Room 27

A very vacant room at Lay's Motor Lodge, or the remains thereof, in Kingdom City.  At the junction of old route 40 and highway 54 in Callaway County.

Chong's Oriental Market

I always felt like the essence of Chong's eluded my camera.  The subtle magic of the building's curvature, the enigmatic quality of the block glass windows, the hand painted sign that seemed to belong to a movie set back alley...I was always searching for the perfect vantage point from which to frame it.  It was difficult to convey the curvature while also hinting at the other buildings rising just beyond.  This spot on Seventh Street comes close to achieving the goal.  I'm glad that I took this when I did, as the spot is now dominated by a hole in the ground and the fury of inane construction.  I think Chong's has plans to move.

Station Agent

An exterior view of the lost depot near South Gifford, Missouri.  According to some history I uncovered on the depot, this once served a local line that ran between St. Louis and Iowa.  A depot in a far-flung town like South Gifford was there to collect surface coal from local farmers.  Once the easily gathered coal supply withered, so withered the rail line.  This line was out of business by the late 1920s or early 1930s.

Back to the creek

Last year during a rainy spring evening I took some photos of the creek that runs through our neighborhood.  I posted one on the blog in July of 2013.  This year I went back after another rain and did some more work in the same area.  If last year's version was light and vertical, this year it is dark and horizontal.  This was converted, with some pains, from a color Nikon D700 file.  It took me maybe an hour of Lightroom and Photoshop work to come close to the kind of effect I used to get from a roll of Ilford FP-4 and a Nikon FE2...

Summer on the Loop

There is something about the summer that sends me gravitating towards the business loop.  Or there is something about the business loop that draws me there in summer.  It's the closest I have in Columbia to a Tucumcari-type photo experience.  And if you've followed my blog at all, and I don't blame you if you haven't, I consider Tucumcari to be the photographer's equivalent of the Valley of the Kings to an archaeologist.  So with that said, here is an aging Mercury Marquis that I unearthed there one hot, July morning. 

Graffiti Station

The richly-graffitied interior of an abandoned train depot in South Gifford, Missouri.  I took a number of images of the exterior, but I think this interior detail offers a much more captivating glimpse at the social history of the back room of this now forgotten depot.  More on the depot in the next post.

Tin Block in Bunceton

Bunceton, Missouri.  This is apparently a commercial block clad in galvanized tin or iron.  You don't see these very often.  The treatment seems to have been removed on the lower level in favor of some clapboard style siding...fortunately the second level is still intact, yielding a beautiful range of textures and values for a black and white photograph.  In downtown Milwaukee there is an entire block made of cast iron called the Iron Block.  Stone Creek Coffee used to have an office down there.  I don't believe this building employs the same construction process, but visually intriguing nonetheless, especially for a small, midwestern town.