Fireworks in New Braunfels, 2009

We got to see the fireworks in New Braunfels TX again this year.

I tried again to get some good photos. I hope you like them!

















Hope everyone had a wonderful and safe Fourth of July weekend! (This applies to those outside the US, too!)

Mike Z

PS-Thanks to Jason R for showing me how to get the "bulb" setting on my camera.

PPS-To see last year's fireworks photos go to Fireworks 2008

Took a Photo Class at Zilker Park

ZilkerPhotoClass-22
Originally uploaded by mzieglertx

Today some members of Austin Pond Society went on a photography field trip at Zilker Park. Our topic at this month's meeting was How to Take More Interesting Photos. Gordon Hamilton, from SeniorNet, and I had presentations, and all the members were invited to this photo shoot to practice our skills.

Click on the Title to see more photos from the class. I hope you enjoy them.

Best regards,

Mike Z

Thadeus Project, with my photo!

I am amazed at Facebook. I have only been on for about a week, and have connected with folks that I hadn't spoken to for years (decades?).

This week Erik Martin (Jan's niece Jamie's husband) sent me a video on Facebook. It's a song called Ghost of Dawn by Thadeus Project. I had not heard of this group, but Erik hooked me by saying that they had used one of my photos in the video! I was so flattered that they would do that.

So I put the video on My Photo Memories, and send it out to the world. I really like the sound of the guitars and smooth vocals. I hope you do too.

More water lilies and ponds in the hopper to post, but I will leave that for another day. To all my new Facebook friends, Hello! and thanks for stopping by. To all the regulars, I thank you.

Best regards,
Mike Z

Betty's Pond, Another Night Shoot for the Pond Tour

Betty and Ralph graciously allowed me to come photograph their pond this week. I have been working hard to get all the ponds photo'd so they could be put on the Austin Pond Society's website for the Pond Tour in July.

disappearing fountain by front door


twilight view w/ back yard

Betty works hard to keep the pond in good shape, and it shows. I enjoyed talking to Betty while she made small improvements to the pond as I took photos.

Betty and Ralph's Ragamuffin cat

As the light from sunset faded, the lighting that Betty and Ralph had installed to accent the pond at night really showed off the best features. I have never seen a lighted fan in an oak tree before. Very unique!

lighted fan in oak tree

Betty lit a row of candles on the patio table and I tried my hand at photographing them. Not bad for a first attempt, don't you think? The accents added to the calming sounds of the waterfall nearby. I could have just stayed a while and enjoyed!

candles

But the time came when all the shots had been taken, and it was time to go. I would highly recommend this pond to anyone who is doing the Night Tour on Saturday July 18th. It is a treasure.

More later,

Mike Z

Thunderclouds Over North Austin

Driving back from Copperas Cove TX after seeing our daughter Amy play the role of Rose Blossom in the western comedy Deadwood Dick, we saw these huge thunderclouds seemingly looming directly in our path. It being one of the few times that I have had the camera ready to go, I pulled to the side of the road and took a couple of quick photos. I hope you can get a sense of the size of the thunderheads. They were pretty magnificent!

As we drove on home, I realized that the main storm was still east of our house, so all we saw from it were a few sprinkles on the windshield. We got a huge rainstorm with a little hail yesterday (nowhere near the amount of hail that we got on March 25th) so it was good that we were spared another deluge today. I like rain, but spaced out a little, not two days of downpours and then nothing for weeks. Unfortunately, no one consults with me on these matters!

Thanks for stopping by again. I hope you'll browse around some of the past entries and see what's here.

Best regards,

Mike Z

Chris O'Brien and Ellis Paul for Mother's Day!

Chris O'Brien "Rosa"

Ellis Paul "Blacktop Train"

This is not strictly a photographic post, but is definitely a great memory. For Mother's Day this year our daughter Amy found out that one of Jan's favorite singers, Chris O'Brien, was going to play at University of Texas's Cactus Cafe on Mother's Day weekend. So she made sure that we would be available, and made the arrangements for us to attend the concert.

Cactus Cafe (reviews) is a very small intimate place located in one of the buildings at UT. I would say that if there were 100 people there, that would be an SRO performance. The fact that it was a non-smoking coffehouse-type bar made it a delight to be there.

It turned out that Chris was the lead-in act for another singer named Ellis Paul. We had not heard of Mr Paul, but we were sure that if his style was like Chris's, we'd enjoy his singing just as well. Turns out Chris only sang 6 songs, and Ellis played 2 full sets! We got to talk with Chris about 1/2 way through the evening, and he autographed a CD for Jan. He was very surprised that an "old codger" like me (not his words, but I could tell) knew about his music.

Ellis Paul was very unique. He played a lot of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs, and had an angry edge of protest in quite a few songs. But I will say, he could play and sing, and entertain an audience! Someone in the audience shouted a question, "Did you vote for Obama!" He smiled a quirky smile and said, "yeah,..twice" It was a great moment. BTW, the audience participation you hear in the video must be a regular thing with EP's concerts, because we participated on the Ooo-oo-oo-o-oo-oooh's too.

About 12:30am the night was getting on, so we left and headed home. I bought a live CD of Ellis Paul's (the cover of the CD is on his Home Page)and I enjoy it very much. The two videos are my favorites from the two performers' sets that night, but I like almost everything I heard, and highly recommend them both if you'd like to hear some new music. Ellis Paul will be back in Texas at the Kerrville Folk Festival on May 29th & 30th. Wish I could be there!

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you like the music. I do apologize for the bad video on the Ellis Paul song, but it was the closest I could find on YouTube to what we heard at the Cactus. Come back often, I will try to have more stuff up soon.

