I know I’ve been doing a lot of Austin Skyline shots lately, but I keep getting request for more images showing the almost “complete” skyline. Of course, it’s never truly complete, but at least most of the cranes are down. Although my exposures were way to long for them to appear in the final photograph, as I was photographing this scene several kayaks silently rowed by. What a wonderful way to spend an evening in Austin Texas!

Austin is a great place to live. I live in one of those rare places that where ever you are in the world you can be speaking to a local & when you tell them you live in Austin Texas, the very predictable response is some variation of “I’ve heard that’s a cool place”. It’s true. Great city, great music, even the buildings are pretty cool. Today’s photo is of the interior of the Austin City Hall. Pretty cool space.

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of doing some photography for my good friend Sarah Pierce and her band. They opened for Kenny Loggins at the Paramount Theatre in Austin Texas. With such a beautiful venue I had to do a few shots to try & capture this classic old space. I shot this about five minutes before they opened the house. Wow what a view!

I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to organize my images. I have a LOT of different images. Some I have posted here, some I have posted on my website, some on HDRSpotting.com, some are sold by local art dealers and gift shops. Most just sit forgotten on my hard drives hoping to be discovered. I am trying to bring order to this chaos . Not an easy task for me. I will be the first to admit I am organizationally challenged. An additional benefit of reviewing all these old images is I keep discovering photos that I had forgotten. This is one such image. I photographed this one evening when I was pulling some images together for Midwest Living Magazine. They were looking for images of 6th Street for an article on Austin so I thought I would shoot some fresh shots to try & get the assignment. They actually ended up using a couple of my images including another of my 6th street photos I shot that same evening. You can see that photo here.

The Continental Club in Austin Texas is another one of those iconic landmarks that are a part of every city. When I saw the old hot rod parked in front I pretty much had to take the shot. Unfortunately, the lighting was not good. If you look through my images you will find that I really don’t shoot much mid day. I really prefer late evening or early morning light. To make matters worse, The Continental Club sign was back-lit & quite blah. In order to try & get the image to pop I did quite a bit of (some may say too much) post processing. I smoothed every thing out to give more of a painterly feel & although the neon sign was on, I hand painted in the neon to increase it’s relative brightness. Now that’s it done, I really want to go re-shoot under more favorable light.

This is another image from my photowalk I did with my sister during SXSW in Austin last week. Austin has a number of these 10′ Gibson GuitarTown guitars around the city. (Gee, you would think we were known for our music…) This one is in front of the Frost Bank building on Congress Avenue. You can see a few more of my images of the guitars here.

It’s been a great week in Austin Texas. The party started with friends and family coming to town for my son Matthew’s wedding. The wedding was spectacular! It was a military wedding in a great outdoor setting. The weather was perfect, the flowers were fabulous, and my new daughter-in-law was radiantly beautiful. Believe it or not, I didn’t take a single photograph. I consciously passed that task to wonderful professionals so that I could just be ‘dad’.
Monday, Matthew & his new bride Jessica left to drive to Alaska where they will be stationed for a few years. I can’t wait to go visit! (Yes, I will take my camera…) This was a great week for family to visit. Sixth Street in Austin Texas is known an one of the great streets in the world to go party. Every year during the international music festival ‘South by Southwest’ it is even more so. This year (2010) St. Patrick’s day fell during SXSW to add even more fuel to the event. My sister & I went down to the ‘party’ just to watch the crowds and take a few photos.
For those that are not aware, if you click on the photo it will take you to my Flickr site where you can see a larger version of the photo.

Austin’s newest residential tower on the Austin skyline is almost finished. At 56 stories tall, The Austonian is the tallest residential building in Texas. You can see another view of The Austonian here. Although my dogs might disagree, I could easily see myself living in the heart of downtown Austin.