Category Archives: Photography

Shooting in the Galleries

Posted on by Bill Chance

I decided to go downtown on Saturday for the first day of the Arts District’s Art in October celebration. The night before, I struggled to get to sleep, and didn’t get up as early as I wanted – but soldiered on anyway.

When I arrived at the DART station and was buying my ticket at the kiosk I looked up to see my train go by. They are scheduled every twenty minutes on weekends so I knew I would have to wait a while. No problem, it was a beautiful day and I settled down on a little seat on the deserted train platform and started to read my Kindle application on my Blackberry.

The Richardson Library now has Kindle books available for loan. I haven’t mastered the method yet, but I had managed to get a book of Billy Collins‘ poetry (“Ballistics”) to appear on the tiny screen – so that is good.

At a break between poems, I looked down and noticed a laptop bag right beside me, leaning up against my little seat. I looked around, nobody… so I unzipped the bag a bit and peered inside. There was a top-end laptop with accessories, including a really nice USB camera, folders of papers, and a VISA card stuck into a side pocket. I zipped it back up and sat there, trying to think of what to do.

A train going the other way pulled into the station and the doors opened wide right in front of me. I expected some panicked commuter to tumble out and yell, “Thank God it’s still here!” and grab his laptop case. It would be easy to get on the train and leave your case behind, but surely you would realize it was missing by the next stop. It would be easy to hop off and grab the next train back the other way.

Nothing.

I sat there for a second and stared at the gaping door in the train. I would love to have a nice high-end laptop like the one in the bag – among physical possessions that is the only thing I can really think of (now that I have my camera back). It would be so easy to simply stand up with the bag and get on that train. The platform was still empty.

I could actually see myself doing this – lifting the case and entering the train with a sigh, as if I was having to go to work on a Saturday. It would be the perfect crime.

A lot of people… maybe even most people (but not you, dear reader, surely) would not even consider this stealing. They would consider it a “found” laptop and they simply lucky. I wonder about people like that. What does the world look like to them? I guess they think of all the stuff that has been stolen from them and that the world owes them one now and then. I guess they have a piece of their head missing, the one that imagines the pain and suffering of someone else that has lost their valuables – in the case of a personal laptop, lost a big chunk of their life. Morality aside, a laptop case like that – with all the critical data in it – is a lot more valuable to the person losing it than to the person stealing it.

The train doors closed and it sped off.

Now what to do? My train would be there soon and I would have to make a decision. Obviously, until my train came, all I had to do was sit next to the case. Any thief would assume it was mine, only the owner would walk up and claim it. But my train would be the next one – nobody will arrive before then. Should I look in the case again, try to find a cellphone number? Should I take it with me and hope to locate the owner later? The easy thing to do would be to simply leave it where it sat and be done with it – but isn’t that about the same as stealing? I wouldn’t get to keep it but I would be abandoning it to a heartless and uncertain world – it would surely end in grief and while I would not be directly responsible and would not be aware of its fate, by inaction I would set the wheels in motion.

Luckily, I didn’t have to make the choice. I looked up and a Hispanic woman and a DART ticket official were walking up from the tunnel (the Arapaho train station is separated from the rest of the world by a wide, busy street – you have to go under it in a long pedestrian tunnel to reach the platform). The official asked me if the case was mine. She began to carefully probe the case, weary of terrorism (something that had not occurred to me until then). I didn’t mention that I had already opened it up. She moved the zipper and inch and saw the laptop within.

The woman that had made the report said the case had been there for a while, “At least five trains,” she said. She and I talked about how odd it was that nobody came back for the case. The official was making a report on her radio. I asked her if there was a lost-and-found and she said, “Yes, but I’m not allowed to do anything, I have to call for the transit police to pick it up.”

At that moment my train pulled up and I was gone.

On the train I went back to reading the Billy Collins poems on my Blackberry. The poems are short and I could pretty much digest one between each train stop.

One of them, “August in Paris” in typical Collins style, spoke of the poet watching a painter in France and standing behind the painter, taking notes, while he worked. He then made the jump to the reader, and how this readers can’t watch him work but he thinks about who they are.

He says, “there is only the sound of your breathing/and every so often, the turning of a page.”

I thought about this… how times had changed. There isn’t the sound of my breathing, but the clacking rails and the tumult of a crowded commuter train cabin. There is no turning of pages… only the silent movement of my thumb across the tiny black Blackberry trackpad and a new dinky screenfull of luminescent text appears.

Dining area at the Dallas Museum of Art. Glass by Dale Chihuly.

Nasher – Tony Cragg

Everyone is taking pictures, not everyone likes it.

