White_Sands-101, originally uploaded by wilsonloftin.

It’s been ages since I posted any family pictures on the blog so here’s one from our recent trip that I’m pretty happy with. This was taken on our first evening at White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo in New Mexico. The weather was breathtaking that night – thunderstorms all around, rain on the distant mountains and sun rays shining through it while we remained dry in a pocket of dunes in the centre.

The picture was taken with a self timer (obviously) and, since it was getting dark, I popped an on-camera flash to brighten us up a bit while darkening the background somewhat. Amazingly, the exposure is good (I never get more than 2 attempts at this kind of thing before one of the kids runs off) and everyone looks happy and has their eyes open!

Although I post a lot of pictures to Flickr on my “DaveWilsonPhotography” account, I also keep a second account which contains only pictures of the things we’ve been up to as a family. Click through this image to see some others if you are interested.

Santa Fe Adobe, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Things have been a bit quiet here recently since I’m currently on a trip to New Mexico and am relying on hotel WiFi which, unfortunately, is not universal. AT&T are living up to the standard I have come to expect by having no effective data coverage anywhere in the state as far as I can see – even downtown in Santa Fe, I am completely unable to get any kind of usable data connection. That is, however, a story for another blog posting.

Today, we spent the morning in downtown Santa Fe soaking up artistic inspiration. Not only is the city centre absolutely beautiful with fabulous adobe buildings everywhere, it’s also home to more excellent art galleries and museums than just about anywhere I’ve ever visited. After the must-be-visited Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the highlights for me were three photography galleries.

The Lisa Kristine Gallery contained some of the most beautiful images I have ever seen – large format prints of people and scenes shot mostly in Asia. Amazing portraits and landscapes with absolutely perfect light.

Since the demise of the last dedicated fine art photography gallery in Austin (by which I mean a gallery selling prints by internationally acclaimed and famous photographers) couple of years ago, I was also delighted to get a fix of superlative print quality at the Andrew Smith Gallery which features original prints by masters Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh amd Henri Cartier Bresson among others. You may think these photographers’ images are superb in books of their work but until you have seen original prints, you really don’t have any idea of just how amazing these images are. The tonal range in the prints is something to weep over.

In addition to these masters, I was also delighted to see more of the luminous landscape work of Christopher Burkett whose large format images blew me away when I first saw them four or five years ago. His large prints are, sadly, rather outside my budget but I came really close to signing a four figure check a few years ago when I saw one if his pictures of an aspen forest in autumn. You could see every vein on every leaf in a 30″x40″ print. Truly breathtaking.

The final gallery I visited was Photogenesis which featured the work of several photographers, most of whom were new to me. One that really caught my eye was Nicholas Trofimuk whose black and white landscapes are wonderful.

While I didn’t walk away with any large prints (unfortunately), I did treat myself to a copy of “The Portfolios of Ansel Adams” and several greeting cards to remind me of the day.

Snakehead Boot, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

I’ve been in Texas 16 years now but, despite seeing about 3 or 4 snakes a year, have never actually come face-to-face with a rattler. Unfortunately, in the last 4 months, both of our dogs have so, when our Fox Terrier, Sugar, got bitten last night, it was time to track the critter down and try to persuade it (terminally) that hunting in our dogs’ yard was a poor decision.

Our quest began with us cutting down all the brush in the yard then looking for anything resembling a hole. A rancher acquaintance told me that the best way to flush out a den of rattlesnakes is to pour a small amount of gasoline in or near their suspected hideout. The smell, apparently, really pisses them off and they bolt out of there as fast as they can. The thought of confronting a band of pissed off, venomous snakes (especially ones that I used to have on a large poster entitled “The Worlds 7 Deadliest Creatures” on my childhood bedroom wall) didn’t appeal but it was less bad than the thought of one of the kids getting bitten so Nikki and I armed ourselves with various garden tools and the remainder of a can of 2-stroke and spent quite some time sprinkling holes and preparing to hit whatever emerged.

In the end, nothing did emerge so we’re left knowing that there is a snake out there somewhere but not knowing where. If there are any rattlesnake hunting experts out there, do leave a comment to let us know how we should go about catching (or, better, dispatching) this critter.

Oh, the photo – I didn’t have any pictures of living, venomous snakes so this is the best I could do. It’s a custom Lucchese cowboy boot made from a cobra skin. Someone obviously had better luck than we did on their snake hunt.

0910-Cameron_10th_Birthday-13, originally uploaded by wilsonloftin.

Our oldest “baby” (second from the right in this picture) turned 10 last Wednesday. It hardly seems any time since I was pushing a stroller around our neighbourhood late at night trying to get our little, colic-suffering bundle of joy to stop screaming and go to sleep. I’m glad to say that most of the screaming these days if of the “scream for joy” variety, thank goodness.

We celebrated on Friday night when a group of his friends came over for a food fight, hot tubbing, marshmallow roasting and many, many hours of video game playing. They had a blast and, thankfully, kept the whipped cream outside and off the carpets.

On Saturday morning, we got together with all the guys in the Cub Scout den and played Blazer Tag, something that was greatly appreciated by Dad as well as the boys. There’s something amazingly therapeutic about racing around a darkened, 3 storey arena blasting people with a lazer gun

0909-Space_Center_Houston-32, originally uploaded by pack101.

I just realised that I had failed to mention that Cameron and I spent last weekend camping at Space Center Houston with the Cub Scouts of Pack 101. This is an annual event which we missed last year due to the fact that Hurricane Ike blew through the weekend before we were supposed to go but it was worth waiting for since we had a fabulous time.

