NightTime in Texas!

I’m hoping to regularly share some of our travels each Tuesday on Travel Tuesdays, AKA BT Tuesdays, when we were on the Bubble Trailer Light Tour!  Traveling is one of my favorite things to do and I dearly miss it, now that we are sheltering in place the past four months!  So, as my fellow Lumix Ambassador, Dave Stock, says: “Lets do a Virtual Vacation!”

One of my favorite memories of our BT Light Tour was the two nights we spent in Quintana Beach Park near Lake Jackson, Texas. The weather was stellar, and the breeze was just enough to ward off the bugs and it was one of the few times we had real “down time” on the trip! We had to pass by our plans to hit Destin’s white sand beaches and celebrate our anniversary because a massive storm wiped out the beach! We made the best of it an went on to Plan B: Quintana Park.

The first thing we did once we got there, was climb up on the picnic table for this shot!! I LOVE taking shadow pics and I could not resist this opportunity for a unique and dynamic shadow shot! Especially since it was just after our 15^thanniversary! 

We set up camp and put out our chairs, and marveled at the flocks of black birds, circling and swooping literally like A.D.D. children playing “follow the leader” only no one can remember who is leading or where they were going! I wasted so much time waiting, following, filming, hoping for that amazing swooping formation to land in the palm over our trailer and then with a frantic scare, go swooping off to another nearby tree. It was quite fascinating and frustrating and fun all at the same time. I never did get anything good, but still had fun trying. We took a short hike up the knoll to see an old cannon and look over the campground. I love to see how tiny Ms. BT is amidst the huge RVs in the campground. She’s just a wee one!

We set up and did a little giveaway video just before it was too dark—almost forgot in the scurry of it all! But the next day we had such a fun time with our fellow photographers Cody and Amy Clinton, and their little “peanut”, Stella! What a doll! We played with bubbles and chatted with a few glasses of wine before heading out to dinner later that evening. Who knew that Cody was as much of a foodie as Jonny? Of course, the food was beyond expectations! We so loved getting to know them better and just sharing stories of the past 5 years since we had seen each other.

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One of the biggest creative highlights was that next sleepless night, though. I was just wide awake about 2am and decided to go out and see what the place looked like at night. The Dow Chemical plant is very close and because of all the lights, there is a huge amount of light pollution. It’s certainly not a place for star photography BUT the clouds are amazing, all lit up at night. The breeze was still going , so I just had to try out a timelapse! I set up my Lumix G9 with a 10-25mm lens because it is nice and wide and has an aperture of 1.7– perfect for the low light. I set it up for 400 ISO and f1.7 and calculated 3.2 seconds for each exposure. I think I did one exposure every 6 seconds. And I let it run for a couple hours while I shuffled around and enjoyed the perfect evening temperature and soft wind. Another thing that kept me busy was figuring out how to do light painting at the same time. Since there was no light on the trailer, she was jet black, so I exposed a few frames with a big flashlight, giving her a nice glow to match the mood of the scene. That made a huge difference!  Putting it all together, I learned a lot, since I had never done a light-painted time lapse ever before! I LOVE THIS!

Every time I take the time to do something unique like this, it is such a highlight and always a trigger of great memories. I love to experience the world through the eye of my lens and the creativity I can capture with my cameras!

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