Downtown from 169

I think this will be my last downtown Kansas City picture for a while; I have processed all the ones I have taken that I like.  I feel this is a pretty unique angle of downtown.  It was taken from north of the city on Highway 169 as I was walking home from the Downtown Kansas City Airport Air Show.  I lived north of downtown, so this is similar to the view I got from my apartment. This is also pretty much the reverse view of my Highway 169 photograph.

I’m not sure what the name of the apartment complex is, but if you notice on the left side of this picture, there is a large parking garage somewhat visible.  It doesn’t look bad in this picture, but in real life, that parking garage and the associated apartment buildings look terrible.  Pretty much all of the other buildings in the River Market area of downtown are old brick buildings.  Many have been renovated and are very nice on the inside, but the historic exterior remains unchanged.  Anyway, these new apartment buildings are architecturally completely different from the rest of the River Market.  They’re poorly constructed, much like many of the suburban apartments in Overland Park (all wood construction, cheap materials, build quickly), and look generally like a suburban apartment complex.  Because these apartments were built surrounding my old gym, I got to see construction progress every day, so I feel that I’m pretty much an expert on the subject.  What I’m really trying to say here is that these apartments are ruining the River Market, and I’m glad I moved away when I did.  I always hoped during construction that the building would ‘accidentally’ burn down and the project would be scrapped.  If you ever get the opportunity, please stop by their office, and tell them to go to hell for me.

Getting back on point, this was taken during my HDR period, so it’s a 5 shot handheld HDR.  Check out the EXIF info below for a little more information.

Exif information
Model	Canon EOS 20D
Original date	2009:08:23 12:34
Exposure time	1/1000 sec
Focal length	18mm
F-Stop	f/8
ISO speed	ISO-100
Exposure	5 Photo HDR

I Didn’t Even Know What a Nuclear Panner Plant Was

No, this isn’t a nuclear power plant, but that is a really funny line from the classic The Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy” featuring Frank ‘Grimey’ Grimes.  What this photograph actually depicts is a power plant located in the River Market District of downtown Kansas City where I used to live.  I was never exactly sure what this plant was, what kind of fuel it burned (I guess I knew it burned coal, since there’s a huge coal pile attached to the facility), and what exactly it powered.  There was no way I was just going to go around all willy-nilly posting pictures featuring buildings I didn’t fully understand.

I set out on trying to figure out what this power plant was all about with a single name I had gotten from a sign hanging on the building.  It wasn’t easy, but I eventually tracked down the parent company and the official name of this generating station, and found an obscure article that made a reference to this power plant.  It’s called the Grand Boulevard Generating Station, and it turns out it burns both coal and natural gas to create super heated steam, which is piped under the city to various buildings downtown for heating.  I didn’t even know that was a thing until I read that article.

This is a hand held 5 shot HDR, with a some sweet post-processing work done after I did the HDR.

Green Graffiti

This is another bit of graffiti from the River Market, where I live in Kansas City.  This wall is across the street from my building, and the entire wall, which extends for about half a block, is covered in a huge mural of graffiti.  As opposed to the last piece of graffiti I posted, this graffiti is far more artistic in nature.  I took this photograph the afternoon that my new ultra-wide angle lens arrived.  It was a sunny day, and I felt the conditions were perfect to test my lens on this wall I had been waiting to photograph.

I’ve never been sure whether or not this mural was painted legally or not.  I am inclined to believe it was not painted at the request of the owner of the wall for a couple of reasons.  First of all, I witnessed this piece of art being created.  I was coming home late one Sunday night and the particular route I took home that night brought me past this wall.  I saw a couple of guys out on the sidewalk spray painting the wall, and although it was at night, they were not exactly covered by the darkness.  The street isn’t a main street for the area, but it gets a fair amount of local traffic.  These guys didn’t appear to care if anyone saw them, but then again, I wasn’t a police.  The next day I saw the extent of their work, and was blown away that they had spray painted the entire wall.

The second reason I would believe that the wall’s owner was not particularly amused at this piece of self-expression was that they eventually hung a large sign advertising their business, which is behind the wall.  Who do these jerks think they are?  Covering this possibly illegally painted piece of street art, just so they can advertise their business, which just happens to be located on the other side of that same wall?  Isn’t that what the yellow pages are for?

I’m getting off topic here, so going back to the photo; I really love this lens.  In post-processing I was able to get the colors to pop a little more than they did straight from the camera, and overall I like the results.

