On our final full day in San Antone I got up at the butt crack of dawn to shoot the Alamo when it wouldn’t be swarmed with tourists and vendors hawking to the tourists. It was pretty neat being the only person visiting the Alamo besides the grounds crew blowing off the walkway with super loud industrial strength leaf blowers.

Around the corner from the Alamo is the Menger Bar.

Gina brought up the idea of making a jaunt down to the border, but I had a vague idea that that part of the border was a bad place to be. I was right. But I came across a pamphlet touting the San Antonio Market Square. It’s a two-block area of shops filled with Mexican tourist crap. It’s as if they brought the border two hours north so that we could experience a different culture without being decapitated and our gutted carcasses stuffed with cocaine. It was a great place to take pictures because everything was colorful and arrayed in interesting patterns. I was happy to see that these Lucha Libre masks were a real thing and not just a prop from a bad Jack Black movie.

A lot of Virgin Mary kitsch going on in that place.

Judging from the amount of stock, the most popular item for border tourists are theCatrina dolls of Dia de los Muertos fame. Gina bought a doll decked out in a wedding dress. The doll. Not Gina.

It’s apparently a thing in Texas to take pictures of your kids among the blue bonnets. We found a good patch on the outskirts of the city and forced Abby to sit for a portrait. A man and his two kids were there doing the same thing.

I didn’t have any light modifiers with me so I used two plastic Walgreens bags as a makeshift softbox. As much as I’d like to chalk this idea up to being a genius, I had recently seen this technique demonstrated on the Strobist blog.

Gina served as my voice-activated light stand.

We kicked off our third day by hitting a caverns tour in the morning. It was really dark underground so no pictures. The next morning we hit the Alamo, a short walk under the interstate from our hotel. It turns out that Texas takes the Alamo way too seriously. When we walked in the front door I was immediately accosted for wearing a hat. You see, the Alamo is a shrine and any arbitrary form of disrespect is met with swift and brutal consequences. It’s not OK to wear a hat inside the Alamo, but it’s perfectly fine to operate a money grubbing souvenir stand selling the usual crappy items aimed at tourists and their kids. For all the love of the Alamo, it’s not even a very good museum. The exhibits are sparse and do only a superficial job of explaining the history. Also, photos aren’t allowed. I got the top photo of the best exhibit in the place by putting my camera on its super-spy-silent mode and firing from the hip.

Gina and Abby bolted to the nearby children’s museum while I wandered downtown taking pictures.

The Texas spring break was the week before we were there.

We spent the late afternoon and evening at the River Walk.

The trip really kicked off on day two with a visit to Sea World.

Gina’s cousin Ginger and her husband, Mike, drove over from Houston to hang with us for a few days. Ginger, Abby and Gina braved certain dousing to ride the whitewater raft ride.

The sea lion show was pretty good.

While everybody was inside waiting for the Shamu show to start I wandered over to a nearby duck pond and shot a few birds.

This is the face Abby makes when she’s enjoying something and talking about it. She wanted to sit where the killer whales could splash her and splash her they did. I stood way in back out of the designated splash zone and shot her with a long lens.

Some of the animals seemed resigned to their fate.

We located a Grimaldi’s Pizza out in the suburbs somewhere and had to go. We first encountered Grimaldi’s last spring break in Brooklyn. It’s one of the famous pizzerias in New York City, but we didn’t realize there were locations elsewhere in the country. The atmosphere was nothing like the Brooklyn location but the pizza was just as good.

They even personalize the urinals at Grimaldi’s.

For Spring Break we headed south to San Antonio. We arrived on St. Patrick’s Day and the downtown River Walk district was in a full-blown Irish frenzy. The water of the San Antonio River was even dyed green for the occasion.

We arrived in the afternoon so I shot some downtown walls in the sunset light.

… while wondering whatever happened to Blackie Sherrod, who inexplicably doesn’t rate a Wikipedia entry. Life’s been pretty dull since I started my part-time job back in November. But I need to clean out the ol’ notebook so here’s a collection of recent photos and the mind-numbing stories behind them. Up top we have the old post office in Scotland, Ark. A few weeks ago Gina, Abby and I toured lower Van Buren County, new territory for us. The tiny burg of Scotland looked pretty interesting. We’ll have to go back sometime. I was pretty disappointed to later observe a newer, shinier Scotland post office on the main highway.

Earlier that day we came across this interesting sign in the middle of nowhere that explained how to get to places even more far flung.

A couple of random Abby pics. That second one we shot on Leap Day.

Last weekend Zac Lehr and I went out looking for waterfalls. Whiskey Chute Falls was running well but the light was way too harsh and I made a mistake with my lens choice and this HDR failure was all I came home with. Zac made a pretty good shot of the falls, however. But he’s a professional photographer, so it’s expected of him.

Abby’s school celebrated the first 100 days of school with a party. Each student had to get a shirt and glue 100 items to it and wear it to school. It was a perfect opportunity to fire up the ghetto studio and get a few pics of Abby wearing her creation.

Abby had her first spelling test and, as you can see, she aced it. We hope this is a good omen.

Due to some technical camera issues, my photos of the various family Christmas events didn’t turn out very well. (I think my all-around lens has some focus issues.) However, when we went to my parents’ place in Kansas, I was able to get out on Christmas Night and shoot this star trails photo. The elder Daileys live out in the country well away from any serious city lights so the nights are quite dark. This barn sits less than a half-mile from my parents’ house. I tried this shot unsuccessfully once before. This time the idea was to take about 20 consecutive exposures of 4 minutes and combine them all in Photoshop. During the first exposure I used my little SB600 flash to pop some light on the barn. I set the pop at half-power, which turned out to be way too weak. I should’ve popped at full power two times, at least. And I should’ve popped on the little shed and tree directly in front of the camera. I had to bring the exposure on the barn way up in Photoshop to get it to show at all. I guess I’ll be going back to this spot with a more elaborate plan.

So it’s the Christmas season and we made our annual trek to Motley’s Christmas Tree Farm and Seasonal Extravaganza. Abby always wants to ride the cow train until she actually gets seated in one of the cows.

Selecting and cutting down your own tree is a lot of fun. The kind of fun I’ll never experience again unless we move to the Pacific Northwest. Gina has dropped the whole notion of actually choosing a locally grown Christmas tree and looks exclusively for those perfect trees that must be shipped in from farther north. Luckily for Motley’s they have an excellent selection of freshly hauled-in foreign trees.

The petting zoo is always fun. Gina loved the little pig wearing a sweater. Abby wouldn’t go near it. I failed utterly in my attempt to get an interesting photo of pig races. (I know, how is that different from the other photos on here? Very funny.)

Then it was home to put up and decorate the tree. Bad picture of me, but good picture of Abby.

These guys guard the living room from their sentry post on the mantle.

Abby’s offensive line.

Wine and hot dogs. We like to mix things up during the holidays.

Playing with whatever that red stuff is has been Abby’s favorite part of Christmas tree day for the last three years.

Abby stalking the wily tree lion to capture his elusive image.