I love Austin Maker Faire. Its more than an "Arts and craft" fair, while there are vendors there, they are also about demonstrating and how to explore creative side. But essentially it is where all the geeks gather and get to show of their projects not only to each other, but to the general public in order to pass on that inspiration - and to fan the small spark of curiosity and imagination in a child into the flames of invention. Yes a bit poetic I know, but I just went with the flow. 

Anyway, the first time I was aware of Maker Faire coming to Austin, it was out at the Expo center, there was a man-sized even more complicated than the classic game version "mouse trap", actually this was one of the things that finally pushed me into getting a DSLR, because trying to photograph that elaborate contraption in action with a point-n-shoot was ... a waste of time.
They also had a demonstration of a full size Trebuchet (I kid you not), also some sort of battle-bots carnage, a series of Tesla coils tuned to 'play' music by fine tuning the frequency of the electric arcs flying between the coils.

But that was many years ago, now they have a smaller event down town, but with more focus of how to get involved, hobbyist and education. Among the Hobbyist was a drone flying club and Drone racing (think large battery operated mosquitoes, I will do a blog on that next).

But among the vendor's was an Artist from The Orkney Islands, Scotland. And in fact as soon as I spoke he knew which region in the UK I came from. He makes stunning metal garden sculptures - treating and heating the metal to create stunning iridescent colours on the surface. We had a pair of lizards of his from many years ago. He had a stunning 'bouquet' of 'flowers' with insects’ buzzing around. It was a photographic opportunity, requiring quite a bit of thought of what and how the capture their beauty. Hope you approve.

As I was studying the flowers wondering what the best way was to capture their Beauty, the Artist suggested using a Polarizing filter to reduce the glare. Why technically it would have reduced the reflective glare and even added more colour contrast, the fact was, I loved looking at them because of the iridescence from the scattered glare...

And yes, we bought the blue flower with amethyst above, as well as a may-fly with scintillating wings which are now sitting in our front yard by the fountain and the Fire-Ant sculpture!!!

If I find the artists Business card - I will certainly post the details...