Water Street Archives

April 3, 2014

Shooting What You See

The 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

That’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.

November 4, 2013

Down by the Riverside

When I went to school back in Ohio, we had the Hocking River flowing through the campus (REALLY through it when it flooded every couple of years). I used to say, though, that to somebody who grew up on the Mississippi, the Hocking was barely a creek.

It was fun taking Ohio Curator Jessica down to the Mississippi at night. We happened to run into a couple of crewmen from the buoy tender Pathfinder who told us what it was like putting out the markers that keep the huge tows in the channel.

We heard music

We could hear music drifting over the floodwall. Jessica identified one of the sounds as coming from a trombone. She knew it was a trombone, she said, because she used to honk one.

I confessed that I could identify a drum or a cymbal on a good day; otherwise my knowledge of musical instruments was limited. “Is a trombone that horn with a slidey thing?” I asked.

I could hear her eyes rolling, even in the darkness.

The Crystal and Anna Serenade

When we got up on Water Street, we ran into Crystal Lander of Jackson and Anna Nice of Cape doing some pickin’ and singing.

Showing my newly-acquired musical sophistication, I observed that a trombone was not involved in their impromptu performance.

April 27, 2013April 28, 2013

1943 Flood Aerial

After I ran photos of the Flood of 1943 from Dad’s scrapbook, a member of the Lamkin Family sent me this aerial photo of the flood. I asked who took it so I could credit the photographer, and he said, “No idea. It hung in my grandfather’s office for as long as I recall.”

Themis Street is on the left and Broadway is on the right. You can see the steeple of Trinity Lutheran Church and the Academic Hall dome in the background. Buckner-Ragsdale is the three-story building on the right, at the foot of Broadway. The St. Charles Hotel is the tall, light-colored building on the left side of Themis. The building with the checkered tile and sharp-peaked roof is Hecht’s Department Store. The Sturdivant Bank Building is between the St. Charles and Hecht’s.

Click on the photo to make it larger.

Here are some earlier stories about Buckner’s and the Lamkin family.

May 25, 2012

Cobbles on a Rainy Night

The headline tells it all. Taken August 3, 1967. You can click on the photos to make them larger.

On the other side of the tracks

Well, maybe on the other side of the floodwall and in the MIDDLE of the tracks. Night view looking south on October 26, 2009.

The Mississippi River and the railroads shaped Cape Girardeau in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because of the western migration, it’s unlikely that the majority of Cape Girardeans hear the mournful whistles of the towboats and trains passing by and through the city.

If you’re feeling you’ve been left a little short with just these two photos, here’s a sampler from earlier that has a bunch of Cape pictures, including ones of the riverfront and bridge. Here’s a place where you can see photos I’ve linked to Pinterest.