I went downtown on Sunday night to work on some new drawings, and I was pretty sure that the gray clouds would not be conducive to shooting. But then, just as the sun dipped below the horizon, it tore through the city with bright pinks for about 10 minutes. I sped over to the other side of the Colorado River and jumped out for a quick shot. Luckily, I always keep the D3X in my car with me in case of a photo emergency like this.

In other news, I finally did that 25 Things thing that has been bouncing around Facebook. If you don’t have a Facebook account, I copied the 25 Things here to the site…

Hey everyone! The crew over at HDR Max has decided on winners for their photography contest. The winner receives a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro! 2nd and 3rd place get full copies of the software.

• 1st place – Justin Kern – Hall of the Mountain King
• 2nd place – Tamara Bauer – Life Is All About Choices
• 3rd place – John McCormack – Three Brothers

I was not the judge, but I know it was a hard choice because I did get to see all the finalists. Really amazing work out there! You can see the three photos on here on my site with the original post or at the HDR Max site.  The contest is over, but you can still get a free trial.  If you decide to order, use the HDR Max coupon code “Stuckincustoms” to get $20 off.

Also, if Justin, Tamara, and John contact me, I want to make sure it’s okay if I post their pics here on StuckInCustoms.com – thanks!

And to celebrate, I have chosen for today’s photo a fun shot of Isabella chasing a baby goat out near Horseshoe Bay, Texas.

I can’t believe it was closed and I couldn’t go inside.  Look at all the little interesting things in there to explore.  I rattled on the transparent glass and some gal I didn’t know shooed me away.  I’ll go back there one day and I’m sure it will open on up…   I mean come on…it’s me!

Everyone likes the Batmobile yes? It’s especially cool when you see one on the side of the road in Texas that some comic-book redneck has souped up to be something that is on the edge of street-legal. I jumped out quick to grab a shot before the owner could come out and hit me with some sort of a 2×4, which I only assumed me might be carrying. Actually, you never know… around Austin it’s just as likely to be a doctor or lawyer (assuming one of those two to be an honorable, upstanding profession!

This was shot after Christmas as I spent some time alone in a Brenham, a little town between Austin and Houston. I arrived right at dusk and strolled about for a few hours, meandering around the streets as dusk set… just me and my tripod and music that seemed fitting at the time. I can’t ever decide if I like being alone at moments like those. Actually, I do quite like being alone, but it’s interrupted by fleeting thoughts that I’d like to share with someone, as much as I’d like to hear new unexpected thoughts and ideas.

Brenham is one of those old Texas towns where there is a quaint square that surrounds a courthouse-like object. I thought this might be fitting, since, according to the twitters and facebook updates, everyone really seems to be strangely in love with the government all the sudden. Those of you that know my Libertarian leanings can pretty much expect that I spend little time getting excited about the power of government..

And, speaking of the twitters (my Twitter is at twitter.com/TreyRatcliff), I have made a change to the comments so those of you that use the same email should see your avatar show up on the right. If you don’t have an avatar, you can upload your own for free at Gravatar.

This is my favorite bakery in the world – Clear River Pecan Company.  I’ve been there about four times… it’s about two hours away from Austin in historic Fredricksburg, Texas.

The brownies here are somewhere between a solid and a liquid… sort of a sweet plasma of brownie!

I do consider myself a connoisseur of chocolate with a specialty within the magistarium of brownies.  So believe me when I say they are a 10/10.  The only other 10/10 I can find in Austin is something called “Miles of Chocolate”, which also barely surfs within the existence of this mortal coil.

I went down on Saturday evening to do some shooting around Austin and caught the capitol around sunset. There are all kinds of interesting things about the Texas capitol, like this cool underground Illuminati chamber you can see here, but the one thing that all Texans seem to know is that our capitol is 14 feet taller than the one in D.C. This is a source of pride for Texans, along with the cool and trivial fact that we maintain, in our state constitution, the right to secede from the Union.

The capitol is made out of this pink granite, and it gets a little pinker at night at soon as they turn on the lights, especially against the blue sky.

I left Brenham early on Sunday morning after crashing in a tiny roadside motel. The motel was pretty sketchy, but sometimes I like that style of drive-up-to-the-door, ditch my camera stuff in the room, crash for 6 hours, then leave in haste to catch the sunrise. Sunday morning turned out to be rainy and freezing… pretty horrible for a lot of outside photography. So I ate in downtown, read a few chapters of Ananthem, drank a lot of coffee, chatted with a waitress who was an aspiring photography student and gave her some golden nuggets of truth, then drove on to Houston.

Several miles outside of Brenham, I saw this strange collection of houses and stores that were all brightly colored but recently abandoned. It was still raining, so I put it on my list to hit on the way back later in the evening. Luckily, the weather was dark and moody when I returned. I spent about an hour walking around this old abandoned place, shooting a bunch of cool and creepy things. I have no idea why everything was boarded up and empty… there might have been some squatters in one distant house, but I was kind of freaked out by some strange music coming out through some of the boarded-up windows, so I decided it was time to leave…

I’ll post more shots of this place later… it was very strange… reminded me a little of a mid-80’s Texas version of my visit to Pripyat (the little town right by Chernobyl that was also abandoned).

I arrived in Houston to meet with a friend a bit early. I planned on spending the morning in the museums, but they don’t open until noon on Sunday. So I decided to head to nearby Hermann Park to the famous rose garden there.

As an experiment, I put on my Nikon 14-24mm 2.8 lens to try some new things out… It’s not my usual stuff, but I’m happy with the results. If you are interested, I have a Nikon 14-24 Review here on the site.

I drove down to Houston this weekend to meet some friends, and I took my time about it, so I might find a few things here or there. Well, I found a bunch!

The sun started to set as I was approaching Brenham (home of Blue Bell Ice Cream, as a few of you dessert-lovers like me already know), I came across a Roadside Revival!

So, those of you from overseas or those not familiar with the Christian sects and various mathic practices of arks in the south may never have heard of a Revival. These usually feature a firebrand ENTJ, who, happens to share the same Myers-Briggs as yours truly, and a happenstance clustering of believers who come to testify amidst fellow revelers, gesticulating about as 18-wheelers rumble along in the background.