Dallas, Ft.Worth and Dad

I suppose that my first facscination with photography came by way of my dad. He always had an eye for the art of the craft and while we lived overseas during my childhood, Dad was able to produce some amazing Kodachrome slides of my sisters and me in places like the Taj Mahal, Calcutta India and Khatmandu, Nepal.

His images impressed me then, and they still do today. Now in retirement, his camera is working again and he's still able to knock out some great images!

On a recent visit to the Dallas-Ft.Worth area where my dad lives, it was a lot of fun to take a few hours on two separate days to go shooting with him. We walked for miles all over downtown Dallas on a cold, overcast day, and then a few days later we hit up Ft. Worth.

It was fun to wander slowly, enjoy the architecture, style and history of two old (but new) cities, and let the eye wander to lines, doors, colors and other shapes that could make a cool image.

Following are a few of my favorites.

Near City Hall in Dallas is an old cemetary, many of the burial dates are in the 1800's. It's surrounded by city buildings, falling apart and a bit out of place, but made for some cool images!

North Carolina

This past week I had the pleasure of accompanying one of my athletes to Greensboro, North Carolina as he was competing in the National Championships of high school track and field. While there, we had a few extra hours to check out the surrounding North Carolina country side and universities. Here are a few pictures I took while there.



Duke University totally took me by surprise! I was not ready for it's gothic architecure and almost medieval look! Pretty in it's own way, the centerpiece of the campus was a large cathedral (the school was originally a Methodist institution) that looked like it was pulled from the 15th Century in France, yet I discovered was built between 1930 and '32! Here is one of the adjacent walkways



Greensboro's quaint, historic street. Fittingly named "Elm Street", it evoked a Normal Rockwell view of Americana!





The Duke University football stadium, it hosted the 1942 Rose Bowl as the US Government banned all large public events on the West Coast in fear of a Japanese attack. Since Duke was scheduled to play in the game, Duke University offered their stadium. Duke won!

Blocks for a Thursday

Scenes from Portland

Recently I had a working weekend in Portland and had a couple of hours to walk around the downtown area and just enjoy the colors and architecture of the town. Portland is quite a place. The Fall colors were still accenting the buildings and block by block, it seemed another discovery was made.

A very pretty place, enjoy!




An outdoor bazaar brought out great colors and interesting people!





I've been experimenting with purposefully out-of-focus images to capture a more artistic rendition of the subject.





More deliberate blurrying ... almost becomes a watercolor!

A Couple of Photo Projects

I spent the good part of 9 hours today putting together a 52-page "yearbook" for the 2009 King Track and Field banquet. It's a labor of love, I guess, as I get to live out the fantasy I had before deciding on teaching to go into journalism and work for a magazine.

This book is the 20th I've done while at King.

Along the way of compiling the story and statistics of the season, I got to play around a bit in Photoshop with some images, two of which are below. The raised hands will actually have text on it and serve as the cover of the program, the next is the back cover.

Sticks

A random shot from the track meet yesterday...

Images from the Field

I had a few moments during the track meet yesterday to snap some quick shots. Not a lot planning, just some willing subjects (thanks to whoever left the Chucks in the middle of the field) and some decent light. Enjoy life, beautiful.

For a Rainy Day

Riverside, Part Three

Riverside, Part Two

A few more shots of Riverside, a few more to come...

Disney Lights

While at Disneyland over the holidays, I deliberately went "unfocused" for this shot of main street, mainly trying to get that effect with the lights. The part of the image that really caught my eye though, was the sky. That's straight out of the camera, no photoshopping!

Joyflowers

It's a Blur

Taken in the spring of '08...