So much for getting out of Dodge in a hurry! Bumper-to-bumper traffic for the past half mile at least and another 2 miles or so past this point. Not real happy about this but what the hell can I do? Work on I-30 continues ad infinitum.
I'm hoping tomorrow will be a better day and streets won't be nearly as clogged. Yikes! As you can see above, only 12.9 miles into the Tour. Took an hour to get back to Dallas from E. Fort Worth. Ouch.
And the problem is, I am waaaaay too anal about planning for every contingency. My idea of packing light, evidently, is loading the back of my truck with way too much gear. Not just photo gear. Camping gear, rain gear, solar power gear, coffee gear, cleaning gear. Hell, I'm not totally sure that I haven't pack some transmission gears for good measure!
The 2014 Texas (NM & OK) Architectural Photo Tour starts tomorrow. Nine cities in 13 days, covering 2100 miles (not including driving around each of those nine cities, looking for iconic architecture. What is iconic architecture, you ask? The only way I know to describe it is that it's the building you stare at every time you drive by. Send me the name and address of that building if it's in Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, San Antonio (the Alamo doesn't count), El Paso, Albuquerque, Amarillo, or Oklahoma City. Or it could be within 20 miles of the route highlighted on the map in my last blog post.
It doesn't have to be a skyscraper downtown. Those are nice, certainly, but perhaps a bit obvious. It can be any kind of building that grabs your attention. A garage/gas station, restaurant, store, or even a dry cleaner. It just needs to hold your gaze when you pass by.
Looks like there may be some nasty weather tonight, not sure about tomorrow, but it looks like I'll be moving past it tomorrow -- Houston is the first stop. If you can accommodate a weary traveler, fantastic. Otherwise, I'm doing this on the cheap and will probably find a motel on I-10 west of Houston.
Not that I've told many close friends about it, but I'm really excited about taking a road trip. A weekend-long road trip can be pretty spontaneous. A two-week-long road trip, however, requires, at the least, a bit more thought. For me, anyway.
Have a few things to do today before leaving tomorrow. We’ll catch up later.
It’s the 2014 Texas Whirlwind Architectural Photo Tour! Well, actually, that should be the Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma Architectural Photo Tour. But that’s just too damned hard to say.
My itinerary includes 9 cities in 14 days: From Dallas on Thursday, July 24th, to Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, back to Fort Worth, and home to Dallas. I am totally insane!!! But I’m going to do it, nonetheless.
I want to photograph your favorite building — of whatever size — in each of those cities. This is not a contest. However, it is a request for your help. As familiar as I am with Dallas and, somewhat, Fort Worth, I haven’t been to those other cities in years and need your help in identifying those buildings that are iconic in stature.
That doesn’t mean they have to be skyscrapers in the downtown Central Business District. Hell, the buildings you suggest could be. . . a funky little gas station or taqueria, or a 3-story office building. Do you find yourself staring at it every time you drive by? THAT’S the building I want to photograph!
Why, you ask, am I doing this? Simple. It’s time to update my Architectural Portfolio and get serious about a longtime interest in this area of photography.
Along the way, maybe I’ll meet some interesting people and throw back a beer or two during down times. I’ll try my best to blog about it here while I’m on the road.
With the best sun in the morning and evening, I won’t have much of a chance to shoot a LOT of buildings, just the ones that fall into that iconic category. Write me an email (Tanguero@mac.com), text me (469-279-9018) or Tweet me (@TangueroLS) and tell me exactly where the building or business is — correct addresses earn extra points!
And while your at it, pass this along to your friends, and ask them to pass it along. The more people involved, the better.
By the way, for anyone who makes a contribution to the cause along the way, there's a print of your favorite building with your name on it waiting for you at the end. Or, rather, with MY name on it, since. . . well, you get the idea.
