Stars in their eyes
Moving back down Congress Avenue on last Sunday’s short expedition; now pulled to my other recurring urban subject of store windows. Sometimes I wonder if anyone else finds shop displays disconcerting, as if something dangerous moved in the corner of your eye then faded into the normal to be ignored again.
Shadow walking
The last picture taken in the Texas State Capitol grounds last Sunday before turning round and heading back down Congress Avenue.
I like this image and would post it anyway but I am realizing that this blog may take me to places that I did not intend. I am in danger of shadow walking. Everything we do influences everything else we do. Sometimes an action leads us to new places we did not realize we could get to, sometimes it boxes us in without us realizing. Maintaining a photography blog is just such a two edged sword and I fear that I have been allowing it to start cutting in the wrong direction.
In Plato’s cave allegory, the occupants look at the shadows on the wall unaware that they are just projections of the ideal forms behind them on the outside of the cave. I am becoming overly concerned with site traffic and Google Analytics charts; with comment counts, Diggs and syndicate site ranking. Site traffic and comments are the shadows in my cave and, wanting to be liked, my image selection is being influenced by my “market.” I risk posting images that I hope others will like rather than those that interest me the most; I might pass on the difficult and marginally successful experiments in favor of camera club point scoring.
So, I promise to stop looking at the charts. At least until tomorrow.
Crosswalking
A near collision of Sunday morning walkers in the otherwise empty grounds of the Texas State Capitol building.
Soloautos
Moving up Congress Avenue from yesterday’s location on Sunday morning, this was my next stop. Not a likely winner in a photographic popularity contest but an addition to my ongoing ‘Urban Semiotics’ series so it gets posted anyway.
The frame appears empty on a casual glance but in fact it is packed with signs and messages; messages we read unconsciously and slot into place. Messages that would mean nothing to the people that founded Austin nor to those that lived here in the centuries before that. They would know the best place to find water in a drought and so do we; but we would look in different places, guided by different signs.
Dark windows
The second in a series of images made this last Sunday morning, walking up Austin’s Congress Avenue to the Capitol building and back. Yesterday’s entry was taken a minute or two after this one; I will post the remainder in similarly rough sequence over the next five or six days.
It is fall in Texas, summer is finally over and the photographers and deer hunters are coming out to play; hopefully in different locations. The temperature is at last cool enough to walk the streets; the sun rises more slowly and the long and interesting shadows last until mid morning.
Metered wall
How much time do we have left?
