Revisiting the Money

December 15, 2009 – In July, 2009, I set myself a simple question: What are the limits of HDR processing in suppressing light and bringing out detail? What better test than a night shoot at a brightly lite area? The price of natural gas has prompted a significant amount of drilling in the Barnett Shale running under Fort Worth, and my old connections to the industry suggested an obvious topic, a drill rig. While there are many active in the area, with many different looks, few present good locations for shooting. This rig provided an acceptable location. Hope there’s decent photo angles on the rig that will ultimately be paying me royalty money.

More experience with HDR processing since July made me want to revisit this experiment. I wanted to go back and reshoot this experiment on a night without high clouds, never made it before the rig moved on. So, using the original shots…

Fort Worth Stockyards 2009

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November 21, 2009 – It was 1983 the last time I took my cameras down to the Fort Worth Stockyards, well before it was declared a Historical District. Back then the sheds were fenced off, unsafe to enter, and what attracted me was the abandoned rail yard and the old Swift & Armour packing plants. Today, all that’s left of the rail yard are multiple rail lines crossing Exchange Avenue, the rest becoming parking lots. Well, there is a railroad turntable installed now that was never there when the stock yards were in full operation.

The sheds and barns are now accessible. Tourism has taken over most of the eastern end. Fortunately, some of the old facility still exists behind the tourist areas. Pens, offices, “subways” where livestock were easily moved from one end to the other. A brick ramp at one end alternates the brick orientation from row to row, providing sure footing for hooved animals when the bricks were wet from rain or mud or whatever….

HCR/PCA 2009 DE

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October 27, 2009 – October has been a busy month with multiple track events, kept me jumping. Have a small gap now to catch up on some things.

Just back from Texas World Speedway where I helped my friends at the Hill Country Region, Porsche Club of America put on their annual High Performance Drivers Education event. Great weather, although the track got almost 7 inches of rain a couple days before we got there. About 200 drivers including students and instructors. And what a great mix of cars! Everything from a 1963 Corvette and a 1964 Sunbeam Tiger up to a new 2010 Porsche GT3. A really fun weekend!

HDR Clouds

#113 Enhancer

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Sept 22, 2009 – Have some experiments in one aspect of HDR photography, the sky. HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques allow expression of a wider dynamic range than film or photographic prints or computer monitors can normally display. The human eye does much better than those approximations. On Friday, Sept 11, 2009 some weather was blowing up in the western Gulf of Mexico, as I was heading for Texas World Speedway (TWS) in College Station. It was obviously going to be a wet weekend, a challenge to our drivers and hopefully one that would present some nice cloud shots, if we weren’t completely flooded.

Caelum Moor

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September 5, 2009 – Caelum Moor, at the time of this writing, was a sculpture park in Arlington, Texas (halfway between Fort Worth and Dallas) that held several large stone sculptures by Norm Hines between 1986 to 1997. Think Stonehenge with later Celtic influence in over 250 tons of Texas pink granite. It was to be the centerpiece of a business development that went bankrupt. It currently (2009) lives in disassembled status in a water treatment plant warehouse in Arlington. There are some folks trying to get it reassembled at the new Dallas Cowboys stadium. Future unknown

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Experiment in Publishing

Welcome to one corner of my world. In this blog I hope to share some of my joy in photography. I’ve been practicing since the mid-1950′s, one day may get it right. The Galleries will show you both recent work and items going back many years. Older photographs and print negatives have tended to fade with time, results of the scans vary widely. Slide film has survived much better (Kodachrome was good stuff). You comments and questions are welcome.