Mystery Factory

Just a few shots from another of my favorite places to shoot.  Next update, I'll post a bunch of the shots I've taken of models over the years here.

I don't know what the original purpose of the building is, but there are a lot of nifty little places to shoot and interesting things to check out there. I love that style of window and it's everywhere in that building.

Karen and Paul

My friend Karen contacted me to ask if I'd shoot her wedding at the fabulous Ambruster Chapel. I knew where it was and remembered wondering what the inside of the building was like. Karen is hysterical and I love spending time with her so I said I'd be glad to photograph this special day for her.

The day of the wedding weather was perfect and the location was absolutely stunning (as you can see in the photographs). The styling and architecture of the building, regardless of it's usual use, was absolutely gorgeous and a fantastic place to shoot photos. I was so glad they chose me to shoot for them. I'm always glad to see people enjoying their weddings so taking pictures of happy people smiling and laughing and enjoying themselves? Sign me up!

Oh and the photo of the bride and her daughter?  Proof that having a second shooter can really pay off!

Misha and His Girls

This is my friend Misha.  I asked him a few years ago to go out and help me practice with some natural, direct light photography.  We headed down to the levee that keeps the Mississippi from flooding downtown St. Louis.  The graffiti wall down there is spectacular, I highly recommend going to see it.  Unfortunately, much of the art has been tagged over with much lower quality work but there are still a few gems to find down there.

This is one of my favorite pieces, with the stencil of two women in pink against the blue background.  the colors in this shot really shoot off of the image which is one of my favorite things to do.  His shirt has been made fun of by a lot of our friends but for this image, the orange and bright red work great.  There are lots of colors here and he is a very colorful guy.

This location is a different angle of the same room that contains the giant, red wheel.  It's part of the Armour Meat Packing plant (which I talk about here).  I love the color scheme that the room has and the state of disarray of the environment makes for an interesting story in my mind.  What mad science is going on in the far corners of the building?

I really like the high contrast with all of the intricate lines and shapes and even colors in the image. It's personally one of my favorite photos of the place.

Big Red Truck and HeadStone Roses

A dear friend of mine for many years had been suffering from a migraine.  Yes, that's right, a single headache that lasted for multiple years and caused all sorts of damage to this poor woman's life.  She called me one day to ask if I would be willing to drive with her to Springfield, stay overnight and then drive her home.  She was going to get a medical procedure that would hopefully help relieve the pain she'd suffered for so long.

We were driving back from the trip and saw a house on the side of the highway with some abandoned vehicles in front.  So I asked my friend and she agreed:  we should go check it out!  We got off the highway immediately and drove over to the building.  It looked like a house but because of the interior and the trash we found, we assumed it had to have been some kind of business or municipal building.

I got a couple of good shots of the vehicles, my favorite being below.

There was a cemetary next door which we hadn't noticed on the highway so we went over there to see what was up.  Plenty of small, mildly interesting headstones but not a lot worthy of photographing.  But something about the headstone above really resonated with me.  I loved the color contrast between the cloth roses and the polished granite headstone. 

Update on The Motive - Mrs. White

Thank you everyone so far for your support on this project.  We've still got a long way to go but as promised, since we reached the $500 mark, here is the first photo to be released publicly from The Motive.

It took me a long time to find the right model and a hallway that would work for my purposes.  The hallway was probably the hardest part though you wouldn't think that would be difficult.  I did shoot this show on a shoestring budget, though, and didn't want to rent locations if I could get out of it.

That being said, my friend Nicole was kind enough to let us use her upstairs hallway to shoot the photos for Mrs. White.  I wasn't sure if it would work but I'm pretty pleased with the result.  I wanted the photos to have a simplicity about them, so that it was easy to see the important parts of the art without a lot of distracting excess all over the place.  I would have loved to shoot this show in an old Victorian Mansion but didn't have one available.

If we can make the next goal of $1,000 I'll share another character from the shoot.  Whoever is the donor who puts us over the top will get to pick which of the five remaining characters to see!  Thanks again for your support and I am really looking forward to seeing where this goes from here!

The Motive

I'm Sean M Posey, and I love to take crazy pictures. Right now, I am contemplating six dastardly murders, but to make this project possible, I need your help.

