There’s a Camel on that Enchanted Rock

I was in a bit of a pano mood it would appear. Here is a panoramic shot of Enchanted Rock. This shot was taken only part way up. It seemed to be a good enough view. It does look a little curved like the image, but the panorama exaggerates it a bit.

If you look closely, especially if you click on the image and see the larger size, you can see what I was calling Camel Rocks. The image below is that part of the pano taken up close. If you don’t think it looks like a camel, then you are in direct disagreement with my 7 year old.

Oh, by the way, the dark patch in the middle? I think I had my polarizer on. Not too bright.

Pedernales Falls Panorama

You have to click on this image to see it bigger. If you have the monitor space, I posted it up to 1400 wide.

This was taken not to long after we got to the Pedernales Falls state park area in Texas. Pretty place. This year however, there was not a lot of water. In fact, you could step over or wade through the narrow areas to get around. Other years there is a torrent of water here. There is a sign at the parking lot that shows the water going from not much more than this to completely covering the rock area you see in 5 minutes in a flash flood. You need to be alert. Well, usually. They haven’t had any rain in this area since December. No flash floods this day.

This was an 8 image panorama with the camera turned to portrait mode. Shot in manual at ISO 200, 24mm, f/16 for 1/30th of a second per image.

Texas Landscape Safari Hipsta Style

Here is a slideshow of some images that I took while on the Texas Landscape Safari last week. What is this ‘Hipsta’ style? These are all pictures taken with an iPhone and the Hipstamatic iPhone app. I am using a B/W film that I will blog about later.

And yes, this is a rip off of Josh Bradley’s video. Kinda. He showed me some photographs taken with his iPhone and I was blown away. I loved the B/W effect he had going. I was already taking iPhone pictures, but this B/W effect really got me going. So, with a tip of the hat to Josh, here is my video.

Most of the images are from on TLS. There are a few at the end from the missions in San Antonio.

I will have another video a bit later with some other images. Same style.

San Antonio River Walk

I think the River Walk in San Antonio is pretty cool. Yes, it is touristy, and expensive, but it is pretty cool. I think a lot of cities would love to have as vibrant a downtown area as San Antonio. It’s a pretty walk. Trees, water, rocks, bricks, waterfalls, paths, grass, flowers, and pretty views. The river walk has it all.

We have stopped a couple of times now for margarita’s. It’s pretty nice to be sitting by the river in the shade of a tree sipping a margarita taking a few pictures and people watching.

Pedernales Falls State Park

I just realized that for a post with a title of ‘Falls’, I don’t have a picture of the falls. Anyway, this was one of my better pictures for the day.

Anyway, we spent Wednesday afternoon/evening at Pedernales Falls State Park. It’s quite a pretty place, but when we first got there, the cloudless sky was making the dynamic range a problem. The water has carved all kinds of channels and pathways through the rock. The water was low enough that the upper sections of the rock in these channels was very light. The bottom and the water, was very dark. Too large a range for the camera sensor. I didn’t end up taking too many pictures of these channels. I took pictures of several other things.
Luckily the light was hitting this tree nicely just before it ducked below the horizon. Unfortunately, with no clouds, no sunset. Still, it was a fun day. I’ll have other pictures later.

Gorman Falls

We got to Bend State Park just as the sun was coming up. We waited a bit for enough light to be able to walk the trail to Gorman Falls. It is a pretty rocky trail, but probably still doable in less light. But it didn’t matter, as the light came around and onto the falls as we were there. This is just one of a bunch of images I have of the falls. I just wanted to get one up.

We are just heading out for the evening. We are going to be out late. I love shooting when it seems like the light is gone.

Those Damn Bats

We tried to see the bats under the Congress street bridge again today, but no such luck. No bats. Unpredictable nature. You would think that someone had trained them by now 🙂 So I bolted up the road to get a picture of the capital. There is a lot of light on this building, and the sky is just a little too dark. Couldn’t get a good balance. I was a little too late. Waited too long for the bats. Oh well.

We leave Austin Monday afternoon. No more bat chances.

The Austin Congress “Bat” Bridge

Unfortunately, no bats. There are supposed to be hundreds of thousands of bats here, but we got skunked. This the the Congress bridge in Austin Texas. We staked out a tripod location on the east side by the Austin Statesman parking lot. They have signs up telling people you can park here. There were a lot of people around, and even more from the bridge.

I had understood that we would see a cloud like mass of bats. I was hoping to get some slow shutter speed pictures. I figured the light would be low anyway at sunset when they are supposed to come out. I guess the temp or humidity wasn’t quite right for the bats, and they preferred to stay hidden under the bridge.