Vintage baseball

Most people know baseball as the game with the large gloves and the small hard ball. When playing baseball according to the 1860 rules, the most striking differences with today’s baseball are: the players wear no gloves, the ball is pitched not thrown and when a run is made this player rings a bell. This is the interesting scenario for today’s fieldtrip.

At the George Ranch Historical Park a vintage baseball game was scheduled for today. For nearly 200 years, the George Ranch is a working ranch. Today, a section of the land is reserved for the museum. The museum is divided into four sections i.e. 1830’s, 1860’s, 1890’s and the 1930’s.
This we take today for granted, weren’t available in the 1830’s, like a water inside the house. Every days live was quite different from today. For a start, nails were so expensive, the wooden elements for the fence was just laid on top of each other (without nails)








Usually it's OK to wait until you'll see the action in the camera's viewfinder. However this won't work for a sport game like I went to today, because then you'll be always too late. The ball already left at the other end of the image before you can even push the shutter. You might think: “Just use continuous shooting.” When you are shooting RAW each photo is about 12Mb. Therefore you can shoot 6 photos, and then the camera switches to 3 shots per second. More expensive cameras can do more shots per second, but still this large number solution is not perfect. An interesting technique is to shoot with both eyes open. The concept is that one eye has the overview of the entire field (the wide angle view), where the other eye keeps the camera on target (the zoom angle view). This needs a little practice because your brains are not used to this way of watching where there is a large difference in what each eye observes. In practice it works like this. Suppose you’re between the home plate and first base. Your right eye looks past the camera at the pitcher, where your left eye, while looking through the camera, keeps the focus point on the batter. When the pitcher throws the ball, you can start the continuous shooting and most likely you’ll get the ball in the frame before you’ll go past the 6 shots.





Attending the vintage baseball game, felt like being the movie 'Field of Dreams' with Kevin Costner.

Usually the meal at a museum is a rip off. So when the cashier asked me if I would like to buy a ticket for a lunch, I thought: “I have to eat something.” The meal was however a pleasant surprise. It was of course a 19th / 20th century meal. Therefore there weren’t any fries, but beans and meat. There was more than I could ever eat.

Rockport birding trip – last day

This is what the photo trip was all about, the whooping cranes.


On our way back to Houston, we stopped at Goose Island. Again no birds anywhere close, but some interesting structures though.


The next stop was Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. The park system in the US is a bit scattered, because there are National Parks, State Parks, County Parks and National Forests. Today ,I found out that there is a fourth type, i.e. National Wildlife Refuge. The National Wildlife Refuge System is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The creature below is definitely not a bird, but who cares.




I didn’t see that many birds over the last few days, but even though I shot a few keepers. At least I learned this weekend that I do not need one of those multi thousand dollar 500mm (a.k.a. left eyeball) lenses.

Rockport - day II

The second day of the Rockport birding fieldtrip was did bring less luck for the photographers. In the morning the group embarked on a boat trip through a wetland area. The main goal was to shoot whooping cranes. These man size cranes are an endangered species and live in the area around Rockport. Their favorite food is blue crab, however due to the drought in the south of Texas during the last years, the blue crab population is diminished and therefore also a small number of whooping cranes can be found in the area around Rockport, this year. The whooping cranes move further away from Rockport in finding food.

Since the whooping cranes were only stamp sized on my pictures, I shot something else. Like our shadows while standing on top of the boat.


Luckily some birds did came close to the boat. Or better the captain steered the boat in the direction of the birds. Like these blue herons.


Later that day, someone decided that it was time to attract some birds by feeding them. This resulted in interesting photos. When you look closely to the beak of the sea gull you’ll see that it is red colored.


Before dinner we went to see sunset at Goose Island. Unfortunately, just before sunset, some clouds showed up and blocked the view on sunset. I could observe another interesting phenomenon though. In the photo below you see that at our viewpoint, waves were coming from two different directions. Where the waves ‘touched’, the wave height increased.

