Features

I was on the way to a different assignment this evening, but stopped to make this feature. I’m a fan of silhouettes and I seem to be becoming more of a minimalist with some of my features, especially ones I know aren’t going to run in the paper.

Monday was a slow day at the office as there were only two photographers working. I spent most of the day driving around scouting some features and trying to set up a photo project for the coming weeks. At dusk, I walked up onto the Congress Avenue bridge to get a shot of the bats coming out from under the bridge. They never showed, but I caught a couple in two kayaks alone on the lake below:

I photographed Austin’s annual Fourth of July fireworks display for the Statesman. The show started at 9:30 p.m. and my editor wanted stuff by 10:15 p.m. I staked out a spot atop a hill in the Auditorium Shores Park and set up my camera on a tripod and had my laptop ready to go. I started submitting midway through the show using my Droid. In case you are wondering, the exposure for the photo below is 5 sec, f/8 at 200 ISO.

Happy Independence Day everyone. I thought I’d pull a frame from an earlier post that kind of caught my eye on a second look. This is a frame I shot out at Austin’s Pioneer Farms, a small village with buildings and re-enactors that appear to be out of 1800s Texas. I got sent out to shoot a Fourth of July celebration, but unfortunately there was a very small crowd due to looming rain. I wondered around and made a few features then focused on the several American flags near the village’s entrance. I opened up the aperture a bit and got darkened corners because I was using a Nikon DX (crop) lens on a Nikon FX (full-frame) body. The result kind of looks like I shot it with a Holga. This is more or less exactly as it came off the camera. I dodged the middle of the flag a bit in Photoshop, but otherwise it hasn’t been touched.

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