It is not unusual in this country to see people who are simply covered with tattoos. Mrs. C and I think they are abhorrent and disfiguring. Both of our children got them, one all over, one more discretely (the route of the Chicago Marathon he ran on his calf). Skin belongs to the owner. Each to their own taste. https://youtu.be/WtTnCeuYkgI?si=Rj_RzNRPB9p3tAyN
What with my creaky spine, sometimes I'll sit or lean on something at the side of an event, flip up the LED screen on my camera leaving it on my lap, and shoot what goes by. When the camera is not up to my face, people don't know I'm taking pictures. This trio swung over by me and I had quite a conversation with the man on the right. He noticed my Fujifilm camera. He's a FF shooter, too, and we had a chat about why they are so wonderful.
Change of scene. Metro St. Louis has a few Pride festivals, and, even though you could compare me to the shortest distance between two points on a plane, you could not find more colorful subject matter. This one is in Tower Grove Park, our second largest. (STL City has a lot of parks.) These folks told me they were family. Mom and the kids?
Last in the series of sculptures in the Patterns In Nature show at the Missouri Botanical Garden. This one is, appropriately, called Balance. The structure on the right is the entry building with the shop, restaurant, meeting rooms and such.
First, a correction. I said that the sculpture in yesterday's post was called Balance. The paper map the Missouri Botanical Garden gave us was not clear. That piece is called Pyrite Field. Pyrite is commonly known as fool's gold. This one, if I got it right from the garden's website, is part of an assembly called Jewel Garden. It had the best light projection onto the pathway.
The name of the sculpture seems appropriate, but it may have to have more to do with structural engineering and metallurgy than a delicate balance of forces. As I edited this picture I thought of the exquisite and often unexpected equilibrium of forces in Alexander Calder's sculpture. This work, it seems to me, stresses the technical over the natural.
That's the association I got when I first started editing this picture, if maybe a science-fictiony version. The geodesic dome, the Climatron, pulsed with solid and patterned colors.
I've got a few more of these to go. Not getting out on the street much, and when I go to an event like this I use a rollator. A new lumbar MRI was, well, a mess. Steroid shots next week as a stop-gap before travel, and then we'll see what the doc recommends. Gotta get more mobile.
