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.