Magic!

In nearly all museums, photography is more or less prohibited i.e. no flash, no tripod or just no photography at all. Not to mention that it is just too dark to take a correctly exposed photo. There is one exception the Flickr meetups at the Houston Museum of National Science.



At infrequent intervals an after hours meetup is organized at a new exhibit of the museum. We can bring our tripods and cameras and the museum opens up free of charge. The catch is that we ‘promise’ to post our photos on the Flickr group of HMNS. Flash photography was not allowed. I was wondering what the problem is with flash photography. It turns out that one flash photo causes as much damage to an item, as two years of exposure from the sun.

The latest exhibit at HMNS is: Magic! The exhibit shows many objects which tell the story about the last few centuries of magic. Many objects were from the 20th century. The exhibit gives a very nice overview of the history of magic with many original objects. Usually an exhibit only shows non-living objects, this exhibit also features a magician.








Magic!
February 26 -September 6, 2010
The Houston Museum of Natural Science
5555 Hermann Park Drive, Houston Texas 77030-1799

Esperson Buildings

Nearly all of the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance monthly walking tours don’t have access to buildings. This month’s walking tour was the exception. The Esperson Buildings walking tour not only showed interesting detail of the interior, but also went to the observation deck of the building. You might wonder how the photo below is created without Photoshop. The little temple on top of the Esperson building got reflected in the modern building accross the street, next this reflection gets reflected in the window over the door in the Esperson building.


Today, the Esperson building with 32 floor and a height of 410 feet is one of the smaller sky scrapers. You might wonder why the photo above mentions multiple building. In 1927, Mellie Esperson had the first of the two buildings constructed for her husband, Niels, a real estate and oil tycoon. Mellie hired a theatre architect, named John Eberson, which resulted in Italian Renaissance architecture.


In the early 1940s Mellie build a building for herself, this time she chose an Art deco style.




The highlight of the day was the visit to the observation deck. One of the people who attended the walking tour mentioned that the deck was open for the public until the 1970s. These days the Esperson Buildings are surrounded by taller sky scrapers.







What I didn’t know was that one of the buildings at the intersections of Travis and Walker Street has a swimming pool on the upper floor.


This was a very unique walking tour from GHPA, and I’m gratefull that the volunteers at GHPA take the time to organize the monthly tours.

Corvettes

This morning when I got up, it was raining. This wasn’t looking good for today’s Meetup. We would visit the meeting of the Corvette Owners Club of Houston. A little bit of rain didn’t stop me before and I hoped for some nice reflections. After a couple of hours, I was quite happy with the photos I captured. There isn’t much to tell about the Covettes, therefore I’ll just show the photos.









Since this cartoon doesn’t look very feminine, my first guess was that the owner would be male. I was wrong.


One of the owners didn’t get rid of the rain on his car, therefore I could make this shot.


The hood of all Corvettes hinges at the front. In the photo below you see the reflection of a Corvette in the black hood of another Corvette. You can see the rear end of the red Corvette twice, because of the shape of the hood.

Bluebonnets

On Friday, I had taken a day off, because today would be reserved for the second Bluebonnet tour. For a reason, unknown to me, many bluebonnets can be found in Texas in the area around Chappel Hill and Brenham, which is about an hour drive north west of Houston.

While I was driving towards Chappel Hill a dense fog developed. Luckily this cleared later in that morning.




This is my favorite photo for the day. There is no question about in which state this photo is taken.


In our search for Bluebonnets, we visited five locations. When I waited before the group would caravan to the next stop, I could find a photo opportunity.