Old Courthouse, Broadway, Winter Night

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I was standing at the top of these stairs between the center pillars when I took the photo in yesterday's post. The Old Courthouse, the former home of federal courts in St. Louis for many decades, has been the subject of several posts on this blog. There is some information about the history of the building in my post of June 17, 2007.

WHAT ST. LOUISANS DID YESTERDAY: turned into weather weenies when we had our coldest day so far this winter. The low was about 1 F./-17 C with a high of 10 F./-12 C. It was bright and sunny. Chicagoans would laugh at us, Minneapolitans look down at us with contempt, and Edmontonians, in the words of John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, would fart in out general direction. Except that up there in northern Alberta, such material would instantly freeze and fall to the ground. Buck up, St. Louis.

TOMORROW: I thought it looked like a little model of a nuclear power plant in Saudi Arabia.

Thursday Arch Series

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Another image from Sunday night's riverfront moonrise shoot. What's that line in the sky? The lights of an airplane heading for St. Louis' Lambert Airport, caught on a two second exposure. If you look closely, you might be able to see the plane's red and green lights flashing at two positions.

WHAT I HAVE: too much work to do. WHAT I DON'T HAVE: enough time. WHAT ELSE I HAVE: a photography obsession and a closet full of gear. WHAT'S A FELLA TO DO? Beat's me. Probably more of the same.

TOMORROW: night at the Old Courthouse

There is another new Arch photo
today on Gateway.

Clare de Lune, Or, Why I Love My New Camera Body

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The photo above and this well-known tune by Claude Debussy are the reasons for the horrible attempt at a joke in Monday's "Tomorrow" blurb. However, it was also a technical experiment.

I scored a Canon 5D Mark II last month and I want to tell you, I am smitten. Its highest resolution RAW file gives you an image of astonishing clarity, weighing in at 21 MB a shot. So, on Sunday night, I went down to the riverfront to shoot the rising full moon.

Photographing the moon well isn't easy, so I read up on it. The advice I found was conflicting. This picture was shot at ISO 400, f 16, 1/20th sec. I used spot light metering and mirror lock-up. Of course, the camera was on a tripod and I used a shutter cable release, all to minimize vibration. My longest lens is Canon's 100-400 mm L series, so I used it at max extension. It's not nearly long enough. The image you see above it perhaps five percent of the original shot, a very tight crop. It's not perfectly sharp but not bad IMHO. Pretty good camera.

WHAT I ORDERED FROM AMAZON: some orchestral excerpts from Wagner operas. The St. Louis Symphony had an opera-oriented program last weekend, ending with four selections from the Ring cycle. It swings from bliss to despair to heart-pounding majesty.

TOMORROW: more lunacy, perhaps.


There is a new Arch photo today on Gateway,
also shot on Sunday night.

Wild Lights

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The St. Louis Zoo, one of the best around, has a thing going on this holiday season called Wild Lights. Much of the area is covered with Christmas-style lighting displays on animal themes. These are just a couple of examples. I may post more after Thursday. By the way, if you were standing in front of the bottom display, the fish would appear to leap out of the water on the left and move in an arc until it plunged back in on the right. With a 3.5 second exposure, you see all the stages at once.

WHAT THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER IS FULL OF: ice, and quite suddenly. I can see it from my office window. It's gotten down to about 7 F. / -14 C. here lately and, of course, much colder upriver. I'd love to get over to the riverfront and shoot it. In my spare time, of course.

TOMORROW: a Christmas Eve thought.