If you choose to support me, you won’t be asked to move any bodies. You won’t be charged as an accessory to murder. Instead, you’ll help me launch a photography show about murderers, their psychology, and our perceptions of these two things.

........
At first glance, "THE MOTIVE" could easily be dismissed as a gimmick, using shock and visual cliches to elicit a response from the viewer.  But the intent of these pieces is actually to challenge our societal views on art, pop media, psychology, and crime.

Unlike other art shows, there is a motive for viewing these photographs, aside from appreciating their particular merits as art.  I want viewers to think about the people in the photographs, fictional though they may be, and use that as a mirror to consider them as real people and how they would behave.

........
So go check out the video I shot in the middle of the night and tell anyone you think might find it interesting!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-motive/x/3817548

Taylor

   

This is my friend Taylor.  She's an absolutely beautiful young woman with a beautiful smile and a fantastic laugh.  It didn't take me long to convince her to let me shoot some pictures of her so I tried my best to make them a little unusual but without losing anything significant in the process.

The day I shot the right and left photos, I was using a new camera body that I hadn't had very long and accidentally set the ISO to AUTO.  That means whenever I was trying to take a photo with the flash, the camera would adjust the ISO settings to shoot in the natural light and THEN when the flash went off, it was entirely too white and too blown out to use the work.  So I turned the flash off and shot using the natural light.

What I didn't know at the time was that my lens was also BROKEN and that's why everything has a slightly soft edge to it.  The lens wasn't able to focus correctly and so the shots came out just a tad bit soft and blurry.  But I don't mind.  In the picture on the far right I think it works with the colors and the background and such.  I'll toss a few more photographs of Taylor up here a few more posts from now.

In the Halls of Heaven...

I took this photo in January of 2010.  The front door to the building was wide open and I was in an exploring kind of mood so I checked it out.  I have other photo previews at the bottom from the same building, but from various shoots.
  I digress.  This is the state of the building in 2010, before any real restoration work or preservation has begun on this building.  there was a blue tarp over the front of the entrance, but it had just been put up.  There weren't even any no trespassing signs when I went there.

  I did a little bit of digging online and learned this amazing building I had been in is none other than the James Clemens House, named after an uncle of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain.  There's no evidence that Twain lived here for any significant length of time, but certainly he spent time here in his youth.

  I went into this building not expecting anything in particular.  I walked through the front door and headed straight for the giant four foot wide staircase that took up half of the hallway.  The wood was in good condition, the plaster on the walls faring relatively well.  I walked up the stairs, turned right into the first doorway I happened across and stopped in my tracks.  The above photograph is the room that I stepped into and held my breath.

Outside the Hall

  To say that the space was holy is not untrue, at least from what I experienced there.  There was a lingering quiet about the place, even as I heard birds chirping from outside the room somewhere.  But a peace washed over me as I walked into this sanctuary and I was humbled by the vastness of the room as well as the toll that the elements had taken on it.

  I've returned to this building since then but the doors were all sealed and once, when I pused on a door to see if it would open, an alarm went off.  One day I noticed the front porch overhang had been removed and that was bad enough.  But then this morning I was able to return to this beautiful building that I had come to cherish so much, and decided to visit my room and see how she was faring in the 3 years since I had seen her.  This is the sight I found.

  The building had been cut away, braced as you can see so it wouldn't fall completely over.  There was no "inside" any longer, just a beautiful alabaster and marble archway that would soon be dissolving in the rain.


  To be really depressed, go look at what this room was like in 2003 at the following: http://www.builtstlouis.net/clemens3.html

P.S. - Trying to post more photos with blog isn't working out as well as I'd hoped.  Bear with the technical difficulties for me, please!

#urbex #photography #abandoned #MarkTwain

Chances are, you have already seen some taste of my interest in the macabre.  This photograph goes right along with it, a little disturbing and also surreal.  I have always wondered about the woman in this photograph, the character she is portraying.  Is she hiding from someone and chose an uncomfortable place?  Or is the set of tools in silhouette a portent of things to come?

We were shooting all kinds of crazy stuff at my house this particular day.  This model is a friend of mine, Gina, and she makes the best desperation/misery faces I've ever shot and that's precisely what I was going for here.  She had asked what sorts of clothes to bring to the shoot and I told her knee socks were always welcome.  They make such an interesting contrast against whatever creepy background I've decided on that day (or will decide on once I see the socks).

