Christmas Card 2017

Sylvia was going to the ATT Center to watch the Spurs beat the Boston Celtics so I dropped her off at The Quarry to meet our friend. 

I had brought my new camera and tripod and warm clothes, intent on doing some recon for our annual Christmas Card Photo. 

Had a few locations in mind, but also slipped into the familiar "bending like a reed in the wind" mindset--ending up in our favorite "secret" parking lot on the Riverwalk behind The Pearl. 

Started walking while shooting with my phone--taking notes, really--and it was fun because we had just gotten new Samsung Galaxy Note 8s which kick ALL kinds of ass. 

When I came onto this scene I set up the "real" stuff, and had this shot in a couple of minutes. 

Using it's built-in Wifi I sent it from the Sony A6000 to the Note 8 and took a good look at it on the big screen. Then I sent it to Sylvia, because I was heading home and she wasn't going to have to follow me around town for a couple of nights, shivering and bored.  

 

I expected trouble, because the search for our card picture is a tradition--something we always do together. 

But Sylvia saw it and loved it and you can't argue with success. 

The Alpha 6000 is by far the finest night/tripod camera I've ever owned. 

It's exactly what I designed in my head many many years ago. 

Love using it, and great results. 

Now to find crazy deals on some more lenses, or the deluxe lens adapter so I can use my 3 older A-mounts. They're at the bottom of the range price and quality-wise, but the fact remains that I really like the results for a lot of what I do. 

As for the Note 8, I have some things to say about it's cameras in a future post. 

121 Months Of Views

That's right, I've been blogging right here at the same URL for over ten years!! 

Crazy, right?
Boy, the internet was a very different place back then, as was digital photography.
"Photobloggers" like me are a dying breed.
Now it's all about news, shopping, gossip, and connecting via Facebook, etc.
And pr0n.

One thing that hasn't changed is that Blogger's (my hosting site) spellcheck still flags words like internet, blogging, and spellcheck. Funny but true.

Anyway, February was a weird month for me, so I forgot all about posting on the actual anniversary and decided to do it today.


Since this post is about me, here are some selfies I took today. (Spellcheck didn't like selfies, of course).

In the backyard with my 8-string bass, using my Samsung Galaxy S3.
We're getting the S5 in 2 months, and I can't wait.
This phone has a great camera, but the newer model is much better.
This is one of the only pictures of me that shows some wrinkles on my face, so it intrigues me. People always assume I'm around forty, rather than my true age of 52. It's cool, and I'm lucky and grateful. As a joke I always say "Beer and weed keep me young" but of course none of that is true. Gets a good laugh every time, though.

At the biggest jewelry store in town. Sylvia just got a raise and wanted to celebrate with her 1st diamond earrings. It's a very impressive building and operation. If you live here, you've fallen asleep during their informative half-hour infomercial.


Over the years I've blogged less and less for many reasons, and what I miss just as much as making (NOT just taking) pictures is the writing.
Just like tonight, I pop open a beer or three and start typing. When I was in school, essays were fun and an easy A grade, but I was never much for verse so writing lyrics for my music never amounted to anything. Very frustrating!
So blogging reawakened the dormant author in me and I always enjoyed it for it's own sake. Never mattered if anyone liked it or commented on it, I just did it because it made me feel good.

Recently, my blogging led to a chance to write something that'll get seen a LOT more than anything I post here.
A young singer that I ran sound for in 2012 needed a new biography for her website, and she remembered the blog I had done during my tenure in the band: A Beautiful Mess Featuring Natalie Rose
The writing was decent, and I liked the photos. Her father was very impressed when he found it and Views of TX, and wouldn't shut up about what a great writer I was.
So over the last two weeks I spent about 7 hours working on her bio whenever some spark of inspiration (or guilt about taking too long) might strike.
It's a different breed of writing, being a weird combo of reporting and selling. Walking a fine line between truth and promotion.
I've done it in the past, usually for myself and my illiterate bandmates, but this was a far more high-pressure affair because she's definitely going to be a big star someday so good work could lead to something. Which is weird, because I could go back to doing her sound and lights anytime I wanted to. Just burned-out on traveling and running sound after being in this business since high school. I've been offered the bass job a few times, too, but don't do country music and I just want to play bass and write heavy music with Televators.
Anyway, here's her website: Natalie Rose.
Click on the "ABOUT" tab.
I emailed it to her yesterday morning and it was on the site within an hour, and she says she loves it.
All in all a good day, this special 121 month anniversary. 


