I wandered around Inks Lake State Park after work on Friday trying to see if I could find a good viewpoint for some sunset photos. Inks Lake is the closest State Park to my house and I go there quite a bit for hiking and photography. Many of the hiking areas were closed for some… Read More Sunset at Inks Lake
I was walking through the tall grass and bushes around Inks Lake trying to find a good photo and carefully watching the ground for cottonmouth or copperhead snakes when I looked up and saw a big spider. I have seen these things around since I was a kid and they’re kind of big and creepy… Read More Spider
Every day I drive by a pasture on my way home from work. There are acres of golden grass in the late afternoon sun, a few isolated trees, and often some cows. The grass is so tall that you really only see the tops of the cows in the golden grass and I have had… Read More Red Barn in a Sea of Gold
It has been extremely hot here recently, up to 45°C or 114°F (take your pick) this week. On top of that, we have gotten a dust cloud from Africa over Texas I am told. All this is to say, I haven’t been out to shoot a whole lot recently. I did make myself go over… Read More A Stream at Sunset
One of my struggles with Milky Way photos has been how to edit the photos. I have watched multiple videos online, had discussions on message boards, and experimented in Lightroom (and a few other tools) a bit. For my last round of pictures, I settled on an editing routine that is combination of a discussion… Read More Editing Milky Way Photo
In addition to shooting pictures of the night sky at Lost Maples State Natural Area, I also did a bit of hiking. There are many things to do at Lost Maples. I saw people swimming in the water, like one of the ponds shown below. I saw several people birding, as there is apparently a… Read More Hiking at Lost Maples
As I mentioned in a previous post, I went to Lost Maples State Natural Area to go hiking and shooting astrophotography. It was a moonless night, it was supposed to be clear, and I wanted to find a nice dark place to take sky pictures. I decided on a hike-in primitive campsite up on a… Read More Shooting the Milky Way
Today I am going hiking and camping at Lost Maples State Park, which is to the Southwest of Austin. It is going to be very hot, but I am going to just deal with it. I drove through this park once on my way from somewhere else and it looked like a nice place to… Read More Gone Hiking
Last week when I wrote this blog, I was mainly focusing on some compositions that I did around a group of boulders in the lake at Inks Lake State Park. I was happy with these photos and also had some images from another nearby place along the shore that I had tried. I didn’t feel… Read More Long Exposures of Inks Lake, part 2
There is a perch I have been thinking about using to take sunset photos or long exposure light trails over Austin. It was a relatively clear evening and I wasn’t expecting much of a sunset show, but I thought that it might be a good night to get headlight and taillight trails along Interstate 35… Read More Austin Light Trails
Jason Frels 