TexasGirl Photography

This year I was thrilled to lead a photowalk at the Texas Photography Festival – one of my favorite events of the year! Three years ago, I was one of the featured photographers at the festival (an amazing experience, possibly my very favorite show experience to date), so I was super excited to be involved with it again. I love everything that the festival does for our local photo community; if you’ve never been, I hope I will see you there some year soon!

The focus of my photowalk was black and white photography. If you’ve looked at more than two of my photographs, you’ve probably noticed that my personal focus is also black and white, so of course I jumped at the chance to share this passion. I wrote up a brief handout of favorite tips, and I carried two cameras with me: the Nikon Zf I purchased from a friend last year, and my trusty polaroid, loaded with their fabulously somewhat unpredictable b&w iType film.

True to form, I packed a “few” other cameras also, but, fortunately for my back and shoulders, I was able to stow my bag and not be overly cluttered while I was leading the group.

One of the things I appreciate about the Zf, aside from it feeling more like my 35mm Nikons and being the type of digital that lets me adjust things from the top instead of messing around with menus, is the handy switch that lets you quickly choose b&w. I might be a film fanatic to the bone, but this camera really does well rendering not only color but also b&w, and I wanted the ability to quickly show the group the photos I was making, should that need arise.

I was happy to find out on arrival that the walk was full, although I highly suspect I had more than the prescribed 20 attendees. . . . some of the possible rule-breakers were my friends and anyway it’s not like I was going to turn people away. I consider all the photowalkers friends now: it was a great group of people and I hope I will run into them again at future events!

Let’s get on with the photographs now, shall we? In no particular order, here are the photographs I made with the Zf. As a group, we were hunting out light and shadows, and as a technical side note: my version of Lightroom is too old to accept the RAW files from the camera, so I work completely in-camera and straight to JPEG.

Below I present the closest I got to a group photo – a dirty window reflection moment with a few walkers who were nearby.

Last but not least, here are the surprisingly conservative number of Polaroids I made while we were walking:

Many, many thanks to David Valdez, Julie Copenhaver, and the rest of the hard working team with the Texas Photography Festival, plus all the wonderful folks at the Williamson Museum who also worked like crazy to make all of this happen. And THANK YOU to the photographers who came along on my photowalk! These events can’t happen without you; I wish I’d had time to talk with each of you for longer but with any luck one day I might get that chance.