The one person not taking photographs was sketching

At the Nasher

Ceiling of the Nasher

One of my favorite Bang Bang videos will not allow imbedding.

Shame.

Watch it on Youtube.

Everyone has a camera

Posted on by Bill Chance

“You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.” ~ William Albert Allard

The thing about photography is that, especially now, everybody has a camera. Everybody is always taking pictures.

How do you capture something different than everbody else?

I was in the Dallas Arts District and taking a picture of the Wylie Theater. Everybody in the picture had a camera.

Think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.

—-Duane Micals

The Wylie Theater. Down in the lower left, a woman is photographing a man.

I noticed a guy walking around the reflecting pool with a big camera and a woman doing a photo shoot .

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

—- Elliott Erwitt

I have no idea who this guy is or why he is getting his photo done.

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.

—-William Albert Allard

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
—-John Berger

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

—-Duane Michals

Plaza of the Americas, DART Station at Night

Posted on by Bill Chance

DART train at the Plaza of the Americas (click to enlarge)


Cool People Live Here

Posted on by Bill Chance
Urban Reserve

Entrance to the Urban Reserve

When I was riding down the Cottonwood Trail to the White Rock Creek Trail, there was a little neighborhood I wanted to visit on my bike. It’s called the Urban Reserve, and it’s one street lined with custom homes “designed by a select group of regionally and nationally recognized architects.”,

Dallas is such an ugly city… both naturally (it is flat as a pancake, and far from the coast) and man-made (despite the great architecture downtown, most of the metroplex are cookie-cutter suburban developments thrown thoughtlessly across the prairie). So it’s pretty cool to see somebody doing something like this.

I discovered this spot driving around when Nick played basketball at a private school next to the Urban Reserve. The southern end of the street has a little strip of concrete that connects to the White Rock Creek Trail.

Water

Some of the homes have water as a design feature. Unfortunately, that doesn't work well with the horrible drought conditions. If Frank Lloyd Wright did the work, it could be called "Stagnentwater." Architecture humor.

Since I found it, I’ve been trying to get Lee to go with me down there and look at the homes. He’s studying architecture at Tulane and I thought he’d be interested in something like that in his own city. Despite my best wheedling and pleading, he never was able to carve out enough time to go with me, and he’s back at school, so I’m pedaling around by myself.

See-Through House

Not all the planned and designed homes are built yet. Do you want to live in the "See-Through House"?

X-acto House

How about the "X-acto House"?

Home

The architecture is billed as “modern.” A lot of the homes are of the contemporary boxy style – Personally, I’d like to see more variety.

Now, why would people pay the extra money to live in a place like this?

See the little blue sign against the dark wall in front of the house in the picture above? Look closely.

Cool People Live Here

This is what is says. “Cool People Live Here. please do not disturb.” This is it, really, isn’t it? Buy one of these houses, and be one of the Cool People.

Would I like to do that? You bet your life. I’ve always wanted to be one of the Cool People. If I could afford one of these houses, I’d do it.

Wouldn’t you?

Bicyclist

I wasn't the only lonely bicyclist.

Cottonwood Trail

Posted on by Bill Chance

I remember in the mid eighties when the White Rock Creek trail was built here in Dallas. The city was installing a new massive water line along the creek and they decided to construct a concrete trail along the top of the pipe. This was a new idea at the time – the trail was too narrow and poorly designed in many parts – but it was wonderful. I lived near the lake and after work I would ride my bike to the lake, around it on the White Rock Lake Trail, then up and back on the creek trail – a total of about twenty five miles – almost every day.

I was young and in good shape and the ride was a blast. I still remember the thrill of flying across the city without the worry of being hit broadside by a pickup truck. I loved riding after work because I could speed past the packed up and stopped rush-hour commuters on their crowded freeways. It was the best of times.

Since then I’ve been an advocate for hike and bike trails – and the city has come a long way. Now, I’m more of a spectator than anything else… but I do what I can.

For years I have been following the building of the Cottonwood Trail – a hike and bike trail that runs from Richardson down under the High Five Interchange at Highway 75 and LBJ 635, then south through Hamilton Park until it connects up with the White Rock Creek Trail. This is an important connector trail, enabling bicycle commuters to pierce a large part of the DFW metroplex by connecting long existing trails through areas of heavy traffic that are otherwise impassible by bicycle or on foot.

I attended a lot of meetings when the High Five was being constructed, because it was affecting the commute to work of thousands of employees at my work site. During the presentations of the enormous, expensive, and complicated plans for ramps, frontage roads, and levels of access I noticed a thin green line snaking down along the creekbed in the maps and diagrams. The legend said the green line was a “hike and bike” trail.

