Two Street Lights a Day

The street we were on to photograph Ace Scrap Metal on Sunday was across a drainage ditch from their teal warehouse. This street doesn't have a name and runs along the St. Louis Lighting Maintenance facilities. In fact, the street itself was lined with various kinds of utility poles and street lamps. These things aren't cheap, so I was surprised they were the public side of the chain-link fence, shown above. Perhaps their location is quick access though. Apparently, an average of two street lights a day are toppled by St. Louis traffic (!$$$). At least that is Katie tells me, who has an ear on such things.

I should note that it is possible the street we were on wasn't public access. There was no signage declaring we were on restricted property but the street was bracketed at the ends with open gates. We figured if someone had the opinion we were trespassing Katie could have used her professional credentials to get us out of a jam. I mean, she knows a guy.

Italian Scrap

Sunday was the nicest day, so far, of January. Katie and I had a touch of spring fever so decided to drive around and play photographer instead of being productive. When we set out I had one photograph I wanted to take -- I didn't get it.

The photo I had in mind was of the teal-colored warehouse owned by Ace Scrap Metal company on Manchester Road next to one of their pink semi-trailers. Unfortunately, the best frame I could get of the two juxtaposed is below. This was not what I was hoping for. 

The trip to scout out the location wasn't a total loss though. I rather like the above photo of the red and white trailers next to the warehouse. The colors scream Italian flag to me. 

Green Shag

I dislike shopping, it makes me anxious unless I have a reason to do it. Katie relaxes by idle shopping, so we often have conflicting ideas about what we want to do with our free time. 

Last weekend we were out running errands and Katie wanted to stop by Green Shag, an antique mall, on the way home. I consider antique malls as the deepest level of idle-shopping hell. This store is different though. The space is airy and lit with Christmas lights, the sound track is decidedly gay dance party and the inventory is fun.  We have left there a few times with things we didn't know we needed until we went in. 

There is a chance, though, that we have no need for crocheted-poodle-liquor bottle cozies. Perhaps we could use them for presents. Come to think of it, I know a few people I would like to give these to.

Looking East at the Arch

In general, I don't have a great sense of direction — being lost is a common occurrence for me. I've found that orientation in St. Louis is simple though. The arch is East. 

This was the view I had of the arch while riding shotgun with Katie the other day. By the looks of things, we were heading East.

Train Tracks Tire Tracks

If I have a camera and see parallel lines I take a picture. 

I like lines. So what? 

When I took these two pictures I figured I'd edit them to high-contrast black and white to highlight their linearity. I found, however, that hyper-saturating the scant color of the original images gave them another dimension without detracting from their parallelism. I think the pictures are much more interesting to look at this way. 

Red and Blue Fence

There are a several places around St. Louis that I want to photograph, but I only want to photograph them under the right light conditions. For example, there is this chain-link fence (above) that I pass frequently on my work commute. The fence is rusty, it has faded vinyl inserts, it has chains and locks and signs and vines and barbed wire — the damn thing just oozes character. I find the fence interesting to look at but I never pass it when the light is right and have my camera in hand.

So I bide my time, but I need another work-in-progress like I need a busted lip. 

I think the only way to approach these things are to be methodical in my approach. Set up a spreadsheet or sumtin' or other, of things I want to photograph, and how, that I can refer to when I have time and light and a camera.

For now, I can offer a close up to feed the blog beast.  

Of Ducks and Things and Dingalings

I like wildlife, I've just never understood the point of getting all gooey about it. Animals are just like people, some are nice nice and lovely and others are just plain jerks. Some are just plain twisted, literally and figuratively. Male ducks, for example, have corkscrew shaped penises, the length of which corresponds to the amount of duck raping they engage in. Yes, duck raping. Female ducks, in a bid to stop duck-rape pregnancies, have vaginas that spiral in the opposite direction. That is to say, ducks are bananas and I doubt the people who get mushy over seeing one in the wild have put much thought in their sexual practices.*

But I like ducks. Especially ugly ducks. Ugly ducks are handsome in the way that weathered old men in tweed are handsome. The ducks I found last weekend in Lafayette Square are some of the ugliest ducks I've met. Just look at those red caruncles on this muscovy, magnificent!

*Duck genitals are worth getting excited about if you are interested in studying evolution. Really, this is interesting and important stuff, even if it is under appreciated. 