This was before I started shooting with a strobe light and so the image is a little bit orange, but I like that.  It shows off the aqua and blue very nicely.

This beautiful young woman is named Nicole and I have yet to meet a person who didn't adore her within ten minutes of meeting her.  She's beautiful, that much is obvious.  But when I met her she was working at three different jobs and was part owner of one of my favorite night spots in St. Louis.  I met her and instantly saw her charisma and personality would come through in photographs.  It took me about three minutes of her smiling and serving drinks and then I was hooked.

I approached her about shooting with me and we took an evening and wandered around one of my favorite buildings, taking photo after gorgeous photo.  We had a great time, even shot some product photography of our favorite beer.  All in all it was a wonderful evening of shooting.  Afterwards, we parted and I went to visit with a friend and I had no idea where she was going.  It was the first time we'd ever really hung out (although we took some photos previously at her bar).

So I meet up with my friend and she says let's go grab a drink at the Jade Room, a bar in the South Grand area of St. Louis.  We head on over there, I sidle up to the bar and there is some beautiful brunette standing there who turns and says "Long time no see!"  It was my friend Nikki!  She introduced me to her boyfriend (who kinda looks like Dave Grohl) and we have a GREAT time hanging out.  I pull out the camera and we go through some of the photos with him and we sat and drank and chatted and talked art and music and all kinds of stuff.  Had a fantastic night hanging out with them.

Unfortunately, fast forward a few years and the couple has a baby with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, the same disease Samuel L Jackson's character has in the movie Unbreakable.  It's a terrible affliction and has a high mortality rate among infants. They recently had a fundraiser to take care of the medical expenses and their bills but when I asked if I could link to their page in the blog, I was told that they would prefer I steer you to the OI website and any donations to go there.  So please, go inform yourself about this terrible affliction and if you can afford it, help a different family deal with this disease.

http://www.oif.org/

In the Hall of the Mountain King

Every time I look at this photograph I think of the musical composition "In the Hall of the Mountain King".  While I don't think the music matches the mood of my photograph, the name of it certainly does which is why that is its title.

I first saw this building a few years ago, when I began my #urbex sojourns and wondered what it was like inside.  I kept finding other places to explore and being distracted from going to this particular building so it eventually fell off of my radar.  Eventually, after three years or so, I saw it again on my drive around the city and swung past to check it out.  The outside of the building is overgrown with vegetation and has lost a fair bit of its glass from the windows but all in all it is still a very sturdy building.

I went in a week later and was awed by the sheer amount of junk that had been left in the building.  I have found no end of bizarre things in this space; broken widescreen televisions (a dozen of them or so), a recliner, thirty or forty highway patrolman uniforms from Illinois, cases of abandoned soda, piles of papers of course, plastics used in forms and even a fully intact cat skeleton  (that was taken by a model of mine and turned into a mobile...don't ask).

This was one of the first photographs I took that day entering into the building.  The thing is, this is the middle of the building, not even the front.  That's a good eighty feet behind me.

This is actually me under the lawnmower.  So /technically/ I didn't take the picture, but I did everything including setting the camera and just had my friend walk around me with the tripod, set it down and take a #photograph.  Walk around, move the tripod, push the shutter.

Incidentally, the human head won't fit underneath a lawnmower comfortably, as is evident by our unfortunate guy here.  I removed the blade and unplugged the spark plug when setting this shot up, and still the bell of the mower was too low and trying to break my nose.  So I dug a hole, tossed a plastic bag down in it and lay down.  Still not enough room.

I dug a strip out of the earth next to the hole so my neck would recess.  My head was lower still and yet, the lawnmower was starting to sit on my neck instead of my nose and that wasn't pleasant.  So I cut some wood and lifted the rear wheels of the mower about a half an inch which kept the thing from cutting off my #AirSupply completely.  (Yes, I did that so fans of Air Supply might accidentally come across this photograph without meaning to.  I like practical jokes.)

All in all, I was only able to be under it for about twenty minutes before I just couldn't handle the discomfort anymore and was done.  I tossed the dirt back in the hole and lay the sod back over the top and voila!  The hole is gone!

A lot of people ask me what that red stuff is.  My usual answer is "my face after the blade chewed me up really good" but occasionally I'm kind and tell people it was a mixture of red food coloring, tomato sauce, tomato paste, diced tomatoes (unsalted) and a tiny bit of post production work.

