Thursday Arch Series

This looks to me like it could have been a magazine photo from the 60s, before color pictures were common. Mid-sized city, mid-sized buildings, big famous monument. There is a little figure-ground trick going on here, with the light on the triangular legs of the Arch and one foot in the trees. If you look at the bottom two-thirds, the Arch could be parallel or perpendicular to the river. If your eye drifts to the top the ambiguity goes away, but that itself is confusing. I like ambiguity a whole lot. It's a sensible way of thinking.

TOMORROW: Rain delay

Thursday Arch Series (With Some Other Stuff)

When the wind blew, the flag in yesterday's post twisted around the cable holding it up. The flag was nearly translucent and my eye was caught by the weave of the red and white stripes with one another.

This photo looks east down Market Street. The Arch dominates everything in our city center. It is our friendly, elegant giant, standing by the great river, always ready to entertain us.

Unrelated product plug: this week's posts have been prepared on my new MacBook, the best computer I have ever used, period. My office and family have used Windows since way back when. I got my first Mac for my personal work almost two years ago. Switching from Windows to Mac reminds me of the old joke: "Why do you keep banging you head against the wall?" "Because it feels so good when I stop." My head doesn't hurt any more.

TOMORROW: The Agonizing Wait

The Rest of the Wedding Party

Well, it looks like there was no open bar on the photo bus of yesterday's bride and groom and their attendants. Otherwise, they would never make it down the long concrete stairs (equivalent to about three stories) that lead from the base of the Arch to the levee along the river. I like the way the setting sun catches the lime-colored jackets of some of the bridesmaids. And no, Mr. Blackwell did not design their outfits. They were quite elegant in bright green and black, a daring color choice.

TOMORROW: Thursday Arch Series. The whole big thing, not just a little bit of it. And with something interesting in the middle.

The Happy, Freezing Couple

Would it amuse you to photograph the wedding parties of complete strangers? There are places around St. Louis you can do that on almost any Saturday: in front of the cathedral, several locations in Forest Park and, of course, around the Arch. I run into them all the time, schlepping around on small buses from one scenic backdrop to another, in varying states of happiness and inebriation. (The bar is frequently open on the bus. I have seen more than one bridesmaid swoon, and not from joy.) It's fun in a perverse way to stand back and be catty - oh my gawd, did they hire Mr. Blackwell to do the bridesmaids' dresses? Can the best man stand up long enough to get back to the bus? and so on.

This couple, standing at the foot of the Arch, must be dedicated to love and imagery. The temperature was right at freezing. The bride might collapse from hypothermia before the ceremony.

TOMORROW: same deal as today. A bit of the Arch is in it but it's still not the Thursday Arch Series. You will just have to come back on Thursday for that. It'll be worth it. Promise.

Man and Horse

Horse drawn carriage rides are available downtown for tourists and romantics. The drivers are charming people who love their animals. Last June 1 (before I understood theme days), I had a post about Chrissy and her horse Curley, hiding from the rain under the main highway bridge across the Mississippi. This past weekend, while taking pictures on the riverfront under the Arch, I met John and Shorty. John told me that Chrissy had been sick and we wish her a speedy recovery. He also kept addressing me as "Sir," which made me feel both old and uncomfortable.

It's fun to talk to the people I meet on the street. It is like the the old advice to men who want to meet women: get a cute dog and walk it. The camera, like the dog, is the introduction. Still, lots of us are shy about it. When I took the fabulous Bobbi Lane's portrait photography workshop, she made us go out for an afternoon to take street portraits of strangers, always with permission. There are ways to do it. Still, I only get a few minutes with John and other people I photograph in brief public meetings. It makes me wonder about their life stories. How does he live on this irregular job? How did he come to drive horses in the city? I don't learn many of these details. I've been trained to go for the image, albeit in a friendly, polite way.

Is this art, journalism or voyeurism? What do you think?

TOMORROW: Not part of the Thursday Arch Series, but the Arch is in it. Just a little.

Thursday Arch Series

Weird stuff with a wide angle lens. All the office buildings bow down in obeisance to the Arch. Shot at 17 mm, the shortest lens I got, on a Canon 5D. The 5D's light sensor is the same size as a frame of 35 mm film so there is no "magnification factor," as with most DSLRs. So, WYSIWYG (what you see i what you get) in the viewfinder. The short focal length creates optical distortion at the sides.

I bet there are going to be a lot of CDPB posts today about the lunar eclipse. I went out in front of my house to shoot it with a 400 mm lens, the longest I got. I know zip about astronomical photography and it was difficult. Not enough light for the autofocus to work. Manual focus was hard because the subject was dim and I wear trifocals. I tried to shoot at 100 and 200 ISO for maximum clarity but, damn!, those celestial bodies move in a 20 or 30 second exposure. I wish I'd tried a higher ISO but after a while I couldn't feel my fingers and I weenied out from the cold. I know, Mitch, this is nothing. If it's 20 F. here it's probably zero or below up there. Minnesotans are made of harder stuff.