Katie's Ice Capades

This week at work has been a long haul, so I'm going to post a few of Katie's photos tonight. Katie was having a good photography day at the Ice Festival. I especially liked the angle she captured on the top photo, why didn't I think of that?

I did take editting liberties with these, for better or worse, I like to fiddle. 

Who gave that kid a bullhorn?

I wasn't thrilled with my people shots at the Delmar Loop Ice Festival. So, I decided to deface them all. 

Really, I was reminding myself how to get certain text effects in Adobe Illustrator. These things are a piece of cake in MS Powerpoint, not too onerous in Adobe Photoshop, and ridiculously complicated (for me) in Illustrator. What is with the user interface with that program?

Delmar Loop Ice Festival

The crowd control barriers in yesterday's gif were used for the Delmar Loop Ice Festival. At the festival there is a winter-themed ball, street entertainment and a large number of ice sculptures. Sadly, the festival seemed less of a celebration of frozen art and more for the purpose of bringing in shopping dollars. Not that I find anything wrong with that, it's just the many of the ice sculptures reflected that uncreative reality. The photo above sums up my cynical view of them. I am, however, a curmudgeon at heart, most others seemed content as there was enough beer, diversions and sculptures to keep people entertained. 

Visually speaking the ice sculptures did have an interesting property of picking up colors from their backgrounds. The second photo is supposed to be the late great James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. I didn't see it, but with the blue and red stripes in the background it did remind me of Shepard Fairey's 'Hope' poster of Barack Obama. The third photo, in the same red and blue color scheme, looks to me like the T-shirt was positioned rather specifically the color in the mustached chef.

People Corrals

Alright, I'm not planning on making gif-ing a regular habit. You Can Not Stop Them, They Never Stop.  But I did spend a few hours playing around with the software after making the planetarium gif. Most of what I put together that day wasn't fit for dissemination, but this I liked. What you are looking at is a 2-photo gif of portable crowd-control barriers loaded on a flatbed truck. I found it hypnotic and not too obnoxious.

Where was I that required crowd control? More on that tomorrow. 

The Gif that Keeps on Giving

The planetarium at the St. Louis Science Center is a 50-year old structure that is uniquely shaped and has a stark white surface. This year they have been coloring that surface with LED light after dark. I wanted to capture the curves and the color of the planetarium so I spent three evenings last week scouting locations to shoot from and taking pictures. It was a very cold week and I was on my bicycle. 

So why did it take me three days? Most of my pictures were taken from a distance in an attempt to include light from nearby traffic. None of these photos turned out the way I wanted though. This building looks more alien than graceful when paired with it's more pedestrian surroundings. The solution was to simplify my approach and take a photo from the front drive. The entrance lends the building a visual base, and lets you know you are looking at a habitable structure and not a cinched nuclear cooling tower.  

Since the color of the building changes over time I wanted a way to represent that without repeating the same photograph a dozen times. I decided this was a good excuse to learn how to create a gif file in Photoshop. Gifs, of course, have existed since the early days of the internet and understandably have a reputation of being obnoxious. They have enjoyed a bit of a renaissance over the past couple of years though and can be used  to great, or at least interesting, effect in the right hands. 

For as old as this file type is I was surprised by how much computing power it requires to create one. I crashed Photoshop several times creating the above gif before decreasing the resolution of the photos. These files also use a limited number of colors, so my images did get noticeably mangled in the processing. Because of this, I included one high resolution photo below. 

If Frank Miller Took a Picture of my Dog

Processing photos to have selective colors, or selective areas of color, are one of those things that can be done with great success if done properly but more often than not looks tacky and cheap. I have a feeling its a technique that family and wedding photographers use to further distinguish their photos from the average Joe's with an iPhone. It's easy enough to do, but requires more work than applying an Instagram filter, and not everyone with an iPhone knows how to do it.

The effect works best when highlighting one thing or sets of things in color. The most common example, highlighting flowers in wedding photos, is common because it works for the most part. The effect falls apart though when the photographer gets too complicated like highlighting shirts, sunglasses and hats. Especially if these items aren't part of the same theme. 

When I'm in the mood to Photoshop I end up using a lot of selective color. It's one of my guilty pleasures and I use it too often. Before I share the photo with anyone though I ask myself, "is this adding or distracting from the photo?" I continue to ask myself that with this photo. The red is very bold and saturated here but I think Larry is distinguished enough to hold his own. 

