How About Some Pictures of Texas?

Since Texas is being bruited about (somehow that's a phrase I don't think Texans would approve of), how about if some of you with access to it were to show the rest of us what it looks like?

I've been to Texas once, but mainly I got to see the inside of the convention rooms of the hotel where I was staying. We also took an uninspiring bus ride through the exurbs of Houston to another windowless building. I've really seen very little of Texas.

If you have a quintessential Texas picture you want to share, send me an 800-pixel wide JPEG saved in the sRGB color space, and I'll post a few of them below. My email address is in the right-hand sidebar.

Please also include your byline as you would like it to appear. (Otherwise I'll just use the name on the email.) And don't forget to say where the picture was taken!

[UPDATE 1:00 p.m.: I've gotten so many pictures now that I won't be able to post all the ones I've already received. So thank you very much, but no more please! My apologies to those who don't see their pictures here. At least I can say that I enjoyed seeing all of them....]

Mike

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Sean C. Garrick: The Hamilton Pool Preserve, near Austin.

Jim Tiemann: Above the red car, I give you
"The Grassy Knoll." Dallas.

David Saxe: Convention Center lobby, San Antonio.

Ken White: Tea Party rally at the Alamo, San Antonio.

Markus Karner: Somewhere near Interstate 10,
West Texas, 1996.

Andrew Kochanowski: Houston, 2012.

Jim Bullard: LBJ Presidential Library, Austin.

Jochen Hettchen: Gas station, Terlingua, next to
Big Bend National Park.

Carl Leonardi: "Texas Earl"

[There have been more than a million "earl wells" drilled in Texas since 1919. —Ed.]

Rod Anderson: The late great "Big Tex" at the State Fair of Texas, Dallas.

Rob Heller: Texas State Capitol dome, Austin.

Andy deBruyn: Bee Caves Creek, Bee Caves

Andrew Hibma: Cotton harvest, Ferris

Jim Powers: Annual Tyler County Dogwood Festival
Open Rodeo, Woodville

Gabriele Harhoff: Marathon. "We live in Hamburg, but we go to Austin and West Texas every year if we can. In fact we are leaving for Austin this Wednesday!"

Gary Mortensen: Seasonal picture, Round Top

Elisabeth Spector: Upper Texas Gulf Coast wetlands, Seabrook. "I'm not sure what 'quintessentially Texan' means to non-Texans, but this image, for me, represents the natural beauty of the upper Texas Gulf Coast where I've lived almost my whole life."

Richard Wasserman: Lake Buchanan, an hour northwest of Austin. "Because of the drought they've been having for the last few years, the water level is down by about 25 feet."

Stan Banos

Jim Woodard: The Chisos Mountains, "by geological definition the only mountain range in the United States totally contained within the U.S. and within one state—Texas!"

Bruce Reeve: Alamo and Crockett Hotel sign, San Antonio

Paul M. Macdonald: Somewhere near Johnson City

Charles Simonds: Texas bluebonnets and longhorns,
north of Chappell Hill

David Raboin: Texas supercell. "An aerial view of a massive thunderstorm over central Texas. This stormcloud topped out at over 60,000 feet. What Texas lacks in topography is more than made up for by its wild sky. Here's a link to the story about how I took this photo."

Danny Spence: Panhandle sunset, Amarillo. "The land there is startlingly flat and in places there are no obstructions—hills, trees—for hundreds of miles."

 

Most of these were posted in the order they came in. I got lots more good ones, but I can't post them all. Thanks to everyone! —Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Comments

[Jay Frew]

Isn't Kirk Tuck from Austin? Maybe you could convince him to fire-up his lab and share some first-person insight, with TOP readers, on this topic.

Cheers! Jay

[Mark Ditter]

For most of my life I was prejudiced against Texas, Dallas in particular. This was somewhat irrationally based on two things, the first was the Dallas Cowboys are from there, and the second being that President Kennedy was assassinated there.

Back in the late 90's I spent a few days in Dallas and found that I really enjoyed it. Everything was big, Texas big, just like it was supposed to be. Our hotel was big, the expressways were big, the airport, the food- oh yes, the food. I think I gained 10 lbs. in 3 days there!

[Charles Lanteigne]

Looking at Rob Heller's picture, I realize that Texas is an anagram for Taxes. Ha.

[Koen Lageveen]

I Googled Jochen Hettchen but found nothing. Can we have more of that though?!

[Chuck Albertson]

*Nobody* sent in a shot of the Prada installation in Marfa?

[D. Hufford.]

I had heard that Texas had mountains, but despite the fact that I had gone through basic training and tech training in an around San Antonio, and had later been stationed at Wichita Falls for 2 1/2 years, I had never seen one. Never even saw any on a trip from Wichita Falls through part of west Texas. (I don't count the 200 foot or so bump at Camp Bullis that some referred to as a mountain).

Now after seeing Jim Woodward's photo, I can say that I have seen a Texas mountain.

[Rob L]

I like this new feature of TOP: torque off a state, then see it's impassioned defenders illustrate their love in photographic form!

[It's actually pretty moving, didn't you think? --Mike]

[Patrick Dodds]

I'm with Koen - more Jochen please.

[Steven House]

I enjoyed these. One state a week should see you right til about this time next year.

[Rob L]

I really do dig the responses - the best response to picking on something you love is to show it's beauty - it's the one argument likely to win over the folks here, anyway.