The Mask Adjustment

This model really isn't a model.  Yes, I know, that doesn't make any sense but then again, neither does a platypus but whatever.  She is, however, a costumer and a chocolatier, which is a good combination to have.  Okay, I'm not sure about that, but I do like her chocolates.

I work for a large industrial building turned artists' space and this is on the roof of one of the buildings.  It's not easy to get up to, involving a wooden staircase and no lights but when you reach the top there is a door and the sunlight likes to peek in around the cracks.  Stepping out onto the rooftop, the actual covering of the roof is a super heavy white vinyl so it likes to reflect lots of light.  So on a solid, overcast day the whole area is lit up with sunlight like a giant white reflective box.

She'd gotten dressed before coming to the shoot which is always a good thing in my book and we went up onto the rooftop, bringing with us another friend who wanted to get some photos taken.  I decided where I wanted to shoot the first set of photos and while she was adjusting her mask to get ready, I took this shot.  Technically, it was the first shot of the day but she wasn't posing.  I often find the first photograph and the last photograph of the day's shoots are usually pretty good.

Hera and the Gazing Pool

This is my friend Nuria.  She was engaged to be married in less than a month when I took this photo.  She suddenly decided one day that she didn't want to marry her fiance' and she didn't want to waste the dress entirely, so she asked if I'd be willing to shoot her in it.  Let's see, beautiful woman, wedding dress, loose ideas of public behavior?...  yes please!

We went exploring down near some locations that I wanted to get her portrait in with the dress.  We went to a fairly nice part of the city and took some photos on the steps of some churches, in front of a couple of huge old houses and generally made a nuisance of ourselves while having a fantastic time.

This location is the courtyard for a church that has been vacant for quite some time.  I saw the pool and simply had to try and take some photographs with it.  She wandered over and we started shooting away.  Eventually, towards the end of the shoot, I asked her to look down into the basin as if it were a divining pool and this is the result of that pose.

After four years I can look at my other work and see how it has transitioned and gotten better.  But this photo still stands out as one of my favorites.  I love the way the colors are all very primary and distinct from one another, as well as all the textures too (the dress, the brick, the inside of the pool, her skin, the veil).  Since I like to think in terms of comic books and larger than life characters, looking at Nuria like this makes me think of Hera, Zeus' wife from Greek mythology.  I like to imagine she is spying on him right now, watching his philandering from a safe distance and plotting her revenge.

Photographing Children

Children like to play.  Playing is fun.  To engage a child so that they are interested in interacting with you and the camera, requires you to have fun.  Tease and poke with them, let them stick out their tongues at you and be a little silly.  But if the child isn't interested in you or is intimidated by the camera (a common issue), let them wander and do their own thing.  Children get engrossed in something often enough that they won't notice you are taking a photograph of them.

The most important photography tip to good portraits are when they are relaxed and being themselves.  It doesn't matter if you are 70 and covered in warts or 20 and barely covered, the principle remains the same.  Tense people make for tense photographs which often make the viewer, well, tense.  This creates and unpleasant effect and anyone viewing the photograph (depending on circumstance) will know something is off and won't like the picture.  Relaxed subjects make for more compelling portraits and make people more attractive.

And since kids are often oblivious to cameras, photographers can get the most fantastic of subjects: children unaware of being photographed.  They will act and react with utter clarity of passion and nothing makes photographs better than that.

In any case, my friend's daughter here apparently likes the camera and having photographs taken of her.  She chased me around after we were done shooting and kept trying to get me to take more pictures of her.

The Council of Eyes also known as the dead fish picture

The image below might be a little creepy for some tastes and that's all right.  I can't imagine someone reading my blog and not being at least a little bizarre, a little twisted, so to most I'm sure it's fine.  It is, for those of you who are curious, a bunch of dead fish staring up at the camera.  Go look if you are interested, I'll wait right here.

Okay, now that it's out of the way.  My thoughts on this #photograph.

It strikes me, every time I see it, the line of dead staring at me, in a way that human corpses can't.  A line of them in this manner would be too much for me to take in, I wouldn't be able to look.  I don't have the stomach for real gore and death even while much of my art deals with those themes.  But give me a mirror and Medusa's gaze becomes much less unpleasant.

