Bike Lids

Mockingbird Station, Dallas, Texas

According to the DART web site, these bike lids were all bought with a federal grant and meet all homeland security requirements. I had to think about that for a while – I guess it’s harder to hide a bomb in these, compared to the old bike lockers. There are 142 of these all over the system.

Bike Lid

DART Bike Lids

DART station access

Commuting Works For Me, but I have a DART issue

DART Bike and Ride Program

DART Bike Pods

Bike Friendly Dallas – DART Bike Lids and Katy Trail Phase III progress

Three shot from one spot, resting my feet by the Henry Moore

Working Model for Three Piece No. 3: Vertebrae, by Henry Moore

My Curves Are Not Mad, by Richard Serra

Eve, by Auguste Rodin

There’s a nice stone bench behind the Henry Moore sculpture in the Nasher Sculpture Garden, where you can take a load off of your feet and look out at all the folks wandering around. It’s one of my favorite spots.

Painting with light

I have been playing around with my camera. I want to try a technique – actually a set of techniques – to paint with light. These are not finished attempts, just preliminary studies to see what the possibilities are.

When I was a little kid I used to read Popular Science and Popular Mechanics like they were the word from God. There was an article where you would set a camera down in the dark, open the shutter, and swing a light over the top of it, making a pattern. It’s a lot easier now, with a digital camera, because you can see what comes out right away – instead of having to develop the film. You can play around.

A couple of test shots with a small flashlight hanging from a ceiling fan.

Working on adding a little color

Next, I want to go outside at night and experiment with “painting” on objects. I actually tried that, but my neighborhood has too much ambient light – plus all the dogs go nuts. I need to think about this a bit more.

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A new version of Video Games by Lana Del Rey

Good Stuff

Granite

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
—-Gustave Flaubert

I was down in the Dallas Arts District. In front of the Symphony Hall the Bald Cypress trees have been growing for decades now, they are huge and beautiful. Their knees are coming up now and pushing through the little blocks of granite that pave the ground between the sidewalk and the street.

The small granite paving blocks.

I set my camera down on the ground and took these pictures – mostly to remind myself of the spot. I’ve always liked the stretch of shaded sidewalk along there, and the rough displacement of the carefully set granite pavestones… the bits of goldbrown cypress needles falling into and filling the gaps… I like that even better.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
—-Thomas Carlyle

“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: ”I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””
—-Primo Levi

Everyone has a camera

“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

A gecko in the watering can.

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.

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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.