New Blog Address

Change of plans. Since all three of my sisters have looked (and commented!) on this blog at least once, it is clear to me that it is going to become a pretty big deal. 

Thinking ahead, it will be easier for me to make major changes to this blog before, rather than after, I have established it as a celebrated internet brand. I'm going to be just like those cats!

Because of this, I am changing the name and address of the blog to:

http://pluckandlights.blogspot.com/ 

The change is effective immediately.

For the time being, the intent is to keep it a daily photoblog focusing on St. Louis. The name change, however, will allow me more freedom to evolve it into something more if I choose to later.

Come join me!

By the way, 'pluck' and 'lights' are cooking terms that refer to different types of offal. 

Memorial Plaza

To be frank, Memorial Plaza on Market Street is not the nicest place to be in downtown St. Louis. The park is littered with empty beer cans and there are frequently groups of people there publicly emptying them. If you are unaccustomed it can feel unsafe in broad daylight. 

There are these walls in Memorial Plaza that I'm absolutely enamored with though. They are concrete structures of open-holed circles and squares with discs of stained glass randomly inserted into the circles. It's that stain glass that I like so much. Both the distribution and the colors of the glass pieces make the walls visually appealing and how light interacts with the glass over the course of the day makes them visually interesting. 

I found getting a decent photo of these walls technically challenging. I wanted to photograph the walls with the sun behind them, to get the most color out of the glass, and with very shallow depth of field, to blur the uninteresting backgrounds. To get that blurred effect though you need to have the aperture wide open which is difficult to do if you are facing the sun. I'm sure there is a magic combination of shutter speed, aperture and body position to get the image I wanted but, as I said, it can be a nasty little park I was in the middle of it in my dorkiest cycling gear holding an expensive camera.  In the end I punted and used cheap Photoshop tricks to draw focus to the glass. I'll return at some point at a different time of day to try my luck again. 

Sherwin's Sheraton

Before moving to St. Louis in August of 2012 I knew very little about the city. I had driven through it many times but I didn't have any contacts here so never stopped. My total experience in St. Louis was the sum of two weekend trips. One trip was taken when I was too young to remember, and the other when I was a teenager and was too distracted to pay attention. 

Of all the fantastic architecture in St. Louis the only building I could ever recall was the painted one. I am referring to what is now the Sheraton Hotel in downtown St. Louis. This 13-story building is covered on three sides with a colossal 110,000 square-foot mural. The work, created by Richard Haas in 1984, isn't my favorite but it adds an unexpected richness to an otherwise dull exterior. Because I get curious about such things, I used the Sherwin-Williams paint calculator to get an estimate of the amount of paint it would take to create the mural. The answer is 315 gallons per coat. Somehow that feels like a low-ball of an estimate. [shrug] Regardless, upkeep on all that paint must be expensive, I would have gone with vinyl siding.    

A Little Chocolate Never Hurt

I love Mexican food, and when I say that I mean the spectrum. I love chips-and-salsa Tex Mex, I love taquerias and Taco Bells, I love chicharrónes, tripa, birreria and menudo, and from the little bit that I've had, I love the traditional regional dishes. 

I did a home stay once in Oaxaca  Mexico when I was in high school. The first night we were there our host mother prepared us a soup complete with a gigantic fish head per person. It was fantastic and not something you will find at any Mexican restaurant I know of in the States. The next night we had pizza, not exactly a traditional Mexican dish, but my host family introduced me to putting Tabasco on it. I won't eat pizza now without hot sauce. 

A specialty of Oaxaca are their savory moles, those intricate sauces that often and famously contain chocolate.  I am a decent home cook but I've only tried making a mole from scratch once. They are complicated affairs, with a rather long grocery list and take hours to make. Since I don't commonly have all day to spend in the kitchen, every variation I have tried since has been short cutted, and I should say, been an abject failure. Some things cannot be rushed. 

So what do Mexican moles have to do with fire escapes? Does it matter? It's my blog and so far no else is reading it.  The reason I've discussed this though is to bring up corrections. After making my one batch of proper mole I would frequently add a bit of chocolate to a savory dish that needed something. That something was never ever chocolate so inevitable I made a number of not-great dishes into legitimately bad dishes by including it. Sadly, the only acceptable remedy for a dinner ruined by chocolate is to break out the Tabasco and order a pizza. Since most of my food turns out well, however, it took me several months to figure out if I was reaching for the chocolate I should just stop.  Live and Learn. 