I can only use my own experience being a new patient as my guide but this is what I believe: Part of the anxiety those new patients feel has to do with not knowing who is going to treat them for whatever condition that ails them. Simple, really. Who the heck is this stranger who's going to poke and prod me and probably cause me pain before I can get a prescription for a miracle drug that will cure me and make me feel like a new person?
That stranger, in my case, turned out to be my Primary Care Physician and has become a good personal friend, Dr John Richmond, who was the 2007 Family Physician of the Year, awarded by Texas Academy of Family Physicians.
Honestly, I got lucky. Some docs (God love 'em all!) just don't have much bedside manner, particularly in a clinic situation where they often see more patients in a day than might seem humanly possible. To his credit, Dr John works with me as a senior "team member" to help me through my occasional malady.
But let's get back to that new patient. The anxiety he or she is feeling could be softened a bit by giving them a wall full of photographs of smiling faces and short quotes of something personal and empathetic. Credentials? Fuggeddaboudit! What that patient is wanting is reassurance that everything is going to be okay. If they want credentials, too, they can ask for them. And they probably will.
Here's the bottom line: Regardless of the type of business you're in, give your patients/clients/customers a face that reassures them that the world and their place in it is going to be just fine. It'll pay dividends. I promise.
— Lawrences Standifer Stevens
Slow down and speed up? How is that supposed to improve my photography? I can already hear you saying words to that effect.
But it is true.
By slowing down the entire process of making a photograph, we see more clearly the things that stand out in that image. And often, we will see those things in greater detail, not simply with greater clarity. What does this do? It sometimes — not always but often enough — will give us greater insight into the main subject, insight that usually isn't possible when we rush to press the shutter.
Next time you grab your camera to photograph that sump'n-sump'n that is drawing you to it like a moth to an old sweater, do this: Slow down. And. Really. Look. At. Your. Subject. Don't care what it is. . . unless it's the license plate of a car speeding away after sideswiping your brand new Tesla. . . just slow down.
What you'll notice is that you may start looking at your subject from more than one point of view. This is a good thing. It leads to discovery, and understanding. "Ooooh, I see," you'll say, "I don't want to shoot it from here. . . mmmm. . . I need to be over there. And a LOT closer."
Taking the time to explore your subject before you even put the camera to your eye pays extraordinary dividends. You get to be really present in the moment. And that is very good training for the rest of your life. Letting your eyes glaze over and daydreaming your ass off is not an altogether bad thing. But it is not always appropriate to one's circumstance.
It doesn't matter what type of camera you use or whether you are a Canonista, Nikonian, or a Sony Maroney. You could be a pro or an am. Doesn't matter. Slowing down your process will inevitably lead to better photographs.
"What about speeding up? You forgot that part, you sly devil, you!"
Now this part is aimed more at the beginner. You know who you are. You just got that brand new Kodak Brownie and you're afraid to waste film so you only take one shot of each subject. Whoops! Welcome to the digital age. Once you have the camera, there's not much more expense to it. Shooting frames is virtually free!
Why is this important? If you only take one shot of a subject, you'll never know if there might have been a Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the subject seven frames later. Subject blinked? Oh, well.
You may have heard the term "spray and pray." It refers to the practice of (almost) indiscriminately shooting frame after frame in the hope that a good image just happens to be captured. That's not what we're talking about.
On the contrary, taking enough shots to completely explore an image has a much higher ratio of selects to rejects than spray and pray. It's a conscious thing, shooting lots of images from a variety of different POV's, where spray and pray is almost an unconscious act. When you find that one image that works, well, that's what makes all the trouble you've gone to worthwhile.
— Lawrence Standifer Stevens
Us? We let the photo be our guide. Often, the main objective in camera is to light the subject/scene in a way that (with current technology) cannot be simulated in software and to compose the image as simply as possible, whether we zoom with our feet or our lens. Cropping in camera, in our view, makes for a larger possible print than cropping in PS/LR.