I had gone with my friend Claire to Seafood City, an Asian market on Olive in University City.  I took my camera along, well because that's why we went, to see if there was something awesome to shoot.  There are long rows of very colorful packages, lots of symmetry and a ton of cartoonlike characters and bizarre things to shoot.  When we got to the fishmarket side of the grocer, I was enthralled.

I actually took a lot of pictures of the fish that day, many varieties and colors, shapes and sizes.  This is my favorite shot for a lot of reasons, not the least is the aforementioned awareness in the eyes.  But I like the patterns in the photograph.  I like the colors.  And I really like the textures.  The combination of contrast, color, and composition (the three big C's in graphic design) really brings me to a stop every time I see it.

Yes, I know it's a little weird and a little dark.  But then again, so am I.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Seafood City if you are in the St Louis area and looking for Asian ingredients for cooking.  As you can see they sell fresh fish (much of it actually live) but they also offer all sorts of noodles and spices and even cereal from over the Pacific at a very reasonable price.  I like it more than Jay's because it's much bigger and doesn't have all the hipsters clogging the aisles.

Everybody likes free stuff, right?  Well here is a free lesson on how to take photos of waterfalls:

To begin with, find a waterfall.  I like them when they have plenty of vertical space, long lines of water to photograph.  It won't be easy to get a good shot of the water but with a good subject, taking pretty pictures is rather easy.  So find one with a good amount of fall to it and get ready to stand still!

Set up your camera so that you can get a good, tight zoom on the waterfall, still showing all of the wonderful range that it has.  I prefer to be able to see the top and bottom in the same photograph.  It is easier to tell what the focus of your image is when you have the whole thing in the shot, versus someone being interested in a particular type of leaf which seems to take prominence and is breaking up the waterfall so you can't see it.

Grab a tripod and set yourself up a goodly distance away.  Set your fstop to as narrow an opening as you like but keep in mind we are going to be messing with the shutter speed here in a minute.  If you have your aperture too far open (too small an f-stop number) then you are going to flood the image sensor (film) with light and it will appear blown out.  I like mine around 6-10 depending on available light but your results may vary.  Finally, set your exposure/shutter speed to as low as you can manage without totally blurring everything in the image.  1/60 of a second is a pretty good rule of thumb, unless you are hand holding your camera, in which case I wouldn't drop below 1/100.

For those of you without an SLR don't fret!  Those controls on the back of your point and click are actually pretty useful if you know anything about shutter speed and f-stop.  There is often an option for nighttime shooting on your camera and that's what you're going to want to use here.  Do not use the sports photography or automatic settings on your camera as that will speed up the shutter and make the water look terrible.  No, for this soft look you want the shutter open a good while if you can manage it and night settings do that very well.  Also, you might consider trying landscape as well.

This photograph was shot off the cuff as I was explaining this principle to someone.  I think it turned out pretty good seeing as I wasn't planning on actually using this photo!

Misha and the graffiti wall

This is my friend Misha Burnett.  He is a novelist who is working on his second book, the sequel to his first novel Catskinner.  I highly recommend the book to fans of urban fantasy.  I had convinced him to come out and shoot with me as I needed to practice shooting in direct sunlight and I think we managed pretty well that day.  This is my favorite shot.

I have a lot of photographs from near this graffiti.  This is actually the Mississippi retaining wall/levy in south St Louis City, just down from downtown.  The wall was home to the Paint Louis graffiti event for ten years from 1990 until 2000.  After that time, the event became too big to manage and monitor and the city cancelled it.

If you get the chance, you should go see the graffiti wall before all the tags cover the murals.  There are far fewer untainted murals than when I first started going to the wall but there is still some fantastic art along that 4 mile stretch of riverfront.

Oh, and go read my friend's blog.  He's over at http://mishaburnett.wordpress.com/

Solidarity vs The Individual

This was an idea that came up spur of the moment on the day of the shoot.  These ladies had been kind enough to volunteer their feet and legs to pose for a different shot I wanted to enter into a local erotic arts show.  But my boot is such a great constrast to all of their different shoes, I just had to do this.  In all actuality, I'm on a ladder about six feet over the top of them (who are stacked on each other like cordwood) and my boot there is sitting on the floor beneath me.

