I had a little spare time on Friday. So, I ran over to the zoo. I knew I did not have enough time to do the entire zoo, so I went to the Asia and Africa areas. The female orangutan gave birth not too long ago, and she and her baby were out.
In the Africa exhibit, the flamingoes were all next to the water, and that made a nice reflection shot.
Finally, right next tot he Flamingoes, there was a flock of Black Vultures in a tree.
I took Joe and Mathias to see a football game in the new stadium last Saturday night. I was able to get a couple good pictures from inside the stadium. This one is from the very top of the upper deck seats.
It is apparent it was an overcast night. In fact, it rained quite hard when we were getting to the stadium. As the night went on, though, the clouds opened, and I got this shot of the stadium with a quite prominent moon.
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.
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.”
The Heart of Texas Professional Photographer’s Guild holds monthly competitions. For August, the theme for one of the competitions was “Around in Circles.” Bryant Stanton is a local artist who works in metal and glass. He was commissioned to do a chandelier and a sculpture for the new Science Building at the Community College. His sculpture was in interpretation of the Double Helix. I decided to work that up as my entry for the competition. This was my final product, and it won the competition.
We took a small road trip a couple weeks ago to Nacogdoches. On the way home, we drove Hwy 84 most of the way. I stopped several places for some pictures, and ended up with some nice images.
I liked the contrast between the color of the shed and ramp and the surrounding winter vegetation here.
The way the overgrown vegetation was melding with this house was quite interesting. And, the two vultures on the roof were rather symbolic.
While in Seattle, we visited the museum dedicated to the glass sculptures of Chihuly. It is located right next to the space needle. 
The sculpts are in various rooms in the museum, but they are also in various garden settings. 
While in Seattle, we went to Pike Place Market. This was an amazing place.
All kinds of seafood and other stuff.
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.
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.
I entered this image into the January Heart of Texas Professional Photographers’ Guild image contest. I took second place in the Associate Member category.
Additionally, I received notification from ViewBug. They have a system of tallying the comments and responses and then produce a year-end summary. They said I scored in the top 20% of all users on their site.
It rained pretty much all morning, and at times the rain got rather heavy. I looked out the back and saw water running off the oak tree and thought there might be a possible picture in it.
For this picture, I cropped the original, adjusted exposure and black levels, added contrast, sharpened it and added a vignette. Those are pretty much standard adjustments I make for any image. This fairly accurately represents the scene. Water can be seen dripping from the limb.
I took that image and converted it to black and white. This helped remove distracting areas of color, but almost seemed too sterile.
I went back to the original image and started by removing color saturation. That helped remove distracting areas of color. To give it a little more interest, I added a very light sepia tone to it.