We’re just back from a short family trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We hadn’t been skiing for a few years so it sounded like a fun thing for us to do for a long weekend when the kids were out of school. Here are a few snaps from the trip. You can click on any image for a larger version.

I’ve just posted the annual family Christmas newsletter. Rather than repeat all the information in a post, I’ll just link to it for anyone who is interested in knowing what we’ve been up to in 2011.

After two years of very hard work, my beautiful and talented wife has some great news to announce today (though we’ve know about it for several months). I’ll let you read it yourself over on her blog.

I’ve already posted my favourite art images of 2010 but here are my top 10 family shots from the year. I counted a picture as a “2010 photo” if I posted or processed it last year which explains why the first picture makes the list (it was taken in 2008 but I just processed it last month).

Cameron during a summer boat trip on Lake Austin.

I’ve been using fill flash outdoors a lot more over the last year and this is one picture taken with it. It was taken the weekend after Thanksgiving while my Dad was visiting from Scotland and we took a trip to Johnson City to see the lights outside the Pedernales Electric Company headquarters.

At Thanksgiving, I took advantage of a captive family to take some portraits after dinner. I especially liked this picture of my wife. Nikki, and mother-in-law, Rae.

Here’s another shot from the Thanksgiving set showing Nikki.

Moving back to Halloween, here’s a somewhat less flattering image of Nikki dressed as a “Mombie” during our neighbourhood hay ride.

White Sands was one of the highlights of our fantastic summer road trip to New Mexico and offered another great opportunity to play with fill flash at dusk.

Of the pictures I took of the boys this year, this picture of Cameron looking goofy in a Santa Fe restaurant stands out as one of my favourites.

My favourite “solo” picture of Drew was taken at a pool party held by some friends. Thankfully, he didn’t decide to shoot the water pistol at me and the camera.

The last image in the set dates back to February when we had an almost-unprecedented 2 inches of snow in Austin and the boys had just enough time to gather it and build a snowman before it all disappeared.

Visiting the PEC Lights in Johnson City, originally uploaded by wilsonloftin.

It’s that time of year again – the time for Christmas cards containing little slips of paper with an obscure URL printed on them! In case your card was lost in the post or you failed to notice the little (though slightly larger than usual) slip of paper, you can find our 2010 Christmas newsletter online here. Apologies for the rather basic design this time round – things have been somewhat busy recently.

Some days, the frailty of life and the general uncertainty of existence gets beaten into you with a large baseball bat. Today was one of those days.

After work, I received a call from Nikki who told me that Alex Wallace, my friend and fellow tenor in the Central Presbyterian Church choir, had been killed in a traffic accident this morning on his way to work. He was 42 years old.

In any tight-knit group, like the CPC choir, there are always people who stand out as the “glue” of the organisation. People who everyone gets on with. People who go out of their way to make newcomers feel welcome. CPC choir had a lot of people like this (which is one of the reasons it’s such a special group and one of the reasons I miss it so much after our church move earlier this year) but, of them all, I’m sure I would not be contradicted if I was to suggest that Alex was the best. Aside from being a great singer, his humour caused uproar during rehearsals and his ability to reach out and make everyone feel so welcome and so part of the group was legendary. Even after we left CPC, his friendship and outreach continued via emails and some of the nicest, most complimentary Facebook posts you will find anywhere. He’ll be sorely missed by a huge number of people.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends in Austin and his home town of Kerrville, Texas.

Update 10/25/10:

Alex’s memorial service will be tomorrow (October 26th) at 2pm in First Presbyterian Church, Kerville, Texas. I’ll be there singing with the CPC choir again (though I wish this was under different circumstances).

Saturday and Sunday were the 2nd and 3rd highest traffic days this blog has had in the 7 years it has been around. The only higher traffic day was when a post got linked to an internationally-reknowned photography site at the beginning of this year. I think this gives some indication of how popular Alex was – about 500 people have read this post alone since Friday night.

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…

Crown Tavern and St. Kentigern’s Church, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

The packing is finally done and we are ready to head off to sunny Lanark tomorrow. 4 flights and, given how much luggage we have, I suspect at least 1 train journey and I should be within range of a decent pint at the Crown Tavern followed by a week of festivities at the annual Lanimer celebrations.

Lanimers stretches back hundreds of years and was originally an annual event to check that unscrupulous landowners bordering the town boundary had not moved any of the marker stones and stolen land from the town. While there are still two major events that involve checking the boundary stones (“The Walking of the Marches” on Monday evening when the townsfolk walk around half the boundary and check those stones, and “The Riding of the Marches” on Wednesday when a large number of riders cover the other half of the boundary), the main event is now the parade on Thursday morning followed by the crowning of the Lanimer Queen at the town cross.