Similarly, I often feel my black and white photos need something. That something is almost always more contrast and you can add as much as you want in Photoshop. The approach has its limits though.  It's much easier to ruin an OK photo than to elevate it to greatness by manipulating it on the computer. In this case I pushed the contrast laughably high, in a move akin to adding a dash of chocolate in a last ditch effort to elevate dinner. I think it worked though, this is pretty close to what my initial vision for the photograph was. 

Craft Store on a Corner

I grew up in a household with my mom and three sisters and am now married to a crafty woman. Despite my best efforts I've been inside a few craft stores. Craft stores have a unique smell that I couldn't identify until Katie brought home some eucalyptus branches and put a few in simmering water. Bingo, craft stores smell like eucalyptus. It is a pleasant smell but its a smell associated with memories of me staring at a wall of buttons while the women in my life poured over sumtinorother that I had zero interest in. If your bored enough you can count buttons to pass the time.

This urn at the corner of Truman and Park reeks of eucalyptus and craft stores. It's, uh, an interesting photo that begs me to study it if not appreciate it for its beauty. 

Equal Justice and a Mustang

Shown here is the front of the United States Court House and Customs House on the corner of Tucker and Market Streets. The building was a New Deal project constructed between 1933-35 and the statue was added in 1939. The Mustang was added bit later but it makes a nice bright counterpoint to the beige Egyptian columns and the dark green tint of the windows. 

Totem Animal

If my family had a totem animal surely it would be a chicken. My mother, who wasn't particularly fond of chickens, was given chicken-related gifts every Christmas and on most birthdays. I don't know why or when the practice began but there was an impressive amount of chicken-themed paraphernalia in the house when we were growing up. 

The most infamous piece of chicken junk in the collection is a plastic rooster named Bart. Bart was given to my mother by an uncle with an accompanying scrapbook detailing Bart's travels. Twenty years later this chintzy lawn ornament still makes it on vacations and into family wedding photos. Sadly, Bart is better traveled than me. 

The photo above is graffiti from the flood wall. I chose it for it's chicken-ness and bright colors. 

Angel of War

Perhaps a misleading title but this picture off a Grand Street bridge reminds me of those impressive photos of military aircraft firing off flares that leave behind angel-wing smoke patterns.

I chickened out while photographing this scene and only took one shot. The narrow sidewalk on the bridge has high-density traffic on one side and a low wall to doom on the other. Had I locked my knees and fainted it would have been very bad news. Not that I would, I know better, I played in marching band in high school. 

Blurred Lines

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for traffic-blur photos. 

Q: How do you make an overpass look vibrant and sexy?
A: Traffic Blur

This photo of the mundane-by-daylight makes me want to forsake my bar, pop my collar and go drink expensive cocktails in a club. And I would, if I had shoes that go with expensive cocktails. 

On a technical note this photo was a nuisance to crop. There is an optical illusion in the bottom right-hand corner that makes the edge look like its curling up. As much as I like this photo I couldn't hang it in my living room. It would drive me crazy. 

Bad Traffic

On Sunday St. Louis was walloped with snow. On Monday the snow in the street was deep and all but the stubborn took a day off from work. On Tuesday the roads remained a mess but it was business as usual. In general, I commute to work by bike, even in the winter, but I have my limits. Because of the snow on Tuesday I rode with Katie to her work downtown and caught a train to my work in midtown. 

Katie worked a standard day, getting off around five, and had a hellish commute home with rush hour and the road conditions. Her normally 15-minute commute ended up taking an hour and a half. When she reached home she told me in no uncertain terms would she get in the car again that night. Unfortunately, I ended up working a 12-hour day and have a 2-mile gap between the closest train stop and our apartment. 

From the train stop the most logical way to get home is the bus, which would take me to within a couple of blocks of our place. I have a long-standing hatred of unreliable bus schedules, however, so if I have almost any other option I refuse to take the bus.* 

So, on a cold-late Tuesday night along poorly-shoveled sidewalks, I walked. Not that it was a heroic effort, but I'm a marshmallow and it had been a long day. 

It turns out a cold walk home after a long day is a good way to unwind. I enjoyed it enough that I decided to do the same thing on Wednesday. This time I packed my camera and tripod to get some long exposure night shots.  The picture above is one of them. In my opinion, this is a good photo but I think its a great concept – one worth working on. Here, the tripod was precariously perched in a snow bank, and it was windy, so city skyline isn't as sharp as I would like. I'd also like to frame the photo so that the traffic blur takes a more dominate role in the image and the skyline isn't quite so obscured by the trees. I doubt if I can get that shot from this particular location but, again, its something worth working on. 

