a Flickrwalk....

This week we went on a Flickrwalk and I counted that for my photo expedition for the week. Tim and I met up with a bunch of other photographers from the area, had dinner with them, and then we all went on a walk around St Paul. Everyone from Flickr was super friendly, and we enjoyed meeting everyone. I'm truly awestruck at the quality of photographs produced by this bunch of people.



We met a little before sunset so that we could catch the light of twilight and then do some night photography. I've done very little nighttime photography, so that was a lesson in itself. I also wanted to try something called HDR – I won't get too far into the technical details (if you're interested, there are many, many tutorials available by googling HDR), but the basic gist is that you take multiple exposures of the same image, and then digitally merge them. The result is more like what the human eye sees, because the human eye can adjust to see the details of both the dark and light areas of a scene. HDR images can be fairly subtle, or absolutely fantastical, and there's definitely an art to producing the image you intended.

Either way, I definitely broke most of my photo expedition rules this week. I didn't worry about how many images I took -- I just concentrated on using my tripod, taking photos in low light, and setting up shots for HDR images. And HDR requires a lot of post-processing work with Photoshop, something I'm usually loathe to do. So there's your disclaimer (as if anyone's particularly bothered by my self-imposed rules beside me....)



The area we explored was called Harriet Island Park – an interesting name considering it's not actually an island. It was once, but in 1949 the small channel that divided it from land was filled in, making the name a misnomer. The park once held a bath house and a petting zoo that were very popular summer attractions, but they were closed because of chronic flooding problems and the pollution of the Mississippi River. The flooding was fixed when levees were built, and the park now hosts docks for steamboats.



Across the river, you can get spectacular views of the St Paul Cathedral. So far, this is as close as I've come to the cathedral, but I've heard that it's far more beautiful from the inside than the outside. I read that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the cathedral looked like a bull dog sitting on its haunches – in other words, aggressive. Nonetheless, it seems to dominate the St Paul skyline, and I really like it. Especially in twilight. Maybe I just like it because it makes for such a good waymarker to help me find my way around the city.

Tim and I weren't dressed particularly well for the chilly Minnesota evening, so we called the walk a bit short. I'm hoping to meet the folks at from the Flickr crew again soon. Some of these images are HDR, some are just straight. I've got a lot I can learn about HDR, but for now I think I'll concentrate on reinspiring my photographic eye. Here are some more photos from the evening....

Mother's Day Farmer's Market

This morning I went over to St Paul to go to the Farmer’s Market to satisfy a definitive hankering for fresh, locally grown strawberries. I’m not sure where that particular desire came from, but for some reason, the California grown strawberries I saw in our local supermarket just wouldn't satisfy, even though they smelled fabulous.



Tim told me that it was too early here for strawberries, but I couldn’t be dissuaded. After all, what’s a Farmer’s Market without strawberries? Well, I found out this morning, because the market was filled predominately with flats of flowers and herbs, and not fresh produce. Ah well. Tim’s right again.



But I did have my camera in hand, and it turned out to be a spectacular (though slightly chilly and windy) morning, so I continued on my photo expedition, despite my strawberry purchasing failure. We came to this part of town a couple weeks ago for an Arts Crawl, so I wasn’t particularly on new territory. But aside from these two trips, I’ve only been to St Paul one other time, so I don’t really know how this area fits in with the rest of the city. At any rate, there are beautiful old brick buildings throughout the area. When we went before, we saw the insides of the buildings, which have incredibly beautiful old-growth timber structures -- huge beams that are a foot or two deep. Those kinds of buildings just don’t get built anymore.

It looks like the area is just on the cusp of becoming a hip new part of town. There are a lot of developments turning old buildings into new lofts, some restaurants (one particular udon place that was out of this world -- Tanpopo), some night clubs, and of course the Farmer’s Market. I’ll be curious to see if the area takes off or not, but I’ve heard that the mayor is doing all the right things (whatever that means), so people are expecting good things to happen.



In the meantime, I’ve heard that the area always has the feeling of a desolate ghost town. All the time. I definitely felt that today. Even a half block away from the Farmer’s Market, the streets were deserted, with maybe one or two people walking about. It’s strange to see city streets that quiet. I wonder how it feels during the week?

Happy Mother's Day everyone! Here's the full set of photos. Have a good week!

An experiment

Just a quick departure from the usual program...

Yesterday I spent some time experimenting with a drawing from one of my school projects. I took this drawing (the original hand drawing I did in the fall of 2005)



I tried doing the same drawing (front elevation of the row house project) in sumi ink instead of a line drawing. After doing four iterations, I ended up with this:



I had so much fun playing around and trying different techniques, brushes etc. I'm sure I could do fifteen more iterations, and still have room to improve. But for now, I enjoyed the process, and I'm happy with the result.

I'm still planning to do a photo expedition tonight, and publish it tomorrow sometime, so come on back. I'm not sure where I'll head with the camera, so we'll see.