In true government fashion, when I would ask about the green line, they would stare at the diagram and say, “I have no idea what that is, we’ll check it out and get back to you.” I never heard from anyone. I had to wait years until the thing was finished and then park my car and walk down there.

Sure enough, beneath the massive construction, there was a hike and bike trail. A beautiful trail, wide, landscaped, lit, and carefully designed and built to all the newest specifications. There was only one problem with this trail. It went nowhere. It dead ended at each end of the massive interchange – truly a road to nowhere. They weren’t able to get the cities that bordered the interchange to commit to connect up with the trail.

For years this strip of pavement was the best homeless shelter you could imagine. I would visit it every now and then and the number of tents, campfires, and piles of sleeping bags near the broken-out lighting fixtures in the shelter underneath the ramps grew and grew.

Finally, the wheels of progress turned and after half a decade or so the trail began to reach out from either end of the High Five. Videos – Going South, and Going North.  I checked up on the progress, encouraged that the trail finally gave a safe bicycle route to the campus where I work.

There was one piece missing, though. The final little bit that connected the trail with the White Rock Creek Trail (the main spine of the trail system that runs through this part of Dallas – the one I enjoyed so much a quarter century ago) was missing. They were taking forever to finish the thing.

Now it is done. And today I had a couple hours to pack up my bicycle and try to ride along the thing.

I packed my crappy old bicycle into the trunk of my car and drove down to the Forest Lane DART station to hop on the final part of the trail. I bought this bike used for ninety dollars almost twenty years ago, so it’s not surprising that I’m having some trouble with it.

The engine, of course, is the worst. It’s old, worn out, and generally gone to shit, but I’m stuck with that. Otherwise, the seat is breaking apart and the derailleurs don’t shift very well any more. I did some work on the front shift levers, moving the adjustment knob to try and get the shifting to improve, but it didn’t seem to help.

I hopped on and headed off. The heat is a little less toxic than it has been, though it is still horribly dry here. Right away I was having trouble. It was a struggle to pedal and my legs were aching and my breathing a chore. I was beginning to feel a little spark of panic – it wasn’t supposed to be this hard.

Then I realized that I had been turning the wrong adjustment knob when I was working on the front derailleur. I had been tightening the front brake by mistake, and it was dragging the bike to a stop.

Fixing that helped a lot – though for the rest of the day I was panicked and tired.

At any rate, I had a good time. The little bit of trail seemed anti-climatic after all the years of anticipation, but that’s that. I wish the thing was there when I was riding all those years ago… or, really, I wish that I could ride like that again.

Old End

This is where the Cottonwood Trail ended the last time I rode it. This is in Hamilton Park, just south of the High Five Interchange.

Now

Here is the same spot now. Those "Trail Subject to Flooding" signs are everywhere, though I can't imagine a drop of water right now.

A little farther.

A little farther down the trail, where it crosses under Forest Lane. One reason the construction took so long is that there was a lot of work involved in this road crossing and the creek bridge.

Forest Lane DART station

The entry to the trail at the Forest Lane DART station.

Bicycle Lockers

Cool looking bicycle lockers at the DART station.

Creek Bridge

The bridge over Cottonwood Creek. Another "Trail Subject to Flooding" sign. Wishful thinking. I don't know where the trickle of water still in the creek comes from.

Rest Area

The trail runs through some thick woods between the train line and the creek south of Forest Lane. There is a nice rest area built there. This homeless guy was sitting in the rest area, reading and writing in his notebook. We talked about the weather and I helped him find a lost sock.

White Rock Creek

The southern terminus of the Cottonwood Creek trail, where it connects with the White Rock Creek Trail. The DART train is crossing White Rock Creek over the trail.

Superdrome

Posted on by Bill Chance

I remember when the Superdrome was built, thirteen years ago. There were some interesting news articles about it.

The thing was up in Frisco, which, back then, was some small town way up north of the city. It didn’t take long for the Metroplex, which has been vomiting new developments out north across the cotton fields for decades, to swallow Frisco and now it’s another tony suburb between Plano and McKinney.

There was a time that I was a good bike rider. A very good bike rider. That was a long, long time ago. I never did learn to/get to ride on a track. Some friends of mine in college did, though I have no idea where the velodrome was, now that I think about it. I remember when one of them had his track bike go out of control on the steep slopes of Mount Oread – no brakes, no freewheel – and he had to steer across a lawn and into a hedge to stop.

