Cape Girardeau History and Photos

September 8, 2014

Growing Things Fear Him

When I travel across the country, my van is loaded with cameras, tripods, computers, electronic gizmos and navigational aides. When Brother David hits the road, he carries such implements of destruction that trees and bushes shrink back in horror as he goes by.

Mother passed on certain traits to each of us. I got her desire to explore new roads and to marvel at the power of storms. David, on the other hand, inherited her desire to attack green, growing things and shorten them to within an inch of their lives (or more).

The sun had scarcely started to think about waking up roosters when he brought out a hedge trimmer that could chop down walnut trees and a blower so powerful that he has to put rocks in his pockets to keep from being blown backward. The only thing that makes more noise than the blower is his snoring in the middle of the night. He was sleeping on the porch (“cause it’s nice and cool”) with the door closed and I was in the basement trying to finish a blog post when I started having problems with my monitors vibrating. I traced the disturbance to my brother creating low-frequency, but powerful sounds.

Like a space shuttle launch

I covered a space shuttle launch one time where I set up a recorder to capture the roar of the thing blasting off. After the last speck of it disappeared into the blue, I played the recording back and found out that the launch caused the earth to shake and created a massive sound wave that washed over you like the surf, but I didn’t capture it. My theory was that the sound was too low a frequency for my recorder to pick up.

If I don’t get the sonic sound track tonight, I’m going to assume he hits those same frequencies. Maybe I can get video of the dining room windows vibrating.

Why don’t we just use a chainsaw?

I watched him tackle a bush in the front yard that was almost as high as the house. He used the massive hedge trimmer to bite out huge hunks of it, then he would walk around snipping a leaf here, a branch there, must like a barber might do to a head of hair. Every trip around the bush would cause it to get smaller and smaller. (I can only imagine how short the coffee table would become if he thought one leg was a little off and he needed to even it up.)

Finally, I said, “Dave, why don’t we make the process shorter? I’ll get the chainsaw and we can just take it off level with the ground.”

“It’ll grow back fast,” was his response.

Does she REALLY like those flowers?

After we finished Mother’s splendid dinner of liver and onions, mashed potatoes, with gravy, corn and some pink stuff with cherries in it, I felt a nap was in order, but he decided the grass needed mowing. Now, I’ve offered to do that before, but Mother always says she likes to mow, so don’t touch her mower. She must have seen the crazed look in David’s eyes, so she didn’t even try to stop HIM.

It took him a little while to figure out that you have to hold down the brake to start the beast. I think he was confused because he didn’t seem to understand the concept of a brake. He operated at two speeds: Fast and You’d Better Get Out of My Way.

Here he is contemplating if Mother really LIKES those flowers. “They’ll grow back,” I could hear him thinking.

Dust and a spray of walnuts

I watched him running at full tilt boogie right up until the time he made a turn and sprayed me with sticks, rocks, boulders and a rat-a-tat-tat of walnuts propelled faster than the speed of sound. I know it was that fast because they hit me before I heard ’em coming. I got the hint.

I calculate that he’s gonna be slowing down a little this week: he’s turning 60 on September 12.

September 7, 2014September 16, 2015

Buildings with Soul

As I travel across this great land, particularly in older sections of towns, I am struck by something: buildings used to have soul and were built as monuments to the people and businesses that inhabited them.

After Curator Jessica and I gawked at Big Muskie’s monster dragline bucket and marveled at the Muskingum River levels in the Great Flood of 1913, we crossed over the river into McConnelsville, Ohio.

We hadn’t gone too far down West Main Street when I abruptly whipped into a gas station to take a photo of the front of this beautiful old garage.

Winged wheels

Something looked familiar about the winged wheels. Then, it dawned on me: a subtle variation of that was the symbol of the Ohio State Highway Patrol. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Whoever built this garage wanted to let everybody in town know that this wasn’t a blacksmith’s stable or some shadetree mechanic – this was a place where the automobile was celebrated.

I get the same feeling when I drive around in St. Louis and see buildings that may not have ornate artwork on them, but still carry the name of the owner or business because it was expected to last.

Where in Cape was such a building?

I’m trying to think of any buildings like that in Cape. I’d have to nominate the old Farmers and Merchants Bank at the corner of Sprigg and Good Hope whose stone columns said “bank” as soon as you saw them.

The Boat House across from Capaha Park would be another.

More?

September 6, 2014September 6, 2014

Pictures from Workshop II

You got to see photos produced by half our Picturing the Past Workshop group yesterday. We’ll show the other half today. Curator Jessica reported that Todd Bastin, Athen Public Library coordinator for Art in the Library, said that they’ve received more positive feedback on the exhibit in the past three days than they usually do in a month.

Each photographer’s work will be shown in a gallery. Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the images.

