more from the archives
flyin solo, post: 414577, member: 8089 wrote: needless to say (but i'll still say it), unless you're shooting fisheye focal length, abstract is your likely medium when shooting downtown urban architecture.
I see a strong design in a photograph as being important, but not usually suffiicient in itself. Architecture isn't just a matter of proportion, but of context, space, light, and people. The ideal photo for me is one that gives a sense of time and place. For example, the Terrell County Courthouse is a difficult one to photograph because of the two oversize cypresses that were planted as ornamentals and now should have been cut down years ago, but which the same local tastes that have scattered tacky monuments around the ground insist upon preserving.
I purposely shot the Pecos River from the bridge East of Sheffield on old US Hwy. 290 to include the rusty bridge truss as a layer of history that paradoxically looks older than the Pecos which was flowing full and much less muddy than usual.
The county courthouses are interesting subjects for me since I want to capture an image of them that gives the building some context. The buildings themselves are more or less interchangeable. Some were obviously built on more lavish budgets, but nearly all of them are sited in a square in the middle of a town without regard to surroundings. When I shot the Jeff Davis County Courthouse, the Texas Madrone that had been planted at one corner of the grounds provided a context unique to Fort Davis.
flyin solo, post: 414588, member: 8089 wrote: more from the archives
BTW I think that is the photo of the group that I wish I'd taken. It has it all: design, visual interest, and mystery. While I'm guessing it was concrete formwork for a floor slab, the descending stair and elements around it take the image to another level (pun not intended).
Kent McMillan, post: 414713, member: 3 wrote: BTW I think that is the photo of the group that I wish I'd taken. It has it all: design, visual interest, and mystery. While I'm guessing it was concrete formwork for a floor slab, the descending stair and elements around it take the image to another level (pun not intended).
It's the ingress/egress point to the rooftop deck (nearly completed at the date of the photo) of some fru-fru bar lying adjacent to and east of the Carr building (the old state comptroller's building, that I happened to be doing the title/as-built/design survey on at the time), taken from the roof of the same. It's also the most highly altered of the photos (though still not much- I never was a big fan of over processing), done in a way to highlight the lack of subtlety in the finish of the wood. But yeah- when I saw even, even with the benefit of visual context- the descent into ? was to interesting to pass up.
bump TTT
In the continuing series of photos of Texas courthouses I've visited over the years, here's one of the Colorado County Courthouse in Columbus. I don't know why I edited out the base of the building in the way the shot was framed, but I imagine there was a reason.
Here are a couple of photos that caught my eye as I was running through some taken on the way to and from various surveying projects. The first is from Rocksprings, the county seat of Edwards County, Texas. The second is from the heart of Czech Texas in Fayette County near Schulenberg.
Oh, back to the "trucks" theme, there is this shot of a truck cab used as a deer stand with roll-down windows that I came across near the far end of a ranch I was surveying once:
And on the continuing subject of Texas county courthouses, here's the Presidio County Courthouse in Marfa, a shapely building designed by the San Antonio architect, Alfred Giles, whose brother-in-law was the son of the former Bexar District Surveyor, John James. Giles and the surveyor's son, the lawyer and judge John Herndon James went into the ranching business in Kendall County near Comfort in the late 1880s.
And one more Texas county courthouse. This one is unusual in being sited on the side of a hill instead of fairly level ground.