Speaking of my band Televators, we're playing next Sunday March 22nd.
Some tattoo convention thing--should be a ton of metal fans in the crowd.

We play for maybe an hour, starting at 3pm.


In conclusion, thank you for visiting Views Of Texas.
It's nice to know that people spent time looking at my photos and/or reading my words.
I appreciate you.

Spurs Mascot Fun

Here in San Antonio we love the Spurs and their mascot, the Coyote.
The original was amazing, and after he suffered a stroke and couldn't carry on his understudy has grown into the job so well you wouldn't know the difference.

The last game we went to was vs my cousin's home team the Memphis Grizzlies, game # 77 of 82 in the regular season. That night the first 10,000 people through the gate received a Coyote Bobblehead!

Here's the pic I took in the stands and posted to Facebook right before tipoff:

Five of us went to the game (Spurs won) and 6 coyotes came home. Somebody didn't want to keep theirs and left it unattended for long enough that our friend snagged it. Is the box empty? Do we need to call security of the homeland variety? Is this a test of honesty? What would an American in the 1990s do?

The deal announced during a break in the game was that free lower-level tickets to an upcoming game would be awarded to the best photo tagged #coyotebobblehead on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Well hell, I was all over that idea.
Within a couple of days we were in Austin and I had brought a mascot.

After the capitol we hit an Irish pub on 6th Street for a few hours:

After getting home I kept having fun with the coyote under the self-imposed limitation of only taking pictures with my phone:

Amazing what you can do using LED flashlights and a tripod with a DIY smartphone mount.

But my photos never showed up in the pool of contest contenders, so either they didn't add FB entries for some reason or there was a very short time window to get them in. Almost every entry I saw was weak in concept and especially execution.

Oh well, no free tickets but at least I had fun trying.

It's not really a bobblehead anyway.
When you flick the head it goes "Boing-ing-ing-ing-ing" and that's about it.
A real bobblehead has a balancing act going on between the weight of the head and the action of the spring it's mounted upon that sucks you in and takes way more than 2 seconds to finish.
Slow and hypnotic, random and magical.

Much like Spurs basketball when they are playing the way they do when we win.

Samsung Pics #1

As I mentioned before, many cameras including the Galaxy S3 went to Austin.

On the grounds surrounding the capitol building I found a rather new Vietnam War Memorial that was pretty nice:

 

With only minor phone manipulation it was possible to get an exposure that revealed much more of what was actually there. Very impressed sometimes by how camera-like Samsung phones can be. 

 

Back at the state cemetery, this view of the 9/11 Memorial turned out nice straight from the phone, and a tiny bit of Photochop didn't make the file get all wonky: 

 

That's WTC steel girders in the middle, with actual battle damage alongside the artistry. 

Had no idea such a display was here in Texas, and as someone who spent many of the most important years of my life living in New York it was good that none of my friends were nearby when I found this shrine. Got a bit misty-eyed, or maybe allergies.  

Anole By Samsung SIII

You don't usually see anoles in any color but solid green or solid brown. Rarely you'll catch one in transition as they warm up to operating temp.
Seeing as how this one let me shove my phone 3 inches from his face I have to conclude he was feeling poorly.

Kinda looks like he has some teeth marks on him, too.


Here's a crop at 100%:

Pretty sharp!