Rockport birding trip - day I

The last year, I mainly joined fieldtrips that would take only a few hours. It was about time to join a long weekend fieldtrip. A group of photographers from the Houston Photographic Study Group would gather in Rockport (TX) for a weekend long of birding.

Rockport is about a four hour drive from Houston, when you include the stops for coffee and a lunch. Since I had to fix some things in Houston first, I arrived a little after 3pm in Rockport. I dropped of my suitcase in my hotel room on the first floor, grabbed my camera and started to explore the area around the hotel. My first surprise was that most houses in the area around the hotel didn’t have a first floor. Maybe that’s why I got a discount on my first floor hotel room.


Every hotel along the beach had its own pier, which were used for fishing.

The person in the photo is not a guy with a golden bracelet, but a lady who is cleaning the fish she had caught during the day.

A little inefficient is that every hotel has its own pier, which looks like this at sunset.


The first day of the birding weekend was over, unfortunately without any birds. Most birds I have seen today were only stamp sized, maybe tomorrow will be better.


Later that evening, most of the photographers would go for dinner. While I was waiting for them in the lobby, I started talking to a man who told me that he lived in the North of the US most of the year, but moves to Texas for January through March. I always thought only Florida was the destination for retirees. The group of people who stay in Texas during the winter are called ‘Winter Texans’.

Houston Heights Walking Tour

Each month, an interesting walking tour is scheduled by the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance (GHPA) through one of the many neighborhoods in Houston. This month’s walking tour visited the ‘Houston Heights’. It is a joy to listen to the well informed volunteers while strolling through a neighborhood.

The neighborhood ‘Houston Heights’ was developed between 1891-1918 as an independent city near Houston, by Mr. Carter and Mr. Cooley. The ‘heights’ part refers to the (small) elevation of this area over Houston. Until today, alcohol not sold or served in the Heights. In the past, I was puzzled how an area in the ‘wet’ Houston could be ‘dry’. On September 25th 1912, a large section of the Heights was voted ‘dry’ by the city council of the Heights. The ban on selling or serving alcohol was one of the terms in the annexation agreement with the City of Houston, of the 1918.


The house in the photo above looks a bit like the Dutch colonial style. However, the architect stretched the style quite a bit, i.e. no chimneys at the end of the house, no symmetry between the front and rear side of the roof.

Due to the sheer size of the suburb, i.e. 1756 acres of land. It took quite many years before all the lots were sold. As a result many different architectural styles can be seen in the Houston Heights. For example the Victorian style below.


The streets, from North to South, are named after colleges, where the streets, from East to West, are numbered, i.e. 2nd St, 3rd St etc. When you take a look at the map, you’ll find one exception, i.e. 10 ½ St. George Wickton Hawkins was the first car dealer in Houston. He lived at the Heights Boulevard. Therefore he was also the first person to have a garage to his house. To get access to his garage behind his house, he needed an extra driveway, this is what became 10 ½ St in the Houston Heights.

Or my favorite the Craftsman style. If I ever win the lottery I buy a house like this. I might start with buying a ticket for a lottery.


These recently constructed houses were for sale, but the lots are a bit small.

Coffee & Cars

Every first Saturday of the month, there is an informal gathering of car hobby enthusiasts Cars & Coffee. Each one will bring their hot rod, roadster, classic, muscle car, exotic, luxury, low rider, rat rod or sports cars to Uptown Park shopping center in Houston. The cars ranged from a 20 horsepower Ford model T all the way to a 900 horsepower pickup truck.

This was of course an excellent opportunity for a fieldtrip with the Photowalk Meetup group. The meeting started early (8am) because after 10am they would make way for customer parking.

It turned out taking photos of shiny cars isn’t as easy as it looks like. Luckily I was able to shoot a number of keepers and I can always return the Cars and Coffee meeting at one of the coming Saturdays.





This is an opera window in the C-style of a Lincoln Continental Cartier edition (1979).




A little after 10am it was time to go.