*I should note that I have no experience with the St. Louis bus system. My hatred of buses comes from the Bloomington Indiana system where I waited too many times for a bus running 20 minutes late to ride a distance that takes me 20 minutes to walk. Damn aggravating. 

Virgin Snow

The wife and I spent a good part of the past couple of years taking photographs. During this time I've had the habit of checking my photos as I go to see what I've got and to make adjustments as necessary. There are two problems with this though. One, if you are spending time checking pictures you have already taken, you are not actively taking more photographs. Two, the image viewer on the camera, at least on our cameras, is much much worse than viewing the image on a computer or in print.  So, it's worth waiting until later to make any irrevocable decisions about deleting photos. 

Last month I decided to quit checking my photos during a shoot in order to break my habit of looking at every picture. Unfortunately, this approach is a bust too. On a recent walk in the snow I wasn't paying attention to how bright everything was. A couple test photos would have prevented me from overexposing every shot that day. Lesson learned, the dose makes the poison, check a few photos but not all. 

The picture above was the only photo from that day I was able to salvage. Luckily, it was the photo I like the most. St. Louis is a rather Catholic city, relative to my experience, and religious lawn decorations are common. What made this one stand out to me was the contrast of the fake flowers in the snow. It's kitsch, but it's earnest kitsch. 

A Loaf of Bread, a Container of Milk, and a Stick of Butter

On Monday the snow had stopped but the temperature was hovering around 0 °F. Despite the cold I needed to get out of the house and walked local Schnucks grocery store to check out the storm-related damage to inventory. For the most part Schnucks had been prepared but the onslaught of people getting ready for the storm. The exceptions, unsurprisingly, were white bread and eggs. 

I had left for the store under the pretext that I was preparing for an impromptu dinner with our vegan neighbors. I bought some collards at the store and made a black bean stew and fried okra to go with them. Why I really went to the store though was to stock up on microwave pork rinds. This is a product that was new to me and had recently shown up in this particular Shnucks and this particular Shnucks only. If you like pork rinds, microwave pork rinds are a revelation of flavor and texture, If you don't like pork rinds, well, there's no helping you. 

Dumb, dumb, dumb

This is so dumb. Google wants me to use its in-house photo editing software. To entice me it's been trolling my photos and has "auto-awesomed" [sic] a couple of my snow storm shots by adding animation. To be fair, the software is probably worth checking out, and I am aware of it now because it's taken a few liberties with my photos, but I'm going to hold out awhile longer now because of this stupidity. 

Cherokee Strong

During my Sunday search for color in a snow storm I ended up on Cherokee Street. This stretch of road is populated by Hispanic stores, Mexican restaurants, hipster haunts, antique shops and artists. It is rough around the edges but that's the appeal. These are mom and pop establishments, not slick-professional venues, and Mom and Pop are a little weird. Not too weird, just enough weird. Every time I come down here I vow to make it back more often. 

People in the Streets

The above photo is Gravois street during Sunday's snow storm. When we first arrived to St. Louis, being a noob, I would pronounce the street name as Grav-wah, because I met a French guy once and I am oh-so-cultured. Locals pronounce the street name Grav-oy and this pronunciation may even be historically correct despite what my French acquaintance thinks. This street is a main arterial for the city and it was one of the few streets I saw that day that was somewhat plowed. That doesn't mean there weren't any cars stuck in the middle of it though. 

If you look closely, there were two people walking down the middle of the road. As the sidewalks had about a foot of snow on them, walking the tire tracks was more the norm than the exception today. I did get honked at by one guy in a pickup who was pointing aggressively for me to get out of the way (I saw him and was off to the side already) I wanted to ask him where he thought he was going in his vehicle.

Parked Cars

When I went on my walking tour through the deep snow yesterday I had three goals in mind. First, don't wreck the camera. To accomplish this I stuffed my camera in plastic sleeve before stepping outside and adjusted my settings to what I hoped would be right for the conditions. I didn't want to make too many adjustments on the fly and expose the camera body to the elements. This worked OK, I fear I got a little moisture in the view finder, the only bit of the camera exposed besides the front of the lens, but it seems to have dried out fine. My second goal was to find color peaking out of the bleak snow. Parked cars kept catching my eye like the four pictures here. 