The camera on our new Galaxy S3 phones is quite the upgrade.
Flash exposures are way better, there's a macro focusing option, 8 megapickles, you can pull your favorite four adjustments out of the menus and onto the screen as shortcuts--for stills I have the timer, flash control, white balance, and exposure compensation. The video shortcuts can be the same or different--nice feature!
Full HD video.

The panorama mode works well enough, and for catching action you can do a burst of frames that's faster than anything I've ever seen.
There's GPS tagging, an HDR mode, and anti-shake, too. A fairly rich set of features I have to say.


I'm actually considering getting one of those gimmicky telephoto lenses for it just to see if they're worth a crap.

Only negative I have so far is that you can't silence the fake shutter sound when taking a picture.
I blame the perverts.


In other news, my old country band (now called The Natalie Rose Band) won "Best Country Group" at the San Antonio Music Association's award show tonight.



Wonder if they remembered me in the acceptance speech, since I had more than a lot to do with their success.
Most local country bands sound like crap, but through the end of 2012 I had them sounding better than many of the big stars. And my photos of them were on an entirely different level if I do say so myself.
Should have gone to the awards show to take my final bow with them, along with the former bassist who started the group in the first place.

Snowmobiles Rock!

Up early on our first morning in South Lake Tahoe California, we drove just a few miles to Lake Tahoe Adventures and paid money, signed forms, fitted helmets, and grabbed goggles for our snowmobile tour.
Other groups soon arrived, and before long we loaded up the bus and hit the road for Hope Valley in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, which is the biggest in the USA outside Alaska.

I only brought my phone for pics because I didn't want to deal with anything bigger--my cameras are very large and heavy. In hindsight, adding Sylvia's Sony T70 would have been the smartest move, giving me a zoom lens and more pixels for printing. Oh well...what I got certainly tells the story, and the quality is better than I expected.

The bus stopped here while the gate to Hope Valley is opened:


So far sightings of snow are confined to small patches in the shade, with almost none at lower elevations. I'm a little concerned at this point as we've been driving uphill for awhile.
Then we drove uphill a bunch more, and conditions start to look better.

We meet Danny, our instructor/guide, and learn about our machines.
He proves to be funny, quick-witted, and super nice.
All four of my girls have a crush on him already, and to be honest I'm a bit smitten myself since he's one of the few men I've ever met who might actually be cooler and more interesting than me.
After about five minutes of instruction we're ready for a quick run up the road so Danny can get a feel for our abilities and establish a logical order so we'd have the best chance of staying together without anyone running up someone else's rear.
At this point we've stopped for a quick shuffle of the lineup, a peptalk, and a little more instruction:

After running on some recently added snow and a few bare patches of asphalt the trail ahead is looking much better.

Time to open them up and start having fun!
Wish I had some action shots.

This first leg of the tour was a blur for me due to extreme concentration on mastering the snowmobile, but the beauty of our surroundings still gets through as we blast up steep mountain roads covered in snow. After I don't know how long, we finally come to the first break in a most scenic location:


Danny gets the photo credit on both of these, with style points for dropping onto his side and shooting this next one from the ground like some kind of pro-with-a-phonecam:

(I had to rotate them 180* in Photoshop cuz he had my phone upside-down--not so cool now, are ya?)

We've reached a pretty serious elevation by now, and this is the view ahead:

I made yellow snow behind the trees on the right. Been over 30 years since I've done that.

Looking back from here, this caught my eye:

Obviously the snow is freaking DEEP up here!
And these signs are 3 feet taller than the ones here in Texas.



From the next rest stop:








Sylvia and I have agreed that we want to play like this again.
Texas being what it is, probably jet-skies and ATVs are next.

In Thin Air

Up bright and early again, and we all went up Heavenly.


The gondola ride is nuts. I'm not fond of heights, but being enclosed isn't too bad.
Screw that chairlift thing, though.

