Barry the Photographer

Also from this past weekends BPC field trip to the Goose Creek stream area of Baytown Texas. This shot is of my other brother Barry, BAPC Photographer of the Year, working his magic.

Teenage Photographers

I believe my niece, pictured here from last weekends field trip, is the youngest member of the Baytown Photo Club. It's good to see here involved in a thoughtful and positive endeavor like photography, it would be good to see other teenagers participating.

San Jacinto Hospital Baytown

Taken this past weekend on the Baytown Photo Club's field trip, this shot is of the old San Jacinto Memorial Hospital on Decker Drive in Baytown, Texas. I'm not sure how long the hospital was in operation but I know my twin brother and I were born there in June of 1958 and my late wife passed away there in October of 1999. During that time the top story , or maybe two, was added and the hospitals role in the community changed from decade to decade.

Goose Creek Stream Baytown

This shot of Goose Creek in Baytown, TX was taken while on a field trip with the Baytown Photography Club this past Saturday. It's a handheld triple exposure HDR combined in Photomatix Pro and finished with Topaz Adjust. I used my Oly E-3 and Sigma 50-500 to capture the scene.

BNC Mockingbird

A Mockingbird shot taken at the Baytown Nature Center a couple of weeks ago. On to something other than birds for the rest of the week, promise....

Painterly Hawk

Rounding a week that was mostly for the birds, this is another shot from the Baytown Nature Center this weekend. To me this posted version has a water color feel that I really like.

Baytown Bald Eagle

Not the best shot of the Baytown Eagle(s) I've seen, but it's the best one I've taken so far. From last weekend, this shot is of one of the pair on the nest @ 167 yards. It's about a 50% crop taken with my 50-500 lens and a 1.4 teleconverter in available light.

Pelican In Flight Part 2

Same Pelican, different shot....

BNC Pelican in Flight

This shot, and yesterdays, were both taken with my newest lens last weekend. I've added the Sigma 50-500 "poor man's" superzoom to my bag of tricks. This lens, commonly know as the "Bigma", has been around [with a few updates] for around 8-10 years best I can tell. On my E-3 2 to 1 crop camera with a 1.4 tele-converter I should net a theoretical 1400MM 35MM equivalency. I don't expect this to actually pan out but I am hoping for some added flexibility to my shooting.

Presidential Busts

In honor of President's Day I decided to drive over to David Adicke's studio on the northeast side of downtown Houston to take some photo's. David Adicke is famous sculpting giant busts of US presidents. His studio, off of Summer St., is quite a surreal place. He reproduces fairly large numbers of the bust so the areas around his studio feature lots of heads staged for shipment.

GENISIS OF A SURREAL PHOTO

In yesterdays post I shared my entry in Tuesday’s nights BAPC “Honors Night” assignment “Surreal Composite.” Several people has asked me about my thought process for developing this shot so today I thought I would summarize a portion of it.

My thinking on the assignment was that the place to start was with an interesting “base” photo. I didn't have any kind of a vision of the finished shot when I started, only this idea that if I could find any kind of a good starting point I would build from there through the required “Composite” portion of the assignment. My original inspiration photo [on Clinton Drive East of Lockwood in Houston] is below...

I certainly thought this scene, with an illogical haggard building perched high on top of a dilapidated old commercial structure in a run down section of town, with the surprise of a distinctly rural grazing horse in front was a surreal shot from the start. But the assignment was for a "Composite" and I could see lot’s of enhancement opportunities through the composite process.

Below is an intermittent version of the shot before I decided a ‘less would be more” approach to the shot was the way to go and cropped away the lower third. This included cropping out the horse which was one of the strongest elements that originally drew me to the subject, a phenomenon which I’ve encountered before.

At the end of the day I was happy with the decision to keep the more interesting [to me] top portion of the photo. I think the final shot [see yesterday's post] ended up conveying the dark sense of mystery that I had hoped for once the base image was selected. And now you know the rest of the story.

Jilted Bride

Last night's Bay Area Photo Club of Clear Lake's "Honors Night" assignment was "Surreal Composite" and my entry here was awarded a Silver from the panel of judges. This image is a composite of seven separate images and was the result of working through 3 to 4 other "final" versions.

BNC No Name Creek

One of many small boggy streams at the Baytown Nature Center photographed this past weekend. [Click on image to see larger version.]

Seagull Soaring

From the archives, this one just seemed like a warm shot for a dreary day!

Hawk of a Different Color

This is an extreme crop of a small hawk I photographed at the Baytown Nature Center this past weekend. I'd been seeing a few of these in flight but this is the first one I spotted sitting still. I like the coloration of this bird but didn't have any luck identifying it on the Internet.

Self Portrait

For a while I was using this "slightly" manipulated image for an avatar on my Google account. This baby squirrel was apparently blown out of a tree during Hurricane Ike and my wife found it in our back yard when our dogs were barking at it. It was pretty run down from exposure and had a slightly bloody nose. My wife hand fed it for about 4 - 6 weeks until it got it's strength back. I guess it liked the treatment because we had a dickens of a time getting it to return to the wild. Eventually it did make return to the wild, if you can call our backyard "wild", and we eventually were no longer able to tell it form the many other squirrels that stay there.

The main impact of this version of the photo was created with Photoshop's "Outer Glow" filter.

Caprock Canyons Landscape

This shot is from our trip through North and West Texas last June at Caprock Canyons State Park just outside of Quitaque, Texas.

Cold Snap

The day after our unusual day of snow for the Houston area I took this photo at the Baytown Nature Center. It's not exactly a windswept snowy and frozen Yosemite shot, but we are semi-tropical after all. What are you gonna do?