It's week 26 (the official half way mark!) of my personal photography project and this week's theme is "landmarks". I have one picture to share and a story to tell.  

I had (what I thought was) the bright idea to photograph one of my dogs at the Mustangs of Las Colinas, a famous statue located in Irving, Texas that commemorates the wild mustangs that were historically important inhabitants of much of Texas. It portrays a group of wild mustangs at 1.5 times life size running through a watercourse, with fountains giving the effect of water splashed by their hooves. The horses are intended to represent the drive, initiative and unfettered lifestyle that were fundamental to the state its pioneer days. 

The work was commissioned in 1976 and installed in 1984 and it, along with the plaza that it sits in, won a National Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects; tt truly is a breathtaking installation.

The plaza is huge and I planned to photograph Ginger at 7:30am on Sunday morning when there would be no tourists. We arrived on schedule and the plaza was empty; perfect. It was pretty windy so I brought a C-Stand (you don't really need to know what it is, you just need to know that it's heavy) for my strobe light. I lugged it, a sandbag counterweight, the strobe, a portable battery, cables and soft box across the very large plaza and over the stepping stones for the water feature as I thought the picture would look better taken from the other side.  

I then went all the way back to the car to get Ginger and my camera and then retraced my steps across the large plaza to start setting everything up. I was about 5 minutes into that process when a security guard came out of one of the buildings and started yelling to me that dogs were not allowed on the property. I explained what I was doing and just asked for 5 minutes. 5 minutes! That's it! He nodded ok and I continued with my set up, albeit a bit hurriedly now. About 3 minutes after that a second security guard approached, he was the supervisor, and said "Nope, no way. The statue is actually on private property and there are no dogs allowed unless they're a service dog".  I thought about that for a hot second, but no. Faking a service dog is not cool.