The third goal was to spend more time outdoors than it took me to get ready to go outdoors. I succeeded in this but only because Katie made me wear a wind-proof coat instead of the flannel jacket I put on first. 

Abominable Snow Storm

We got hit by an honest to goodness snow storm today. Since the streets were snowed in I decided the leave the car and go on a walking tour. Others had more confidence in their vehicles. Many others. After helping one driver get herself unstuck I quickly lost interest in being a Good Samaritan and helped only when asked. Below is a view of the street in front of our four-plex. Presumably the drivers saw this before getting into their sedans right? They may have had a good reason to drive though, I did feel for the pizza delivery people I saw on the road. More pictures this week.

Riverfront Warehouses

The building above is at Cedar and 2nd near the flood wall. Despite its appearance I believe it is at least partially occupied. I couldn't tell by what though with a lazy search for signage using Street View in Google Maps. The Street View images are a bit outdated however-- they show a building, that no longer exists, precisely where I was standing to take this photo.

A block away at First and Cedar is another building that no longer exists. This structure burned down a couple of weeks ago in a four-alarm fire. You can tell this is a low traffic area by the lack of effort used to cordon off the rubble.

More Faces on the Flood Wall

These are more photos from my New Year's Day bike ride along the flood wall. Of course, the graffiti on the flood wall is more varied than faces I've shown today and Thursday but I really appreciate the boldness of these paintings. You see the same boldness in the more common lettering that graffiti artists paint, of which there is plenty on the flood wall, but I find myself distracted with trying to figure out what the letters are or what they mean. Faces are faces and are less of a distraction to the color and form. 

-Vince

Larry in Black and White

My poor dog Larry was the subject of many elaborate photoshops over the past couple of years. He's often the butt of a joke but he's funny dog so I don't think he'd mind if he knew. One of my goals this year though is to take more sincere photos and use a lighter hand with the digital manipulation. To get higher quality portraits I've been playing around with light. In this photo Larry is sacked out on his bed completely oblivious to the shop light I've got focused on him two feet away. In the end I did have to resort to blacking out the narrow space between his eyelids with the computer. Larry has a habit on sleeping with his eyes slightly open.

-Vince

StL Flood Wall

In Saint Louis, the flood wall just south of the Arch is an almost two-mile long canvas for graffiti artists. It's claimed that painting the wall here is legal but I have yet to track down where it officially says that. It is possible that the practice is tolerated but not strictly legal. Some of the works on the wall are created by skilled artists, and some by complete hacks, but the scale of the graffiti is worth a trip to wall alone.  Many of the more ambitious paintings are put up during Paint Louis which occurs every year in June. That is to say, by this time of year much of the work that required forethought, talent and a lot of paint has either faded or been tagged over. This is especially true at the end of the wall closest to the arch because it has the highest traffic and graffiti density. The photos here were taken at the less trafficked section of the wall further south. Here many of the larger murals are still mostly unmolested, and a few even look fresh. I especially like the vibrancy of these faces. 

This area of the flood wall is relatively safe, but it doesn't particularly feel that way. It can be reached by taking Chouteau Street east until just before you hit the river and taking a right at the wall onto South Wharf Street -- a left will take you to the river-side of the arch if the flood-gates are open. South Wharf Street is a rough bit of road that runs along the wall going south until you hit Arsenal street. This stretch of road is in a post-industrial neighborhood with a train yard next to it. Really, not much of anything goes on there, illegal or otherwise, but you could get into trouble on the off chance you ran into someone that means you harm. The train yard also limits the number of access points to the road so if desolation and lack of escape routes give you the heebie geebies, take a friend and go during the daylight hours. That said, I have biked the road by myself several times without any trouble. 

-Vince

Desolate Duck

I spent a number of days over the past couple of weeks sick. Today, New Year's Day, I was feeling pretty good and the weather was fair. I decided to get out of the house and do some biking and photography. The first place I stopped was Benton Park about a mile east of my home. The geese were out hopping off and on a ledge of thin ice in the park pond. I'm not much for wildlife photography but was willing to do some mild stalking to get a single-goose-in-the-frame shot. With the goose pointed away from the bright reflection and from the viewer he (she? I'm no gooser) looks like a lonely goose indeed.  No worries, there are plenty of other geese just off the frame and they left evidence of their existence all over the Benton Park sidewalks.

-Vince