This weekend, the lady and I spent a lovely Saturday afternoon exploring the studios of local artists in Saint Louis. The Contemporary art museum here in Saint Louis sponsored the 5th Annual Open Studios, which showcased lots of artists in the area. Since we are new here, it was really great to get out and talk to the local arts community, and I am always excited to see other people’s work spaces.

In addition to meeting great people and seeing some crazy wonderful art, we also had the opportunity to explore other parts of the city. Obviously Cherokee Street was the big draw for us on Saturday, having not ventured over there previously. It was very exciting. We are definitely going to spend a lot more time getting to know the local art scene although being new to Saint Louis I felt like much of the afternoon I should have had a sign around my neck that said “Will You Be My New Friend?”

For all the friends I didn’t get to see: I’m sorry I missed you and I will try to have a little more advanced warning the next time I come into the city so I can plan meet-ups with all of you. I miss you dearly and can’t wait to see you again.

Studio Windows at Sunset

It was kind of a surreal experience, going back to the city as visitor for the first time, and not as a resident. In a lot of ways New York will always be “the city” in my life, no matter where I live, but being tossed back into if after a prolonged absence gives me a little bit better of a perspective on how the bewildered tourists feel. After the relative relaxed lifestyle I’ve enjoyed in Saint Louis, the first couple hours in Manhattan were stressful and shocking. The people, the noise, the speed. Even though the heat and humidity are similar to Saint Louis this week, it seemed hotter on the teeming avenues as I inched along in my rental car trying to get to the rental agency to return it.

Returning the car was the first step to getting myself normalized as a New Yorker again. It wasn’t long before I’d re-acclimated and was squeezing onto the 6 train at rush hour and dodging traffic in the East Village like I’d never been away. After some Thai food, the ice cream in the park and a few cocktails I nearly forgot that I didn’t live there any more. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t going to walk home to my apartment; I was going to take a plane back to my new home.

And so now I’ve returned to my lovely and spacious studio, tired and dehydrated from my whirlwind tour, but I’m happy to be back. Saint Louis is really growing on me. Even though an anonymous commenter on STL Rising said recently “when someone from new york says good things about st. louis it’s time to burn it down” everyone I have met in Saint Louis has been wonderful and friendly. The lady and I are settling in nicely. I feel like we’ve moved to the downtown area at a time when all sorts of exciting things are happening. We are happy that we can do our part for our new neighborhood by supporting new businesses in walking distance rather than driving to big box stores and by staying in tune with neighborhood events. I feel that my New York City philosophy of urban living fits nicely with the philosophy of downtown Saint Louis.

I will always miss New York, and I treasure the few hours in the city when I can get them, but the sadness I feel when I leave again is tempered by the thought that I’m heading back to my new home, and as homes go, this is a pretty good one.

First thing on the agenda was, of course, the arch. We had been down to see the arch several times (and we run down there nearly every day) but we had been waiting to take the trip up into it for when guests were here. Wednesday evening at sunset was a pretty good time to go – the wait was short. All in all it’s a bit of an anti-climax, the top is, well, a curved space covered in carpeting with some sketchy looking stairs at either end and some windows. To be sure, the view is great, and it’s a bit of an odd feeling knowing that you’re standing over an open space taller than the Seattle Space Needle.

It was fun and I’m glad that we took the time to do it, although it’s unlikely that I’d do it again. I find the arch to be so completely fascinating from the outside that the slightly dumpy interior didn’t work for me. I’m working on a post about the arch with some images that I’ve taken since I’ve been here, more on that later. I do know that I’ve taken a lot of photos of the arch already, and I’m sure to be making a whole lot more.

I moved to New York in the fall of 2000. For the first couple of months I couch-surfed at my friend’s place and when his girlfriend got too fed up with me I moved to a rented room in an apartment with two aging hippies. It was very clear from them that I was just renting the room; we weren’t roommates. While I am sure that I was paying the majority of their rent controlled monthly rate, and while I had my own bathroom, it wasn’t exactly the most social of situations. I was occasionally invited to “their end of the apartment” for dinner, which was entertaining to be sure, but I couldn’t exactly call them friends.