Memorial Plaza

To be frank, Memorial Plaza on Market Street is not the nicest place to be in downtown St. Louis. The park is littered with empty beer cans and there are frequently groups of people there publicly emptying them. If you are unaccustomed it can feel unsafe in broad daylight. 

There are these walls in Memorial Plaza that I'm absolutely enamored with though. They are concrete structures of open-holed circles and squares with discs of stained glass randomly inserted into the circles. It's that stain glass that I like so much. Both the distribution and the colors of the glass pieces make the walls visually appealing and how light interacts with the glass over the course of the day makes them visually interesting. 

I found getting a decent photo of these walls technically challenging. I wanted to photograph the walls with the sun behind them, to get the most color out of the glass, and with very shallow depth of field, to blur the uninteresting backgrounds. To get that blurred effect though you need to have the aperture wide open which is difficult to do if you are facing the sun. I'm sure there is a magic combination of shutter speed, aperture and body position to get the image I wanted but, as I said, it can be a nasty little park I was in the middle of it in my dorkiest cycling gear holding an expensive camera.  In the end I punted and used cheap Photoshop tricks to draw focus to the glass. I'll return at some point at a different time of day to try my luck again. 

Sherwin's Sheraton

Before moving to St. Louis in August of 2012 I knew very little about the city. I had driven through it many times but I didn't have any contacts here so never stopped. My total experience in St. Louis was the sum of two weekend trips. One trip was taken when I was too young to remember, and the other when I was a teenager and was too distracted to pay attention. 

Of all the fantastic architecture in St. Louis the only building I could ever recall was the painted one. I am referring to what is now the Sheraton Hotel in downtown St. Louis. This 13-story building is covered on three sides with a colossal 110,000 square-foot mural. The work, created by Richard Haas in 1984, isn't my favorite but it adds an unexpected richness to an otherwise dull exterior. Because I get curious about such things, I used the Sherwin-Williams paint calculator to get an estimate of the amount of paint it would take to create the mural. The answer is 315 gallons per coat. Somehow that feels like a low-ball of an estimate. [shrug] Regardless, upkeep on all that paint must be expensive, I would have gone with vinyl siding.    

A Little Chocolate Never Hurt

I love Mexican food, and when I say that I mean the spectrum. I love chips-and-salsa Tex Mex, I love taquerias and Taco Bells, I love chicharrónes, tripa, birreria and menudo, and from the little bit that I've had, I love the traditional regional dishes. 

I did a home stay once in Oaxaca  Mexico when I was in high school. The first night we were there our host mother prepared us a soup complete with a gigantic fish head per person. It was fantastic and not something you will find at any Mexican restaurant I know of in the States. The next night we had pizza, not exactly a traditional Mexican dish, but my host family introduced me to putting Tabasco on it. I won't eat pizza now without hot sauce. 

A specialty of Oaxaca are their savory moles, those intricate sauces that often and famously contain chocolate.  I am a decent home cook but I've only tried making a mole from scratch once. They are complicated affairs, with a rather long grocery list and take hours to make. Since I don't commonly have all day to spend in the kitchen, every variation I have tried since has been short cutted, and I should say, been an abject failure. Some things cannot be rushed. 

So what do Mexican moles have to do with fire escapes? Does it matter? It's my blog and so far no else is reading it.  The reason I've discussed this though is to bring up corrections. After making my one batch of proper mole I would frequently add a bit of chocolate to a savory dish that needed something. That something was never ever chocolate so inevitable I made a number of not-great dishes into legitimately bad dishes by including it. Sadly, the only acceptable remedy for a dinner ruined by chocolate is to break out the Tabasco and order a pizza. Since most of my food turns out well, however, it took me several months to figure out if I was reaching for the chocolate I should just stop.  Live and Learn. 

Similarly, I often feel my black and white photos need something. That something is almost always more contrast and you can add as much as you want in Photoshop. The approach has its limits though.  It's much easier to ruin an OK photo than to elevate it to greatness by manipulating it on the computer. In this case I pushed the contrast laughably high, in a move akin to adding a dash of chocolate in a last ditch effort to elevate dinner. I think it worked though, this is pretty close to what my initial vision for the photograph was. 

