It’s springtime in Texas. Even driving in the city, the medians & shoulders of the highways are spotted & sometimes covered with a wash of spring color. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity this spring to make it out into the central Texas countryside so I am cheating a bit & posting a photo I took last spring with my 4×5 camera near Ennis Texas. While these days most of my photography is done digitally with my Nikon, there is nothing like the detail in a 4×5. For perspective, while a good digital image these days is between 10 & 20 mega pixels, this image was originally scanned at 500 mega pixels. I actually have a 40″ by 50″ print of this image hanging in my dining room & you can see every leaf & petal.

Last Saturday I finally got around to photographing another Austin Icon, the Pennybacker Bridge . Although I only live just a few minutes away I had never made it a point to actually climb the hill overlooking the bridge until early last Saturday morning when I joined a group of other Austin photographers that met there as part of a group shoot. Although it was a bit cold & blowy, it was nice shooting with a group of 20 or so other photographers & then comparing images. It’s pretty remarkable how you can take a group of people & put them in basically the same place & get such a variety of different images. It brought me back to a photo assignment I had many years ago in college. The class went on a field trip to a local park & as we were walking the professor had us all freeze in place & shoot a roll of film (typically 24 or 36 shots for those that don’t go back that far…) all, without moving our right foot. Obviously the point being, there are beautiful & interesting images all around us if we just take the time to actually see.

This past weekend my wife & I flew to Kansas City to attend the wedding of my nephew Austin & his new wife Keisha. My sister Dorothy & brother in law Steve were kind enough to act as our chauffeurs while in town and on the way back to the airport we drove past these giant badminton Shuttlecocks or ‘birdies’ that are on the grounds of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. Since both Dorothy & Steve are members of a badminton league, Steve & I hopped out to take this quick photo.

This past summer my son Matthew & I took a trip to the UK. Matthew is very interested in history (it’s one of his minors at Texas A&M University) so I pretty much let him set the itinerary. Our last stop before heading home was a few days in Dublin Ireland. We stayed in the heart of the Temple Bar District. For those of you that are familiar with Austin, the temple bar district is somewhat analogous to the 6th street district in Austin.  Think blocks & blocks of bars & restaurants with the sound of music flowing out of every door. While I enjoyed all the traditional Irish music, I’ll never forget drinking Guinness in a crowded bar with a few hundred Irish all singing a rousing chorus of John Denver’s “Take me home Country Road” .  Our last night in Dublin I took this HDR photograph of  ’The Temple Bar’ bar on Barra an Teampaill in the Temple Bar district. Got that?.