Incidentally, one of the girls in the #photograph was apparently a schizophrenic but none of us knew that at the time.  She apparently wrote a letter to the operator of the artshow threatening legal action if the artwork was displayed as she didn't sign a model release.  She didn't even bother coming to me.  And legally speaking, without being able to identify the person definitively in the photograph, the artist isn't required to have a model release on hand, except in special cases of federal law.

Salvation and Damnation

 This is a house that I remodeled down in the Shrewsbury area of Saint Louis.  The house had been occupied until a few months before when the previous owner died.  The house was purchased and my crew was sent in to clean it out, paint everything, do any minor repairs that needed to be done and then get out.

When we first entered the house, the sheer amount of stuff was daunting.  This was a small, two bedroom house with a partial second story, and there was enough junk in there to fill my three bedroom home.  Furniture was everywhere, multiple beds, books, clothes, trash and all sorts of junk.  The smell was awful, too so we took to trying to open the windows.

That's when we noticed the first bizarre thing about this house:  the windows were caulked shut.  Every window in the house had to be cut open with a razor knife and then a couple of screws removed to actually get the things open.  We never did puzzle out why the windows were so airtight.

And the fact that they were airtight presented us with another situation.  It appeared, having gone through the entire house one time, that the previous occupant had been a Camel nonfiltered cigarette smoker.  That's right: a smoker who smoked inside his home and never opened the windows.  You can imagine the smell in the place.  The walls were nearly slick with nicotine stains as the man had lived in the residence for at least ten years that we could see.

Going through the house turned up all sorts of other odd things: books on governmental conspiracies, camping equipment, bows and fishing poles, tons of stuff.  And while going through the house and trying to decide what to do with all of the junk inside of it was when we found the water.

The room pictured above was the master bedroom of the house.  It's probably 20x15, a goodly sized bedroom.  There was debris everywhere along the wall you can see under the window and beneath the crucifix.  But the wall directly to the left of the photograph was lined with 2 liter bottles of water.  I mean 2 liter SODA bottles that had been emptied and refilled with water.  There were dates on all of them as well.

Going through the house we found more hoarded water.  Seven 1 gallon milk jugs in the basement had been filled.  More 2 liters were scattered around the house.  There was a trash can in the basement that when the lid was taken off you could see dozens of smaller, old glass soda bottles from the 70's and 80's that had been emptied and refilled with water.  Tab.  Coke.  Mello-Yello.  The works.

But the most bizarre collected was in the yellow room.  In the middle of all the collected bottles of water sat a 30 gallon trash can with a lid on it.  We tenatively removed the lid, concerned about the contents and found...yes, more water.  The can had apparently been filled with water, as if by a garden hose or pouring buckets upon buckets into the thing.  Our homeowner had been a hoarder, potentially paranoid schizophrenic from the looks of the place.

As a side note, I'm going to post a second photograph from this house to show one other oddity we discovered.  While cleaning the place out, we couldn't help but notice that the areas on the walls where the crucifixes were (and there was on the wall in every room) was particularly clean.  The yellow stains from the cigarette smoke had been somehow washed off of the walls around the Christian symbol, just a few inches to each side.  As well, there were tiny spatter marks of water all over the house, but only on the ceiling.  It baffled us until I discovered the exorcism kit in the kitchen.  Yes, he had a tiny exorcism kit, complete with vial of holy water and crucifix stand and everything.

What we had considered briefly as a some sort of bizarre house stigmata turned out to be simple Catholocism.  He had been blessing the crosses with holy water, spattering it along the ceiling and around the crosses which would then run down the wall, washing the nicotine off.

It took us five coats of oil based paint to cover those walls.

City Hospital Wringer Plate

For many years, the City Hospital of St. Louis served as the main hospital for the area.  This massive complex of buildings stood from the early 1900's until about 1985 when the facilities were moved up onto Delmar Boulevard.  After that, the buildings were vacant and sat open to all sorts of people going in there.  The complex was huge, 12 buildings in all, built to support hundreds of patients at a time, possibly thousands.

Around the turn of the century, plans began to renovate the property and convert its massive structures into condominiums.  The first of these renovations was completed in 2006 and the main building of the city hospital had been repurposed.  The rest of the buildings in the complex were either torn down (5 in all) or renovated (the remaining 6).  This particular photograph was taken in the laundry building, which was the only one I was able to access without actually, you know, breaking in or something.

