Bikers Are Your Friends

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People are scared of bikers. Not that I'd approach one who has a beer in one hand and is swinging a steel chain in the other but the ones I've met have always been interesting and friendly. Treat then with respect and you get the same. And who's going to feel aggressive towards a balding 61 year old guy with glasses and arthritic hands? (See illustration from a press photographer who got me from behind at the Chuck Berry statue dedication here.)

There is a detail in the top photo I really like. I was shooting in a very tight space and had to use a short focal length. That makes his hand and cigar disproportionately big and powerful. I wish the white foam cup was out of the frame, though.

More Splat

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Sorry. I can't resist.

A couple of commentators have asked if Tomatofest provided support for a good cause and indeed it did. The event was for the benefit of Lift For Life Academy, what we in the US call a charter school. These are usually (but not always) run by not-for-profits in places where the public schools have failed, with a mix of private and government money. The idea and its execution remain controversial - some charters here do better on standardized testing than the public schools and some do worse. Lift For Life seems to be an inspirational place. Its students' test scores exceed those of the state schools in St. Louis and Kansas City.

I thought this event was a lot of fun when I was out being a photographer. Later, with my lawyer mindset creeping back, I had some concerns about it. They were not using old, soft tomatoes. The fruit was fresh and hard. In the photo above, the young woman looks like she was hit close to the kidney. She was fine, but still. Then I realized that the players did not wear eye protection. Look at the children below and think about it.

One BLT, Large, To Go

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I said it stretched to the horizon and I wasn't kidding. There were 250-plus sections, each cut into twenty servings. All-in-all, they used 600 pounds of bacon, 440 pounds of bread, 550 pounds of tomatoes, 220 heads of iceberg lettuce, 110 pounds of butter, and 60 gallons of mayonnaise. Um, uh, what to think of that? Maybe they could have invited Somalia.

Didn't have a piece myself. You can't eat one of these, juggle two camera bodies, keep the lenses clean and take any shots at the same time.

SPLAT

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Iron Barley is a bar and restaurant in a blue collar neighborhood way down on the south side. Its tone is somewhere between funky and biker. I've had lunch there and enjoyed it and I've never met a biker who wasn't happy to have me take his picture (more about which later in the week).

Its big annual event is Tomatofest. Every year as the crowds grow they make a bigger and bigger BLT sandwich - I mean from here to the horizon. However, this year's big attraction was what was euphemistically called tomato dodge ball. There was a playing field marked out in the street, an actual referee, backstops to limit the spray onto the crowd but, to my great surprise, no sponsorship deal with a laundry detergent. More red stains tomorrow.

A Girl And Her Dog

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Another shot from last weekend's Tomatofest, just doing my usual, working the crowd, asking interesting people if I could photograph them. I asked the man if I could photograph him and his dog - they were equally interesting. He said he'd rather not but I could shoot his daughter and the dog, equally cute. She told me the dog is a Boston terrier. I don't do dogs. People are enough to keep me fully occupied.

STL DPB Photo Caption Contest

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This picture is, uh, so ripe with possibilities. It is someone selling locally grown produce at last weekend's Tomatofest. I don't know how to characterize it - you can imagine so many different meanings. So, I have declared it the subject of a photo caption contest. Submit your entry by comment to this post of by email to me (link to my email in my profile - click the photo of me on the left) not later than when my Saturday post goes up, +/- 11:00 GMT on 15 August 2009. The lucky winner will receive a print of the photo of their choice (autographed, if you like) from STL DPB or my Flickr site.

THE FINE PRINT: enter as often as you like. I don't care. Winner will be selected by a panel of biased judges, viz., me. Employees of St. Louis Daily Photo, its agents, lackeys and immediate members of the publisher's family may not enter the contest unless their idea is too clever to pass up. Winner will be announced in this blog's post of Sunday, 16 August, 2009. All taxes and fees are the responsibility of the winner, except I'll mail the print anywhere in the world. And, as they say in Chicago, vote early and often.

TOMORROW: Thursday Arch Series.

Tom Coghill, King of Tomatofest

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Seems like there's a festival of some kind going on every weekend during the summer in St. Louis. Sunday brought one of the most quirky and fun. Deep in the south side of the city proper where suburbanites fear to tread, Tom Coghill runs the very cool bar and restaurant Iron Barley. For the fifth year in a row, Coghill has sponsored Tomatofest, a celebration of the delicious fruit you should not eat while wearing white. I asked him why he did this during the worst of our August heat. Because it was his wife's idea, he told me.

This year's festival attempted to break the Guinness Book of World Records mark for the largest bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich ever. I don't know if the book will recognize it, but the one they made (before I got there, unfortunately) was 179 feet long, 16 inches wide and 3 inches deep (that's 54.56 meters by 43 cm by 7.6 cm for the rest of the world). It produced 1,092 servings. I found out the hard way that you can't eat one while driving.

The event was for the benefit Lift For Life. This started out as a weightlifting gym for inner city kids and has become a big athletic facility and a charter school, soon to provide full junior and senior high school education. I spent some time with the staff and should be over there soon to photograph their activities.

PS TO TOM, IF YOU SEE THIS: I tried to email your picture to you at the address on your web site, as we discussed. It bounced back as no such user at that domain.

TOMORROW: STL DPB photo caption contest!