Zooming – January 2017

I use the zoom on my camera in so many situations – to look at the details of a façade in McKinney, Texas,

A swan and coot at Josey Ranch.

And then there is the combined strategy of photographing through a window and zooming: crepe myrtle seed pods through the window of the hotel in Grapevine, TX (when it was very cold outside),

Kitt Peak (probably) taken through the window of the plane taking off from Tucson headed to Los Angles, and

A tangle of plum tree branches covered in water droplets in the morning sunshine.

Sometimes the zoom is so great that it makes the picture look more like a painting. I thought this shelf fungus looked like a stylized bird!

McKinney, Texas

My sisters and daughter took a walk around the old down town of McKinney, Texas – a place none of us had ever been. It’s a small town that has been around for a long time but is not feeling the encroachment of Dallas. The down town has become a place of repurposed buildings. It has a lot of boutique type shops and eateries. We did our walking around before lunch.

There is a courthouse at the center of it all that has been repurposed to be a performing arts center. Most of it was not open on January 2^nd but we appreciated the outside part of the building. Most of the visible façade was built in the 1920s.

There are also two ‘bank’ facades. When they were built, the thought must have been that they would always be banks!

There are bits of whimsy along the sidewalks too. I’m not sure how many painted frogs there were. I managed to photography two of them.

One store had a metal giraffe with a scarf outside the doorway.

There was a cotton boll wreath in one of the store windows. At one time, the town economy was based on cotton and it was prosperous enough to enable to remodeling of the courthouse to its present form.

The store fronts themselves are interesting and the businesses appear to being doing well enough to maintain them. Unlike a lot of small towns that are overcome by a nearby big city, McKinney seems to be thriving as itself. There were people enjoying a sunny (and warm) winter day all around the square while we were there and the Irish Pub where we had lunch filled up while we were eating our lunch.

If you are in the area – it’s worth spending a few hours browsing the shops and having a meal.