I attended the Ciclovía Dallas on the Houston Street Viaduct today (for those of you in the New York metropolitan area, this ‘Houston’ is pronounced ‘Hyoo-stun’ and not like the Houston (‘Howsden’) Street in lower Manhattan…) as a nominal part of the North Texas Photo Explorers Meetup Group (though I didn’t see any of the group, not that I’ve met any of them before).
The event itself was much smaller than I expected, or maybe the viaduct is just so large that it made everything look very small… I’m not sure how well it was publicized, and I didn’t see any of the usual East Dallas cycling suspects, so I suspect attendance was fairly low. Also, there were facilities and services for maybe 2500 people (at the very outside), but everything was so spread out and jumbled that it looks like this was a fairly slapdash affair, which is a shame, since this is the 100th anniversary of the Viaduct, and the event was (theoretically) the anniversary celebration.
I guess maybe this points to the ahistoricism that pervades Dallas culture.
Anyway.
I tried to shoot some street photography and practice zone focusing, but failed in both regards. In the first case, I didn’t get near close enough with the 24mm ai lens, and everything you see here was cropped down by at least 1/4, and in some cases much much more. The Massage photo, for example, was a vertical shot that I cropped to horizontal, and not nearly as wide as the original either. I need to do a lot more of this, but it was a bit of a step to even go to an event of this type alone, much less actually shoot people while I was there, so it’s a baby-step-type win, I suppose.
Everything was shot with the D7000 and Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai, ISO100 and f/5.6 or f/8, with shutter speed determined by the camera as I was in AP mode—my usual practice when on photowalks.
The 365 shot, titled “I was always the kid in the blue shirt (and I still am, only rather a lot bigger and very much older these days)” was shot f/8 at 1/125th, and I’ll leave you to create the rest of the narrative.
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