I love taking photographs in museums because there's always so much line, color and texture. I'm careful to use quiet cameras so people can enjoy the respite from all the noise of daily life.

These are all from my favorite Austin, Texas museum,

The Blanton Museum on the University of Texas campus.

A few more bizarre shots from the Pentax K-1.

Outside a shop on a street in the Old Town area of Montreal.

Early morning in our suite at the L Hotel in Old Town Montreal.

Highly recommend this property for anyone visiting. 

Get a suite. Roomy, quiet and comfortable.

2019 was the year that I had a lot of fun photographing at a food market in Montreal. I'm not a stranger to food photography and as long as the light is good and the food is high quality it's hard to make a bad image.

When Belinda and I were on vacation in Montreal in October we visited a famous outdoor food market. We don't have anything like it in Austin so we stayed for a long time and looked at pretty much everything. 

I've done a number of food photography assignments for magazines, did my first cookbook (Creative Mexican Cooking, by Anne Lindsey Greer) for Texas Monthly Press in the early 1980s, contributed many, many photographs for the internationally awarded, Fonda San Miguel: Thirty Years of Food and Art, cookbook and art Latin art collection book in 2007. Recently I've done several videos for restaurants that are centered around beauty shots of the food and food preparation. In addition to those experiences I also love to eat food. 

Our photography in Montreal was mostly done with my Pentax K-1 camera and the 50mm f1.4 lens or the 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 Pentax lens. It worked well. The color and the detail in the files are the equal of any 35mm format camera currently in the market. We can argue about usability and lens availability but the ability of the camera to make absolutely beautiful files is argument-proof. The full frame sensor helps with limiting depth of field in order to focus attention on main subjects while the camera's in-body image stabilization is great and provides a good platform for longer than normal exposures --- which help keep the ISO down.

While the Lumix S1 and S1R are at least equal in their sensors' abilities to make beautiful files where the new cameras really shine for me is the selection of lenses I've been able to put together. They transcend most of the available Pentax lenses and let me work right out to the edge. 

That being said, I have a warm spot in my heart for the Pentax K-1. It's definitely designed and built to be one of the most useable and comfortable cameras I ever had the pleasure to shoot with --- even when it didn't quite hit focus....

Two totally different self-portraits. Two different cameras.

Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 

L Hotel mirror. 

Third Street, Austin, Texas, USA.

Downtown building reflection.

My Two Favorite Architectural "Studies" of the Past Few Years....

Both shot with a Sony A7R2 and the 24-105 f4.0 Zeiss zoom.

Corrected in Lightroom. 

Zilker Park. In the Summer. Haze included.

On the way to Barton Springs Pool.

The end of every year is a great time to look through all the folders of images you've curated in the past 12 months to re-see and maybe better appreciate images that got lost in the hustle and bustle of life and work.

I photographed a bunch of material for a play called, "Immortal Longings." I didn't care for the play itself but I did have a great time photographing the ballet dancers who performed in little bursts in the production. These images are from a shoot at the very beginning of the rehearsals; done in conjunction with a TV commercial shoot. 

I grabbed "the greatest hits" at the time and sent them along to marketing but I always meant to circle back and look at the dance images more closely. Yesterday I was cleaning up my physical desktop, which is a boring and mundane task, and to break the boredom I had a Lightroom window open on my computer and I was intermittently browsing through images from 2019. I liked them many of them better than I remembered. 

Mostly photographed in dreadful light (I wasn't able to light the scenes...), and at high ISOs, with a Fuji XH-1 and the very, very, very good 90mm f2.0 lens. 

Photographs always look different after appreciable time has passed since their creation. Sometimes better than we remember and sometimes worse. 

And sometimes they match what I remember. 

This last shot, of the ballet slipper, is my favorite. The texture of the tights and the wonderful out of focus highlight in the background make it for me...