TOMORROW: Crown Candy

Thursday Arch Series

An American Airlines Boeing 757 heads north over the Mississippi just behind the Arch. Soon it will turn left, descending to the west into Lambert St. Louis International Airport. Nobody here has a clue who Lambert was. You could look it up, I guess.

We're a secondary hub for American Airlines, which is not so bad. We can get to most of the world if we transfer in Chicago or Dallas-Fort Worth. Back in Lambert's glory days, it was the main hub for TWA, with 425 departures a day including non-stop service to London, Paris, Mexico City, Vancouver, Anchorage and Hawaii. No more. Nevertheless, my wife and I are skilled players of AA's frequent flyer program. It gets us where we want to go.

TOMORROW: Valentine, A Day Late and a Blossom Short

Across the River

What we call the Poplar Street Bridge is the main vehicle crossing of the Mississippi River, carrying Interstates 55, 64 and 70. The span is functional, not beautiful, but the scene looks pleasant in Golden Hour light and big, gentle cumulus clouds.

I am curious about our visitors reactions to my posts of the last two days regarding the Kirkwood murders. As I write this late Sunday evening, no comments were posted about the day's pictures and comment, although there were a considerable number of visits. We usually try to show beautiful, arresting or humorous images on our CDPB blogs but I don't think that tells the whole, true story of our cities. Each town has beauty and squalor, joy and tragedy, celebration and quotidian routine. When I can, I'd like to show a variety of views of St. Louis, and not just pretty ones. It's just life here.

How does that approach make you feel? Does it seem uninteresting or uncomfortable, or does it intrigue you? Share your thoughts about this.

Graph Of A Function

Friday Arch supplement. This was shot through a window of of what we call the Old Cathedral, the historic (by American standards) mini-cathedral near the feet of the Arch. It's web site refers to it as the first Catholic cathedral wast of the Mississippi. The Mississippi River, which splits our country from the Gulf of Mexico to nearly the Canadian border, is an historical great divide. I find it hard to believe the Old Cathedral's claim. There were extensive Spanish Catholic missions in what is now our southwest, particularly in California, in the 17th century.

This picture makes me think of the ethereal abstract beauty of the Arch. It reminds me of the graph of a function from calculus class many, many years ago. I admit that I am obsessed with the Arch. I feel lucky to live and work near such a superb, enormous work of art.

Thursday Arch Series

For me, one of the most interesting things about the Arch is how it fills space, reminding me of the work of sculptor Richard Serra on a much grander scale. But the Arch's magic trick is that it fills space differently from every point of view.

The Thursday Arch Series will be on vacation with me for the next couple of weeks. I hope I can find other images to interest you. Next Thursday I will be in Shanghai.

Thursday Arch Series

It's been a while since I've shot pictures of the Arch. I went out last weekend on a cloudless, torrid day, looking for new points of view. Many of the pictures I took were up the sides and edges. The Arch's well-known shape is not obvious here. Does this form remind you of anything?

Thursday Arch Series

This photo was shot lying on my back directly underneath the apex of the Arch. The horizontal slits are the windows of the observation deck. almost 190 m above me.

Notice the light dot in the upper set of windows, a bit right of center. You can't see it at this resolution, but when I zoomed in on the original I saw that it was a face looking downward. The windows are at about a 45 degree angle so it it possible to look straight down.

Thursday Arch Series

One of the few night time shots I have of the Arch. I'm not a late night guy at my advancing age. This was shot in December 2006. Our office had the holiday party on a boat on the Mississippi: dinner (mediocre), dancing (music supplied by an iPod whose owner had bad taste) and a cruise on the river along an industrial area. On a dank, overcast night. Did I mention that it was pitch black?

But I brought my camera and a small tripod. I tried to take some pictures as the boat was docking but the damn thing wouldn't stop its throbbing engine. When I started editing the pictures, I decided that I actually liked this effect - grainy, shot at ASA 3200 equivalent, and soft focus caused by the motion of the boat.

Since I started this blog I've noticed lots of thing I want to shoot at night. That will have to wait a few months until it gets dark earlier.

TOMORROW: From one extreme to another

Thursday Arch Series

This is the last or my recent posts of the Arch reflected in downtown buildings. Next week it's back to the stripped-down black and white images I had been posting since the blog started in March. Need to get down on the riverfront with my camera and refresh the stockroom.

TOMORROW: Been here before but I know you'll like this one. (Sez me.)

Thursday Arch Series

An image half-way between two varieties of my Arch photos: reflected in a building but in black and white. The spire and flag pole sit atop the Old Court House. Some history and links to other photos of this historic building are in my post of June 9.

TOMORROW: Wet, very quiet.

Thursday Arch Series

A few more weeks of Thursday Arch pictures in color. I'd like to think of this one as an emergency exit from the earth to the part of the sky the Arch lives in. Thanks to the school bus driver for creating such a great chromatic effect.

FRIDAY AND SATURDAY: Two pictures with horses in them. From me, a city boy.