I was new to the city, and because the few friends I had lived in Manhattan, I felt very alone in Brooklyn. I spent a lot of time exploring the city the same way I am currently exploring Saint Louis – on foot, just walking around, seeing where the streets took me. The difference between now and then is that back then I didn’t have a camera. I spent that fall walking around just lookin’ at stuff. Then one day, I was walking down a random street and found an antique store, junk shop, something or other. I don’t remember what compelled me to go in, but in I went, and found several cameras in a glass case. I hadn’t held a camera for at least a couple years since college, and it just seemed right. I chose a Konica Autoreflex T3 with a 57mm lens. I don’t remember why I chose the camera – it wasn’t even that clean. I think it was the one I could (barely) afford. I think I paid $140 for it, which was a ton of money for me at the time and I’m sure that was more than it was worth. But I was all excited and rushed out to buy some film.

It was incredibly cold at the time, and about three quarters of the way through my first roll of film, the shutter started locking up. I think the cold was just too much for it, and I didn’t have any money left to fix it. I was really discouraged. I was sick about spending the money and the fact that I would have to shell out even more money to have the film developed, and I was still alone! I finished out the roll, convinced it would be a failure, put the camera down and didn’t pick it up again. Later that year I saved and scrimped and bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1. I haven’t shot film since.

I never developed the roll of film I shot with the Konica and never tried to use it again. But I hung on to it for all these years. I’m considering film again now, as an exercise. I want to see what it is like to have a finite number of frames to shoot, to have a little more guesswork in my exposures, and just to try something new (old). So I rolled out the Konica and cleaned it up. I have five rolls of 35mm film laying around which I found in my dad’s camera bags last summer (who knows how old those are), so I’m committing myself to shooting all of these rolls of film, having them processed and seeing what I’m able to make of it. I’m going to use the Konica even though the meter is broken and not having developed any film from it I have no idea if the thing even works. It could have light leak, the jammed shutter may be a problem (although it is certainly not cold in Saint Louis at the moment.

We shall see what happens, won’t we? Wish me good film karma!

It’s kind of like Christmas in July here in the apartment as the lady and I work our way through the task of unpacking our stuff. Since most of our things were packed by the movers, each box is like a present; we never know what we’re going to pull out of the packing paper. It seems like several doze rain forests perished in order to get our stuff safely from New York. We had a number of casualties in the form of broken dishes and such due to the craptastic packing job but so far only a few things of note have been damaged. My down bubble jacket was torn up because the movers put tape directly onto it while wedging it into a box, and my filing cabinet was bashed and bent into an unusable state.

The worst thing, so far, is my Drobo which contains my backup of all of my digital photography for the last four years or so. When I turned it on yesterday instead of seeing the lovely green lights indicating that everything is hunky dory, all I saw was four solid red lights, indicating blank hard drives. Yikes! After some messing around I was able to get it to recognize three out of the four drives, and it is in the process of sorting itself out (I hope). It’s a several day process for it to copy data onto a blank drive, so I’m hoping my Monday I’ll know if my work is safe. One thing I’ll definitely need to look into is a better backup plan, probably an offsite option.

On the agenda today? Car shopping. We are also going to try to take part in some of the exciting local celebrations this weekend, but car shopping is a priority so we don’t have to keep renting. We have a number of makes and models we want to try, but having not owned a car in ten years, I’m sure this will be an adventure. Xina has her note-taking pen ready so I’m sure by tonight we’ll have a lot of options to choose from.

Our stuff arrived yesterday morning and much to our delight the movers were really really excellent. BJ and Mike from Dodge Moving were super. They were efficient and friendly and actually listened when I talked to them rather than blowing me off like their New York counterparts. They moved our stuff like movers are supposed to move them. We felt so much more comfortable with them than with the New Yorkers. The jerks in New York completely lied about everything they moved, including the number of floors they had to carry stuff (claimed it was a 6 floor walkup when it was only 3rd floor) and doubled the number of boxes on the manifest. Best part is they claimed that we had an elevator but it was broken on the day of the move, so they charged an extra $1000. Our old building didn’t have an elevator. What a bunch of crooks.

In any case, we are in the process of settling in and unpacking and finding spots for all of our stuff. And this weekend…we have to buy a car. Boy howdy, things are different here. In anycase, it may be a bit quite around the blog for a few days while we get sorted out. Happy holiday weekend (we are having a parade here in St. Louis and fireworks over the flooded Mississippi!)

