Wortham Park 4

 

I am not sure but think these trees may be Cypress...however I do not see the knots of roots coming up that are usually seen with that tree.

Wortham Park 3

This is at the back of the park and has fountains down the center of the pool but I cloned out the metal pipes since they were not spraying anyway.  Photographing here at dawn or maybe on a cloudy day would allow a more evenly lit image --- the bright sunlight on the columns to the right are distracting, I know.  It is hard to tell but there are benches under the ivy covered walkway. I cloned out distracting patches of sun from the lattice windows on the left foreground also, but decided there is just too much uneven light all over the image to continue with all that.

Wortham Park 2

Another slightly different angle of the waterfall columns.  You can see how the trees are planted in multiples and behind the waterfall columns is a narrow reflecting pool with two rows of stone colums, ivy covered roofs and lattice windows and benches.

Wortham Park

Nikon D700, 24- 70mm f2.8 lens at f11 and 1/125, ISO 200

When we had the big freeze in the Houston area in January I wanted to find the frozen waterwall in the medical center...no luck.  But we did find this park that I was not aware existed ---  Gus and Lyndall Wortham Park at Holcomb and Main, built in 1991 (note, this is not the Gus Wortham golf course).  

Talk about repeating elements!  Ivy colums, waterfall columns (turned off), rows of trees, rows of bedding plants, a reflecting pool with fountains (off too), arbor columns, benches, lattice windows and shadows from all the vertical elements.  It is not possible to shoot all the elements in one frame, and we arrived here late in the morning so the light was turning too harsh but this is a place I would like to return to.  Here is a 3.3 gigapixel panorama of the park taken by David Engle (Texas_Photo) with a Canon SX110 camera but while the waterfall columns do gradually increase in height, they do not curve through the park as this image seems to show : Panorama

Maggie's Quincinera

 

Before I composited Beautiful Bride I practiced on this image from a Quincinera portrait.  The shoot was done in 2008 so could not be used for our photo club assignment.  In this one I left Maggie's ears instead of the human model's...for some reason when I tried that on the bride it did not work well.

Beautiful Bride

This was my other submission for our photo club's February assignment of Surreal Composite. Thank goodness, the human model is an animal lover and was not offended by my replacing her face with our dog's.  The original portrait was shot in Galveston on our one and only "trash the dress" session and was one of the latest portraits I had shot and since the images submitted for assignments have to be recent, I didn't have a lot of choices.  Every time I do the club assignments I learn something, and this time I had to work a lot on my Photoshop skills in order to get a believable composite. I still have problems with the whiskers...  The birds are actually PS brushes that I downloaded from Jerry Jones.  Then I had a really hard time trying to get them to look like real birds and ended up layering duplicates in different blending modes, with lots of masking.  FIrst I tried putting wings on the bride --- I knew I wanted something in that negative space on the left, but I never got the wings to look the way I wanted them to.

Pet Photographer Practice

While I am posting about cats, here is a shot of my sister's kitten Xander, grown up a little since she got him last July.  I have always been a dog person (how serindipitous to have married a Barker!) mainly because I just didn't know any cats.  Now both of my sisters and my parents are owned by cats so I have been around felines a lot more and can appreciate how special they are.  I doubt my 3 canines would ever allow a feline in our home but I have thought about it lately after learning the sad fate of most of the cats in our city's animal shelter.  I am sure I am nearing the limit of pets allowed in households in Friendswood...maybe I should apply for a zoo permit.

 

What fantastic eyes Xander has!

Nikon D700, 24-70mm lens at f5.6 and 1/125th, ISO 1100

 

And I can't forget Christina's first cat, Kya.  I have colorcast issues with this image that I just can't seem to resolve.  The walls in that room are a bright yellow, and while daylight was coming in from a window there also may have been some lights (tungsten, halogen, fluorescent?) on.  All I know is her eyes and the comforter she is on are both a beautiful yellow-green-blue color that is not showing up well. So, take my word for it!

 

I just love her mouth!

Nikon D700, 24- 70mm 2.8 lens at f8 and 1/10th, ISO 800