Scenics Archives

June 22, 2011September 22, 2011

Road Trip Fires and Floods

I got a late start getting out of West Palm Beach because of auto repairs. Wife Lila always says that Florida does good clouds, so I snagged this shot of a brush-fire-enhanced sunset somewhere along the Florida Turnpike.

Advantages of traveling alone

Wife Lila has discovered that she’d rather be trapped on board a flying aluminum cigar tube than spend 2-1/2 days on the road with me. In fairness, part of it is because she’s found out that I can’t ever leave on time and she’s ended up flying back home to get to work. Since she’s operating on a tighter schedule than I am (and would rather do lots of short trips instead of fewer long ones), flying makes sense for her.

That means I can spread out all of my junk food on the passenger seat next to me, play whatever I want on the radio, stop if I want to stop or drive forever if the mood hits me. My motel standards are lower than hers, too. All I ask for is for the room to be clean, to have AC in the summer, a decent shower and sheets that aren’t still warm.

Room was broiling hot

When I started getting tired long about the Florida line, I was delighted to see the prices on this hotel. The desk clerk looked a little sketchy, but the lobby seemed clean. When I got to my room, though, it was broiling hot. I went back to the clerk and asked, “What are the odds that little window AC unit is actually going to get the room cooler than the surface of the sun?”

He said he’d upgrade me to a double on the first floor where the air had been running. He did and I had a good night’s sleep for a reasonable price. (That’s a relative term. I stayed in a room in the Ozarks for two bucks a night. Motel 6 and Super 8 got their names from the amount of money they charged for a room.)

Fires and floods in Georgia

My good weather luck ran out on this trip. I saw on the radar that there was a chance I was going to hit rain going through Atlanta, but I had pretty much clear skies about 90 miles south of there. I passed a section of road where a whole section of trees were snapped off and blown down by this spring’s storms.

About an hour south of Atlanta, just about the time I crested a hill, I saw all kinds of debris blowing across the road. It was a good thing traffic was light, because I got hit with a crosswind that blew me all the way over to the next lane. There was no rain yet, but the wind was spectacular. I decided to take the next exit to see what the storm was going to do. After about 20 minutes of torrential rain, it looked like it was slacking off, so I headed off again.

Signs warned of structure fire

Just south of Atlanta, highway advisory signs warned of a large structure fire on the west side of I-75. They weren’t kidding. There was a major column of jet-black smoke rising high into the sky, then blowing off to the east.

The combination of rain and rush hour made Atlanta one huge parking lot. I let the GPS send me off on an alternate route through the countryside that probably didn’t save me any time, but was a lot nicer than inching through the traffic.

Back in the old CB days, we were running northbound with a bunch of truckers when we got word of a jam like that. One of the drivers said, “Follow me. I’ll get us around it.” The next thing we knew there was a huge convoy of 18-wheelers and my little Mazda blasting through a raft of small George towns. I bet some of their stop lights are still spinning.

June 17, 2011February 23, 2015

How to Save a Bad Picture

Most of my photos are uncropped and have minimal enhancement. My goal is for the photo to reflect reality (or, at least my vision of reality) as much as possible. That might mean that I’ll burn down (make darker) areas that I want to minimize or lighten areas that I want to emphasize. Your eye naturally goes to lighter areas, so I may subtly darken the outside of the print to lead you to what is important.

During the 70s, photographers overdid that effect, creating what we purists called “Hand of God” burns where the backgrounds were taken all the way to black and the center of the print had an unearthly glow. That phase didn’t last long, fortunately. (As usual, click on any photo to make it larger.)

I won’t add nor take away people and objects like some national publications have been caught doing.

Old film can be challenging

Because I’m working with a lot of old film, I have to spend a lot of time taking out scratches and dust spots. Some of the film had uneven development or, because of the way the film was stored, it may have deteriorated. That’s not so much of an issue with black and white, but it can require quite a bit of tweaking with color film.

Sometimes, like with these photos of Bald Knob Cross, which I published in February 2010, the picture is made in the darkroom almost as much as in the camera.

Here’s what I started with

I didn’t even realize I had these. They were tacked onto a roll of other aerials. They were grossly underexposed to the point where I originally probably dismissed trying to print them on photographic paper. The Nikon digital film scanner picked up detail that I didn’t know was there.

Here are the problems

The film was way underexposed.
The developing of the film was uneven, probably due to lack of agitation during the first step.
It was a cloudy, hazy day.
It was sharp, but not REALLY sharp.