Craft Store on a Corner

I grew up in a household with my mom and three sisters and am now married to a crafty woman. Despite my best efforts I've been inside a few craft stores. Craft stores have a unique smell that I couldn't identify until Katie brought home some eucalyptus branches and put a few in simmering water. Bingo, craft stores smell like eucalyptus. It is a pleasant smell but its a smell associated with memories of me staring at a wall of buttons while the women in my life poured over sumtinorother that I had zero interest in. If your bored enough you can count buttons to pass the time.

This urn at the corner of Truman and Park reeks of eucalyptus and craft stores. It's, uh, an interesting photo that begs me to study it if not appreciate it for its beauty. 

Equal Justice and a Mustang

Shown here is the front of the United States Court House and Customs House on the corner of Tucker and Market Streets. The building was a New Deal project constructed between 1933-35 and the statue was added in 1939. The Mustang was added bit later but it makes a nice bright counterpoint to the beige Egyptian columns and the dark green tint of the windows. 

Totem Animal

If my family had a totem animal surely it would be a chicken. My mother, who wasn't particularly fond of chickens, was given chicken-related gifts every Christmas and on most birthdays. I don't know why or when the practice began but there was an impressive amount of chicken-themed paraphernalia in the house when we were growing up. 

The most infamous piece of chicken junk in the collection is a plastic rooster named Bart. Bart was given to my mother by an uncle with an accompanying scrapbook detailing Bart's travels. Twenty years later this chintzy lawn ornament still makes it on vacations and into family wedding photos. Sadly, Bart is better traveled than me. 

The photo above is graffiti from the flood wall. I chose it for it's chicken-ness and bright colors. 

Angel of War

Perhaps a misleading title but this picture off a Grand Street bridge reminds me of those impressive photos of military aircraft firing off flares that leave behind angel-wing smoke patterns.

I chickened out while photographing this scene and only took one shot. The narrow sidewalk on the bridge has high-density traffic on one side and a low wall to doom on the other. Had I locked my knees and fainted it would have been very bad news. Not that I would, I know better, I played in marching band in high school. 

Blurred Lines

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for traffic-blur photos. 

Q: How do you make an overpass look vibrant and sexy?
A: Traffic Blur

This photo of the mundane-by-daylight makes me want to forsake my bar, pop my collar and go drink expensive cocktails in a club. And I would, if I had shoes that go with expensive cocktails. 

On a technical note this photo was a nuisance to crop. There is an optical illusion in the bottom right-hand corner that makes the edge look like its curling up. As much as I like this photo I couldn't hang it in my living room. It would drive me crazy. 

Bad Traffic

On Sunday St. Louis was walloped with snow. On Monday the snow in the street was deep and all but the stubborn took a day off from work. On Tuesday the roads remained a mess but it was business as usual. In general, I commute to work by bike, even in the winter, but I have my limits. Because of the snow on Tuesday I rode with Katie to her work downtown and caught a train to my work in midtown. 

Katie worked a standard day, getting off around five, and had a hellish commute home with rush hour and the road conditions. Her normally 15-minute commute ended up taking an hour and a half. When she reached home she told me in no uncertain terms would she get in the car again that night. Unfortunately, I ended up working a 12-hour day and have a 2-mile gap between the closest train stop and our apartment. 

From the train stop the most logical way to get home is the bus, which would take me to within a couple of blocks of our place. I have a long-standing hatred of unreliable bus schedules, however, so if I have almost any other option I refuse to take the bus.* 

So, on a cold-late Tuesday night along poorly-shoveled sidewalks, I walked. Not that it was a heroic effort, but I'm a marshmallow and it had been a long day. 

It turns out a cold walk home after a long day is a good way to unwind. I enjoyed it enough that I decided to do the same thing on Wednesday. This time I packed my camera and tripod to get some long exposure night shots.  The picture above is one of them. In my opinion, this is a good photo but I think its a great concept – one worth working on. Here, the tripod was precariously perched in a snow bank, and it was windy, so city skyline isn't as sharp as I would like. I'd also like to frame the photo so that the traffic blur takes a more dominate role in the image and the skyline isn't quite so obscured by the trees. I doubt if I can get that shot from this particular location but, again, its something worth working on. 