All the best,

Mike Z

Night shots of Wonderful Water Features

As some of you might know, I am the photographer for the Austin Pond Society this year. It has been a wonderful experience so far. I got involved with the APS last year after making the rounds at the APS Annual Pond Tour, and taking some photos of the ponds we visited. (See Kathy and Rick). One of my projects is to take photos of prospective ponds for this year's tour, and report to the Board of Directors with the photos.

Disappearing Stream

A feature of this year's tour is Saturday evening/night pond tours. Several of the pond owners have ponds that are lit up and viewable at night as well as in the day. This particular pond owner even has water lilies that bloom at night to make the visit even more interesting.

The Large Pond and Patio

There are two water features at this home, and both are equally wonderful. The photo below is the second, smaller pond. Both have fish in them, and their dog really likes to stand at the edge of the pond and watch the fish. They seem to like the dog as well, because they gather in the water below him whenever he does.

Smaller pond

The photo below is an attempt to get a "long view" of the larger pond from the yard back to where I was taking the earlier photos from. As I took the photos, the sun set and the sky darkened to a rich purple and blue backdrop for the photo.

This is my first serious attempt at evening or night photography. I think the photos came out ok. The pond owners were kind enough to give me permission to publish these photos on the 'blog, and I hope I have made them proud.

Come back and visit again! I hope to have some more photos up soon.

All the best to you and yours,

Mike Z

I finally shot the heron! (photographically)

The rains we've had (hail storms included) have done wonders for the grass and plants around the neighborhood. I set off Saturday afternoon, camera in hand, to search for the heron that I've seen many times before.



coneflower



The wildflowers were shooting up wherever the grass had not been cut. This particular flower I had not seen before. I had seen coneflowers with dark red petals (I think they're called sepals, but that's a whole other conversation) but not with yellow. It looked like it was struggling to grow faster than the grass around it.



I have passed this tree many times on walks, but I had never seen the "squirrel" in the tree till this time. I was watching along the canal on my left, and heard a noise on my right. When I turned, there it was! Interesting that if I moved a few steps either way, the illusion was gone. If you look carefully you can make yourself believe that you can see his ears.



As I crossed the bridge over the canal, I heard a loud noise and there was the heron! I must have startled it, but it flew back and returned to hunting for dinner. I zoomed in to the maximum, and tried to hold the camera still enough to get a good shot, but realized that I'd have to walk along the retaining wall in order to get a good one. I stalked him as carefully as I could, but this was as close as I could get. Suddenly, he took off!



My disapointment was great until I saw where he landed. In the branches of the tree on the other side of the waterway were two herons. The sunlight was bathing the one, and the other was in shadow. This is my favorite photo of the elusive herons.

I have looked on several bird identification sites, and cannot find a photo that looks exactly like these. The closest I have come is a Tri-colored heron, but I am not sure. I will keep looking and will update when I get better information.

Thanks for stopping by!

Mike Z

UPDATE 4/27: John Malloy of the Surfbirds Backyard Bird Identification website says this is a Yellow Crowned Night Heron. He has a wonderful close-up of the bird's head and beak here. The photo is almost at the bottom of the page. Research pays off!

UPDATE 4/28: Mary Ann was kind enough to write and confirm that they are in fact Yellow Crowned Night Herons. She sent me to Cornell's web page. Thanks, Mary Ann!

March 25 Hail Storm in Austin TX

As I drove north on I-35 and reached Buda, I noticed that the weather in Austin was looking worse and worse. When I got to south Austin, Jan called me and told me that there was a huge hail storm happening right at that moment at our house. She said the hail was so thick on the street, it looked like snow!

I could hear the sounds of the hail hitting the roof and patio, and asked Jan to run get the camera and take some photos. She was a little intimidated by the rig, but I told her to set it to auto, turn it on, point and shoot.

I think she did a pretty great job of capturing the moment! She scooped up some of the larger hailstones and put them in a ziplock bag in the freezer for me to see. Some were half-dollar size in diameter. Pretty impressive.

That night on the news, KXAN I believe it was, the meteorologist told about the "strange coincidence" of hail storms on March 25th. He said that in the years 1993 and in 2001, similar large hailstorms had hit Austin, and caused large amounts of damage to autos and roof shingles each time. He showed videos of previous hail storms and hailstones from the video archives. Pretty cool, I thought.

More later, thanks for stopping by.

Mike Z

PS - in searching around Google and Yahoo! I found this post by Treye Rice with a great shot of the hailstones around the tree in his front yard. He also has some great photos of the same sunsets I tried to capture on another post.

Bluebonnet time in Central Texas

Man, it has sure been a long time since I have posted to the 'blog. I have been so busy that March went by in a flash! I have several posts to do this weekend to catch up, so I'll try to get them done over this weekend.

These photos were taken on one of my usual trips to Houston from Austin on Hwy 290. Even though the weather has been exceptionally dry, the wildflowers were blooming in pretty good numbers near Brenham. There were so many families along the side of the road taking photos of the kids in bluebonnets that I wondered if I could find a spot that hadn't been trampled or squashed to get this year's bluebonnet photos for the weblog.

This year there is lots of Indian Paintbrush among the bluebonnets. It really adds to the color of the roadside, and is one of my favorite wildflowers this time of year.

The sun was setting fast as I took the photos.

It was hard to pick the "best bunch" of bluebonnets for these photos. I did my best.

The next photos are of Coreopsis, I believe. I spent some time on the Wild About Texas Wildflowers website looking at each yellow variety, and Coreopsis looks closest to these flowers.

They really looked great among the bluebonnets.

The last photo is an attempt at an "arty" photo of the sunset with wildflowers.

Hope you like them. I will be posting our March 25th hailstorm pictures, and some photos of the Zilker Garden Festival soon. Till then, enjoy!

All the best,
Mike Z