Ghost Runners at 510 Broadway

Joggers 510 Broadway 04-21-2014The night I shot the street art on Broadway, I was headed back to put my camera and tripod back in the car when this colorful display at 510 Broadway caught my attention. I fooled around a bit, but could never quite get the right exposure to recreate what I saw with my eye, so I didn’t bother to do anything with it.

I took a second look at the sequence tonight and noticed that I had captured a couple of joggers passing by the window. For you photo geeks, I was zoomed to 55mm on my Nikon D7000; my ISO was 6400; the exposure was 1/13 @ f/5.6.

Click on the photo to make it larger.

“Reality” Is Just a Level Adjustment

BNSF Tracks in Cape Girardeau 04-11-2014I’m pretty much a photo purist. I don’t set up photos and I try to manipulate the image only enough that the finished product matches what my eye and mind saw when I pushed the button. On one of my walks from the river at dusk, I saw the light reflecting off the BSNF train tracks between the floodwall and Water Street.

It’s pretty similar to a shot I took in 2009, but that didn’t stop me from shooting it again.

That’s pretty much what my eye recorded, except that my eye saw the reflections on the rails as more red.

So, is THIS real?

BNSF Tracks in Cape Girardeau 04-11-2014One of the first things I do when I open a frame in Photoshop is decide if it needs cropping. The second step is to adjust the levels of the highlights, shadows and midtones. The program has a feature so you can adjust it by a graph rather than with your eye. You just keep moving a slider until the highlights or shadows block up, then you look at the picture and see if you want to tweak it. Generally you do.

In this case, I blindly moved the highlight slider to what should have been the “optimal” point and let go of the button. As you can see, the photo is radically different: the red reflections are gone, the sky has turned a brighter blue and the mural on the floodwall has become more prominent.

Neither iteration of the photo captures exactly what I was looking for, but it goes to show how a few twitches of your finger on a mouse can serve up two radically different views of the same subject.

Tower Rock Overlook

Tower Rock 04-18-2014I’ve shot Tower Rock from about every angle except underwater (and I came close once to doing that when Brother Mark and I walked over there). I’ve been on the top of it, flown over it and have seen it from both the Missouri and Illinois sides.This is the view from the parking are where most folks see it.

The one place I HADN’T seen it from was the overlook.

In the summer and fall, the leaves are too thick to see anything and in the winter, I’m not crazy about a long, cold walk.

Overlook hangs out over hill

Tower Rock 04-18-2014On April 18, though, I didn’t have any excuses. The day was cool enough that I wouldn’t overheat, the sky was blue and there was no rain around. I drove across the railroad tracks (Stop, Look and Listen) and went up the road a couple hundred yards until I came to a wide spot that looked like the start of the trail.

Mother suggested I take a couple of deep swigs of water before heading up the hill. She said she’d stand by to dial 9-1-1 if I keeled over. I told her not to bother. There’s no signal down there.

The climb is moderately steep in some places, but it flattens out toward the top. You’ll definitely feel a burn in your thighs if you aren’t used to exercise. When you get close to the top, you look at the tiny platform hanging out over space and feel a little twinge of concern, but closer examination shows that it’s solidly built and in good condition.

Didn’t use polarizing filter

Tower Rock 04-18-2014Photo geek stuff: I keep Hoya circular polarizing filters on my lenses all the time. I find that being able to kill reflections improves many photos, even indoors. It also protects the front element of my lens from scratches.

Most folks think of them useful only to make skies darker, but that’s not the case. When I was rotating the filter to get the best result here, though, I quickly saw that the reflection of The Rock in the river added to the photo, so I kept as much of it as I could. It was a lot less interesting picture with the reflection knocked out.

Higher than The Rock

Tower Rock 04-18-2014Overlook is the right word. You are clearly higher than Tower Rock. If you are going to see it, better hurry, I think the trees will have too many leaves for a clear view before long.

Booms for river spill

River activity near Wittenberg 04-18-2014While we were in Altenburg, we heard scuttlebutt that a barge with fuel of some kind had run aground on a sandbar north of Wittenberg and that equipment was being staged at the boat ramp there. We saw about a dozen vehicles and two trailers of orange flotation booms in the parking lot, but there was nobody around to talk with.

Some of the trucks and trailers had “SWS Environmental Service” on their sides.

I called my friends at The Missourian with the tip, but told them I didn’t see much photo opportunity there, and I wasn’t even sure it was worth a story. I haven’t seen anything in the news, so either they couldn’t find out anything or it really wasn’t worth covering.

I didn’t offer up a photo because the last time I went in with a spot news photo I was told they don’t pay even a token amount for submitted photos these days.

Wonder if this was it?

River activity near Wittenberg 04-18-2014On the way from Tower Rock, we could see some activity close to the shore north of Wittenberg. We could tell that it wasn’t a string of barges. I heard traffic on the marine radio about trying to make fast some lines, but they were afraid they were going to foul. The action was too far away to see clearly, plus I was getting hungry.

Click on the photos to make them larger.

If you are interested in my small picture book, Tower Rock “A Demon that Devours Travelers”, stop by the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg for a copy.

 

 

Shooting What You See

Water Street and bridge in rain 04-02-2014The rain was just slacking off when I got out of a meeting Wednesday night, so I decided to take a run downtown to see if there was any wet street art to be made. I saw something promising on Main Street, but couldn’t find a parking spot nearby. I decided to go down Water Street and make another pass at it.

When I got to the intersection with Independence, the stop sign glared back at me. Nothing unusual about that, it’s supposed to reflect light when your headlights hit it at night.

That’s when I saw the reflection of the street sign and the stop sign in the water on the wet street. Fortunately, nobody was behind me, so I put it in back-up and angled into a parking space.

I got out of the car and slogged through the water until I thought I had the right angle.

The picture was gone

I’ve talked before about how you have to shoot as soon as you see a picture: if you don’t the magic might leak out. I figured that’s what had happened here: that in the 30 seconds it took for me to get out of the car, grab the camera and find the angle, maybe enough water had drained from the street to lose the reflection.

That’s when it dawned on me: REFLECTION. What had changed was that my headights were no longer hitting the signs, hence, there was no light to be reflected.

I got back in the car and changed from angle parking to aiming my lights down the street. I didn’t want to block the street, so I was still well off to the side. It was close, but not what I saw the first time.

There are no cars out

Water Street and bridge in rain 04-02-2014That’s when I realized that this is CAPE. There ARE no cars out on a rainy Wednesday night. I positioned my car in the travel lane and fired away. NOW I was seeing what I had seen behind the wheel.

This was one of the situations where the photo probably would have been better if I had gone the HDR route, which takes multiple exposures, then combines them into one frame. There were several reasons why I didn’t do that:

So, why didn’t I use HDR?

  • I don’t use HDR enough to be comfortable to setting the camera in the dark.
  • It required me to drag my tripod out.
  • My tummy was growling.
  • It was still sprinkling. Those last three things violate my Retirement Contract where I don’t (A) Go hungry; (B) Get wet or (C) Lift heavy objects.

 Other night weather photos

I’m a child of the night. I loved roaming the streets and alleys of towns after dark. After every cop in town had stopped my at least once, they tended to leave me alone.

Want to know why most car ads are shot with streets that have been sprayed with water? It makes them look cool. Here are a some of collections of night weather pictures.