Looking up at the Gateway to the West
Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Mo. | Canon 5D Mark II and 50mm f/1.4 lens | Exposed 1/640 sec. @ f/11, ISO 100.
Who says you can’t make a good picture in the middle of the day?
Over the weekend Elizabeth and I found ourselves in St. Louis for Independence Day, partly thanks to a hotel deal through Hotwire.com. While I’ve been going to school at the University of Missouri for two years, and have spent some time in St. Louis in that time, I haven’t actually gone up to the Gateway Arch since a seventh-grade field trip back around 1997. Frankly, I can’t even remember if I took a camera (taking a 35mm SLR was something I was never too keen to do back when I was in middle school). But I do remember going up in the arch and feeling the structure sway back and forth in the wind. Fun! But it’s still standing there. Unfortunately, getting up to the top of the arch is harder than I can recall from all those years ago: you have to go through a magnetometer, your bag through an X-Ray, and rangers are standing by to pat you down. We actually tried two days in a row to go to the top, and both times the line for tickets was either painfully slow or, on the second day, not moving at all because the eight (eight!) employees behind the ticket counter weren’t selling tickets. C’est la vie. Read the rest of this entry »
