Paris, Texas

Although titled Paris, this post is actually about Terlingua, Texas.

Our cabin's number in Terlingua.

We watched the outstanding Wim Wenders movie, Paris, Texas a few days ago (on streaming Netflix!). This is a superb movie that is highly recommended to people interested in photography. Every shot is beautifully composed with respect to color and composition. Just great. The music (mostly haunting slide guitar melodies) in it was done by Ry Cooder and I have had it for years. One of the things I never realized is that the movie starts in Terlingua, Texas, a place we visited a few years ago. This point in the movie is also the first time you hear the Ry Cooder song. This is interesting as when we stayed the night in Terlingua, the cabin next to us was occupied by a band from Austin.

The guitar player of this band (sorry didn't take his picture and I don't remember their name) actually did a really good rendition of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas music. I never realized how appropriate that was until I rewatched the movie. I linked the South West Texas thing with the movie of course, but had not linked Terlingua with the movie. Funny.


Rusty nails in Terlingua.



Terlingua's really nice ghost town cemetery:


EDIT: Should have done this before, but you can find the opening scenes here on youtube. The scene that shows that we are in Terlingua here comes right after this scene. The landscape you see in the beginning looks like it was filmed in Big Bend National Park. A really amazing place. Terlingua is at the west entrance to the park.

Mount Evans/Summit Lake

In recent weeks, I went out twice in the evening up to Mount Evans to do a sunset at Summit Lake. The geography of this place is not right for good Alpenglow, but under the right conditions (as you'll see below) you can get glowing clouds that bathe the entire place in crazy light. I've never seen pictures like this from this place before so this mostly was a gamble on my part. This condition only happened the second time I went there and lasted only a few minutes. It was spectacular nevertheless. I got good shots both times that I really like and I'll share them with you below. Click on them to see them in the gallery. You can also visit a set on flickr.

Blue and yellow

ISO 200, 11mm, f/16, 3.0 secs

Yellow blankets

ISO 200, 16mm, f/16, 4.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.

King's crown

ISO 200, 11mm, f/16, 25.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.

This was one of my two favorites from the first evening I went there. The King's crown flowers are deeply red colored (not visible in this scaled down copy, but will be if you order a print as the full resolution of the image will be used. My second favorite was this rock shaped like a bird:


ISO 200, 11mm, f/16, 30.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.
The shutter is much longer here because it was getting dark very rapidly.

Rolling clouds

ISO 800, 11mm, f/16, 30.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.
Far after sunset.

The second time I went there as I said, the conditions were right for a glowing sunset. Here is my favorite.

Assembled from 9 images at ISO 200, 35mm, f/16, 0.8 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND in the top row of shots.
This will print well even wall sized. There is also a panoramic version of this here that I use as a backdrop on my monitor.

This is a detail from the above panorama that I liked.

ISO 200, 35mm, f/16, 0.8 secs

A few minutes later it looked like this:

Assembled from 12 images at ISO 200, 30mm, f/16, 5 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND in the top row of shots.

This is an image focusing on the reflection you can also see in the above image:

Assembled from 8 images at ISO 200, 30mm, f/16, 5 secs.

All in all this was a very productive two evenings. I have far more interesting shots from this place than I put in the gallery but I did not want to overwhelm you.

£9,500 toilet?

Is it some sort of commentary on modern society that a toilet (interesting Delft blue motif BTW) that John Lennon used for a few years and got rid off by giving it to his builder to use as a plant pot sold for more than a rare and famous Lennon/Ono album from his collection. Are celebrities venerated for the right reasons?

New Layout

As you might have noticed, I did some major updates to the page layout on this site. The main change is that I flipped around the color scheme from what it was and changed the banner graphic to an image from sunrise on the Cathedral Spires in Rocky Mountain National Park. I started from a blogger supplied template that I did some major hacking on to make it work for a photography website. I don't want tiny columns, and the sans serif should be Helvetica, not the ugly arial clone that is generally used for this purpose. I also added some drop shadows here and there.

Jpeg quality comparison

To my shame I notice that I neglected to link earlier to this excellent analysis by Jeffrey Friedl on the effect of the jpeg quality setting in the Lightroom export module. If you use Lightroom and export images to the web, it would be well worth your time to read this article and check out the comparisons.