An Oasis Sunset
Sunset Over Lake Travis
The Oasis Restaurant, which sits on a cliff some 450′ above Lake Travis in Austin, labels itself as the sunset capital of Texas…and it may very well be. I recently visited with an out-of-town guest and a few of my daughters and was amazed at the enormity of what they are building out there. You see, in 2005 the Oasis burned as a result of a lightning strike. It has since been rebuilt and then some. An employee informed us that the place currently seats 2600 people — enough to be the third largest restaurant in the USA. Construction is well underway on an expansion which will increase the seating to 4000…largest in the country is their claim! According to their own website there will also be about 30 retail shops on site.
The signature architectural feature of the Oasis is its many levels of outdoor decks. Large patio umbrellas cover the tables and about ten minutes before the sun hits the horizon the staff makes a mad scramble to collapse all the umbrellas to maximize the view. As the sun sets, a bell rings out, hundreds of cameras click, and everyone cheers.
What’s the food like? Let’s just say that I’m not all that picky and I still don’t like it much. Oh well, I go (once every 5 years maybe) for the sunset and not the food.
I took brackets of three different compositions on our last visit. One was an immediate reject and I processed one of the others (shown above). Standard-ish 3-exp (or was it 6???) HDR tonemapped in Photomatix, combined with bits from the original exposures, and run through a bit of curves adjustments, etc. I plan to get out there again sometime soon and really spend a bit of time taking photos from various vantage points.
Capturing What Matters Most
Working The Fish
I bought the spinning rod/reel combo pictured above for my son’s recent birthday. I knew I’d be taking him fishing at the beach and wanted him to have something he could handle, yet something stout enough to handle the creatures one may catch in the surf of the Gulf of Mexico. My oldest son caught a 40″ redfish (yep, 40″) on a rig just like this when he was 10 or 11 years old.
I’m amazed again and again how young children are able to learn and accomplish much more than we give them credit for. [In fact, I think that some part of society’s problems these days are related to expecting too little out of our young people from age 2 all the way to 25…but that’s a discussion to have in person over lunch or something] There were some lousy casts at first as my son learned how to use the spinning reel, but within 30 minutes he was practically a pro. He put on his own bait, cast it, reeled it in to check it here and there, and landed some fish completely on his own. I still removed them from the hook…we’ll work in that next trip maybe.
I didn’t have my camera out much on the beach b/c I (1) the trip was about father/son time and (2) I wanted to keep the sand out of the camera. But, I did take a little time to record some shots of him fishing. I took many that included a wider scene — the entire rod, more background, etc. but this is really my favorite. This photo wasn’t posed at all and he looks like a little man “working the fish”.
There were several cropping options considered but in the end I didn’t crop it at all. I really like a square crop because of the focus it put on my son, but I wanted the dunes and sky to give a more complete sense of location. Having the fishing rod disappear out of the frame actually bugs me somewhat. Post-processing was minimal and consisted of simple tone/contrast adjustments…I believe I did everything in Lightroom.
If I were a photographer on assignment I suppose what I would’ve done is gotten out in the water further — almost straight in front of my son. This might have allowed me to capture the whole rod with the dunes and sky while keeping my son relatively prominent in the frame. I was on a father/son assignment though and I got what I was really after and what mattered most — shots that capture the memory of the trip.
Michael Tuuk Photography 