Summertime in Austin. Hot and lazy. It's all good.

Here we are in the middle of August and everything is going according to history and precedent. The jobs have fallen off to zero, the temperatures have gone through the roof and everyone left in Austin is burrowing down somewhere cool like the frog that lives under the faucet drip in the garden outside my front door.

This image of Noellia was taken at a popular spot in the middle of Austin. It's the stream that comes from the Barton Springs spillway and flows on to Lady Bird Lake, which runs through the center of downtown Austin.  The water is from an underground spring and is a constant 69 or 70 degrees.  People come with dogs, picnic baskets, little kids and whatever else to spend hours frolicking in the stream and staying cool.

We headed to the Springs because Noellia wanted some new images for her portfolio and she wanted "outside."  Okay by me.

This was taken with the Sony Nex 7 and either the kit lens or the 50mm 1.8.  I just don't remember which. Too hot to remember.  I knew I needed a little bit of fill flash but I'd never cracked the flash menu on the camera before and I've only used the Sony HVL-58 AM flash on a few occasions and then on complete automatic with a Sony a77.  What the hell.  I gave it a try.

I put the flash on a short, off camera cord, put it in ttl-auto, dialed it down a couple of stops and shot.  I had the camera set to manual exposure, 1/250th of second and in the territory of f 5.6.  I chimped a couple of times to fine tune the flash ratio and then we moved on.

My big mistake of the day was not tossing the cameras to one side and throwing everyone into the water.  That would have been even more fun.