Cape Girardeau History and Photos

November 28, 2011

Holy Cow! Ice Falls from Sky

Mother and I had to journey over to Kentucky Lake this morning to meet a plumber who was going to winterize her trailer.

For you Sunbelt Readers (I’m talking to YOU, Jan), that’s where you drain all of the water out of the pipes, then blow antifreeze in them until pink stuff spews out the faucets. You drain the toilet bowls and put antifreeze in them, too. If you don’t, and if you don’t have heat turned on, the freezing water in the pipes will expand and cause them to burst. The purpose of pipes is to keep liquid inside them. Pipes that have burst fail in that purpose, as we found out when I turned the water on this spring. It is an unpleasant and expensive thing to fix.

You can click on the photo to make it larger. I actually like it. For the record I did NOT put those leaves there. Sometimes I think there’s a Higher Power who looks at a Florida photographer with sleet bouncing off his follically-challenged head and says, “You know, I’m gonna cut him some slack:’ Leaf, it’s time for you to go anyway, land where it’ll do him some good.'”

Foggy, rainy, cold

When we left Cape around 8:30 a.m. it was foggy, misting rain and about 38 degrees. On the way to the lake, it alternated between misting and pouring. Creeks were running out of their banks, so Illinois and Kentucky must have gotten a lot more rain than we did. By the time we got to the trailer, the temperature had dropped to 35 and the rain looked like it might have something mixed in it. I started raking and blowing leaves to get them off the deck and away from the trailer. I spent two weeks in Seattle and didn’t get a drop of water on my new Marmot Precip Rain Jacket, but it paid for itself today. I stayed dry and reasonably warm and the built-in hood kept water from running down my neck.

The only problem with blowing wet leaves off the north side of the deck when the winds are gusting to 36 mph FROM the north is that the wind hits the side of the desk causing an updraft. That carries your blown leaves up in the air. Then the north wind blowing horizontally flings the leaves right back at you. It was a lot more fun for somebody to watch than it was for me to do it.

What’s that blue stuff on the radar?

While we were waiting for the plumber to do his magic, I called up the radar and saw that we were surrounded by blue. We don’t get any blue on our radar in Florida, so I had to look at the legend. It said it was snowing on us. I didn’t see how it could snow in a rain storm, so I didn’t get excited.

Then I switched over to Facebook and saw that KFVS had asked people to submit their photos of ice, snow and slush. There were a gazillion comments from people reporting snow, freezing rain, slush and ice pellets. This sounded Not Good. We saddled up the pony and headed back home, still not expecting much more than rain.

About 40 miles from Cape, I started seeing suspiciously large raindrops that floated. The closer we got to Missouri, the more ice pellets and snowflakes we saw. When we pulled into the driveway at about 4 p.m., the snow was falling like crazy. We unloaded the car, and I walked over to my van, which had been sitting since yesterday. It reinforced those signs you see that say, “Bridges Freeze First:” the hood and windshield were coated with the slush you see above.

So, in the space of less than eight hours, we saw just about every form of Missouri weather short of sunshine, hail and a tornado.

Winters past

I’ve done several winter-weather related posts.

November 27, 2011January 16, 2024

How to Shoot a Barn

Well, that title is a bit presumptuous, but studies have shown that using the words “How to…” in the headline causes the story to rate higher with search engines.

When Friend Shari and I were on our way back from shooting Tower Rock Quarry and taking the scenic route where I discovered High Hill Church, she said to keep my eye out for old barns; there was one in particular she’d like to shoot again. She recalled doing it years ago and wanted to have another crack at it.

STOP!!!

We were tooling along down 177 near Egypt Mills when she hollered, “STOP!” She was always good at that. I locked down thinking she saw an 18-wheeler getting ready to hit us head-on and heard everything loose in the car slide forward.

She had spotted her barn. I threw it in reverse and cut over on CR 634 (I think) and pulled off on the side of the road with the hazard flashers on.

What are you looking for?

Being a former shrink, she’s always curious about the thought processes that go into making a photo. After dismissing her (and most other folks who ask that question), I’ve started to think about it. I told her that I would try to explain how I looked at the overall scene and then drilled into a detail here and there. As we walked around, I explained that sometimes everything would fall into place. Other times, I’d shoot a frame and decide that something didn’t work. Sometimes a slight change in angle would fix the problem; other times, there would be some extraneous object that would intrude that I couldn’t work around, and I’d move on.

I’m a sucker for contrast

I love dark photos where the light hits something and causes it to pop out. Sometimes, like in this shot, the light is striking it directly. More often, I look for a strong back or sidelight to make it translucent.

Signs that it wasn’t a good shoot

Leica made some great photo enlargers. One of the neat things about them was that their negative carriers were cut just a little larger than a 35mm frame. That let pure white light project down on the photo paper if you printed full frame. It was a point of pride to have your print have that black border around it because it showed that you “cropped in the camera.” In other words, you visualized the final product when you pushed the button.

