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Tag: Photos
HOW TO SEE YOUR PHOTOS ON SWAMPLOT 
Got some good flood pics you’d like to share with a wider audience? Or maybe some drier images of Houston street or strip-mall life that deserve to be highlighted on this site? The Swamplot Flickr pool is hungry for your photographic contributions! To join, just click the “+ Join Group” button at the top of this page. Pics that are more Houston-as-you-see-it than Chamber-of-Commerce-y are preferred. Just be sure to provide location info for each cité-vérité image you submit — or geotag them, if that’s easier. Photo of I-45: Paul via Swamplot Flickr Pool [license]
Sure, these days with Google Maps and other available sources, we’re all pretty accustomed to seeing recent satellite images of our city. Does that make seeing a moments-ago fresh-from-the-camera view of Houston sent directly to you (and maybe 354,400 or so other Twitter followers) by an astronaut hanging out on the International Space Station less of a thrill? If not (or even if so), behold: Here’s an overhead view of downtown Houston taken just “a little bit ago,” sent by low-earth-orbiting astronaut Reid Wiseman this afternoon.
- Downtown #Houston a little bit ago [Reid Wiseman on Twitter]
Photo: NASA/Reid Wiseman
Someone Was Watching Over You
- 4515 Elser St. [HAR]
COURTLANDT MANOR SITE PHOTOGRAPHER: GOOGLE PLUS ATE YOUR ‘G’ 
The reader who sent in pics that Swamplot posted yesterday showing a banner announcing the new 14-townhome Courtlandt Manor development at 411 Lovett Blvd. — where developer Croix Custom Homes had a 1906 mansion in fine condition torn down earlier this year — writes in to apologize and explain why they inadvertently made it look like the developer’s sign had a prominent typo. Having examined the originals and discussed the issue with one of the firms marketing the project, Swamplot can now confirm that Courtlandt Manor is indeed “pre-selling,” not “pre-sellin” units for $875K and up, and that the actual sign spells this out accurately. “I feel really bad about this,” writes the photographer, who didn’t notice anything wrong with the photo until it was posted. “My phone automatically uploads all the photos I take to Google+ for backup. When it sees several images taken side by side, it ‘auto-enhances’ them into a panorama.” That’s more of an explanation for a missing letter than Croix had provided publicly for the site’s now-missing mansion, but the spelling-oblivious auto-panorama mechanism in Google+, apparently, is a little more complicated. Original, unstitched photo of sign at Lovett Blvd. and Taft: Swamplot inbox
- 5017 Wayne St. [HAR]
PHOTOGRAPHERS: SHOW US WHAT HOUSTON REALLY LOOKS LIKE 
How tough is it to get your photo featured on Swamplot? Not very: Just submit your pix to the Swamplot Flickr pool. That’s where we’ll be looking for great images to use atop our daily Headlines posts. If we like one of yours, we’ll post it and credit you. Be sure to label every photo you submit so it’s clear where it was taken and what it shows. We already have way too many glowy tall-tower shots and downtown-skyline sunsets to choose from, thanks. What we’re looking for instead: Pix that show the greater Houston landscape as it really is, or as you experience it. Everyday places that maybe haven’t been photographed so much; your little pieces of the city. Photo: Sohail Rizki [license]
- 502 Pickford Dr. [HAR]
The man seen above crawling back onto the back porch of a North Montrose bungalow with a pillowcase full of electronics and jewelry in hand is 29-year-old Steven Groucho Hicks, the Houston Police Dept. now believes. According to a KHOU report, Hicks was arrested yesterday and charged with burglarizing the home by crawling through its doggie door. An extensive gallery of photos documenting the burglary was posted to Flickr last month, retrieved from a surveillance camera the homeowner had installed after learning of similar episodes in the neighborhood.
Note: Two updates below.
A North Montrose family found itself enriched Wednesday by a treasure trove of photos showing the burglar who had been stalking their back porch — and impoverished by the iPad, camera, and jewelry the man nabbed from his home, stuffed into a pillowcase. The surveillance pics gathered from the incident near West Gray and Montrose Blvd. are now on display in this Flickr account. They show remarkably clear images of the neighborhood’s new doggie-door burglar — nicknamed “the Ghost” because no one had caught a glimpse of him during similar incident last week — pacing back and forth in the back yard, talking on a mobile phone to an accomplice who was apparently acting as a lookout. The culprit “spent 10 minutes casing the back yard and 4 minutes inside the house,” the victim tells Swamplot.
“People are always peeing on my street, so I bought a Q-Beam.” With that informative epigram, blogger Jay Rascoe takes his focus off his usual guns and tacos beat for a wee bit in his new Tumblelog, OneBlockOffWashington. There he catalogs his growing collection of caught-peeing, caught-puking, and caught-in-a-ditch videos shot from his home perch, which is, apparently, a block off Washington Ave. Rascoe’s frequent late-night interactions with would-be sidewalk urinators wandering back from club visits are frequently aided by the million candles’ worth of halogen in a pistol grip he points at perpetrators. But some of his most entertaining street-scene captures use only available light:
- 606 Cottage St. [HAR]
- 1120 N. Luzon St. [HAR]
