Cooper's BBQ

I went hiking with a group of friends yesterday, out near Enchanted Rock in Texas. After hiking for over 3 hours in the blazing sun, we went to Cooper's BBQ, in the quaint little town of Llano. The curious thing about this place is that before you even enter the restaurant, you pick out your meat right off the grill outside. It's very smokey there, so you just have to resign yourself to the fact there you're going to smell like smoke the rest of the day. These were all made with the Sigma 10-20mm.

Here's the pit area. I tried to capture how smokey it was, but with little success:




Choosing your meat:




This place uses more traditional Texas-style bbq sauce, which is quite thin and not very sweet at all. Not my favorite, I have to admit:




Inside. Note the deer heads. And how tired the guys are from all the hiking:

Them deer shore musta been runnin' purty durn fast when they hit that wall thar. :evilgrin:

haha.

:rofl: :rofl:

But I prefer southern BBQ over Texas BBQ. And I prefer dry rub over wet rub.

Sometimes if you slow the shutter speed down, you can capture the smoke.

And the blonde in the second photo is very attractive.

Texas-style is not really my favorite. It's a great place, though.

Yeah, I figured that making the dark interior a little brighter (via slower shutter speed) would make the smoke more visible, so I turned up the exposure compensation to +0.7, but I think it needed more. I would have stayed and took more pictures, but the snaggle-toothed guy manning the grill saw me and started yelling, "What's wrong with this picture! What's wrong with this picture!!!", in a loud and sort of crazy voice, so I decided to skedaddle.

The girl was not part of our hiking group, as you can tell by her fresh and clean appearance. I actually like that photo a lot, just happened to catch her in a good pose.

BTW, RagingInMiami, I've noticed that many of your photo-journalistic shots are using fairly wide lens. Do you mind me asking what you use for those? I used the 10-20mm for the bbq shots and, while I like them, they seem a bit too wide.

Most photojournalists, I've noticed, prefer telephoto lenses because they like to sit back as observers and capture the moment.

But I've always prefered to get right in people's faces while capturing something in the background that provides place setting or a nice backdrop.

My main lens is the Canon 24-70 f/2.8 L zoom lens, but because of the 1.6x crop factor on my digital camera, it's really 38.4-112. So when that is not wide enough, I pull out my Canon 20mm f/2.8 lens, which is really a 32mm lens.

So that is my widest lens right now. I was considering buying the 10-20mm, but then I decided to save my money for the 5D body, which has a full frame sensor, meaning my 20mm will be a 20mm. That way, it will be like buying a new body and a new lens.

I'm looking forward to it because back in my film days, my widest lens was a 24-85mm, which was 24mm at its widest.

A wider angle would be beneficial because I tend to shoot in a lot of crowds where there are other photojournalists and TV cameramen and reporters in the way, so I sometimes hold my camera over the crowd to take a shot of whatever I'm trying to get at. Sometimes these shots come out perfect, but sometimes I end up cutting the person's face in half. A wider angle would make it easier.

Usually if a shot seems too wide, it means you did not get close enough to the main subject or you don't have a background that provides composition or adds to the photo.

So don't be afraid to get closer.

Something about her posture reminds me of Urban Cowboy.

Is it the composition? The dripping meat? The assortment of meats? The guy looking on in the background? I'm not sure, but it really speaks to me.









Or maybe I'm just hungry. :)