Most of the way up there's an observation deck so we got out to sightsee.
It was WAY colder than down below, and snowing a little.



Gotta represent.

Up at the lodge level it was snowing harder for a little while.


Time to show off our hats:

Sylvia found a SPURS hat by Adidas at Academy a few weeks ago.

I wanted something a little wilder, or a different SPURS hat, and that took longer to find.
Then, at a different Academy we found mine:

A mohawk AND Spurs logo?
And half-price?
More than I could have hoped for...gonna wear it to a game someday.

We had planned to just sled on the innertubes, but it had gotten icy and windy so they shut that down for safety reasons. Bummer.
Then we chatted with the staff and got a full refund on the gondola rides, so we're going up again tomorrow and now all the girls have decided to ski.
If anything I'll sled, or just take pics and hang out at the lodge.
We spent a couple hours there today and it was nice if you like $10 pints of beer.
(I had a sandwich in my pocket + a flask of bourbon, so there)

The previous gondola photo is pretty tame.
A lot of the ride was more like this:



Tonight we went to dinner in the nicest restaurant at Harrah's.
Also pricey but good.
Then the girls played in the casino.
I was the big winner--put $3 in a machine and won a bottle of Aquafina.
Quit while I was ahead, proving that beginner's luck is real.

July Happenings

This would have been a typical photo for Zzakk's Garage.




If you're seeing a new header on top, this is where I got it:
A Beautiful Mess was at Luensmann's Ice House in New Berlin last week. Great show, nice post-rain clouds and puddles.
Another phone-cam pic.
I'm getting lazy, and actually look forward to our next free phone upgrade as much for the camera as anything else. They are getting better all the time, and you can't beat the convenience.



Here's A Milestone For You

You would have to know me pretty well to get the significance.
It's HUGE.
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I Went To The Movies!

One day in the middle of living life I suddenly realized it had been over a dozen years since I had stepped foot in a theater. Years later at a party someone was yapping about films and asked me what I had seen last, and the shocked reaction was kinda fun.
Then it got past 20 years and I thought maybe a quarter century was a good place to finally give in and end the run. It wasn't fair to Sylvia, cutting out a way to spend time together.

Problem was, I had decided that it would have to be a very special movie to get me to put up with all the downsides I remembered from my youth, and NOTHING looked good enough to be worthy. Came close to choosing that Dukes Of Hazzard remake with Johnny Knoxville and Jessica Simpson just for the irony and shock value, but I was quickly getting good results with my friends just from threatening such an act.

And before you know it we're talking 28 years.
Last time I went to the movies was in 1984, and it was freaking Purple Rain at Ingram Park Mall.
How do you beat that for a story you're going to have to tell a LOT?

Ted

Maybe it was subliminal since that's my Dad's name, but seriously the first full-length feature film by Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane that's full of F-bombs and bong-hits sounded like a resolution that'll crack me up while helping my street cred.
The very early "restricted" trailers a few months ago had convinced me within seconds, so I made it known expecting to get held to my promise this time.
We went to Santikos Silverado tonight, and it was freakin' awesome.

More leg-room, unsticky floors, reclining chairs, great sound, and flawless digital projection?
Nobody trying to stab me afterwards?
I was more impressed than I thought I would be by the theater experience.

Obviously it hasn't escaped my attention over the years that the tech has gone WAY up, but as someone who's been away forever I have to admit that the overall experience was much better than expected. Part of that falls on the shoulders of our fellow audience members, who didn't suck at all. And the movie was hilarious. I'm really glad I saw this before it trickled-down to my usual free or $4 pawnshop system.

Just in case you missed the 1970s and '80s, we used to smoke up a storm and drink as many snuck-in beers as possible back then. Bottles rolling down the slope...

Trailers And Amps

Ever have one of those weeks when it seems like everything is a little off?