The boys and their parents (totalling about 160 people, about half of whom came from our pack) were locked into the visitor center after it closed to the public and enjoyed an evening of spaceflight-related science activities before crashing on sleeping backs among the exhibits. The next morning, we all watched an IMAX movie then got an early tour of Johnson Space Center where we got to see Mission Control, the Astronaut Training Facility and the Rocket Park, complete with a Saturn V in its own building.

We had a super time and will definitely go back again next September. In the meantime, here are a few pictures from the weekend. Click on any for a larger version.

UT vs. University of Louisiana at Monroe Panorama, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Cameron and I had an exciting outing to the Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium last night to see the UT Longhorns destroy the Warhawks from University of Louisiana at Monroe in front of a crowd of over 101,000 people (most of whom are shown in this not-too-great panorama of the event).

Unfortunately, UT football games impose restrictions on photographers and they won’t allow you in if you are carrying a telephoto lens. People do get past the checks, though, since the guy behind me at one game had a gadget bag and a 300mm lens on his camera but I’m too chicken to try so the longest glass I had yesterday was 105mm and, as a result. I got no pictures worth talking about. This year too, there is a new rule prohibiting the distribution of any image taken during the game. I figure I’m OK with this panorama since it was taken before the game started

Despite not being able to get close to the action with the camera, I enjoyed the half of the game we watched and, of course, it was great to see the UT band at half time. Cameron faded in the middle of the second quarter so we headed off after the band had finished its show, leaving the Longhorns to score another 20 or so points in the second half of the game.

The Whole Gang

Originally uploaded by wilsonloftin

For the first time in several years, my whole family were together while we spent a week in the English Lake District so we took advantage of the fact and I shot a group containing Dad, all three brothers, their wives and all our kids (plus both the UK dogs). This was taken in the garden of Routen House, the rather excellent and extremely secluded house we were staying in for the week.

This shot also gave me another excuse to play with fill flash. I used a single SB600 on the hotshoe to open up the shadows a bit and add some foreground light and it seems to have worked reasonably well even though it was rather far away and probably somewhat underpowered given the ambient light.

I used to think that art photography was an occupation which required the participant to be highly immune to frequent rejection but I had no idea how much worse the publishing industry was until Nikki gave up her last job last August to concentrate on writing full-time. To be a writer, regardless of how good your work is, you must have an enormously thick skin and the ability to continue working despite a barrage of rejection from agents and publishers. J.K. Rowling received rejections from a dozen publishers before finding someone willing to take on the first Harry Potter book and Theodor Geisel had to try more than 20 publishers before getting his first book published (you probably know him better as Dr. Seuss).

With one finished middle grade novel, an almost complete sequel and half a dozen picture books under her belt (not to mention another middle grade fantasy which has been shelved pending rework and a fantasy market which is not saturated post-Potter), Nikki is in the throes of crafting and sending query letters to agents and publishers. Hopefully this weekend’s news will help things along a bit – she has just won the 2009 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Competition in the middle grade fiction category! Just back from their annual Agents’ Conference, she has already had several agents from prestigious agencies request her manuscript (yes, the agents asked her for the manuscript rather than responding to a query letter). All fingers are crossed that one of these folks will like the book as much as all the non-agents/non-publishers who have read it so far!

Toronto by Night, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

The blog has suffered while we’ve been off on holiday. I tried to post ot Flickr and the photoblog on a fairly regular basis (when I had access to the internet) but didn’t post anything significant here at all while we were away. Sorry about that.

To make amends, here’s a photo I took on Tuesday night while in Toronto. We were staying in the rather fabulous (and incredibly reasonably priced) Grand Hotel – definitely consider it if you are traveling to the city – which has a great patio 19 storeys up on the roof. It’s open to guests until midnight so I spent about an hour there waiting for the light to be just right for a dusk skyline shot.

Toronto was a superb place to end our trip. We spent two days there doing tourist things. On Monday, we visited the CN Tower and Royal Ontario Museum (photos here and here). The weather was wonderful and the view from the tower superb. The last time I visited Toronto about 20 years ago, the humidity was sky-high and the visibility horrible so this was a pleasant surprise.

The ROM had changed a great deal since my last visit. It was still a superb museum but it now sports a fabulous modern addition on the Bloor Street side which contrasts rather strikingly with the classical architecture of the old building. The kids loved the dinosaurs and the gems and mineral collection. I loved the fact that, unlike so many other museums I’ve visited, there were no photography restrictions at all.

On Tuesday, we spent the day at Ontario Place, a fairly gently, kid-oriented theme park on the shores of Lake Ontario. We had a great time, especially in the water park section where Drew got to experience a long, raft-ride flume for the first time and really loved it.

The flight back from Toronto yesterday was uneventful except for Cameron managing to lose his Nintendo DS case containing all his games somewhere in Toronto airport. If you happen to be there and see a blue Pokemon case, do let us know.

Ennerdale, Lake District, England, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

We just got back to Lanark (and an internet connection) after a week in the English Lake District where my dad had rented a large house for the whole family. We stayed in the somewhat remote Ennerdale valley in a house that was about 6 miles from a main road down single track roads with rather questionable passing places. It was absolutely glorious.

We did a bit of walking with the kids including a lovely trek through the “dark and very expensive forest” (seen in the middle of this shot) to a super waterfall. The best walk, however, was on the trail around Ennerdale Water which Nikki and I did one afternoon after leaving the boys in the care of their aunts and uncles. This was an 8 mile route which started very easily on the near side of the lake but got a lot more challenging on the opposite bank where climbing was involved at various points. The scenery was stunning, though, and it made for a fabulous 3 hours on a lovely sunny day.

Photographically, this has been a great trip. I’ve filled 20GB of memory cards, run out of hard disk space on the laptop and have 1000 or so images of Glasgow, Lanark, the Lanimer Day celebrations and the Lake District to edit when I get back to Austin.

Onward now for 3 days in Toronto before heading home…