Twist And Shout - And A French Blog Fan!

There was a 5 km run before the St. Paddy's parade. At the end, the crowd got together in Kiener Plaza, had a few mid-morning brewskis and milled around. There was a band. Some in attendance decided to show their stuff. I think one of them had actually participated in the race.

Later, I was elbowing my way down Market Street toward the staging area. A woman with a charming French accent stopped me. (All French accents are charming. And Irish, too. But not German. Definitely not.) "Eeks-kyuze me," she said. "Are you Bob Crowe?" Mais oui! It turns out Simone is now living in St. Louis with her husband Jay and their daughter, Lynne. (I hope I got the names right.) She reads STL DPB and enjoyed my photos from France last year. Je ai été enchanté.                        

Irishmen Behaving Badly

Well, except for the last chap, but you get the idea. We have a big St. Patrick's Day parade on the Saturday before (six years out of seven), two hours long this time. As I have noted before, St. Louis loves an excuse to drink in public and this is a prime example. And boys will be boys, or some of them will. Which came first, the blessed saint or Guinness?

                           

Fog On The Mississippi

Taken from my office window on a recent morning. It's been a lot warmer here but the water in the Mississippi, flowing from the north, is still cold.                                

Musée des Fleurs

If you are from this part of the world, anything sounds better if you say it in French.

A couple of final shots from Art In Bloom at our art museum. That's a Rodin bust in the top photo but I can't identify it on SLAM's web site.

Some urban landscape tomorrow for a transition, then the high flyin' leprechauns at our St. Patrick's day parade. 

Oh, and happy Friday the Thirteenth.                        

Three Of A Kind

Do three orchid pictures beat, say, two pairs of roses? I didn't note the names of the varieties - they don't mean anything to me and I wouldn't remember them anyway. Just chasing images. These came out pretty good.                         

Attention Span

Mine isn't all that great, having grown up with 30 minute television shows and 3 minute pop songs. Now, as an adult, I've got the MacBookiPadiPhone set of distractions, delivering the world to me in tidbit size servings. The only thing I can concentrate on indefinitely is editing a photo. It must involve a different part of my brain.

Not so the woman above, who is completely engaged with this floral piece. Below, some very warm flowers compete with a cool Dan Flavin neon tube. I like Flavin's stuff. It's as much about the space around the tube and what you can do to it as the neon bulb itself.                          

At The Orchid Show

I'm going to bounce back and forth between the floral event at the art museum and the orchid show at the botanical garden. I get around to shoot that more years than not, even though it is not much different over time. It's sort of a technical exercise.

In the past, I've mostly shot the orchids with my 16-35 mm or 24-105 mm lenses, using extension tubes to get the macro effect. If there was need for it, I used my flash gun with a diffuser. This year I took a different approach, using only a 100 mm macro lens and a ring flash (not a fancy one like this but the cheaper kind that slips over the front of your flash gun and then has a series of reflectors that encircle the lens). It's supposed to create smooth, even light. I didn't much care for what it did to flowers - the effect was more flat than smooth. See what you think.