New Orleans 2

I had to attend the LMCA meeting in New Orleans. This time Debbie came with me and we took the train.  That was a great experience.  It is so much better than flying or driving, although it does take a little longer. Because the train only runs each way three times a week, we had to go a day early, but that was great because it gave me a whole day to take pictures.  I had two goals – a good trolley picture, and a picture of Preservation Hall. I got those an a couple more.

Preservation Hall

Dr. Zombie's House of Voodoo 1

Cafe' Du Monde 1

I am going to discuss the Trolley pic in another post.

McLane Stadium

Baylor has built a new football stadium on campus.  Everyone has been eager to take photographs of it.  I have a couple in my own style. Here is my picture of the stadium.

McLane Stadium

It is am impressive facility.  I wanted to go a little beyond the normal photograph, though, and I took pictures of the old Floyd Casey Stadium and superimposed on into the reflection in the water.  I call this “Now and Then.”

Now and Then

Sunflowers

Friday, Debbie drove her mother up to Iowa.  When she got there, she texted me that there was a field of sunflowers on I35 in Itasca that were amazing.  So, Saturday morning I drove up there.  There were actually several fields on both sides of the highway.

Itasca Sunflowers

Images of Waco – East Waco

When leaving Sam’s the other day, I noticed the junk yard on the other side of the street, and thought the rusting old truck between two railroad cars made a pretty good image of contrasting colors.

Junk Yard

I then drove up Elm Avenue again and saw an old, abandoned fast station that I thought would also make a good image.

1128 Elm

Decades ago, there was an all Black college in that part of town called Paul Quinn College. There are still buildings that remain, and many of them have been renovated for use as schools.  But this one had not.

William Johnson Hall

February Image Competition

Another image of mine received a second place in the Associate’s category of the Heart of Texas Professional Photographers Guild image competition on February 11. This is the original version.

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However, in order to improve it for competition, I removed some of the distracting elements.  The speaker, Mark McCall did a critique of all the images and suggested a couple of small additional changes.  He also said that images should always have a border.  So, that said, this is the final version of the image.

Rolling Stock Tunnel

Thursday is Photography Day

My Thursday afternoon schedule is rather flexible, and the last couple weeks, I have taken Thursday afternoons to take pictures around town.  Yesterday, I concentrated on the Southeast are of downtown and then went to the courthouse.

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Pink is normally an inviting color.  To have a wall and a door painted pink and then putting a big Keep Out sign on it seemed to me to be a contradiction. This was a vacant building on the corner of Eighth and Jackson.

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When is the last time you saw a building with a cistern for collecting rain on the roof? This is the Texas Fireproof Storage building on Eleventh and Mary.

Back on Hwy 6

A couple weeks ago, coming back from Galveston, I noticed the Goldenrods were out.  I have never gotten any pictures of Goldenrods.  So, I decided to take an afternoon and go back and get some.  I stopped at several locations, and will share those pics in another post.  But, as I was coming home, I passed by this abandoned farm.  All of the pictures of similar places I have taken were taken in the winter, and the lack of trees with leaves enhances the starkness of the image.  In this case, I decided, rather than coming back, that I would go ahead and take some pics.

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In doing some of the processing of the image, I added a vignette.  Then I wondered what it would look like with a negative vignette.  I think it enhances the feeling of this image.

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Producing an image

I want to write a longer post about what I went through to produce a specific image.  When I was coming back to the car after I took the pictures of the “Wacotown” sign on the building at fourth and Franklin, I looked and saw the combination of the clock on the WISD’s Mae Jackson Building and the ALICO Building.

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I used the exposure brackets in the camera to take three pictures – one correctly exposed, one under exposed and one over exposed, and used the HDR software to produce an HDR version of it.

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I liked that, but, somehow the clock was giving me an art deco vibe, and that made me wonder how this would look as a black and white image.  So, I took the HDR image and removed the color in Aperture.

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That had a rather dark and brooding nature as a result of the HDR treatment.  I decided to try something else, and used NIK effects Color Effects Pro on the HDR image to make a Black and White version.

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That made it a little darker and even more broody.  I tried Using NIK’s Silver Effects Pro on the HDR image and got this.

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That was really dark and broody.  It had almost an old horror movie feel to it, and it looked really grainy like it was shot on tri-X film and pushed.  So, I wondered what it would look like with less treatment.  I went back to the original, single image that was correctly exposed and used Silver Effects on it to get this.

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This is much “cleaner.”  I think I am going to make an 8×10 print of it, and put it in an 11×14 mat in a simple black frame.

The Dr. Pepper Museum

Another Waco landmark is the Dr. Pepper museum.

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While photographing the museum, I noticed about a block away, across the street from First Baptist Church were these two structures.  I believe they are grain silos, but I am not sure.  They appear to be long-ago abandoned, But, they are still interesting.

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