Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

Just a minor little day-brightener I found in the files….

One thing I’m loving about some of the new technology for cameras and lenses is the capability to work – casually – in extreme conditions which would have meant hours of work in pre-digital days. (Not that I minded the hours of work; sometimes I even miss them…)

Some of these things, however…

This is a shot which I would not have even TRIED to get, ten years ago. 1/6th second at 3200, handheld? Only in my dreams.

Now, it’s a throwaway, an “oh, nice lighting on those” view that I grabbed almost casually while chatting with a couple of musicians I know.

In some ways, it really IS progress.

Lock and load; let’s get back to work.

Spent last Saturday at the San Jacinto Festival, commemorating the final official battle of the Texas Revolution, when, on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston’s small army caught Santa Anna’s forces by surprise and defeated them, capturing Santa Anna himself and forcing him to agree to remove his troops from Texas.

It’s obviously an important day in Texas history; in some ways almost the beginning OF it. So every year there’s a festival and a re-enactment of the battle on, or very close to, the actual field where it was fought.

Editing the pix down into “interesting,” “good,” and “utter dreck” is going to take a bit, but there were moments….

A Mexican cannon (about a 6-pounder) fires, a mass of smoke and flame and noise, doing no damage but attracting the attention of the Texian gunners….

whose aim was somewhat better.

(Actually this is all carefully controlled pyrotechnics, (see the guy in the green shirt under the Mexican fortification?) but the reenactment gets you up close and personal and it can be a bit disorienting.)

she said, tapping my elbow, “you’ve GOT to come see the water lilies in the outdoor classroom. They’re blooming.”

And they are.

Thanks, Lynne.

The Branch School, Houston, Texas

Must be spring or some such thing.

Okay, this is NOT, very definitely, a wild flower. It’s a very carefully crafted, meticulously pruned bonsai bush, on display at the Houston Bonsai Association’s display at the Japan Festival yesterday.

The festival was a great deal of fun, drumming by Kaminari Taiko, beautiful tea ceremony demonstration, impressive martial arts (remind me not to mess with those folks), some lovely ikebana, and a fair number of photos being held pending the editors’ choices. More maybe later if I remember…

As the number of pro labs who still process slide film diminishes, it takes longer to turn those images around. However, since I have a plethora of film cameras which I truly love to work with, and a couple of freezers worth of film and processing, I shall persevere (for personal work, anyways…)

Especially when I can generate files like THIS from them.

Yet another pretty day tomorrow.  Charge those batteries and check your lightmeter, and don’t forget to grab that brick of Provia from the freezer….  let’s hit the streets.

and that means bluebonnets and wildflowers out the wazoo.

I’d cancelled several things to go out and shoot bluebonnets over the weekend… and then Friday evening and Saturday the universe said “thou shalt not shoot the bluebonnets” by way of thunderstorms and tornado warnings and reports of hail and very high winds and one damn thing after another. Shooting delicate flowers under these circumstances is nothing short of impossible, so I stayed to home and got some admin and housecleaning things done and watched weather reports, and it appeared to be quite bad where I was going. So along about 0400 Sunday morning when it was time to start getting set up to leave I was REALLY not terribly optimistic about finding anything much and told myself that a few more hours of sleep was a better idea, besides which it was still raining here.

Of late, however, I’ve come to be VERY skittish of anything that seems like a good idea, so I loaded and gassed the truck and coffee’d the photographer and away we went.

Bluebonnets, it seems, are resilient little glories.

And it’s a bumper crop.

The closeups were shot at a streetcorner just a few blocks from the Brenham courthouse. (Please note that when you’ve skipped breakfast it’s not a good idea to hang around across the street from a fried chicken joint that’s just getting fired up for the day…)

Another pretty day today if we ignore the raindrops. Let’s hit the streets.

So I’m in the Bear Creek Park yesterday on business, and as I was leaving I was abruptly reminded that there’s a “zoo” of sorts there. With apologies to the responsible officials, it’s not particularly well done, being mostly flat space with cyclone fences and that sort of thing, and one feels somewhat sorry for the inhabitants…

but there they are, so one takes what one can. (Besides which at this angle he (or she, I don’t have any idea) has kind of a snarky look to him; I was execting a Don Rickles zinger any second. Apparently I wasn’t worth the trouble; that seems to be a common opinion these days.)

Lock and load; let’s hit the streets….