telwink

The Rebel is a phenomenal camera; absolutely excellent for the price. I still need to get the 50mm 1.8 for my 40D, as the lens is a must have given its speed and cost. I'm a n00b, so let me ask you this Jax; is the 50mm 1.8 good for scenery photography, like most of what you have on your flickr site, for example? What kind of techniques is the 50mm 1.8 good for?

Ricco67: Are you familiar with GIMP? Back when I was on everything open-source, I used GIMP quite a bit for graphics processing. While I used it as a Swiss-Army knife of sorts in my IT toolkit and not really for straight-up photography, I'm pretty confident you can do most anything in GIMP that you can do in Photoshop, as far as photography is concerned. If you'z interested, http://www.gimp.org/windows/ As for organizing and whatnot, I used to use iPhoto, which made life very easy. Now that I'm primarily on a PC, I use Picasa to organize my photos, and have been pretty pleased with that, although I have yet to see how Picasa handles huge amounts of photos, which iPhoto did reasonably well. I'll probably know soon though, now that the humidity is going away some and the sky is getting clear As far as cameras go, I have a good friend who uses a $200 Kodak Easyshare, auto-everything, and he gets stunning photographs. I'm actually probably going to get a p&s Canon Powershot or something of the like, so I can have a camera on my belt for instances that its just not practical to have a honking DSLR and telephoto lens on my person.

Yes, having a camera on your person at all times is a great way to get some priceless photographs. As for my gear, I use a Canon 40D, which suits me pretty well. While good photography is all about what's behind the viewfinder etc etc, I'm pretty pleased with the camera thus far.

Hey, thanks for the kind words guys. Jax, your photography on Flickr is extremely impressive to say the least. In fact, powerful Houston photography like yours is what inspired me to get into the hobby. Keep up the great work. b

So I'm relatively new at photography, and I had this photo I took from the 20th floor of my work building on the North side of downtown, facing Northwest. The sky was completely bleached out in the original, so I used masking layers in photoshop to select the sky, and re-adjust the Histogram as to fix the lighting. What came out of it is this pretty neat shot (I think), where you can see the curvature of the earth, you can see clouds for miles, and you can see rays of sunlight through the sky. Just thought I'd share on good ol' HAIF. Hope all you guys are doing well; thanks for checking out my photo.

Call your friend, and tell him/her to call his old boss to see if he or she has any photos of Town and Country Mall in the 70s

That was the 90s version of the "food court." These places certainly did exist, but in T&C Mall's strong days, there was actually a more comprehensive food court of fast-food-ish joints on the 3rd floor where the McDonalds was back in the mid 80s. I wish I remembered what else was up there, but I don't :/

From what I remember, they were essentially right next to each other. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they were both on the North-bound Beltway 8 feeder road, separated by one of a few Town and Country parking garages. I think the Lowes was closest to I-10, but still south of the hotel, while the AMC T&C 6 was a block or so south of the Lowes, but still on the northbound feeder road.

Great photos, JFive. That answers the two movie theater question - no wonder we got confused over time; seems sort of funny to have two movie theaters right next to each other! And TheBez, that is hilarious about the concert when the tollway opened there. Someone definitely has to have pictures of it - that's actually worth starting a new thread for. As for your mall-rat days, dig up some pictures if you can, I'm sure those don't exist anywhere on the internet; I'd have seen them by now. I'd love to see Town and Country in its glory days though. And ChannelTwoNews, get that other computer and upload them for us . This is a Town and Country call to arms!

I vividly remember going to Town & Country Mall when I was really young. I wish I had some pictures. I remember going to Town & Country when it was a pretty happening place in the 80s. I was as young as 8 back then, and I remember going to KB Toys or something like that down on the lower level. I also remember when there was a McDonalds on the top (3rd) floor, and a coin-op merry-go-round up there. Also, I remember in the early 90s, there used to be a comic book store on the second floor. Was there also a movie theater in there at some point? I remember seeing the original Transformers movie in the theater that was just outside of town and country mall back in 1987, but I seem to think there might have been another Town and Country theater back then. Interestingly, I actually worked for a company called Wristwatch.com in the mid to late 1990s that was located in Town and Country Mall. This company was located on the 3rd floor, right next to Neiman Marcus, in the few years right before the mall completely tanked. Wristwatch.com occupied what used to be a bank of some kind up there, and the office was still routed with these extremely old-school looking vacume-tube communication .. uhh .. tubes. Whatever those were called. And the walls were brown color, brown carpet, etc. All in all it made me think of what the glory days of the mall must have been like - people walking around smoking cigarettes inside the mall, walking on shag carpeting, with 80s arcade videogames here and there. My friends and I who worked for this company would walk through the floundering mall on our breaks, and go look at old shops that had long since closed. One of the neatest things was, where the McDonalds used to be, there were still those swivel-chairs and tables bolted into the concrete floor that were VERY indicative of an 80s McDonalds. It really took us back. In fact, whenever we went on a lunch break, we'd get our food to go (from einsteins over in the village, or that little french gourmet lunch place), and we'd say "lets go eat this at McDonalds), in other words the 80s chairs bolted into the ground. I would also love to see some vintage pictures of Town and Country Mall - so do what you have to do people - blow the dust off your scanners and put something on the internet that truly doesn't exist yet. And if you have any Town and Country stories/memories, lets hear those too. Thanks in advance! b

