Color and Light

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I used to go to a lot of Broadway shows when I was in high school in New York City. After I ended up in St. Louis, my wife and I went occasionally when we were back visiting my family. They became less and less interesting to me over time - they turned into shallow, mass-appeal extravaganzas. No more Mama Mia for me.

However, one of my all-time favorites is Stephen Sondheim and James Lepine's Sunday In The Park with George. It is based on the obsessions of painter Georges Seurat's while creating the masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (click on the thumbnail for a bigger version). It has both beauty and substance. Early in the show, Seurat sings to a young woman while painting on the island:

Color and light.
There's only color and light.
Yellow and white.
Just blue and yellow and white.
Look at the air, miss-
See what I mean?
No, look over there, miss-
That's done with green...
Conjoined with orange...

I thought of this song while editing the photo for this post, taken in Forest Park yesterday.

Power For Industry

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An old power plant in the area north of the Arch. The architecture is beautiful: take away the smokestacks and it could be a museum. Still, it looks as if it is holding off an encroaching prairie. The place still pumps steam through a large downtown loop, used to heat many buildings.

WHAT I LEARNED AT JIM RICHARDSON'S SEMINAR YESTERDAY: I am making much too little use of my wide angle lens. You can do much more at night with new DSLRs than I imagined. You can get really good candid street shots of people by using pre-set manual focus and exposure, taking the camera away from your face and putting it on your lap aimed at the area of interest, using motor drive on the shutter, then just firing away when something interesting passes. You should take two external hard drives for backup when you travel, leave one in the hotel and keep one with you when you are out.

TOMORROW: two windows - and a kidnapping?