Mary Connolly

I was particularly drawn to Mary Connolly’s work because she’s a runner who says a regular camera would be too heavy, so she shoots everything with her smart phone. It goes to prove that it’s not the camera, it’s the eye that make the picture. She admits that her frequent stops for taking photos throws her running rhythm off, but the results are worth it.

White’s Mill is one of the most photographed landmarks around Athens. Mary, though, nailed it from a different angle than most, and she did it on a snowy day. She photographed Ali Babas’ food truck because “who knows if food trucks will be around in the future?” I like the way she didn’t just shoot a mug shot of the truck: she engaged with the guy INSIDE the truck.

We had some debate about the shot of Radar Hill graffiti. She really liked, but I thought she had stronger photos. We compromised by cropping it tight so it made the image of the woman much more prominent. The man in the alley is her friend waiting for her to get done taking the photo so they could go to the restaurant in the doorway at right.

Robin Barnes

Robin had two photos of women with hats. I really like the composition in the one on top, but it was shot with a cell phone and fell apart when it was enlarged. When it was paired with another hat photo in a layout, it could run smaller and still look good.

I like the way she let the boy’s shoes echo the red in the flag. The fact that he’s holding a phone will make the photo interesting when we all have microchips implanted at birth to carry on that function. Robin had two frames of the little girls lined up for a contest of some kind. I picked this one because I liked the way they are all off in their own little worlds.

Everybody called the guy on the left “Santa Claus.” There was some discussion about cropping the clown barrel on the right out of the photo because it was too dark to read properly. When I got it into Photoshop, though, I could save enough of the tones to make it show up. It was a great pairing of a barrel-chested guy balanced by a barrel.

Sallie Sauber

Sallie was an interesting person in her own right: first off, that’s her in what she titled “Roller Derby Selfie.” She didn’t want to show it to me at first, but I convinced her that the technical limitations were outweighed by the spunky attitude she captured. It was a way better than average selfie. Boy in Leaves wasn’t my first, second or third choice, but I was outvoted by the workshoppers who loved it.

We had some debate about the girl on the bike. She showed up for office hours with a tight shot from behind. It was interesting, but this picture with lots of activity has much better composition and shows the wide variety of ways kids get around on wheels at that age. She, too, made good use of a mirror and reflections.

Steven Koch

Several of the participants said they liked to shoot in black and white or convert their color to B&W in the editing process. I said I really liked black and white – and shot it for most of my career – but that since digital single lens reflexes had come along that let me shoot color under low light levels, I had made the transition to color.

Steven took what, to me, was a curious middle ground: he “desaturated” his really nice color photos, leaving them as something that was neither full of color nor was a pure black and white. A good example would be that he liked the “dull-looking” school bus over the one with vibrant colors. I don’t know that we ever convinced him that the color work was better, but the group voted to go with the color versions of his pictures. [Wife Lila said she liked the way the bus lights showed up in the “duller” shot, but she like the color shot better overall.]

Despite our disagreements over color and B&W, I have to say that Steven was the most technically versatile of the group, with the ability to shoot unusual landscapes, an industrial photo and a nice portrait. That’s quite a range.

Susie Blauser

Susie did a wonderful series of photos showing the Glasshouse Works greenhouses, a Stewart, Ohio, mailorder nursery specializing in rare and exotic plants from all over the world. It was hard to narrow down her take to only four photos. (As someone who lives in South Florida, it feels odd to see tropical plants that grow in our back yard called “exotic.”)

Teresa Faires Winning

When Teresa showed up for the first office hours meeting, she had a photo of an intersection with yellow traffic dividers in it. “We’re going to do something that won’t make Historian Jessica happy – we’re going to crop out all of the stuff that she’s going to want to see in 50 years – but we’re going to end up with a much more striking photo that will probably look more like what caught your eye than what the camera captured.”

Teresa was one of my point ‘n’ shoot people who went out when the sun was going down. Before the sun set, she grabbed a great slice of sidewalk life in town. In addition to preserving a wide variety of clothing of the era, she also managed to get a girl with the ubiquitous white earplugs and the girl in the red dress in the background gabbing on a cellphone.

She was disappointed that she wasn’t able to push the button at the right time to get the lightning flashing in those boiling clouds, but she did manage to capture a spectacular sunset, the gates to the Main green and a row of street lights. She was also astounded at how neat businesses looked at night. It was great to open up a whole new way of seeing for someone.

What’s next?

The group played together so nicely that I hope they get together from time to time to share what new stuff they’ve uncovered.

September 4, 2014September 17, 2014

Pictures from the Workshop

You’ve heard me talking about the Picturing the Past Workshop in Athens, Ohio, until you are probably tired of it, but here’s a look at what our participants produced that is being exhibited at the Athens Public Library and the Athens County Historical Society Museum.