This was one of the first photographs I ever took with an intent to print and frame.  The id plate on this clothing press (yes, that's what it was) struck me with it's detail and clarity.  I suspect part of my awe comes from seeing similar plates on machines and appliances today that are not made with the same attention to detail or longevity.  It's unfortunate that with all of our modern manufacturing techniques we make things that aren't meant to last very long and need to be replaced every few years.

I have a couple of other photographs from this building, but this will always be my favorite.

Redd Foxx - AJ

Another photograph taken at 14th and Howard, the building just north of downtown St Louis.  The whole place is covered in crazy graffiti, splashes of color on an otherwise drab concrete building.  These pillars run the length of both sides of the building, which has to be at least a hundred yards long.  It takes me about eight minutes to walk from one end down to the other.

This is my friend AJ.  She had gone thrift store shopping a few days prior to this and asked if I had any requests for something for her to get/wear at our upcoming shoot.  I said pick something you wouldn't normally wear, something crazy and out of the ordinary.  She said she immediately found this super colerful and wildly patterned dress and knew that's what she was getting.

She's had those shoes for a long while and we thought the clashing patterns would be fun, especially since the shoes were black and white and the dress decidedly not.  Once we got there, the sun was starting to slip down towards the horizon so I got to work as quickly as I could.  We actually took a lot of photographs that day, maybe 300 in an hour and a half, by the time the sun was out of sight.

The red wig was the final touch on her outfit and I fell in love with the look almost instantly.  The graffiti above her head was a nice coincidence.  Redd Foxx is a graffiti artist here in St. Louis and you can see his work all over the place.  Frequently, he likes to suggest you should "Fo'give Yo'self" which, spelling aside, is pretty good advice in my opinion.  And hey, with the wig, AJ really is a Red Fox.

Nefertiti

This is my friend Kelley.  I had asked her if she might be interested in doing some photographs with me and she said let's do it!  She'd had a cabaret type costume from Halloween so we headed out to Alton, Illinois and visited this park not too far from the Mississippi River and went to shooting.  It was a crisp day, just a tiny bit chilly, so that sitting in the shade wasn't much of an option if we were going to get any good work done, so I dragged her over to these yellow benches to have a seat and do some shots there.

Kelley was a fantastic model.  This shoot is the only time we've worked together and every time I see this photo I think to myself "I really should shoot photographs of her again."  I like to imagine my models as characters from fiction or history, people that I've never met but would like to take photographs of.  I know it may sound a little strange but that's how my mind works.  I turn people into someone larger than life, with their help of course.

This was one of the last photographs of the day and I just love how all of the lines sweep through the image from right to left.  Her eyes take us in that direction, the bench slats, her arms, even the clouds all seem to flow to the left of the screen, making us wonder what she is looking at with such stoicism.  I assure you, she was not stoic that day, she had me cracking up.  But in the end, with this crazy image, I couldn't help but think of Nefertiti, with the crazy hat on top and that regal air about her.

Convergence

The first photograph that I posted in this blog was of the inside of a building covered in graffiti.  I said you couldn't get inside of it and that is still true, as far as I know.  But this is the outside of that building.  I have one more photograph from this shoot to show you but it has a longer story with it so you'll just have to be patient with me.

And yes, I enhance the colors of all of my shots but that's just what my eye prefers.  Although all of the colors you see in this photograph were in fact present when I shot.  I don't paint color onto them, I just liven things up a bit.

Natural Bridge and Grand - Loneliness

This was a pharmacy building around the corner of Natural Bridge Boulevard and Grand Boulevard.  The place had been deserted for a long while and there really wasn't much of interest inside the building.  But I loved the long hallways and empty rooms with huge areas of walls that had fallen down flooding the rooms with beautiful light. 

I actually have a few other photoshoots that I did in this awesome space, including a very creepy picture of myself in the broken down elevator that I'll post up sometime for you to check out.  But in any case, you can't visit this building because it has been demolished and the lot is just grass now.  I suspect the city tore it down because it was so easy to get into.  As I said there were huge sections of walls that were missing out of this amazing three story building.  I never did learn any of its history.