Fake Bicycle

I got my new lens in the middle of the week and only really got to play with it for about an hour the day I got it.  The Saturday after I got it was a nice day, so I geared up and went to do some exploring north of the River Market where I live.  There is this nice bicycle and walking trail along the Missouri River that I’ve been on a few times before, but never with my camera.  I spent a few hours down there, mostly in solitude, taking photographs of some interesting things I saw, and trying out a few new techniques with my new lens.

As I was walking around a bend in the trail, I heard a shout of pain, and then witnessed a goofy guy with his kids, playing on this statue of a bicycle.  The man had climbed on the fake bike and sat down with unsurprisingly painful results.  He quickly got off the bike, and though his kids were thoroughly entertained by his antics, he was visibly shaken by the experience.  I chuckled to myself, and made a mental note to come back and investigate this bike more thoroughly.  A few hours and many pictures later, I made my way back to this bicycle.  This time there was nobody playing on it, and I was able to get a couple pictures of it.  I found it interesting that they placed this very inviting plaything right next to some dangerous steps that led down to the river.  As you can see, these steps are so dangerous someone was compelled to install a sign warning of their hazardous nature!  Enough about these crazy steps; I think this is a pretty cool little statue to have on a bike path.

EAT EN

I finally got the ultra wide lens I've been wanting; the Canon 10-22mm.  It came last week, so I ran home over lunch to play with it and got a couple of pictures I really like; this being one of them.  I took this across the street from my apartment in an alley between an old brick building and a new modern building that houses an architectural firm that laid off a bunch of its employees last spring (how rude).

What does this say?  I don't know.  What does it mean?  I don't know that either.  What I do know is that I thought it looked cool; especially from this perspective.

I got to thinking about what it might say and I've got a couple of theories.  My first theory is that it says EAT EN, and that's assuming this is supposed to be English.  Perhaps the person who wrote this wanted to write 'EATEN' but ran out of room so had to extend his word to a second line.

My second theory is that it isn't English at all, but was intended to profess a favorable opinion of one's favorite fraternity and sorority.  Now I don't speak Greek, but it is my understanding that the letters EAT and EN or the symbols E-Triangle-T and E-N translate into Sigma Delta Tau and Sigma Nu.  This reminds me of my encounters with the EAT sorority while I was at the University of Kansas (which were limited to me simply observing them on campus).  This EAT sorority was most unfortunately named, as every girl I saw wearing an EAT shirt was of the overweight variety.  Hilariously unfortunate.

Any other ideas?

Doing Some Excavating

Although nice to look at, I didn't want to only share a picture of me today.  This is a photograph I took of an excavator that was sitting at the side of a big hole in the ground across the street from my apartment.  Someone has been working on a seemingly small scale construction project in the public parking lot across the street for, what I would consider, an disproportionate amount of time.

It all started a few months ago when I came home and noticed a small portion of the parking lot partitioned with orange plastic construction fencing.  About a year ago some developer had a sign up saying the parking lot was the future home of some new condos (terrible idea), so I wondered if they were finally breaking ground on these.  I slowly began to wonder if they were breaking ground on anything, as the site sat idle for the next couple of months.  Strangely, although the site was cordoned off by the plastic fence, there was still a place for cars to enter, so it was just an annoying mild inconvenience to anyone who wanted to park in that lot.  During this time we had a pretty strong storm with strong winds which came along and blew almost all of the fence down.  Until some guy came back by and put it back up a few days later, the inconvenience was even smaller, as people could now park directly on the fallen fence.

Finally a few weeks ago I woke up to see some construction equipment being moved in, and within a few days part of the parking lot was gone.  These guys actually worked pretty quickly for the first two days of this phase, but left and didn't come back for another week or so.  They finally came back and dug a bit deeper and cleaned up the hole, and left it in the state I found it in for this photograph.  They've done some work since, but the scale of this project doesn't lead me to believe these are the stupid condos that were planned.

Technically, this photograph is a combination of nine photographs I took in succession to get this point of view.  I then combined them using some panorama software, and did some post-processing in Photoshop.  I like this picture because of the point of view and the subsequent distortion in the image.  It makes me think of a super wide fisheye lens, but not quite as extreme.

Regardless of what these bozos are building, the best part was every morning when the driver would start the day out right with a quick 360.

Highway Divider

This is another one from my day at the downtown Kansas City airport air show.  I took this near the end of the day as I was walking home across the bridge from the other side of the Missouri River.  This photo turned out pretty close to what I had envisioned when I took the picture. The only thing I would really like different would be a wider view.  I took this at 18mm, the widest my widest lens will go; I’d like to see this at 10mm and see how it looks.  A super wide angle lens is at the top of my wish list, but lenses aren’t cheap; especially super wide lenses.  In my mind though, I already have so many pictures I want to take with a super wide lens.