I'm actually in the Criminal Courthouse: Sorry I don't have a better shot of that one, I'm too lazy to walk outside and down the street And yes, the Love Street Light Circus will be cool whey the re-dev Allen's Landing. I think the re-development is a wonderful idea, becuase this is a historically rich part of Houston that is relatively un-tapped. As far as the Love Street Light Circus building itself, I am actually keeping a really close eye on when they pull the ply-wood off the building, so I can run down there with my camera and see if I can't bribe my way into the building to get some interior shots before they tear it up. In fact, interestingly, the back-side of the Love Street Light Circus building has an arched doorway that is coated in a flower theme tile mosaic. Sort of a nice window to the hippy-past that this building used to have.

So this is a view from the 7th floor of my office buildnig. Noteworthy places in the shot are; http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb212/benny2oo0/outwindow.jpg 1. Love Street Light Circus and FeelGood Machine is the little green abandoned building towards the lower-left side of the shot (http://www.faculty.missouristate.edu/d/Den.../lovestreet.htm) 2. University of Houston Downtown, obviously, is the big building on the left 3. Baker St. Jail is the big building on the right-hand side of Buffalo Bayou 4. Buffalo Bayou itself 5. A train edit: 6. The light-rail (thanks nativehou) Oh yeah, and of course ... Allen's Landing (right around the Love Street Light Circus).

I've been out of town for a while, so I haven't really had a chance to keep an eye on this thread for quite some time, but wow! Excellent find, Isuredid! I think we can call this thread a success. Sorry to bump this because I'm sure its old news now, but I appreciate everyone's help and input in bringing this case to a close. b

Wow, that's an interesting find! I'm going to try to swing by the library this week. If I can get there, I'll post a few of these pictures.

I completely and strongly agree. The information provided thus far in this thread is phenomenal - thanks to all who have contributed, and those who have expressed interest. As you can tell from my posting history, I'm a relatively new member to this forum, but I've trolled it for a long time now. I'm a History graduate from the University of Houston, and I work for the Criminal Justice System now, and love looking at and researching all the time capsules around this city; from the Astroworld Hotel all the way to the old support beams you can still see sticking up out of the water underneath the Smith Street bridge over the bayou on the north west side of downtown. Thanks guys! Oh, and here's a linkless pair of those cool ebay pictures; thanks for posting them earlier in the thread.

This is a really interesting thread, guys! Excellent information thus far ~ I'm going to do some digging when I get home from work and see what I can come up with as well, but if anyone has any more information on this place, do share! That'd be neat if this was the mansion texianjoe speaks of. b

A friend of mine pointed out the questionable nature (althouth not for the first half+ of 20th century Texas) of the bar in the corners. Does anybody know where this picture was taken, or anything about the bar? ~ http://www.cah.utexas.edu/db/dmr/image_lg....iable=e_bb_1832 I did a google search for "Abe & Pappy's," and ebay comes up with lots of that 1920s 'black-face' stuff, and a cached listing for an "Abe & Pappy's Cabaret - Dallas," but nothing specific about Houston. Heck, that may not have even been the name of the place, I'm just judging from the name above the bar. b

Very well said, gwilson. That just about sums it up.

HAHA heck yeah! I remember the mirror maze being so difficult it was actually scary. It was as though the employees constantly shined it up with windex so it was really hard to tell where to take your next step without slamming your face into a wall. Does anybody remember the fact that the "prize" stand where you could redeem tickets from playing skee-ball, would let you redeem your tickets for Fake Puff Cigarettes? I can't imagine a children's entertainment center these days having an extremely difficult mirror maze much less fake puff cigarettes, but back when I was 5 this stuff was extremely fun; it was a rush.

When my brother and I were about 5 and 7 years old, we spent summers at the YMCA on Post Oak, north of Westheimer. We used to go to Physical Whimsical in Sharpstown Mall quite a bit for day-trips, and my friends, brother, and I trade our memories of this sort of bizarre, but outrageously fun indoor play land for kids. They had a mirror maze that was scary as hell, a net, pole, or rope you could climb up to the second floor on (felt dangerous!), and among the "prizes" for winning skee-ball tickets were fake-puff cigarettes that emitted real-looking smoke and glowed at the tip when you blew through them; they looked extremely real.