Had a recent business trip to St. Louis. Which meant I would have some time for some photography. I made sure to visit the arch. I shot from golden hour through blue hour and settled on this gold hour shot. I was hoping for some nice colors and lights during blue hour but it never really happened. Also, the blue hour shot has literally 0 clouds in the sky. I think this one made a much more interesting image. If anyone has any advice on combining the blue hour with something like this please let me know! I tried several different ways but the colors are just so different I couldn't make anything work. All in all I'm pretty happy with this shot. Any comments/critiques are welcomed! Hope you enjoy!
Hey Kyle, good solid photograph. My parents used to live just outside of St. Louis so I have lots of images from this area of the city. Normally, I don't critique other peoples' work but since you're welcoming them... I think would have made an additional image, this time tilting the camera downward just slightly so that the oval formed by the arch and its reflection lay dead center in the frame giving a perfect top/bottom symmetry to the image. By the way one of my favorite quotes by Mark Twain is about St.Louis; "If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out."
Hi Kevin. Thanks for your comments! I actually did do another version where I cropped the top down so the arch was perfectly centered. I liked the sky so much though that I didn't want to crop that much out of the photo. The problem with tilting down was the embankment of the pond and the ground would come into the frame which I thought would be distracting. I do like it perfectly centered though! Thanks again!