One of the particularly nice things about Austin’s River Walk is that if you catch a boat taxi, you can just sit as it carries you past all sorts of beautiful and photogenic scenery — take this view, for example:
Of course, you’d better have your wits about you. Â Things come up fast, and you can miss a number of interesting sights in the time it takes to swap lenses.
Brought to you from the Natural Bridge Caverns, near San Antonio, Texas — it’s the King’s Throne:
Honestly, I’m not sure where they got the “throne” part of this — looks more like a geological Cthulhu to me. Just the same, it’s an impressive formation.
The Natural Bridge Caverns are in the heart of Texas’ “hill country,” essentially an old limestone plateau since shaped into hilly scrublands by underground erosion and subsequent collapse (much like what happened in the northern Yucatán peninsula). These caverns were formed when the water table lowered, and an eroded underground space gradually was decorated by stalactites and stalagmites formed when water percolated through the surviving limestone overhead, carrying minerals (largely calcite) into their new home.
Anybody know what kind of beetle this is?
Seen at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center; Houston, Texas.
Some hand-/foot-holds on a smokestack of the Battleship Texas:
I liked the geometry of this shot, with the eclectic mix of regular, repeating elements with odd jumbled patches. It took a bit of work in PS Elements to get this lined up (since I took the shot from below, there were significant skews to remove for this view).