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Noel, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

As most folks who know me will tell you, I have a habit of taking pictures of inanimate objects rather than people. This has been true of pretty much all my photography with the exception of a couple of trips to Guatemala when you can’t help but take people pictures since you spend most of the time being mobbed by picturesque kids desperate to have their photos taken. In normal circumstances, however, I tend to steer away from human subjects.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this recently. I’m a sociable person so why don’t I take pictures with people in them? Part of it is that I’ve known some outstanding portrait photographers and am daunted by their abilities but it’s also the fact that I don’t feel particularly at ease directing other people to do what I want them to do in front of a camera. I’m also clueless about lighting but that’s a whole new discussion which will have to wait for later.

Anyway, I’ve decided that I need to fix this problem and will be trying hard over the next year to introduce more people into my photographs – confront my fears and all that. As a start along this path, I’ve been carrying my DSLR (rather than just the compact) to a lot more events – kid’s sport games, family gatherings, etc. This gives me the opportunity to shoot people either in a candid setting or, if the light is right, by taking some informal outside portraits.

Today was a great example. We attended the lovely wedding of Jack (choir master at FPC San Marcos) and Noel (flute player and alto singer extraordinaire). I shot a hundred or so candids but also tried to get some tight crops on various guests and the happy couple and one of these has turned out to be a people picture that I am actually rather happy with. The other 99 were all somewhat so-so. I must remember to shoot twice as many pictures next time to get a few more good ones.

If you are interested in seeing the rest of the snaps, they can be found here.

Some of my very favourite portraits have been taken by Annie Liebovitz (take, for example, this image of Willie Nelson) but I’ve got to wonder if she’s jumped the shark given this year’s Lavazza Coffee calendar. Click on the “Photos” link and see what you think.

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Driskill Hotel Lobby, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Today’s picture is another hotel (OK, the same hotel as I have posted a couple of other shots from) but minus the Christmas decorations which, I am told, appeared a couple of days after my visit.

This is the main lobby of the Driskill Hotel on 6th Street. The actual building is a great deal darker than this image suggests but it is well worth visiting (with a tripod) since the decor is fabulous.

Continuing the year end “best of 2008″ theme, Sports Illustrated has just posted their gallery of Greatest Shots of ’08. This is a stunning collection of memorable shots though they really shouldn’t have included number 17

Boston.com’s regular Big Picture photography feature is starting a rundown of the photographs which best illustrate the year 2008. Part 1 is published today with 2 more parts to follow.

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Stephen F Austin Hotel Christmas Tree, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Back to hotels and Christmas trees today. This is the lobby of the Stephen F. Austin Intercontinental Hotel on Congress Avenue in Austin (about 4 blocks from the Capitol). Nikki and I had eaten in their rather excellent restaurant the previous week so I dropped back in to grab a shot of their decorations during my downtown wander just after Thanksgiving.

Have you ever wondered how those fabulous movie posters are put together? Artist Tomasz Opasinski has a page on his site showing the evolution of a movie poster.

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Autumn Morning at the Office, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Autumn comes late in Texas but this year it was worth waiting for. Often we see very little colour – most of the “greenery” round here is either cedar (an evergreen) or Live Oak (which drops its leaves in March/April for some reason) but there are enough Spanish Oaks and Cedar Elms to give us some reds and yellows in November and early December.

Perhaps because of the drought this year, the Spanish Oaks have been spectacular. This one grows outside our office and the lighting on it a couple of mornings ago was absolutely gorgeous. I took this with my omnipresent Canon Powershot G9. The juxtaposition of the hard, geometry of the office building and the soft, fractal tree was very appealing to me.

In case anyone wonders, the colours here are as seen. The only tweaks performed were to darken the sky slightly in the upper left corner.

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Engine 794, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

OK – enough Christmas for now. Here’s something a bit different. This shot was taken in San Antonio just after Nikki picked up her registration packet for the Rock-N-Roll Half Marathon. We were dashing back to the car and, all of a sudden, came across this rather wonderful steam locomotive in what appeared to be a restaurant parking lot. I grabbed a quick shot using my compact without paying much attention to how it was set up and only realised when I got home that I had the white balance set wrongly. Result, one very blue train.

Rather than write the picture off, however, I decided to turn it into a black & white and, after some tweaking in Photomatix and Photoshop to improve the contrast and crop off some nasty highlights on the edges of the image, I ended up with this rather unusual composition which I rather like.

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Austin Omni at Christmas, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

In keeping with the current theme of hotel interiors, here’s an image I took in the Omni in downtown Austin on my birthday. I wanted to get across the sheer scale of the atrium – 19 storeys (or thereabouts) tall so put the camera on the Gorillapod and shot from the floor just beneath the Christmas tree. I then desaturated the background to highlight the tree but, hopefully, leave the sense of scale intact.