At a minimum, every final selection from a shoot is dodged and burned (to use old-school terms) and sharpened. We also will adjust the histogram (the display of distribution of light and dark tones) so that the image is printable. That is, the image should have no blown highlights and few, if any, plugged up shadows with no detail.
After that, we remove objects (telephone wires, unwanted birds too far away to be of interest, lens flares, stray hairs, etc.) that detract from the subject/scene.
Once all this is done, a photograph will tell us whether it's done (stick a fork in it) or it needs further manipulation. Sometimes, it will call out for another element -- clouds in a bald, uninteresting sky, let's say.
Let's stipulate that that's exactly what it needs. Clouds. We keep a folder full of clouds that we photograph for this very purpose. Here's an example of just such a photograph:
Yes, we know It's not a photograph taken all at the same moment. Get over it. Composite photos have been made almost as long as photographs have been made.
And this one, as they go, is a pretty simple one to execute. Merely select the aforementioned bald, uninteresting sky, refine the edge along the treetops to prevent a white outline, mask the clouds with the field of hay and trees, and you're almost done.
Doing this kept us from having to wait days or weeks for the proper clouds and take the chance that the field would be cleared of the hay, and it also affords us the flexibility of adjusting all the elements of both sky and field independently -- contrast, highlights, shadows, sharpness, etc.
Even though this is a composite, we did everything we could to frame and expose both elements. We waited about half an hour for the last bit of sunlight to skim across the field and hit the hay at just the right angle. The shadow from the horizon was moving so quickly that next frame was half-covered in shadow and the hay rolls were dark where they were light moments before.
The clouds were almost as difficult to capture. Shooting them from a high vantage point to remove clutter and bracketing exposure to make sure there were no blown highlights took some experimentation, too. Pumping up the contrast, they became a bit more ominous than they appeared to the eye. Adjusting them further in PS/LR helped to exaggerate that effect.
So, when it comes to making a good photograph, we go to one school to get what we can and then on to another to make the most of all that we learned. It's really an ongoing exercise and we never fail to learn something new with every photograph.
— Lawrence Standifer Stevens
Last week, we travelled to Austin to photograph a client as a 60th birthday gift. Even though it was a non-paying job, we like to be prepared as if it were of the paying variety. We believe it keeps us on our toes and fights off the urge to become — how do we put it? — lackadaisical.
So, prep included research on the locations where the client wanted to shoot, some rough storyboards, and packing all the gear we anticipated even the remotest possibility of needing. If you are a shooter, you know what I’m talking about. It gets pretty intense out there, far away from the studio and all the resources we might normally have at our fingertips. Who knows what might come up?
However. . . in the moment, things don’t seem to seem to be quite as exigent as they do in the planning stage. Carrying a boatload of gear while concentrating on how to light, compose, and shoot a subject to best capture her tender personality seems, at best, a bit contradictory. Particularly when the location frowns upon the use of said boatload as it might detract from other visitors' experience. So, the boatload becomes a dinghy, if not a raft.
The point is, in the moment, getting the shot means doing it as simply as possible with little more than just the camera, lens, and a single “voice-activated” lighting unit (or assistant, for short). Okay, we did go to the car for a reflector for fill. But moving quickly, leaving a small footprint, capturing the essence of the subject, these are the things that matter, not having access to every piece of gear we own.
As it turns out, we captured more successful images than we thought possible by keeping it simple. It’s something to think about.
— Lawrence Standifer Stevens
I find myself lost in thought more and more, contemplating my navel and coming away with no answers at all. Solving none of the world's problems and precious few of mine, gazing inward seems more and more pointless. So, turning outward to the world and action therein seems like it might be more appropriate. Out to take a walk through downtown Dallas with my camera, I find lots of pretty people but none with a face that interests me. Typically, I turn to things to satisfy my need to capture what I see in the world.
Please enjoy a sample and visit the page where it lives. Look for STREET in the GALLERIES menu.
— Lawrence Standifer Stevens
