The Marathon Day Ended Up at the Natural Science Museum

Yesterday was a marathon but I took the role of the tortoise and ran it slowly. The plan to be at Hermann Park at 8am for a parking spot turned into getting out of bed at 9am—much better plan. One trip through the park at about 11am convinced me that was all the traffic I wanted to fight for one day so I headed downtown and parked near the Preston Street Station and took Metrorail to the park—good plan. But that meant that I missed most of the picnic. I had picked up a Subway downtown and found a shady place in the park to picnic alone. The Janet picnic was a good idea and I may do one soon when I can park within comfortable walking distance.

Since I was running late I headed straight for the Japan Festival thinking I would find the photographers there. In three hours I only saw two people that I knew—does that sound like a familiar story? Matt and I had a couple of $5 Japanese beers and I decided that if I wanted to shoot indoors with a group of people I really should go home, clean up and change clothes in spite of the shower I took before heading to the picnic. Old people sweat.

Got back to Hermann at about 5:30pm and found a parking space at the front door of the Natural Science Museum—that is much more like it. Met up with the group inside the museum and spent two of the shortest hours of photography that I have done in a long time.

We were photographing the Texas Exhibit, artifacts from Texas History. I wasn’t really interested in artifacts I was interested in photographs. I made two rounds through the exhibit. The first I decided that I wanted to shoot the rooms rather than the exhibits so I put on the wide angle. Instead of fighting the reflections on the glass enclosures and the people milling around I decided that I would do my best to incorporate them into my photography. I was using long exposures, 4 to 8 seconds so anyone that moved was blurred—I liked that. It seems appropriate to have ghostly figures in photographs inside museums. That was the fun round. No one but me will probably like the people pictures but that's okay.

Then I switched to the 105mm macro and made another round to photograph some of the object on display. I enjoyed both but I got more “good” photographs on the first round although most people looking at the photographs will disagree. Okay, I had more fun the first round. I stayed up until 3am processing and posting the photographs.