Category Archives: Photography

Azaleas

Posted on by Bill Chance

On our visit to Lafayette we could not help but notice the beauty of all the azaleas blooming across south Louisiana. No matter how humble your little cottage might be, you can have all the color you want exploding outside.

Azalea in Lafayette, Louisiana

I stepped out of a little restaurant and walked around back to take this picture. As I was raising the camera a couple of guys tumbled out of the business next door. They looked a little mixed between confused and upset and one said, “Is there anything I can do to help you?” – and not in a tone of voice that implied he really wanted to help me with anything.

“Nope, I’m just taking pictures of the flowers.”

“He’s just taking pictures of the flowers,” the guy said to his buddy, in a disgusted tone, and they went back inside without another glance at me.

Azaleas don’t do very well in Dallas, where I live. The soil is not acidic enough – right under the surface is a thick layer of limestone (caliche) that keeps the soil basic. A lot of people do plant them and fight the acidity. Some pour swimming pool acid (hydrochloric) into a trench before planting – the best thing is to dig a big hole and fill it with peat moss. Still, no matter what you do, eventually the caliche will infiltrate the soil and your flowering bushes are toast.

East Texas has beautiful azeleas. I remember, years ago, doing a bicycle ride along the Azalea Trail in Tyler. It was gorgeous. Maybe a road trip this spring would be an idea.

Dallas is right on the edge between two areas of vegetation. To the east, it’s all piney woods, dogwood, and azaleas. To the west – mequite and prickly pear.

None of it is like what I saw in South Louisiana, though. The things seemed to grow like weeds.

Available Light

Posted on by Bill Chance

Friday… there was going to be a lot going on down in the Dallas Arts District. It was the end of spring break week, the streets would be blocked off and all the venues would have events scheduled. I decided to take some pictures. My plan was to get out of work and take the train down before the sun set – taking advantage of Daylight Savings Time to get some shots off during the magic hour.

Unfortunately, everything wrapped around the spindle and I didn’t get out of work on time. When I reached the Arts District it was dark as pitch. I wandered around – there was a band playing in the garden of the Nasher, and they were going to show Hugo in 3D on a giant portable screen, but every square inch of space was already spoken for by blanket-toting families and groups of partiers that had invaded while I was still in my cubicle. Their multi-colored quilts marked off the territory of every clan like patchwork Balkans that no tardy invader could penetrate.

I retreated from the Nasher Museum and wandered the streets. A short time ago only a handful of food trucks would show up down in the Arts District for these events but the phenomenon has rapidly grown and well over a dozen lined both sides of Harwood street. There was music and food and a huge crowd surging in the darkness. Folks poured in and out of the Nasher, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

Despite the lack of available light I experimented snapping some shots. Some day I want to learn how to use a flash properly, but, still, I have a strong desire to use available light only. I want to steal the stories of the people I’m shooting and a flash warns them of the upcoming thievery. Forget about a tripod in a crowd like this.

The problem is when there isn’t enough available light. I set ISO all the way up (grainy photographs), Aperture Wide Open (no depth of field, everything out of focus) and Speed as Slow as Possible (anything moving is extra fuzzy). There was no way to avoid blurriness, so I tried my best to minimize and control it. I’d prop my camera on a pillar or lean against a light pole, trying to gather in all the photons I could before it all goes to crap.

I don’t know if the blur is artistic or simply poor technique. I like it though… I guess that’s something.

Waiting to order at the Ssahm Korean BBQ truck.

Sharing a foam plate and a quiet moment in the surging crowd.

The colorful blur in the left is a guy walking around selling light sticks from a bag - ten dollars a piece.

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

I didn’t stay long. Shooting all these people in the dark filled me with a terrible loneliness – the kind you can only get inside of a festive crowd. So I packed in all in and headed back to the train station. When I got off in my neighborhood I still had about six hours left on my train pass so I stuck it into the money slot of the ticket vending kiosk. Hopefully somebody else could use it, out for a night on the town.

Old Barn (again)

Posted on by Bill Chance

Old Barn (click to enlarge)

Another picture of another old barn. This one is from pretty much the same spot as the one  I posted the other day, taken only a few seconds later in another direction. It was processed with the same software, but going for a different effect.

Old Barn

Posted on by Bill Chance

Old Barn (click to enlarge)

Messing around with a RAW image using HDR and the Luminance HDR (formerly Qtpfsgui) program. I know everybody is sick of these overprocessed, oversaturated, unrealistic digital photographs, but let me have a little fun.

It looks like this is an old, rustic, overgrown barn out in the middle of the swampy bayou, but it’s actually on the campus of the University of Louisiana Lafayette, in the middle of Lafayette, Louisiana.

The Trees are in Bloom

Posted on by Bill Chance

When we first lived in Nicaragua, before the earthquake, my brother and I had to catch the bus to school at the entrance to our driveway on Carretera Sur. Since the drive popped out in a narrow space between two walls, one of us had to stand there and wait for the bus – or it wouldn’t see us and wouldn’t stop.

The problem was there was this big tree – right there, splitting our driveway at the entrance to the highway. It would bloom all the time – covered thick with bright yellow blossoms. These would fall and form a carpet under the tree. It looked great- the blossoms a colorful scene of yellow against the green of the leaves, the brown of the bark, and the dark gray tarmac of the drive and highway.

But the blossoms would rot in the tropical heat. The sweet-smelling flowers would decay into a sickly foulness that was impossible to stand. The smell was unbearable. My brother and I would take turns waiting under the tree, watching for the bus while our sibling stood well back up the yard in the fresh air, until we couldn’t stand it any more and then switch places. When it was really rank we would have to hold our breath and would trade off every minute or so until the bus rumbled up.

