skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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.
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.
.
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.
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.
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?
You could read all sorts of things into this. I'll leave the interpretation to the viewer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm going to try real hard to do at least one post a week on Gateway and keep it going.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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. 
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.
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.
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. 