I am a little over a week before my move from New York, and the reality of the situation is starting to sink in. At the beginning of June (due to circumstances that were so completely New York and beyond my control) we left our apartment in the East Village to move into a sublet for our last month in the city. It is much smaller than we are used to, and doesn’t have things like desks and chairs, so we have spent a good bit of time trying to figure out how to spend time elsewhere. To that end, I left this afternoon and am spending the day at an Cafe Office in the East Village. Me and a bunch of other home (homeless?) workers share the scarce power plugs, drink coffee, and generally ignore each other.

I wrapped up my stint as a corporate staff photographer on Friday with relatively little fanfare, and after some celebrating over the weekend I woke up Monday as a self employed artist with a long todo list and without a regular paycheck. It’s all very exciting in theory but now that it is actually upon me, it’s a little intimidating. I have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do.

The biggest issue is that I can’t do a whole lot until I get my office set up in our new place, which isn’t going to happen until July 1. Not having a permanent desk is a bitch. So until then I am trying to be as productive as possible and try to get as much administrative work done as possible. Lesson one: don’t have wine with lunch just because you can. It will make you want to sleep in the part for a few hours. Lesson two: choose a cafe office that doesn’t have pretty girls walking by every five minutes to distract you. Lesson Three: Lesson Two can’t be done in NYC.

As I type this the guy across from me has a sticker on his laptop that says “Never Not Working”. This is something that I need to start thinking about. I’m so used to getting up, going to work, hating it, and then coming home and spending all my free time trying to forget about it. Now, when I wake up I want to work work work, but on days like today there isn’t a whole lot I need to do. But I desperately want to make sure that I’m doing something, not just sitting around. I’ve been plowing through my todo list, including errands for Dr. Fiance, and I’m trying to go for a run every day.

Interestingly though, I’m not feeling the drive to shoot. I think this is because my mind has already gone to the new city and I’m fully consumed with the move, the new apartment, buying an apartment, and all the other changes that are going on at the moment.

But I am getting things going, starting with marketing plans, website updates, and I’m chasing down old clients and new clients. I am open for business and ready to roll. 7 days until the move.

While packing for the big move this weekend, I was surprised to hear a massively loud drum line outside my apartment. I’d noticed metal police barricades up along Saint Marks Place but didn’t really think there would be a parade on my little street. But parade there was, the 4th Annual NYC Dance Parade. It was a mixed bag of costumed dancers, matching t-shirted amateurs, and a whole lot of noise and fun. Overall everyone who danced past my apartment seemed to be having a good time.

I initially went out on street level to photograph the parade, but was getting unsatisfactory results. I felt the images I was creating were run of the mill and not very interesting. So I went back into my apartment and photographed the parade from above on my fire escape. I really liked the distorted perspective and the graphic quality that the tree leaves added to the compositions.

I think some of the hoola hoops images were particularly successful. They have me thinking of a potential series project…

I’m not a wild life photographer by any means, and it took me most of the first day to get the hang of it. There were a lot of challenges that made things difficult. I don’t shoot outdoors a lot and struggled with the constantly changing light. I was using a 70-200mm lens and I could have really benefited from something longer, like maybe, I dunno, a 600mm. However, I was limited by what I could carry on this trip. The nice thing is that on the game drives, the rangers drive you right up to the animals (something you could never do on foot without getting eaten). Animals in the bush are relatively comfortable with the vehicles, so you’re able to get very close. However the animals are skittish with humans on foot and could just as easily attack you as run away.

The game drives were spectacular. We saw all of the “Big Five” including lions which unfortunately we only saw at night, albeit three feet from me beside the vehicle. There is something really refreshing about spending three hours every morning and evening driving in the open air, in perfect weather, and in some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen. I do wish I’d been able to bring along two camera bodies though, because I kept wanting to switch between my zoom lens and my wide angle, and often had to make choices on what shot to get. The other challenge to being in the vehicle is that you’re stuck with the angle where the driver stops. Sometimes this put be in situations where I was shooting directly into the sun. I had to think quickly for ways to make great shots without full freedom of movement.

I’m a terrible vacation photographer. When I’m shooting, I concentrate, but when I’m just relaxing I generally experience the moment rather than spend the whole time behind the camera. I left for the trip feeling a ton of pressure to come back with a ton of amazing shots. Considering I only had three days on the safari (wildlife photogs can easily spend months photographing one animal) I’m very pleased with what I came home with. Plus the experience of shooting outdoors was invaluable experience.

You can view the full gallery of my Sabi Sands images here.