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.