Old building, Comal County, TX

For many years i have been photographing a couple old building located in between San Antonio and New Braunfels. When i was in college about 20 miles north of the buildings, they were function and the building on the left had (even then) an old fashion gas pump, the kind that has a glass bulb with a spinning wheel inside and the store was, more or less, your old country store.

This is the earliest photograph i have, June 2006. However, my memory is that i took many long before that and just can't locate them. Clicking on the image will give you a much better view of the buildings.

Four years later it didn't look too much different but ... i took the photograph in the afternoon and the sun was shinning on the front of the buildings.

The yellow realtor sign on the left building is gone but not much else had changed - the sunlight certainly made it look better.

In 2013, some of the bushes were removed from in front of the building on the right and this sign had been installed:

The building on the right was where the above sign was located

And all the realtor signs were gone and the front door of the left building was slightly open so i stuck my camera inside and took a few photographs without seeing what i was shooting until i withdrew my arm - this is what was inside:

Isn't that amazing ... just like old country stores that i grew up around in the 50's; the room next door, the one you can see thru the door, looked like this:

At that time the front of the left hand building looked like this:

'Nuff for now.

Geared Heads

These are 'geared heads', an adjusting via gears that i only learned about about 18 months ago.

Made by Manfrotto, a company i've never thought made very good products, these turn out to be quite good. When shooting macro items having to adjust the camera's placement by moving the tripod causes all kinds of necessary adjustments. I bought the smaller, on the right, geared head without doing much research to discovered the camera and rails i was using was too heavy for the head and when tilted downwards tended to literally fall forward, ie the gears didn't hold the tilt. Then i discovered they made different models for different weights and today i received the model that will, i hope, handle the weight of the camera, rails, lights, etc.. I was lucky and located a used one that was about 25% less then a new one. Over the next weeks i'll learn if i have finally bought the one that will work.