Blue vs. Red Comic 1

I wanted to shoot some superhero type stuff because I love comic books and I love the colors and stories that are associated with them.  So I took some time, talked to a friend of mine who refers to herself as a "makeup enthusiast" (she has no training) and she did some designing of masks that superheroes might wear, or in this case superheroines.

Also, most female superheroes wear the most revealing and ridiculous costumes so I thought I would push that envelope as far as I could.  High heels, a slip, garter belt, the works.  The woman in red owns a bunch of weapons so I had her bring her swords and that giant mace my blue friend is wearing.  We drove around north St Louis, down by the riverfront, for a good half hour before we decided on this staircase and alleyway for shooting.

Unfortunately, we took so long getting ready and finding the location that sunset had already started so I had to make do with the lighting that I had.  I think it works anyway, though, like car headlights or something like that.  Yeah, I know, there's only one shadow.  Nothing's perfect, geez!

Big Red Wheel

This is an enormous wheel from a refrigeration pump motor inside of the Armour Meat Packing Plant in National City, IL.  In the later parts of the 1800's and early 1900's, this section of East St Louis was covered with stockyards, meat processing plants, slaughterhouses and packaging facilities as well.  As time went on, theindustry changed its methods and factories like this one were closed.  This one closed its doors in 1959 and the land was donated to the city of East St Louis.

Incidentally, this wheel is large enough that standing on the ledge next to it, I can't reach the very top by a foot or two.  This leads me to believe this wheel is somewhere in the 10-12 ft. diameter range.

1930 Salisbury

This is 1930 Salisbury.  It was the St. Louis Turnverein, a German-American club in the Hyde Park area.  When I discovered it, there was a chain link fence around the entire property, which was for safety reasons more than anything.  From what I could tell, there was nothing of value left in the place except these bricks and some burned out old basketball hoops.

This is the only place I've ever been injured, my foot popping through the gymnasium floor (at the other end of the building) and I had to grab ahold of something to keep from following it too far.  I usually wear boots and gloves when I go into these places but this particular day I was wearing tennis shoes.  Someone had pushed down the fence and I hadn't expected to see such easy entrance that day I went to check on the building.  I got a scrape on my right ankle that stung for a couple of days.  Yeah, not an exciting story.

In any case, what I did not know then was that there was a bowling alley underneath my feet until I researched the building's history.  It was also known as North St. Louis Turners Hall, built in the 1880's.  The building has since been demolished, about three years ago now if I remember right.  It is just a large open grass field now.

10th Street - Building is gone

At highway 70 and 10th street headed south into St. Louis, there was a building that sat slightly above and to the west of the highway.  I don't know what the building originally was, as there were no markings on the outside to designate it's function or who built it or owned it.  I spent a year waiting for someone to tear open some plywood or open a door and leave it hanging and finally in 2010 I got my opportunity.

The inside of the building was pretty cool but it wasn't interesting enough anywhere to take many photographs so I didn't spend long in there, maybe an hour.  I took this picture in the bathroom as I always love these sorts of signs depicting the life of the structure before being abandoned.  The irony in safety signs or cleanliness warnings in a building that obviously has far bigger problems to worry about amuses me greatly.

In any case, this building was demolished not much later after that to make way for a new bridge crossing the Mississippi river, just north of downtown.  It's sad that these old buildings have to be demolished in the name of progress but in the case of this particular one, I think it is better off as a road.  The place was really unusable by the time I had gotten inside of it.

Summoning the wrong guy..pt 1

This is my friend, C.  She has this awesome steampunk style costume and I thought it would be too much fun to have her summoning a demon from the pits of hell.  It seems the guy she got was a bit surprised by the calling and it looks like she didn't expect him exactly, either.  I think he was taking a refreshment break when the magick yanked him from the underworld and into my house.

Yes, that is me in the photo too.  And that is one of my photos on the wall in the background.  The cuckoo clock, however, is dead and in the trash.  So sad.

Big Screen

One of my favorite locations to shoot, this building is near downtown St. Louis, just north of Lumiere Place.  Now before you ask, no you can't get in there.  The building is shut up awfully tight.  But I was fortunate enough to meet a homeless person who had been caretaking the location for the owner of the building.  He let me in and let me wander the building for a few hours.  This was on the third floor and yes, the chair was where I found it.  I titled this piece "Big Screen" because that's what it reminded me of, someone sitting in their easy chair and watching a huge television.

Prints are available of this shot.