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.
There were a lot of choices in food trucks down in the Dallas Arts District on Friday. Most of my Favorites Were There – but, as always, when presented with a temptation, I chose one I had never tried before.
I have seen the Green House Truck on several occasions, but, for no good reason, hadn’t tried it yet. It was one of the first trucks in Dallas, it may be the first one – a pioneer from the days that they were highly restricted.
The Green House is known for healthy food. Looking over the menu, I chose a Portobello Mushroom sandwich on Ciabatta bread with walnut/basil pesto, grilled vegetables, and a side order of sweet potato fries.
Makes you hungry just thinkin’ ’bout it, doesn’t it.
My food was really good – I regret not trying the truck before – I’ll definitely look for them again.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Somewhere miles deep underground the dried salt remnant of an ancient sea is being squeezed by the unimaginable weight of the Mississippi delta building up above. All the loose mud from Ohio and Minnesota ends up washed downstream, piles up, and presses down. The salt becomes a sort of geological fluid and globs rise like pale columns in a crystalline subterranean lava lamp – reaching miles up until they almost burst forth under the starry sky.
One of these salt domes sits under Avery Island – pushing the land upwards above the surrounding sea-level flatness. It is truly an island – a disk-shaped protuberance rising above… not the trackless sea but the feckless swamp – a bit of dry, elevated land looking down on the miasma and the bog.
The salt dome rises and bears a number of gifts. There is the salt itself – mined or boiled from springs for centuries with only a short break when the saltwork was captured by Union troops during the Great War Between the States (as it is known in these here parts). There is the gift of petroleum – oil is dragged along and concentrated by the rising column until, like Spindletop to the west, a forest of derricks sprout up sucking at the black gold.
And finally, there is the gift of high, dry farmland – rich and fertile. The Avery Island Plantation could grow pretty much any crop and – luckily for us – they chose a unique crop, grown from seed brought back from Central and South America… Hot Peppers.
For Pepperheads and fans of spicy food Avery Island is capsaicin ground zero and a visit there, at least once during a lifetime, is a necessary pilgrimage – a hot sauce Hajj.
Avery Island is the home and only manufacturing facility of the McIlhenny Company – the maker of Tabasco Pepper Sauce. Every little red bottle – somewhere around 750,000 bottles a day – are made on Avery Island.
We were going to drive back to Dallas from Lafayette, about a seven hour drive, but I wanted to go see the McIlhenny Tabasco factory on Avery Island first so we drove south instead and, after a couple of wrong turns, crossed the little wooden toll bridge (one dollar per car) onto the complex of green hills atop the salt dome.
The first thing you notice when driving up to the factory is the smell. It is wonderful. It’s not a hot, painful tear-gas like capsaicin reaction like you might expect, but a mellow, complex warm feeling that envelops the whole complex. First, we took a tour of the factory. You get a lecture; watch a film, then walk past the filling lines behind a glass wall. It was a Sunday, so the filling lines weren’t running, which was fine with me – I’ve seen plenty of food filling equipment filling food in my day. It was good enough to be standing behind the glass looking at the place where all the goodness happens.
At the end of the tour was a little museum with facts about Tabasco Pepper Sauce. I already knew most of it, having seen it on the How It’s Made television show. The most amazing thing about Tabasco is that the ground up peppers are aged in second-hand whisky barrels and allowed to ferment for three years before being mixed with vinegar, blended, and bottled. The barrels are covered with a layer of Avery Island salt while they age. Ground peppers (the seeds are developed on Avery Island, though the peppers are grown in Latin America), water, salt, and vinegar… that’s it.
To help the pepper pickers pick the perfect peppers they are given le petit baton rouge – a little red stick. This is painted the color of a perfectly ripe Tabasco pepper.
Then we walked across to the Tabasco Country store and bought our share of touristy knick-knacks and hot sauce products. I looked long and hard at the gallon jugs of hot sauce with the plastic pumps – and was able to resist the siren song. They had a sampling table with all the different flavors, including one I have never seen before – a chipotle raspberry sauce (I bought a bottle). There is no reference to this chipotle raspberry Tabasco anywhere – it’s a bit gimmicky, but it tastes good.
They also had spicy cola, two flavors of ice cream, and anything else you can imagine – plus a few you can’t. Candy bought some stuff for Nick (he loves Tabasco) and a bag of cooking wood made from their broken fermenting barrels.
One odd thing I did buy was a big ziplock plastic bag of pure pepper mash. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but it makes every room smell wonderful.
I took a walk around and snapped a few pictures, like a good tourist. Down at the end of the factory were some long brick buildings – these must be some of the fermenting warehouses where the sauce ages for three years in those oak barrels because the odor wafting out of the vents was unbelievably wonderful. One must have been the Chipotle warehouse because I could detect a smoky note in the air.
We had planned on stopping by a tony Cajun restaurant north of Lafayette on the way home, but there was a little trailer set up next to the country store selling red beans, rice, and sausage from crock pots. Of course, there was a large selection of spicy condiments available for testing.
I doubt the expensive restaurant had anything on the five dollar foam cup of red beans that I gobbled down with dabs of at least seven different Tabasco sauces on different nibbles.
There is a lot more to Avery Island – the Jungle Gardens and the Bird City went unvisited by us. We had a long drive ahead and couldn’t tarry. I’ll be back though, to smell that smell and explore some more. Once is not enough.
The factory has this crazy bayou gothic look to it.
The recycled whisky barrels with salt on top. The mash ages in these for three years.
Walking around, I found this pallet of old barrel lids after the peppers have been aged.
Bill Chance 