The first session was held on August 23. About two dozen people listened to me drone on for 2-1/2 hours, then Curator Jessica talked about historical photographs and their importance for about 30 minutes. Participants were asked to go into the community and shoot anything that interested them, with an emphasis on things that people in the future would be curious about.

“Office hours”

We held “office hours” on Tuesday and Thursday evenings so we could see what had been shot and offer suggestions. The goal was for them to come back with 10 shots they liked. We said they would narrow those down to two for the final exhibit, and that the audience could nominate a third photo. On the first evening, I suggested to two women that they explore the town after dark and gave them a two-minute demonstration about how they could vary the exposures on their point-and-shoot cameras.

A larger group showed up for the second “office hours” and we had lively discussions about how and why a particular photo was taken. I hardly needed to be there. The participants gave each other great feedback.

On August 30, we had a three-hour slide show of the final selections. You’d have thought we were at a fireworks exhibit with all the audience “ohhhs” and “ahhhs.” The group did a great job of commenting and critiquing the work. It was tough to boil the show down to 48 selections. Here are about half of them (in alphabetical order). I’m going to put up each photographer’s work as a gallery. Click on the photos to make them larger, then use your arrow keys to move around.

We’ll do the other half tomorrow to keep you from being overwhelmed.

Alex Westerfelt

Alex Westerfelt was one of the photographers who made good use of reflections. He thought his hand and camera were a distraction in the mirror, but I liked them. We had an ethical discussion about whether or not to remove some distracting water spots on the mirror. I told him I am a bit of a purist, but that I didn’t have an issue with taking out the spots anymore than I would hesitate to take out dust spots on an old negative.

This artsy reflections photo started out as a horizontal, but we kept creeping in from the sides until it became a much cleaner vertical. For reasons I can’t exactly explain, I liked the moment captured in the picture of the boy in the red shorts. The trees growing inside a building was taken in Shawnee, an old coal town I documented in 1969. It reminds me of Cairo, Illinois.

Angie Faller

I’ve seen a lot of ice bucket challenge photos in the last month, but I give Angie credit for shooting a nice sequence. She has the dump photo (with the cubes nicely stopped by the flash), the boy watching a video and a third picture of the ice on the ground. (I left that out because we had a limit on the number of photos. I didn’t realize that I would turn it into a layout.)

She took a portrait of a vendor at a farmers’ market and was captivated by a scale building at The Ridges, Athens’ former insane asylum. She had some interesting shots of the interior, but we liked the light in this picture.

Brenda Ruth

If I had to pick an overall favorite as an image and a collection of cultural icons, it would be Brenda’s photo of her granddaughter quilting. It’s a super portrait and has a smart phone and a piece of exercise equipment in it.

She had at least three variations of this old building. We liked the wide, long shot because of the purple flowers and the barbed wire and fence wire that may not be around in the future.

I’m particularly happy with her night shots. She’s one of the women who had never taken her point ‘n’ shoot out after dark. She was rightfully proud of how well her experiment turned out.

Carolyn Highland

Carolyn came in at the last minute on Saturday with an addition: a photo of her mother’s roller skates. The picture meant a great deal to her because of the personal connection, and it was also a nice icon. I shot a similar picture of my skates (except that the wheels were wood in the old days.)

The portrait of the old man started out a lot “looser.” We kept cropping in until it became much simpler and a lot more powerful. At one point, we homed in on his face, but decided to back out to include the wording on his shirt. The scenics are just plain nice.

Marie Barone

One of the questions that kept coming up, particularly because of this photo of the kids playing in Nelsonville, was “do you have to ask permission to take someone’s permission?” My overall contention is that “if I can see them, I can shoot them.” If the situation is fleeting, I shoot first, then engage with the subject later. If your photo is used for advertising, then you DO need a release. You also can’t hold someone up to public scorn or ridicule (unless they really deserve it).

When I was editing Marie’s photos, the guy with a hat jumped out at me because I had seen it in the pictures submitted by another person. Not only was THIS guy in it, but the woman in polka dots and the woman in the dark glasses was there, too. Both shooters said it was a coincidence.

Marilyn Zwayer

I was really happy with the photos Marilyn took in the Ambassador Laundry. For some reason, she found herself doing laundry there instead of at home, so she decided to follow the lesson plan and shoot her surroundings. Some of the pictures aren’t tack-sharp, and she was reluctant to let us use them, but we convinced her that she had captured a slice of life. I was particularly appreciative because I was in the same place the night before when I realized I had reached the critical UW – 0 stage in my suitcase.

Exhibit dates

The print workshop prints and some of mine will be on exhibit at the Athens Public Library until September 27. Additional photos will be at the Athens County Historical Society Museum until about October 1. There will be a reception at the library September 16 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. I hope the photographers will be there to see how their photos are received.