CowParade Austin, Photography

CowParade Austin Calendar – February – Moosic Capital

4 Comments

This is only the 2nd day of my new web site, and already I find myself with something to add.  I don’t believe I am a blogger, but two days in a row might make one wonder….

Today about 40 of my friends, family, and clients will be turning the page on the CowParade Austin 2012 promotional calendar that Barb and I had made and handed out around Christmas.  For February, the pictured cow is “Mosic Capital”. The artist is Sharon Roy Finch, and the financial sponsor was Coats Rose.

This cow was located on the southeast corner of 2nd and Congress Ave. here in Austin, TX. Dad and I arrived a little after 8:00 AM on Sept. 3, 2011 to photograph this cow, which was positioned very close to one of the Austin GuitarTown guitars that were on public display in 2007. The guitar was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Lonestar”.

There was a bright haze in the sky, so we tried to keep it out of our photos, but that wasn’t easy.  The most difficult part of the photo that ended up in the calendar was simply waiting, and waiting for an opportunity for when there were no pedestrians or ugly traffic in the background.

The photo above appears to be compressed horizontally when viewed in Internet Explorer 8, but looks fine in Internet Explorer 9. Not sure how any of this appears in other browsers. I have no idea why this is happening – the photo above was exported from Lightroom with the exact same settings as the photo below. By the way, to “uncompress” the photo above, or to see any of these photos at a larger size, just click on them. You will then have to use the “Back” button to return to my post.

What surprised me the most about this cow was how different it looked on the opposite side from what is shown on the calendar. Here it is:

That is an accurate color rendition!

Anyway, here are a few other photos that I took while we were near this particular cow.

 It would be great if you could leave a comment, letting me know if you liked this, or not.

Thanks!

Web Site Development

A Bridge Under Construction

7 Comments

For the past few months, I have been wrestling internally with myself over what to do with my old, outdated web site.  I mean, it was up and running, and had links to a few of my photo galleries, but it just looked like it was designed in 1996.  Well actually it was….

So I did a little research, and stumbled upon a book named “Get Your Photography on the Web” by Rafael “RC” Conception.  In it, he described how to build a new web site using a open framework utility program known as WordPress.  I started reading this book before Christmas, got about half way through, and then got busy with other aspects of trying to set up my new photography business.  About a week ago, I picked the book back up again – this time with determination to get it done.

After finding out that my old web site was on an old server, that would not support WordPress, the tech support at Go Daddy moved my old web site to a newer server, and sent me the instructions on how to install WordPress.

Yesterday I went to a Scott Kelby seminar here in Austin, and at the lunch break I walked up, intruduced myself to Scott, shook his hand, and had him autograph my Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It book that I had brought to the seminar with me.  I handed him my new photography business card. I also said something about my web site being very poor, and told him that I had bought RC’s book, and was about to do something about it.  Scott replied with something like, “Well, that’s a good start.”  He was trying to be polite and somewhat encouraging, but after I returned to my seat I vowed that I just wasn’t ever going to have to feel embarassed or apologetic about my web site.  Sooo…

Last night I went home, deleted everything off of my old web site, and instructed Go Daddy to install WordPress to run my web site.  So here it is…. and now I need to learn how to use it!  Feel free to watch me build this bridge.  I don’t know if I will figure it all out quickly or not.

I hope to.  I need to!

Thanks for reading.

Gregg