First crop was too tight

My first attempt was driven by laziness. My thought was that the more I cropped the photo, the less I’d have to fix., so I came in very tight. That got rid of the uneven development problem, but it didn’t feel right. It was cropped so tightly that the cross didn’t have room to “breathe.”

How did I get to the final Bald Knob Cross?

I cropped out the imperfections, but I gave it more “air.” It turned out that the dark cloud shadow behind and in front of the cross helped emphasize its whiteness.
I increased the contrast, making the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. That caused the trees and their shadows to do some interesting things. It caused the cross to “pop,” too.
I applied sharpening. Adobe’s Photoshop editing program has what are called Sharpening Filters. You don’t want to overdo those. I normally set them to from 33% to 66%.
I hit the Sharpen button and liked the effect, so I punched Sharpen More. Wow, those trees are really being emphasized nicely. One more punch and it looked like they had been drawn with pen and ink. One more punch and they looked like crap. Time to back off.
I could have burned in the edges a little more, but the cross is so white that your eye doesn’t need much help to figure out what is important.

Making something out of nothing

This photo has more wrong than right.

There are ugly dark spots from poor development all over the frame.
The cross is lost in the haze and distance.
The foreground is a jumble of uninteresting brush. (To be honest, there are some intriguing shapes in that brush. Someone more skilled in Photoshop and with more patience could probably pull something out of it. I’m not that person.)

Finding the pony in the manure pile

There’s an old story about an optimistic child who, when given a pile of manure for Christmas, immediately started digging. “There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere,” he exclaimed.

Here’s what we did to find the pony in this picture:

We cropped the bejeebers out of it, turning a dull vertical photo without a center of interest into an extreme horizontal that drags your eye right to the cross.
We bumped up the contrast and let the sky go almost completely white, which allowed the cross to have some texture.
The hill was taken from a dull gray to almost completely black. The left and right edges, an exception to the normal rule, are allowed to keep just a little texture to balance the grayish white of the cross. The grainy effect of the extreme crop gives the illusion of a forest.

It’s not great art, but it’s what distinguishes the professional from the amateur. Many amateurs can outshoot a lot of professionals on any given day. The difference is that the pro ALWAYS has to come back with a picture, even if he has to dig deeply into the pile to find it.

Carve away everything that’s not a lion

Do I really have to go through all those thought processes in the old-fashioned darkroom or the digital editing process?

Nah, not really.

The way you print a photograph is a lot like what a sculpture said when asked how he was able to carve a magnificent statue of a lion: “I start with a square block of marble and keep carving out everything that’s not a lion.”

A photographer captures a tiny fraction of time in a box, then works to bring it back to life. Some days it works better than others.

June 13, 2011December 29, 2011

Do These Photos Say Cape?

I have a friend who was looking for some stock photos of Cape to use as headers on a web page. I started poking around and came up with these old and new photos that I think capture some of the spirit of the town.

The biggest challenge was finding pictures that would fit the exact format shape – a skinny horizontal.

Photographers HATE to shoot for shape

Photographers HATE going out to shoot for shape. We always figured that was a sign that the page designer was too lazy to work with the most story-telling photos on deadline. He wanted to dummy the page early so he could go home early.

Photographers, of course, believe that every photograph is perfectly composed. Some would express that conceit by printing their photos “full frame” with black borders that indicated that the picture had not been cropped. (Guilty as charged.)

Of course, as a guy who had to do his own layouts, I found that sometimes cropping the photo made the page look a lot better. It was OK if I did it; it was a mortal sin if someone else did it.

Photo gallery

Since I’m not exactly sure what my friend is looking for, I’ve pulled together photos that you’ve seen before and some that were in the pipeline. I’m curious to see what you think best says “Cape Girardeau.”

If she uses any, I’ll post the website address. As always, click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

June 9, 2011September 22, 2011

Deadly Old Appleton Bridge Set for Replacement

Missourian webmaster James Baughn and author of The Pavement Ends blog, had a story headlined “The Death Trap at Old Appleton will soon be demolished.”

He did a great job of telling the history of the bridge and the paper’s campaign to get it replaced. I won’t plow the same ground, I’ll just encourage you to read his blog. By the way, you can click on any of these photos to make them larger.

Missourian campaigned for improvements

The story hit home for me because a lot of the pictures that were used in the campaign were ones that I took. I don’t know if One-Shot Frony didn’t want to run the spot news or if he was out of town, but for some reason, I was the designated Old Appleton crash photographer for a number of months.

