During this period of pandemic lockdown, and as the weather has begun to warm, I’ve started smoking meat again on my backyard Weber grill. Being a good Texan, I’ve loved eating smoked meat ever since I was a little kid. One of my grandfathers was a tremendous home chef who enjoyed smoking everything from fish to game, while my other grandfather was a master of pit barbecue, delivering up extraordinary chickens that I still haven’t been able to recreate. When I lived in Austin (and later San Antonio), I fell hard for the central Texas barbecue belt – eating at places like Smitty’s and Kreuz Market whenever I had the time to pop down to Lockhart. So yesterday, as I was smoking meat in my own backyard, I remembered this photo from a visit to Kreuz in 2014.
My wife’s family has a long history of visiting Disney World, and I’ve now been more times than I can count. Disney’s Animal Kingdom is a special treat for zoo lovers for both the number of amazing animals and the quality of their enclosures. The gorillas occupy a vast hilly area with lots of room to move and separate areas for the male bachelors and the females. One of those enclosures opens up to a windowed area where it’s possible to see them up close, sometimes really close.
In February, 2015, my wife and I took a quick trip from Denver to Santa Fe where we explored the city, saw some great art, and took a few nice photos. Among the city photos I took on that trip, this one turned out the best as an abstract black and white view on the New Mexico Museum of Art. I loved the shape of the adobe tower combined with the protruding beams – the fancy carved wood sticking out while the windows sink inward.
On one of my visits to Poland in 2013, I brought along a Fuji X100S camera instead of my usual SLR gear. The X100S was a brilliant little camera with a rangefinder styled body and a single fixed 35mm lens – meaning you couldn’t zoom in or out. Instead you had to “zoom with your feet” – shifting your point of view to find the right composition at the right moment.
