Silhouette

An oldie but a goodie excavated from the archives. Sort of makes me think of the opening scene in 2001. If I had a music player on this blog I'd put on Also Sprach Zarathusta.

Apex

We almost always look at the Arch from the side, more or less. Well, what if you look straight up at it from underneath? This is the point where the pieces come together, the keystone. The narrow rectangles are windows in the observation deck. They are angled down at about 45 degrees. Bring your Dramamine.

Post-Industrial Arch

The Arch sits in a leafy park but there are old, run down industrial areas to the north and south. It all looks rather nice from the south with sunshine on it.

Apparition

I'm going to try real hard to do at least one post a week on Gateway and keep it going.

Sometimes the Arch seems not quite real to me. I mean, how did Eero Saarinen and a bunch of space aliens drop this far-beyond-human scale metal epiphany in an ordinary Midwestern city? Sometimes when I walk or drive by I start thinking what the hell is that doing here? Building the Arch was one of the few acts of real vision in the modern history of this sometimes indifferent burgh.

A Much Neglected Blog

I've been terrible about keeping Gateway up to date. Time is the issue. Work, shooting for and maintaining St. Louis Daily Photo, whah whaa whah. I'll try to be better. I shot this from the top of the water tower in Compton Hill Reservoir Park.

Renaissance

.

Gateway has been moribund for four months. Good intentions but not enough time. The new plan is to post images that have appeared in the Thursday Arch Series on St. Louis Daily Photo and any other images I come up with. They don't need to be new Arch pictures; they just need to celebrate the monument. So Gateway is back with levels on levels of arches.

Another Hammer Blow

I've posted a number of pictures lately on St. Louis Daily Photo of the sculpture Kindly Geppetto by Tom Otterness in downtown's Citygarden. The last couple of them (here and here) have been titled Geppetto's Hammer because this old woodcarver in in the process of whacking little Pinocchio to bits with a gigantic mallet. Not kindly at all. I find the work dark and fascinating.

But here's another hammer: a view of the north leg from inside the curve. It looks to me like a titanic blow from Thor or John Henry or maybe Maxwell blasting our city center.

Salvage Job

An exercise: this photo has a close relative appearing today on ST. LOUIS DAILY PHOTO. They are parts of a seven image sequence of the same subject, shot at 2/3 stop intervals from -2 stops to +2 stops. The aperture remained the same and the shutter speed varied. They were intended to become part of a seven layer HDR of the Arch. However, when I blended them in Photomatix, the sky came out with a marked box-shaped weave pattern in. It looked like fabric. Actually, it looked terrible. If any HDR experts can explain that to me I'd appreciate it.

So, I started playing with the individual pictures in the sequence. This one was +1 stop (ISO 100, f 6.3, 1/100 sec., spot metering). I always shoot in RAW so I could mess around with the image a lot. This is what came out.

Click to see the companion photo on ST. LOUIS DAILY PHOTO. Which do you prefer, assuming that either one does something for you?

Detour

You could read all sorts of things into this. I'll leave the interpretation to the viewer.

Small City, Big Sky

The writer Jonathan Franzen was born in Chicago but grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, the town where I have lived for 22 years. He wrote a novel, set mostly in St. Louis, called The Twenty-Seventh City. That was the city's U.S. population rank at the time. It's fallen considerably since, what with devastating suburban sprawl, although we remain the 16th largest metropolitan area if you believe Wikipedia. It doesn't look like much in this view from across the Mississippi but the Arch is ever glorious and we are covered by the boundless Midwestern sky.

Summer Arch

Sunday was a day you could have ordered out of a catalog, to use an old expression, with the Arch surrounded by the expressions of summer. And it pays to keep a wide angle lens in your bag.

Horizon

If you look at the Arch from the side, the very top has the most gentle of curves. You notice the slope when you are in the observation deck inside the top but it's no big deal. Then, as you move down the leg, things go downhill in a hurry, to borrow an expression. When you stand at the foot, you see a horizon part way up, like the way the earth drops away on the ocean.

Magic Mirror

I've been neglectful of this blog, although I do get something posted on St. Louis Daily Photo every day. It's not that I've lost interest in the Arch but rather that my time is spread so thin. Taking and editing the pictures themselves has become a compulsion. Everything gets shot in RAW, everything has to be sorted, all the final choices get edited in Photoshop. It's become compulsive. Maybe I should look for a local chapter of Photographers Anonymous. Hi, my name is Bob and I'm a photographer.

Anyway, I got back by the monument over the weekend, trying to slow down and think. The result was a series of Lensbaby shots about the surface of the metal and how it interacts with what's right around it. My friend Lisa, a painter and photographer who is working in Morocco these days, said that this image felt like a childhood memory. I hope it has some sense of wonder.

Summer Sky Arch

This photo has a similar look to the one posted today on my St. Louis Daily Photo Blog but this one is an HDR. It gives more detail and dynamic range than you might otherwise get. The image sort of looks like an avalanche is about to engulf the monument.

Peek Over The Wall

A more traditional, if that's the right word, HDR, with slightly garish color and big tonal contrast. I have mixed feelings about these in color. They are eye-catching but loud. There's a black and white version of this photo on Flickr here. You can see which you prefer.

The bad thing about shooting the Arch from the new overlook in Illinois are the eight damnable high voltage lines that run right through the middle of your picture. In many of the previous photos from this location I have Photoshopped them out. It's a slow, tedious process. I decided to leave then alone this time.

Soft Touch

Nice light. More Lensbaby. What else is there to say? Well, maybe that this was shot from Eads Bridge.

From The East Side

This is from the same series of photos as today's post on St. Louis Daily Photo Blog. St. Louisans refer to all the Illinois suburbs as the East Side. This is obviously an HDR. When you look at views like this it's hard to accept that the Arch is exactly as wide as it it tall. It's true, though.

As mentioned today on St. Louis Daily Photo, the much-anticipated overlook in East St. Louis, Illinois, opposite the Arch opens on Saturday. It could lead to a repetitive motion injury of my right index finger.

A Gamble

St. Louis factoid: this place is awash with casinos. There are three in sight of the Arch. This billboard rises from the parking lot of one of them in Illinois opposite the monument. It advertises that it has the loosest slot machines in the whole country (that is, the highest payout percentage) but it's still a bad bet.

Lightening

This is an old photo, taken almost four years ago. I was just starting to explore the monument, trying to find different ways to look at it. This is the north leg reflecting the afternoon sun, creating a streak down the stainless steel.

OOPS - Thursday mid-morning: I just noticed that I posted this picture in March. Oh, well. Better get some new material this weekend.

Long Time No See

I'm sorry that posts here have been so infrequent. There are a dwindling number of Arch photos in the inventory and I haven't had time to shoot there in weeks. Finally got by last Saturday.

Another problem is finding a fresh approach. Thousands of snaps over the last few years, a hundred and something posted here and on St. Louis Daily Photo Blog and what's new to say? Photographic technique offers options. The original of this image, shot from Eads Bridge, looked pretty mundane. With a little Photoshop razzmatazz, there's something worth looking at.