Despite front-page coverage and editorials, about all we accomplished was getting some warning signs posted in advance of the bridge.

Danger could sneak up on you

In the 1965 aerial photo above, Hwy 61 curves from the top left to the bottom right. The old highway passed through Old Appleton and crossed Apple Creek at the mill next to the old bridge. The Silver Dollar Tavern is located just north of the bridge.

As James points out, the bridge doesn’t look dangerous from a distance. A combination of things made it hazardous, particularly for out-of-town drivers. First, it’s located on a curve at the bottom of a downhill stretch of road. It was too easy to build up speed going down the hill, find the curve was sharper than it appeared and overcompensate.

Adding to the danger was the “lip curb” design of sections of Hwy 61. Instead of being flat, the sides of the road had a slightly inclined curb. Periodically, the curb was broken by V-shaped drains. If you weren’t paying attention or needed to get as far to the right as you could, it was easy to ride up on the curb. Your first instinct was to pull the steering wheel back to the left, which would send you careering over into oncoming traffic.

Bridge hasn’t changed much

If you did that while coming up on a drain, you would find yourself riding up, crashing down and then bouncing into the air when you hit the high side of the curb again. Loss of control and blown tires were common. The highway was repaved over the years, bringing the roadway even with the curbs, which eliminated the danger, fortunately.

Of course, folks who have been raised on Interstates and cruise control don’t know what a trip to St. Louis was like in the Old Days.

Curvy, narrow with steep grades

U.S. Highway 61, running between Chicago and New Orleans was a curvy, narrow road with steep grades by today’s standards. The speed limit was 70 miles per hour, so you were closing with oncoming traffic at 140+ miles per hour with no median or safety cable to keep you apart.

On top of that, because the trucks of that day were so underpowered, a heavily loaded truck could back up traffic for a mile or more. Eventually, somebody would ignore the double yellow line and pass on a hill or blind curve, with disastrous results. Remember, cars didn’t have seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, collapsible steering columns or padded dashed. Kids rode standing up or stretched out in the rear window deck.

When people say, “they don’t build them like they used to,” they’re right. Today’s cars are designed to crumple so that the sheet metal absorbs a lot of the impact. Those solid steel frames and heavy bumpers insured that the crash energy was transmitted directly to the occupants, who frequently became unguided missiles.

Vehicles would crash through guardrails

Several times over they years, cars and trucks would go over the side of the Old Appleton Bridge. I’m not sure exactly which wreck this one was, but the trooper and a volunteer are looking for someone who plunged into Apple Creek. The police report said the southbound driver ran up on that lip curb I described, overcompensated when he tried to pull back on the road, then broke through the east guardrail.

I’ll never forget one crash. Not because of what I saw at the scene, but what happened after I got back to the office. If I remember correctly, they had recovered one body and identified the driver, but there was concern that there might have been a passenger in the car who was unaccounted for.

“Was anybody riding with your brother?”

I was coming up on a hard deadline and decided to show a bit of enterprise. Since I had the driver’s name and since quite a few hours had gone by since the crash, I assumed that the family had been notified. I found out the name of the driver’s brother and called him. “Do you know if anyone was riding with your brother?” I’d like to think that I didn’t finish the sentence with “when he went over the bridge,” but I’m afraid that I probably didn’t stop in time.

There was a pause, and the man asked, “What do you mean?”

I apologized for my call and said someone would be contacting him soon. I hung up as quickly as possible and called the highway patrol to suggest that they might want to speed up their notification calls. I never did that again.

That was the second-worse call I handled at The Missourian.

The worst phone call of all

The worst call came in when I was filling in as news editor handing the AP wire copy. Back in those days, people relied on the newspaper for news, so a phone call asking about a news story wasn’t unusual.

When the phone rang on my desk and an elderly man asked if I happened to know the flight number of the airliner that had crashed, I didn’t think twice about swiveling around to grab a piece of wire copy off the teletype and casually saying, “”Sure, it’s flight number 1234.”

“My granddaughter…”

There was a sharp intake of breath and the man said, “My granddaughter is on that plane.” The next thing I heard was the sound of the phone dropping and a “bonk, bonk, bonk” as it bounced at the end of its cord against the wall.

A better newsman would have stayed on the line on the off chance that someone would pick up the phone and he’d have a chance to interview a family member.

I put my handset back on the cradle and went in to tell editor John Blue that there might be a local angle to the crash story. Then I told him a fib, “The man hung up the phone before I could ask him any questions.”

Sorry, Mr. Blue, for the fib. I’d like to think you would understand.