Lufkin Civic Center

I haven't felt much like working on photos recently; I've been taking quite a few, but I haven't been doing much past that.  It's easy for me to get into that habit; it's what I've done with my photos for a lot of the time I've been a photographer.  This website helps a lot though, because now I have an audience who expects to see more. Not to go all artist on you, but I need to be in the right mood to work on my artism, and I haven't been lately.  I did get into the mood for a while last weekend though and finished a few photos, and started a few others, so updates should be coming more frequently for a while, especially if I can get some time at home, which has been rare as of late.

I was in Texas last week, and of course brought my camera.  I’ve never been to Texas, aside from layovers in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport, so I was excited to get down here.  I heard southeast Texas could be home to some interesting people, but unfortunately, I didn’t meet any of these people.  We got done with our work early, because I'm an extremely efficient field worker, so I was a little worried I'd run out of free time for photography before I left.  Luckily, the nature of the work we were doing down there took me all over the area around Lufkin, Texas, which is in southeast Texas.  I was able to scope out a few places I wanted to shoot and then go directly to them when we were finished with the work we had to do on the last day.

This photograph, of the Lufkin Civic Center, was not on my original list.  We journeyed into the heart of Lufkin to find a location to host a future public meeting, and this was our first (and most beneficial) stop.  I went outside as the woman I was with worked out the details of renting some space, and grabbed my camera.  With an audience of an obese woman in her truck yelling at her young daughter who didn't want to go to daycare at the church across the street, I composed this photograph.  Boring building you say?  Maybe it’s boring to some, but there is something about this type of large concrete building that I really enjoy.  I can't put my finger on exactly what it is about this type of building I like.  Maybe it's the overall look of this solid, impregnable, prison like building that was designed and built to be a Civic Center.  Maybe it's the fact that it's built to last a long time, and solidly constructed, unlike so many of the crappy buildings I see built today.  Maybe it’s the sheer size of this one story building.  The inside of this place is awesome; my apartment has 20 foot ceilings, and they’re dwarfed by the height of the ceilings in this place.  Maybe it's all of those things.  Regardless, I like this building, and I think the photograph is pretty nice to look at also.

I'll keep the technicalities short on this one, but I did want to mention that in addition to being an HDR photograph, this is a composite of "three" pictures I took of the building in succession.  I say three in quotations because each of those three is an HDR image, so each one of the three is actually five.  I really like the field of view in this picture; it’s around 90 degrees from left to right, mimicking an ultra-wide angle lens.  It’s also a little distorted within that angle of view, which happened during the process of putting the scene together, which I like also.