[Roger Bradbury]

Shoulda gone to bed by now, but instead I'm relaxing and enjoying all these photos. Thanks to one and all.

[Dave in NM]

Here ya go, Chuck: http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/Images/AIPAD2012/uzzle_desert%20prada.jpg

Burk Uzzle's take: "Desert Prada"

[MJFerron]

What a kick. I too have a shot of the Johnson City Bull. Hard to pass up as it sits alone on 71 with a nice side road to pull off and park on.

[John Willard]

Oh, I am going to risk getting effusive. I live in southwest Colorado and love it. But, I have lived in Abilene, Graham, and Denton, Texas. My work has taken me all over Texas. It is an amazing state with their named Seven Regions of Texas, most countries have less geographic and bio diversity than Texas. And the cities are all very disinct.
East Texas is the Piney Woods. Visit Caddo Lake and hookup with John at http://www.caddolaketours.com/ great guy and beautiful place.
The Gulf Coast includes Houston (huge huge huge) and a place I visited, Port Arthur. Surrounded by refineries, quite a scene at night. And just down the road on the coast is Sea Rim State Park with a very nice boardwalk. Be sure to have the lunch buffet at Larry's French Market. Houston has everything, the museum district and Rice University is very pretty. NASA is in the southeast. Any of the Goode Company restaurants are worth enjoying.
Down in the southern tip is McAllen, where I saw at the airport a display of amazing wildlife photos from a very illustrious photo contest sponsored by these folks http://www.imagesforconservation.org/front the honorable mentions would have been grand prize anywhere else.
The Hill Country hosts San Antonio and Austin, great cities with easily Googled attractions. Pedernales Falls State Park is very cool.
The Prairies and Plains, I had access to the Greenbelt Trail just east of Denton, which is a nice bike or hike. The cities Dallas (Nouveau Rich) and Ft Worth (Cow Town) both have great museum districts, I preferred Ft. Worth. The oilfield really starts west of here. DFW is The Metroplex; Ranger, Eastland, and Cisco is The Microplex. Cisco is where Conrad Hilton went from banking to hotelier during the oil boom. I used to hang out at Possum Kingdom Lake, one of hundreds of manmade lakes in Texas.
West Texas entails the Panhandle Plains, Big Bend Country and some of the Hill Country. Here is where you start seeing the wide open spaces and oilfield apparatus. This is home to those hundreds of tiny little, almost ghost, towns. The cotton, the grain, the windmills, the longhorn, the pump jacks. And it is mind boggling huge. You can spend weeks getting lost and photographing. The cities out here are smaller, Abilene (Joe Allen's BBQ), Lubbock, Midland/Odessa ("Raise your kids in Midland, raise hell in Odessa"), Amarillo (Big Texan Steakhouse), El Paso (Los Bandidos de Carlos & Mickey's. Guadalupe Mountains National Park (McKittrick Canyon in the autumn), Big Bend National Park (alas, never visited) Palo Duro Canyon State Park and Cap Rock Canyon both south of Amarillo. Also in that area is Turkey, home of Bob Wills, cool little (I mean little)town. Monahans Sand Hills west of Midland/Odessa
Oh, Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup, March 8-11 2013, is absolutely amazing to see.
And rodeos, you can find one happening just about anywhere. In the small towns it is much more intimate and accessible.
And the county courthouses, some guy made a poster of all of the courthouses, very interesting.
Texas is an easy target for jokes, but I do enjoy my visits there and am always amazed at the variety. Both city and nature.
Sorry for such a big post, but everything is big in Texas.
Geez, you would think I was paid by the tourism department, and I only lived there 5 and 3 years.
No, I am not leaving Colorado and the Four Corners, that is another big post.

[Ross Chambers]

As an younger Australian I received an extraordinarily distorted idea of Texas, thanks to US "soft diplomacy"

As a grown up I find it surprisingly cultivated and diverse.

A few words from the "New Yorker" (and the Joyce and Carroll archives were what led to my new knowledge of the state)

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The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.

[Dragos B]

Texas without J.R. Ewing... Picture this! ;(
RIP, Larry Hagman!

Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean...
Giants ...

[Phil Maus]

Mike, you're really showing your skills as a photo editor here. A very talented photo editor. These are beautiful! Looks like the final selects for a Nat Geo spread!

Great follow-up from the 'earlier' post on TX.

[Mike Johnston]

Phil,
I'd love to take credit, but I did very little. I just basically published them as they came in. First picture is the first one submitted, second one was second, and so on.

Had to cut it off at some point, but it's kind of gnawing at me because some cool pics didn't get posted.

Mike

[David Bostedo]

"Had to cut it off at some point, but it's kind of gnawing at me because some cool pics didn't get posted."

Why don't you just get together with the site owner and the blog editor and figure out how to make another Texas-centric article featuring some more pics?

[Robert Howell]

Came to this a bit late but I'd like to contribute some by linking to James Evans, a photographer from Marathon in Big Bend.

[kirk tuck]

When I was a student at UT, many years ago, I would go to the HRC photo collection, put on white gloves and get to handle and stare at original prints from Edward Weston, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank and many, many more legends of photography. Recently I went by to go into a darkened booth and look at the world's first photograph. Austin, Texas may be just behind NYC, Paris and London for the sheer depth of historical photography archived here. Mostly in Austin. And I just remembered, Richard Avedon's stellar show, In the American West, first opened in the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas. Pretty culturally cool, if you ask me...