I was old and fat before the Superdrome was built, though I still wanted to go out and see it. A friend from work rides there and he used to always bug me to take Lee up to the track and let him try it out. I was worried about letting Lee see the track. I knew he would love it and we couldn’t afford another expensive sport.

That’s not really true. I wanted to let Lee give it a shot, but there wasn’t enough time.

Now, after all these years, now that it’s far too late, I was able to drive out there after work and watch some races.

I wanted to take some pictures, but my good camera is still broken and I don’t have the money to get it fixed. I had to settle for a few quick snaps. It didn’t take long for the sun to set and the bikes to get faster and all that I had were blurs on the track.

The most startling thing about a velodrome, the first time you see one, is how steep the banked curves are. It looks suicidal to go up there on a bicycle. In the races, though, you see how the riders use the bank to control their speed, to slow for a second without losing momentum – they pick their speed back up when then roll back down the slope.

Superdrome

The ends of the oval track are high banked curves.

There are several division of riders: juniors, masters, Categories 1-4, women… they even took a break to let a toddler pedal around on a bike with training wheels (the announcer said, “250 meters is a long way to go when your legs are that short – this is a track, no coasting!”) – and they were all fun to watch.

Superdrome

The junior riders were the first ones out on the track.

Superdrome

While one class is racing, the next group warms up on the infield.

There were enough races to get a feel for how it goes, for the different types of race, and for the different classes of rider. I was the only true spectator there – everybody else was either riding or there to watch a family member.

I enjoyed going out there and will go back. I have no idea why it took me so long to get out there, even though it is a long, gas-guzzling drive from my house during a Friday rush hour. It was fun to watch, but I would give anything to be able to ride on those slopes, and it’s never going to happen now.

First Saturday Sale

Posted on by Bill Chance
Customers

A wide variety of customers listen to a sales pitch at the First Saturday Computer flea market in Dallas.

Candy’s laptop is hosed and we need to get her back into the digital world. She is thinking about an iPad or a new laptop, but in the meantime, Lee has decided not to take his desktop computer back to school with him. It’s a Frankenstein machine I built for him years ago, carefully assembling it from pieces as they went on sale at Fry’s or MicroCenter. It’s now about half a decade out of date, but it’s still functional, chugging along as always. It’ll work fine for surfing the web or doing some light word processing. He has a nice monitor that he’ll take with him, so all we need is a new monitor and we’ll be good to go.

I know I can get a cheap used monitor at the First Saturday Sale. And today is the first Saturday in August.

The First Saturday Sale used to be a big deal. It started out in 1969, in the pre-digital days, as ham radio aficionados would gather in the vacant lots on the east end of downtown Dallas and trade tubes and microphones and whatever passed for electronic equipment back in the day.

With the rise of the personal computer, digital technology entered the picture, and the popularity of this high tech swap meet/flea market grew until in the 1990s it reached the stage where hundreds of vendors and up to forty thousand customers would descend upon the cracked asphalt. Rows upon rows of vendor tables would stretch over about a square mile of real estate with crowds milling between, staring at memory chips, picking through piles of used software, or feeling hard drives, wondering if they would work or not.

I remember needing to buy a replacement drive, and picking up three of them for less than a tenth of what a new one would be. I asked the guy if they worked and he said, “I have no idea, I pulled a thousand of these out of a corporate job and don’t have time to test them.” I figured at least one of the three would be good – two were.

I used to enjoy going down there during the salad days. Actually, I would seldom actually buy anything, but to walk up and down the crowded rows gawking at the stuff was fantastic entertainment. I remember once a guy had about a half-dozen high powered industrial lasers for sale out of the back of his pickup truck. The vendors were wildly diverse, everything from legitimate computer stores picking up a little extra business to people that were obviously spending the week dumpster-diving and dumping their crap in a big pile with a cardboard sign that said, “Everything One Dollar.”

The only people making big money probably were the folks that ran a breakfast sausage truck feeding all the hungry bargain hunters. I remember salivating at the smell of the cooking sausage as the sweet smoke crawled down the aisles between the vendor tables, pushed by the yellow light of the rising sun. The sale was officially Saturday morning, but to get the hottest deals you had to get there at one or two AM. The whole thing was pretty much over by noon. Candy went down there with me once to score some deals on used music CDs and said, “I have never seen so many nerds in one place in my entire life.”

It was a blast, and like all good things, it didn’t last. The rate of change in computer equipment accelerated to the point that used stuff wasn’t good for anything. The prices for hardware kept dropping until it was cheaper to buy something new. And software migrated into two camps – extremely expensive (and the First Saturday Sale has always been crawling with the authorities looking for bootleg software – there were some spectacular arrests) and free – neither category does well at a flea-market. The vacant lots of the east part of downtown were torn up and replaced by the billion dollar development of the Dallas Arts District and the humble computer sale was pushed west under the Woodall Rogers Freeway Overpass.

