Another Day In Gotham

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I bet the people in the next car never even noticed. So where are they supposed to be, in a tunnel (it's never too long until the next stop) or a station? Did they mug the conductor so they could lock the doors shut? What's with the Robin Hood meets dirty old man outfits? This poster I saw at the Gypsy Caravan must have been for an old movie. You can tell - no latter day New Yorker in his/her right mind would ask for a sum as trivial as one million dollars. Donald Trump would fire them.

That's it for the Gypsy Caravan unless I run out of new material down the line. There is a set with all I've edited, many of which were not on the blog, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobcrowe/sets/72157629975865922/ . Tomorrow we start looking at a lot of people who like to pretend they're in central France 500 years ago, and their pals who like to drink with them.

Who's The Fairest Of Them All?

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The mirror isn't on the wall but it will do. This woman might be with her daughter or granddaughter. Will they find anything at the flea market to make them more beautiful?

One last photo from the Gypsy Caravan tomorrow and then onward. The destination, in some people's minds, is the Lyon of 1518.

Character Studies

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Church artifacts, nicknacks, beer souvenirs from the Gypsy Caravan.  That top one is so Catholic (and I have firsthand experience).  In the middle, some bit of publicity for Falstaff beer, once a great St. Louis brand now passed into history, featuring Sir John himself. The red-faced gentleman behind him may be Buster Keaton but I'm not sure. I think the doo-dad on the bottom is an egg cup. Would you pay $24 to have that staring at you under your soft-boiled?

String Theory

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Okay, lame title but it's what popped into my head. And anyway, the picture is in two dimensions, not eleven. So, moving right along...

Electric guitars were a radical invention. Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton undoubtedly hastened Andres Segovia's death. The basic technology is  simple but how come most of the pickups are perpendicular to the strings but some are at an angle? Why do some instruments have one or two or three pickups? Who invented the whammy bar? There were no answers at the sale table at the Gypsy Caravan where I found these instruments.

Still Life With Stringed Instruments

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From a sale table at the Gypsy Caravan. I've had a go at both of these instruments in my time. I took violin for five or six years when I was a kid. Although classical music was a great love even in childhood, attempts to play the fiddle were a failure: good ears, bad hands.  I could distinguish Heifetz from Stern on recordings but my clumsy fingers couldn't play double-stops or trills to save my life. Later, I picked up a used electric guitar. Never made it past Louie Louie for the same reason. The image brings back memories, though.

Thursday Arch Series

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This one isn't bad - nice and crisp, good tonal range - but it's one of the same old views. It was shot from the pedestrian walkway on Eads Bridge, as have many others in the past. I think I'll make this series occasional, posting when my eyes and brain find something that's different. More night work is a possibility.

By the way, this is a 5-image HDR. Photomatix 4.2 makes less lurid HDRs than older versions and the camera body I'm using these days will bracket five shots for HDR rather than three.

Mass Transit

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There are a lot of email photography news letters and tip sheets around the Web and I get more than I can read. However, one that came through yesterday morning got my attention. The author urged us not to buy expensive solar filters for our lenses and definitely not add to the mountain of pix that will be on the web today, fuzzy images of a yellow bowl of soup with a pea floating across it. The recommended alternative was to get the atmosphere of the whole scene, local weather permitting.

It was a glorious day in Missouri. As recommended, I shot at f 22 (which creates the starburst effect), ISO 400 to darken the area around the sun and let the camera set the shutter speed. This was taken a few minutes before sunset, looking across the school yard near my house. There's a dot in there somewhere.

By the way, kids, don't try this at home, even if you're looking through I-don't-know-how-many lens elements and a viewfinder's pentaprism very late in the day. Leave the job to seasoned semi-professionals like me or you might end up like the character below, depicted on a shirt for sale at the Gypsy Caravan.