TRAILERS

Coming home from a show in Kerrville in the wee hours of last Saturday morning, everything was fine.
Just two band brothers yapping about The Spurs and music and such while dragging a heavy trailer up those damned hills on IH10.
I pulled up in front of our house, unloaded my personal gear, and bid my boss good night.
Some time later he called with the news that the trailer's axle had parted company with the suspension in a most catastrophic fashion and asked my advice on what he might do about it:
Being late, I was tired and a bit in my cups, so I wasn't particularly helpful.
He was only a mile from his house, but had to call a tow truck to get the trailer the rest of the way.


The tire grabbed the fender and folded it up rather well while also shredding.



Somehow, the other fender sustained damage as well.
I'm just glad it didn't happen while I was driving in the middle of Nowhere, Texas.
We had to split the gear between our pickups for the next gig, which luckily was a private party that didn't require all of it.

He bought a new (used) trailer today that's a bit bigger in every dimension but height (to fit his garage) so the good news is more space for more stuff.
Bad news is I'm still going to hit my head at least twice a week for the next few years.


AMPS

By my count I have used at least six different amp/speaker combinations since I started playing bass a couple years ago, first with Loud Nine and now for Televators. It gets old pretty fast, borrowing stuff and never getting the chance to settle on ONE amp rig that you can get used-to and fine-tune over time.
If I wasn't a sound expert I think I would have gone insane, but luckily it's fairly easy for me to get wildly different products to do what I need them to do.
Doesn't mean I like this situation--it really blows and I hate it.

A big step forward was buying a Peavey bass speaker cabinet from my friend Buz.
It was part of the rig I used with great success in the studio two months ago.
Still need to pay him for it...

While working up amp situation #7 this week I took a peek in the rear port of the cabinet and spotted this:
WTF???
Never seen such a thing--a bottle of something was neatly wedged between the frame and cone of a speaker.


Mickey Mouse Shampoo & Conditioner.
The kind you find in your hotel room at Epcot Center or Disneyland I suppose.
Buz had zero idea where it came from or how it got there.
And yes, it's location will have an effect on the sound but with the other 3 speakers involved it would be hard to notice, even for an "expert" like myself.


It took a while for me to take a hard look at the bass amp that's been sitting in Bex Televator's practice room, rather than treating it like a carpet-covered nuisance that's only good for banging my knees and holding up my soda and camera bag. When I finally had no choice but to use the thing there were issues with random volume drops, so I brought the sucker home and took it apart.
As I suspected there were some cracked solder joints on the input jack, and a couple more on one of the power transistors.
Fixed in mere minutes thanks to the best invention in recent years--the cordless drill/screwdriver. (Mine is a 24-volt Black & Decker we got at Target for a mere $36 with many accessories).

As it turns out, for a basic "practice" combo amp it has WAY more features than usual.
In fact, it's preamp section is a near clone of the one Buz let me use in the studio minus the tube section--it's all solid-state circuitry. Good thing I have a tube preamp/direct box to put in front of it for some old-school tone through the amp and also sent to the PA system.
I did a bunch of stuff to the 4x10" cabinet, including the addition of a big metal 1970's vintage Peavey logo and removing the casters so it'll stack nicely. Not done yet, but getting close.

Used this rig at practice tonight and we all agreed is sounded fine.
I'll be using it for the next Televator's show, June 23rd at Charlie Brown's on Starcrest. Hope to see some of you there.

This doesn't change anything. I still NEED a complete bass amp system of my own.
I've selected the specific items I want, and it's going to sound way better than rigs costing 3x as much.

I Would Drive 500 Miles...

Since Wednesday I've set a mileage-per-day record in my Delightful Dodge Dakota.
Up to Austin for set-up, further north to a certain Marriot, back to the studio, around town for stuff, repeat, home, Beautiful Mess show in Adkins, Austin, home again...506.1 miles in five amazing days.

I will get to the specifics soon, but just wanted to start the Televator's recording sessions posts with a quick mention of my extreme fatigue.