It’s still there. Even though it is only a vague shadow of its former self, bargains can still be had at the sale. I have had good luck buying headphones, networking gear, wireless keyboards, small obscure components, and especially, flat screen monitors.

monitors

There were several vendors with tables full of used flat screen monitors.

So down we went. We didn’t want to deal with the heat so we left as early as I could haul myself out of bed – about seven in the morning (it was still plenty hot, though the rumbling overpass overhead provides some well-needed shade) and everything was in full swing. Years ago, it would take an hour to walk from one end to the other, but now it is so compact that within ten minutes we had bought a nice used Dell flat screen monitor for forty bucks. We walked around a bit more and Candy bought a beat up old tool box for next to nothing, but I didn’t see anything else that caught my eye.

Working

It's a lot of work sometimes to get this old crap up and functioning.

There are still bargains. I you need a computer, you can buy a useful desktop for a hundred dollars or so. These are obviously corporate units that have been replaced and refurbished – they should work fine. There are still vendors selling top-quality stuff at a discount and there is still a big area where it looks like someone dumped a huge pile of random junk – if you are brave enough you can dig through this and find a jewel – something that you never knew you couldn’t live without.

Instead of a breakfast sausage truck there is a taco truck, and they seemed to be making the most money. But it is nice to know that there are still enough die-hard nerds to keep the sale alive, if barely.

Geezers

A couple of experience computer bargain hunters work their way through the many bins of parts. Coffee helps.

A gecko in the watering can.

Posted on by Bill Chance
gecko by chancew1
gecko, a photo by chancew1 on Flickr.

The terrible heat continues…. It’s always hot here in the summer, of course, but this is crazy. When I left work today, going out into the parking lot, it literally felt like I was walking into an open oven door.

At any rate, I took this picture a few years ago… it looks cool and relaxing somehow.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Oh, and here’s some music from a band I really like… and you have never heard of. They are called “My Favorite” – I have no idea where I first heard their stuff, but I really liked it. They broke up in 2005, I don’t know anything about what’s happened to their members since. They did have some fans.

Music never really goes away though, does it.

Man Between the Ponds

Posted on by Bill Chance
Man between the ponds

Man between the ponds

There are these two flood control ponds down in the park at the end of my street. Every day, every damn day, I drive to work down my alley, facing the ponds, and then make a left turn over a little bridge and past them. Every day.

In the evenings the ponds are popular with walkers, picnickers, and fishermen (though I have never seen anyone actually catch anything). But during the day, the area is pretty much deserted, save an occasional walker on the trail.

A while back as I was making my left turn, I thought I caught a lone figure out of the corner of my eye. I was not paying much attention, though, I was thinking about work, so I put it out of my mind quickly. But the next day, I saw the same thing.

The next day, I paid a little more attention. Sure enough, there was a black-clad figure out in the middle of the ponds. The two ponds are separated by a concrete apron – during wet seasons the water flows over this spillway. Lately, however, under drought conditions, this area is as dry as a bone. There is still some water leaving the ponds, not much more than a trickle, it must be seeping through under the concrete.

But why would someone be standing out there? I thought I saw a city truck down by the road, maybe it was a workman digging out algae or repairing a pipe or something.

Then the man disappeared. I didn’t know if he was gone for good, or simply making his appearance during some time other than my morning commute.

And then he was back. This time I could see clearly enough to realize that this was a black-clad person out between the ponds doing some exercises, probably Tai Chi Chuan or some variation. I could see him progressing smoothly through his set of exercises and movements.

It was an arresting sight. The dark figure, clear, yet distant enough that I could not make out any details, moving, mysterious. There are a lot of people that practice various martial or meditative arts, usually in small groups, in the park or around the ponds, but nobody has chosen such a dramatic location as the apron between the ponds.

I started carrying my camera in the passenger’s seat in the morning in hopes of getting a picture. For a week the man didn’t show, but then this morning, there he was. I must have caught him at the end of his routine, he was standing motionless. I snapped a couple of shots and drove on. I don’t know how long he stayed there in that position.

I wonder if he is there on the weekend, on a day that I don’t have to rush out to work. I might walk a little closer, wait until he is finished, ask him details of what he is doing and why.

Or maybe I’ll let him remain a mystery – a distant dark figure out between the ponds, a monument to discipline and relaxation to be glimpsed for a second through a car window on days while I’m hurrying off to the rat race.