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.

Thursday Arch Series

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It's amazing that St. Louis, not the most happenin' town, can produce this much color. For some reason, the last couple of Arch pix I've edited got me thinking of Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air. It fits. What pure pleasure.

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!

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: J. C. Gray

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J. C. Gray was one of the most interesting people I met during studios open house weekend. Her approach is simple, sincere and lovely: she paints what she sees and feels. She doesn't have a website. She's not on Facebook. She has no need of e-mail (she said I could send us to her daughter if I wanted to). I was almost overcome with the charm of the painting she was beginning. Gray told me that it represented how she felt when she was at her happiest as a child.

Flickr says that this is my most interesting photo of all time, and there are 1,906 of them there as of today. The results you get at this link may change. Flickr has an arcane, semi-secret algorithm for determining "interestingness." It has something to do with how many views your picture gets, who views it, groups you upload to, tags and more. Every day, they determine what they call the 500 most interesting uploads. You can see August, 2009, to date here, for example. My work has never made the list, although sometimes I look at it and think "my picture is way better than this &$#!*&%@ picture." I almost never add tags. Maybe I should start doing that. Anybody have any insights about this?

By the way, if you look through my somebody-else-said-so most interesting pictures, all the ones from Nepal were shot by my wife in February-March, 2008. I'll get my own next month.

By the by the way, it's impossible to select your own most interesting photo; it's all so subjective. However, if I had to choose one I'd pick this.

There is a new Arch photo

today on GATEWAY.

Depression-Era Civic Architecture

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For decades, this building housed the federal courts in St. Louis. When the feds built this shiny new building in the next block, they gave the old one to the state. It now holds the 22nd Judicial Circuit of Missouri, the St. Louis Circuit Court. This went up as federal construction during the Depression. Like much other government architecture of the era, it has a sense of power, heaviness and bombast. Maybe that's why an HDR image suits it so well.

I think we'll go back to the artists portraits tomorrow. Maybe I could feature myself.

Life on The Mississippi: M/S Mississippi V

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A short break from the local artists portraits series:

The navigable rivers of America are maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They are responsible for the channels, dredging and the complex lock and dam system. The Mississippi has 26 of them, from the northern end of St. Louis up to Minneapolis-St. Paul. The river is so flat between here and New Orleans that none are necessary.

This is the Corps' MV Mississippi V, the largest towboat on the river. Check the link for its specs. It held an open house last weekend at Lock and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois, quite a piece of engineering by itself. When I took the picture at the top, I was standing just beyond where the two black walkways come together in the bottom picture. A crew member told me the boat could push 30 barges. Power.