I thought of that as I sat at the Farmer’s Market. The central passage, around the La Marketa Café, is lined in trees and the trees were in bloom. They were thick with white blossoms which were falling like a dusting of snow. A thin layer covered the ground, stirred up into tiny white flowery tornados whenever the wind circled into miniature cyclones coming around the corners of the building. They were beautiful.

And best of all, they didn’t stink.

Yet.

The trees blooming in the Dallas Farmer's Market

blooms against the sky

the petals fall in front of a mural on a restaurant

Amigos Pottery

Posted on by Bill Chance

Off to the side of the Dallas Farmer’s Market is a store that I am very familiar with. It sits on a sharp corner and has a tin-roofed building and high rows of steel shelving outside. It’s a Mexican import extravaganza called Amigos Pottery. They have a factory in Mexico and produce a bewildering array of artwork and such – pottery, statuary, chimeneas, wall hangings, welded steel, fountains, and mixed combinations of all of these.

Long ago I bought a chimenea there – I’ve bought some planters, and we’ve purchased a bunch of decorative stuff over the years. Today, my friend and I wandered around with our cameras – shooting in the cramped aisles full of… all sorts of stuff.

Big digital SLRs always attract attention and a guy working there asked me for copies of my photos for his website.

I’ll send him an email as soon as I can find what I did with his business card.


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Veggies in the Farmer’s Market

Posted on by Bill Chance

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

—-Gertrude Stein

This last weekend, after grabbings a couple shots of the fashion shoot next door, I met up with my friend and we wandered the Dallas Farmer’s Market, Nikons in hand, taking photographs of what caught our eye. What I saw first was the vegetables (other subjects to follow in the dreary days ahead).

Some sheds at the market feature fresh local produce, others produce dealers – so I suppose what you get isn’t too much different than what you see in your local supermarket, but it looks so much more ripe and delicious lined up there in split-wood baskets in front of the trucks with hand-lettered cardboard signs. The vendors hawk their wares – holding out sample chunks of melon or wedges of grapefruit they cut in front of you with pocketknives. You can’t help but smile and salivate at this cornucopia of wonderfulness.

Filling bags with food to take home is one thing – buying fruit and eating while you walk around is another, a sweet treat – blueberries, tangerines, peaches and plums – all designed to nibble and stroll, packaged in their own skins, ready to give up their juice and pulp.

An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.

—- Will Rogers

One vendor features tomatoes. The back of his slot is filled with pallets of tomatoes. Lots and lots of tomatoes.

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant’s hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

– Michael Pollan

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

—-Henry David Thoreau

In our gardens, Lord Ganesha sends His power through fruits and vegetables, the ones that grow above the ground, to permeate our nerve system with wisdom, clearing obstacles in our path when eaten. The growers of them treat it like they would care for Ganesha in His physical form.

—- Hindu Deva Shastra, verse 438, Nature Devas

I bought some of these - the broccoli and asparagus in the lower right.

I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup.

—-Spalding Gray

Dried peppers and tomatillos

This cabbage, these carrots, these potatoes, these onions … will soon become me. Such a tasty fact!

—-Mike Garofalo

Poblano and Habanero peppers with some tomatillos.

Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.

—-Ambrose Bierce

Apples, peaches, and plums. I love these dark, Texas plums - I love to have a cold bag of them to eat while I drive long distances.

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

—-William Blake

Fashion Shoot at the Farmer’s Market

Posted on by Bill Chance

I had plans this afternoon to meet a friend at the Dallas Farmer’s Market and shoot some photographs. For days I watched the weather and despaired that the cold and rain seemed to reign over North Texas. Sunday morning was cold, gray, and the water still fell. Looking at the forecast, though, they predicted that the precipitation would end precipitously at about two in the afternoon – so I decided to hold out hope and drove down there.

Sure enough, right at two the sun broke out. Within two hours there was not a cloud in the sky.

In a continuation of good omens, as I was driving down there, coming off of Good Latimer Freeway, I cut through a new urban condominium development and spotted someone doing a photo shoot on the sidewalk – either a fashion shoot or a set of senior pictures. There was a photographer, a model, a couple assistants off to the side, and a small collection of lights, diffusers, and reflectors.

I love taking pictures of other people’s photoshoots – like the one I stumbled across in Pirate Alley in the French Quarter. I guess it’s because I don’t have any models I can use – so I like to steal images from other people.

The problem with shooting in a condominium complex is that people keep walking by. Nobody seemed to notice anything.

I'm actually taking a photo of the STOP sign. The others just showed up by accident.

Shoes on a Wire

Posted on by Bill Chance

Photograph taken on the University of Louisiana Lafayette campus near the Intramural Athletic Fields, Lafayette, Louisiana.

This is a relatively untouched photograph. After I put up this entry I brought it into Illustrator and traced it. Now I’m trying to think of an interesting background to put behind the shoes. Any ideas?

In the Pines

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me

Where did you stay last night?

I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines

And shivered when the cold wind blows”

Grove of Pine Trees, Avery Island Louisiana (click to enlarge)

My husband was a railroad man

killed a mile and a half from here

his head was found in a driving wheel

and his body hasn’t never been found

A Simple Song That Lives Beyond Time

Black girl, black girl where will you go?

I’m going where the cold wind blows

You called me to weep and you called me to moan

and you called me

to leave my home