When I looked at these pictures, I found myself reaching for the Crop tool to hack out pieces that didn’t work for me. I might have thought the composition worked, but I hadn’t successfully ‘cropped in the camera.” When we did that in the real darkroom, we’d call it “pulling it out of our rear orifice (or something close to that).”

Here’s an example. This is the full frame photo of the splotch of red paint with an orange leaf in front of it and some tendrils of vine and their shadows on the gray, weathered wood.

I couldn’t find the center of interest. Is it the leaf? Is it the vines? Is my eye supposed to follow the vines up and down, left and right? What’s important?

Cropping helps, but it’s not the answer

In this print, I’ve taken the same picture, but I’ve cropped up from the bottom and down from the top so you don’t see any of the gray wood there. Your eye tends to go toward the lighter area of a print, so this keeps you in the frame better. It also brings your eye to the leaf. I would have cropped a little more off the left, but I like the shadow of the vine over there. If you look closely, you can see the vine, then the shadow. The shadows of the vines on the right become more prominent and more interesting. Still, if the first photo was a D-, playing with it barely raised the grade to a C+.

Photo gallery of barn pictures

It’s not one of my best barn sessions. I shot this particular barn when I was riding my bike in this area about eight or nine years ago. I didn’t capture Essence de Barn then, and I’ve missed it this time, too. Maybe this barn and I just don’t click. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

November 27, 2011May 1, 2014

Old Notre Dame High School

Brother Mark, Mother and I were taking a short cut through New Lorimier Cemetery so we could see if the flowers were still on Dad’s grave. They were. Instead of cutting through Fairmount Cemetery and coming out near the library, I whipped a left to get a mug shot of the old Notre Dame High School. I knew I had some photos of some school plays and other activities, so it would be good to bag something new to go along with them.

As it turned out, the light was really nice on the building this afternoon. What surprised me when I was half-way to the entrance was all the graffiti on the front of the building. And, it looked old. Surely this wouldn’t have been allowed to stay there when I was in school.

On closed examination, though, it was a mural or artwork. The drawing styles were different, but the line thickness and spacing indicated they had been done by the same artist. I did a quick Google and Missourian archive search, but didn’t come up with anything that would tell when it was done or who the artist was.

Madonna

I was also quite taken by the simple Madonna on the southeast wall.

The Notre Dame High School web site has a good summary of the history of the school.

Notre Dame was also a target in the notorious toilet paper wars of the 60s, but this particular stunt went sadly wrong.

Notre Dame High School photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

November 25, 2011November 26, 2011

I Have Someone’s Family History

Brother Mark always likes to hit the antique shops when he comes to Cape, so we started at Annie Laurie’s. I was doing a pretty good job avoiding temptation when my eye fell upon this 1959ish black and white photo shop owner Laurie Everett had under a Christmas display. It jumped out because it was uncharacteristically sharp and well exposed for a snapshot of that era. It was for sale. Mark paid for it, so it couldn’t have been much. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

Look at the IDs on the back

When I flipped it over, I saw that someone had taken the time to document who was in the photo:

My Sis and our Grandchildren in Tom and Jo’s basement. Christmas Eve 1959

Tommy – 3 yrs 9 mos
David 2 ” m 90s
Jeanne 1″ 7 mos
Marie ? Ha Ha!

Note for the younger generation: “Ha Ha!” was the 1959 way to say LOL.

Throwing away photos is alien to me

For budget purposes one year, I calculated that the average photographer on my staff used about 30,000 frames of film a year. Back in the day when I was buying my own film in 100-foot rolls and cutting it into 36-exposure rolls (and under the influence of One-Shot Frony), I didn’t hit those levels, but it’s safe to say that I’ve shot a lot more film than most folks. (Kodak called someone who bought 12 rolls of film a year a “heavy user.”)

I would bet that I probably have all but maybe 100 rolls of those bazillion rolls of film. I may not be able to find an individual photo right away and it may not be properly identified, but it’s there someplace. My “coffee can film” contains pictures that are more interesting to me today than the stuff I shot for the paper and filed away in negative sleeves.

How can you throw away your mother?

How could you let a photo of your mother when she was about three years old in the midst of a flock of chicks slip away? Particularly since she’s with her brother Kenneth, my namesake, who was killed in a car vs. train crash. I sure couldn’t.

Other people, obviously, can. I was at a yard sale where I picked up about a dozen Kodak slide trays. When I went to check out, I noticed that the trays were full of slides: weddings, graduations, vacation trips, first car, basically all the facets of the family’s life. I pointed it out to the seller and she said, “That’s OK. Just throw them away.” I eventually DID throw away a lot of them, but I held onto some of the better shots because it would have been a crime not to.

Mother always fills our birthday and holiday cards with family photos she’s collected over the years. It’s always the best part of the card.

Do you recognize any of these folks?

If so, I have a piece of your family history. I won’t even charge you to get it back. Mark’s already paid for it.