*I should note that I have no experience with the St. Louis bus system. My hatred of buses comes from the Bloomington Indiana system where I waited too many times for a bus running 20 minutes late to ride a distance that takes me 20 minutes to walk. Damn aggravating. 

Virgin Snow

The wife and I spent a good part of the past couple of years taking photographs. During this time I've had the habit of checking my photos as I go to see what I've got and to make adjustments as necessary. There are two problems with this though. One, if you are spending time checking pictures you have already taken, you are not actively taking more photographs. Two, the image viewer on the camera, at least on our cameras, is much much worse than viewing the image on a computer or in print.  So, it's worth waiting until later to make any irrevocable decisions about deleting photos. 

Last month I decided to quit checking my photos during a shoot in order to break my habit of looking at every picture. Unfortunately, this approach is a bust too. On a recent walk in the snow I wasn't paying attention to how bright everything was. A couple test photos would have prevented me from overexposing every shot that day. Lesson learned, the dose makes the poison, check a few photos but not all. 

The picture above was the only photo from that day I was able to salvage. Luckily, it was the photo I like the most. St. Louis is a rather Catholic city, relative to my experience, and religious lawn decorations are common. What made this one stand out to me was the contrast of the fake flowers in the snow. It's kitsch, but it's earnest kitsch. 

A Loaf of Bread, a Container of Milk, and a Stick of Butter

On Monday the snow had stopped but the temperature was hovering around 0 °F. Despite the cold I needed to get out of the house and walked local Schnucks grocery store to check out the storm-related damage to inventory. For the most part Schnucks had been prepared but the onslaught of people getting ready for the storm. The exceptions, unsurprisingly, were white bread and eggs. 

I had left for the store under the pretext that I was preparing for an impromptu dinner with our vegan neighbors. I bought some collards at the store and made a black bean stew and fried okra to go with them. Why I really went to the store though was to stock up on microwave pork rinds. This is a product that was new to me and had recently shown up in this particular Shnucks and this particular Shnucks only. If you like pork rinds, microwave pork rinds are a revelation of flavor and texture, If you don't like pork rinds, well, there's no helping you. 

Dumb, dumb, dumb

This is so dumb. Google wants me to use its in-house photo editing software. To entice me it's been trolling my photos and has "auto-awesomed" [sic] a couple of my snow storm shots by adding animation. To be fair, the software is probably worth checking out, and I am aware of it now because it's taken a few liberties with my photos, but I'm going to hold out awhile longer now because of this stupidity. 

Cherokee Strong

During my Sunday search for color in a snow storm I ended up on Cherokee Street. This stretch of road is populated by Hispanic stores, Mexican restaurants, hipster haunts, antique shops and artists. It is rough around the edges but that's the appeal. These are mom and pop establishments, not slick-professional venues, and Mom and Pop are a little weird. Every time I come down here I vow to make it back more often. 

People in the Streets

The above photo is Gravois street during Sunday's snow storm. When we first arrived to St. Louis, being a noob, I would pronounce the street name as Grav-wah, because I met a French guy once and I am oh-so-cultured. Locals pronounce the street name Grav-oy and this pronunciation may even be historically correct despite what my French acquaintance thinks. This street is a main arterial for the city and it was one of the few streets I saw that day that was somewhat plowed. That doesn't mean there weren't any cars stuck in the middle of it though. 

If you look closely, there were two people walking down the middle of the road. As the sidewalks had about a foot of snow on them, walking the tire tracks was more the norm than the exception today. I did get honked at by one guy in a pickup who was pointing aggressively for me to get out of the way (I saw him and was off to the side already) I wanted to ask him where he thought he was going in his vehicle.

Parked Cars

When I went on my walking tour through the deep snow yesterday I had three goals in mind. First, don't wreck the camera. To accomplish this I stuffed my camera in plastic sleeve before stepping outside and adjusted my settings to what I hoped would be right for the conditions. I didn't want to make too many adjustments on the fly and expose the camera body to the elements. This worked OK, I fear I got a little moisture in the view finder, the only bit of the camera exposed besides the front of the lens, but it seems to have dried out fine. My second goal was to find color peaking out of the bleak snow. Parked cars kept catching my eye like the four pictures here. 

The third goal was to spend more time outdoors than it took me to get ready to go outdoors. I succeeded in this but only because Katie made me wear a wind-proof coat instead of the flannel jacket I put on first.