Portals

Nikon D700, 24 - 70mm lens at f11 and 1/250th, ISO 400

We came upon this surreal scene unexpectedly on a recent trip to Galveston.  I had not been to Stewart Beach in many years but this was a cold February evening and not many people were there so we pulled into the entrance with the intention of shooting the clouds and waves.  These frames are not apparent from the road, or maybe I just wasn't looking --- they are behind the large abandoned building that had the restrooms and souvenir shop, maybe food places, which is still closed since Ike.  I cannot imagine what the purpose is for these wooden structures though at Honor's night Keese told me that for him this is a very morbid image because they look like the hangman's frames used in Germany during WW 2.

I have not been to the concentration camps and to me the frames had a "twilight zone" or Alice-in-Wonderland feeling.  They cannot support an umbrella, but maybe an awning of some kind?  It could not be very stable with just 2 uprights and a crossbar.  I hope someone with contacts in Galveston can tell me why they were built.  It had to be after Hurricane Ike.  I tried different angles and compositions and was thrilled to see a person wearing black walk along the beach and so waited until he was framed to shoot.  This image is actually a composite with another shot because I was not at this exact angle when he walked by, I think a mother and a little girl in hot pink were inside the frames in this one but not in as ideal a place as I wanted.  I also removed a ship on the horizon and cloned away a couple of distractions in the sand.  

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.