Coffee in focus and taco out of focus.
New café at the downtown library.
It was "Austin Summer Hot and Sticky" when I left the house this afternoon around 2 pm to go and take some random photographs on South Congress Ave. A sweaty Father's Day walk with that new 75mm f2.0 lens I picked up a week or so ago. As I walked north on South Congress I was already starting to perspire. By the time I got to Jo's I was hot.
I ran into my friend, David, there and we chatted while live country dance music played in the background and people with lots of tattoos drove by the front of the coffee stand on loud motorcycles. All of a sudden the sun dimmed, gray clouds rolled in accompanied by stronger and stronger wind gusts. The sky to the north turned dark gray. Zone 2 or 3. Seconds later the rain got into the act and for the next half hour we had an amazing storm complete with near horizontal rain and wind that dispersed the rain under all the sheltering roofs and soaked the assembled crowd with mist.
The band unplugged their electrical instruments and amplifiers and rushed to get their gear out of the downpour. I instinctively covered my camera and lens with my hat --- just to minimize droplet fear.
And then, an inch of rain to our credit and twenty degrees cooler temperatures with it, the rain stopped and the winds died down. Of course David and I were shooting photos with water resistant cameras but old habits die hard and my gut reaction to rain on cameras is always to cover them up. Especially if I'm just out having fun and a client isn't there as a rationalization to power through a storm no matter what.
After the atmosphere settled down I headed home to play with photos and then clean up and get ready for a Father's Day dinner with B&B at a new (to us) restaurant over in Central Austin. We have high hopes....
So pre-rain and post rain images below. Click on them to make them bigger.
Rain drops in the pool at the San José Motel.
A MacBeth color chart painted on a wall for the convenience of photographers
and cinematographers in the area. Gotta nail that white balance. Right?
And then? Back home.
I get so much satisfaction and inspiration from looking at your work. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteVery nice batch of pix Kirk!
ReplyDeleteWhat’s up with the pictures of real people? Were all the mannequins in hiding on Sunday?
ReplyDeleteHi Chris, Sadly the good, world class photography of mannequins requires more or less continuous practice. Since I was out in the Non-Mannequin wilderness on Wednesday and then working on the subsequent blog post on Thursday; re-writing over and over again.... I fell out of practice entirely. Either that or the mannequins were hiding from the rain. Didn't want their make-up to run.... But thanks for asking! Just trying to assure readers that I can, in fact, still photograph real people.
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