took this photo of the is 251 feet (76.5 m) tall observation tower.

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I thought that I heard the faint voice of our tour guide in the distance. He seemed to be in the backstage area of the amphitheater, so that’s where I headed. Just before I caught up with the group, they had all turned around and were heading back towards me…. I had missed the tour guide’s speech, but I swam upstream like a salmon to get only two very quick photos of the amphitheater as seen from the stage.

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Just think – The Lumineers would be on that stage in just over 24 hours, in front of a sold out audience!

I had to walk quickly out of the backstage area to catch up with our tour group. A few others with cameras were standing at the base of the tower looking up, so I figured I had at least a couple minutes to do that myself.

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The photo above is from the back side of the tower, while the next one is from the front side, right by the open door of our bus.

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That was pretty much the end of our tour. The busses took us back to our cars in the south parking lot. The bus drivers, the tour guides, and everyone that we had an encounter with were very friendly, helpful, and answered any question that anyone in our group had.

Barb waited patiently in my “racing Honda” while I got a photo of it in front of the entrance to the grand stands. 😉

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And as we circled our way around to get out of the parking lot, I couldn’t help but stop the car, get out, and take one last parting shot of the entrance with the observation tower also in the photo.

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Well, I hope that you enjoyed seeing what we saw on our tour of Circuit of The Americas (COTA). I wouldn’t call my photos artwork, but I do hope that I did a good enough job documenting what I saw that will give you a good sense of what this new facility looks like. Maybe you will remember seeing my photos when you get out there to see it for yourself.

Thank you for visiting my blog!