Posts Tagged: Zilker
Zilker Park Trail of Lights
Welcome to 2013! I wanted to do a quick post on here with some pictures from the Zilker Park Trail of Lights here in Austin. I posted all of these on Facebook already, but why have a photography blog if I’m not going to put my photography on it? For the last two years – my only years in Austin, there was no Trail of Lights due to budget issues, so this was my first visit! Here’s a brief description of the Trail: Zilker Park is the largest park in Austin and is surrounded by a circular drive where people normally park their cars, but during the time of the Trail, Zliker is shut down and all the lights and various scenes are setup along this circular drive. You park nearby (or far away) and walk thru the trail, which ends at the huge Christmas Tree made of lights. “The Zilker Tree stands 155 feet tall and is composed of 39 streamers, each holding 81 multicolored, 25-watt bulbs – totaling 3,309 lights” (from austintexas.gov). It’s pretty impressive in person, and a lot of fun to stand underneath and spin around (last picture). Hope all my blog readers had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. I’ll be doing a “Best of 2012” coming up soon!
Bloom: Before and After
I PROMISE that Europe pictures are coming soon, but I couldn’t help myself with this one – it just needed more attention. The featured image for this post is titled “Bloom,” and it’s also featured in the previous blog entry. Bloom is one of those pictures I took, reviewed on my camera screen, and knew right away that I was going to love the final product. I also knew that what I saw on my camera screen wouldn’t be nearly the same as the final product. Normally, I don’t let everyone in on the behind-the-scenes stuff, but this time, I decided to do just that.
I use Adobe Lightroom pretty extensively to enhance every picture before I publicize it. Lightroom is an essential tool for importing picture files, selecting the photos I want to edit, publishing them, and creating archives of old “albums” of imported images. Most people think about Photoshop when they hear “editing photos,” but I haven’t touched Photoshop in months. IN FACT, I only have Photoshop Elements installed on my computer right now – not even a full version of Photoshop. Anyways, I used almost all the “weapons” in the Lightroom “arsenal” to get the final product just the way I wanted.
Zilker Botanical Garden
Since I finished editing the images of our trip to Zilker Botanical Garden first, these pictures will serve as an interim post until the blog entries about our trip to Europe. Compared to the Chicago Botanical Gardens, Austin’s Zilker Gardens don’t have a whole lot to offer. But it was a nice afternoon spent among the trees before Katie and I went to a University of Texas baseball game with some friends.
