Texas Renaissance Festival - 2007

Texas Renaissance Festival, is an annual occurance in the otherwise sleepy town of Plantersville, TX. Happens every Oct-Nov, scheduled dates can be found here. If you were traveling from Houston like I was, you will be better off taking I-45 North all the way to Conroe and then driving West on Hwy 105 to Plantersville. Hwy 249 from Houston to Plantersville, plain sucks with the numerous traffic signals until you are out of the city and have crossed Tomball. Plus there is all the traffic going to the Fest, if you are visiting over a weekend. Entry tickets may be purchased for a few dollars less at HEB or Randalls and some other locations listed on the official website. There is plenty of parking and the fair grounds are converted spectacularly with medieval times scenery and the costumes people wear will have an average Joe like myself reaching for that camera.

Jousting Knights at an arena, axe throwing, drench-a-wench (she had a real bad tongue), aiming tomatoes at this fella, dancing gypsies, music from a long lost french era, english/french/european foods and crafts, pirates, women dressed as european upper class from the times of Queen Elizabeth I, can be all seen here. Without wasting anymore words, here are the pictures. Enjoy.

Faith in Colours

One idle saturday morning saw me driving towards the Annunciation Church in Houston downtown (S-W corner of Texas ave. and Crawford st., map here) I was greeted by sister Martha and briefly introduced about the church before given a good half hour of the prayer hall to myself to shoot. One can visit the church between mass times to find absolute peace and darkness for shooting the stained glass paintings that are the main attraction for shutterbugs. The church is about 138 years old, it is one of the few European style churches at Houston. I think it is Victorian style architecture, but cant guarantee it. Half a block of downtown was bought in 1866 for $2000 to build this church, the interiors were restored sometime earlier this century.

If you plan to go to the church for taking pictures, an appointment is recommended. For suitability of lighting, avoid 1-2 hours on either side of noon to get the sun behind the huge 10-12 ft tall windows. A weekday would be the best if you wish to avoid people, but if you work weekdays like me, saturday is better than sunday.

Pictures are taken using a Nikon FE2 with a Quantaray 70-300 mm tele-macro on Fuji Sensia 200 slide film. The candlelit picture of the Holy Mother was taken with a Nikkor 50 mm lens at 4.0 stop. Here are some pictures of the paintings, sorry about the shake on some of them..


This picture is the one I liked the best of the lot, there is mild shake but the colours look great on print.

Wings Over Houston

Ellington Airfield, is a tiny airport on the Spanish settlement of Houston, the southeast corner where you are alien if you are neither Mexican nor poor. The airfield is home mostly to cargo planes and this once a year airshow which I went to this year in October. The day started off well with two friends burping away breakfast at What-a-burger and then finding the roads leading to the airport as choked as our arteries were from the b’fast.

This would be the first time I was experimenting with slide film or popular name – transparencies. I was using Fuji Sensia ISO 200 (although I am much against Fuji for their being heavy on the green compared to red and blue), in a Nikon FE2 with a 70-300mm tele-macro Quantaray lens. Half of the pictures are shot on regular Kodak 100 Gold and I will leave it to the discerning eye to sort out which from which.

The show had F-16s, one F-15, a Stealth, formations by the Canadian Snowbirds and an impressive re-enactment of the Pearl Harbor bombings by well preserved B-2 bombers. Details about the planes can be found on the airshow’s website. Some pictures I took of the bombings are pasted here faithfully.

Of course Texas had a trump card up its sleeve and it rocketed out in the form of a Truck designed by NeXplore Shockwave Jet Truck. Its basically a truck strapped with 3 Jet engines, with 36K hp (yeah K) and goes about 256 mph in 6.36 seconds. It beats chutput planes in races for lunch and has its name in the Guiness Book of World Records for dinner. Here is a picture I took, standing near the front row fence, braving the loud Texan drawl laden announcements from the high pitched squealing loudspeaker installed 2 feet away from the fence.

The strip was well populated with refreshment stands serving the regular American fare of hotdogs to pretzels, well avoided by me and my watan-ke-saathis. A bright lemonade cup made its way into my camera.