The town will be absolutely mobbed on Thursday (don’t even think about trying to drive through it any time between about 7:30am and 1:00pm) but we have been kindly given passes to an area near the cross that should afford a great view of the procession and crowning ceremony. I’ll be using a lens that’s probably unfashionably large that day, I expect

Frankie Catches Air, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I’m definitely way behind the curve when it comes to lighting. Up until now, I’ve considered a flash to be a necessary evil – something to use in a dire emergency or when I’m taking snaps at parties and the like. Over the last few months, however, I’ve been reading David Hobby’s Strobist blog and demolished Joe McNally’s book “The Moment it Clicks” in a single sitting and, inspired by these, have been keen to start using a flash for “serious” photography.

To further this goal, I got out the manual for my Nikon SB-600 to try to figure out how to use some of its advanced modes, notably wireless off-camera triggering and high speed sync (the ability to use the flash when your shutter speed is faster than the usual 1/200th sync speed). With this new information in hand, I headed off for a day of shooting with Miles Bintz at the Walnut Creek BMX track yesterday and this is one of the resulting images.

This proved to be a great experience. I was only using a single flash but the difference it made was incredible. The track is heavily wooded and, with the sun so high in the sky, photos taken without the flash always ended up with the riders’ faces in the shade. By using a flash to the left and below the riders as they jumped, these shadows could be filled in resulting in good light on them. Exposure adjustment also allowed the background to be darkened rather nicely to highlight the rider. I’ve done some arty stuff to this picture but, even with the monochrome background, you can still get a pretty good idea of the effect. No doubt I’ll post a few more (less processed) images from the shoot here over the next week or so.

So what were the main lessons learned yesterday?

1. To use the high speed sync capabilities offered by the SB-600, you need to ensure that you are not trying to use the on-camera flash for fill. It doesn’t support high speed sync and you find yourself limited to shutter speeds longer than 1/200 or thereabouts. Use it purely as a commander, however, and the SB-600 will sync with all shutter speeds up to 1/4000 (albeit with dramatically reduced guide numbers as the shutter speeds get faster).
2. You need at least 2 lights to get this right. With a single light on one side of the jumper, you end up with harsh shadows cast by the arm across the body in most shots. Another, slightly less powerful light on the opposite side would help reduce this. Miles was shooting with this arrangement and his lighting looks lot more even.
3. I thought I would be using my long lens most of the day but ended up getting the best shots (like this one) with the 50mm or even the 10-20mm ultra-wide zoom. The prespective distortion introduced by the ultra-wide results in very dramatic pictures but you take your life in your hands to get them since you end up very close to the bikes as they fly through the air.
4. The most difficult part of the process once you get the lights positioned is focusing. Most of the time, I stuck to manual focus and prefocused where I thought the bike would be at the apex of the jump. I then fired the shutter when the rider flew through the field of view and chimped the result to check the focal point before refocusing for their next run if necessary.
5. As an extension of the last point, even the super-fast autofocus on the 70-200mm f2.8 VR can’t track one of these guys as he flies towards you.
6. Don’t leave your water bottle in the car if you intend spending 4 hours in the sun in the Texas summer.

Yesterday’s experience was enormously positive and I’m left with whole new vistas of flash-enabled photographic opportunity. I’ll definitely go back to the track since I think it would make a great documentary subject in addition to being a fabulous place to get some really dramatic action shots. Maybe I’ve found the photo project I’ve been looking for?

Butterfly Drinking, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Our main objective in going to Houston a couple of weekends ago was to visit the museums down there. One of the highlights for me was definitely the outstanding butterfly exhibit in the Houston Museum of Natural Science which is housed in a large, glass structure on one side of the building. The space contains a spectacular waterfall dropping about 40 feet from the roof down the center into a pool. This is surrounded by a large variety of rain forest plants with a huge number of butterflies flitting between them.

I spent an hour or so there (Nikki and the boys left for the gift shop well before me) and played with my Tamron 90mm f2.8 Macro lens. Lighting was a bit tricky but I managed to get several shots I’m very happy with, one of which you can see here.

My hit rate was pretty poor (about 4 to 5%, I reckon) but given how the insects flutter around and the tiny depth of field when you are that close (about 2 to 3 inches away in this case), I guess that’s reasonable. It all comes back to my firmly-rooted belief that to get a few good pictures you have to take a whole lot of bad ones.

Drew as Eragon – Arts Run 2008, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

OK, so it’s not the front page of Texas Monthly but Drew was pretty chuffed to find this photo of him on the back of this month’s “Parent:Wise Austin” magazine. Regardless of the lack of photographer credit, fame or fortune, it’s a proud Daddy moment nonetheless.

For the story behind this photo, see my original blog posting here.