Some of our songs are long, and others are fast. ALL are pretty heavy.
Extreme concentration while the dollars are flowing like water on a GPM scale messes with your mind.
Can't begin to imagine how tired our drummer Jaime got, but he's younger than me and recovered well.





ALL THE SMALL THINGS
Recording studios are an amazingly complicated place.
Ours was chock full of vintage equipment with jaw-dropping stats.
I'll spare you the details of which legendary hit songs had the vocals or drums or bass etc recorded using this item or that, but for a music junkie like me it was a trip through history that made all the biographies and oral reports I've read come alive. It's easy to think they are BS-ing until confirmation comes from 2nd and 3rd sources.
But with the good comes the bad.
We lost a lot of time right before the very first instance of hitting the record button when a fuse blew in our guitarist's Mesa Boogie tube power amp. The speaker cabinet was isolated in a closet with a single ribbon microphone, and it was screaming loud!!!
Probably louder than it had ever been pushed since built, and the amp's fuse quit like a big fricken wuss. For a change, I didn't have a spare and neither did the guys at Wire Recording, so an assistant engineer got sent to Radio Shack and we were back in business a hundred wasted bucks later...

Me: "It's a tube guitar amp--of course it's a slo-blo fuse!" and naturally I was right--the replacements looked exactly the same and worked perfectly.

On the second day we also lost an hour at the start when *again* the guitar wasn't working right.
After the entire signal chain got de-constructed and many cables were strewn about and many tiny screws were left rolling around on a dimly-lit end table, I overheard a conversation that mentioned that this particular guitar is equipped with EMG pickups.
Me: "So...it has a battery?"

When I hooked-up my multi-meter that piece of shit 9-volt was reading a mere 3.11v!!!
I replaced it with an already used 9v from A Beautiful Mess's wireless in-ear monitors that had enough juice to get the session cooking again, and cook it did.
The guitar was screaming, and sounded amazing!!!

Minor details like fuses and batteries can bite you in the ass.


The third item in the picture above is THE pick.
Call me weird, but I made it a point to practice and play with any one of several nearly identical picks in my pocket but when it was time to actually record Televators music this was the exact piece of plastic clenched tightly in my right hand.
Most bassists pluck the strings with their fingers at about a 75/25% ratio or some such.
As a guy who's played mostly lead and rhythm electric guitar since the Ford administration I'm most comfortable hitting strings with plastic instead of dirty calloused fingertips. And when you hear the results from this week's work I hope you agree that there's no better way to play tight and fast basslines than with a 0.88mm Dunlop Ultex triangle.

Kinda wish they made a 0.75 version to tame my aggression a bit, but what are you gonna do?


All kinds of photos from Wire Recording Studio are coming soon.
The last few days have been the most important and educational of my entire life.
Music has always been the key to happiness for me, and all of a sudden it's working much better than ever.

Famous By Fifty!!! is my new motto, but that's pushing things a bit.
51 is more realistic but doesn't flow as well when you say it out loud.

Drowning Worms

We weren't catching fish, but I guess it's still fishing if you're sitting there quietly and your line is wet...


This part of the Guadalupe is gorgeous, and I guess the water was too cold because there were no tubers to disturb us.











The only catch we witnessed was by one of these fly-fisherman in a small inflatable.
It was in the morning, and I was surprised that they landed anything with all the loud talking they were doing, plus their guide kept splashing the water with his oars despite using an anchor.

It provided a clue as to our lack of success, though--we couldn't quite reach the fish from our shoreline.



Google overhead view shows how shallow it is on the left side (that's our cabin a little below and to the left of center) and even casting halfway across the river you aren't anywhere near the fish.

We had zero results after a few hours at Canyon Lake, too, but at least I had a nibble and saw some big ones in the shallows by the shore.

Not complaining--fishing is fun and relaxing whether you land any or not.