Photography: Fireflies

Some friends of mine went out to a park the other day and captured some fireflies. Taking pictures in the dark is kind of challenging, and boy, was it dark.

The fireflies were everywhere though.

(click on pics for full sized version)

They lit up in waves, making the 4 foot tall grass look like a randomized airstrip.

I am sure there are different species of firefly. Some have a very long light, others only blink. These were the blinking kind.

 

The shutter was open for 15-30 seconds in these, depending on my settings. I should have recorded them in RAW format. Alas.

Afterward, we played Frisbee in a nearby field.

Friendly Atheist Eating Atheists

Back in the infancy of this blog, Flimsy, our friend Saint Gasoline and I published this post of us heathen atheists eating babies... for real.

Technically, we were eating fetus, but that's just splitting hairs.

The other day, the three of us met Hemant Mehta, also known as The Friendly Atheist.

Since he had featured our baby-eating antics on his blog, we thought it fitting to grab a little photo op.

The baby-eating atheists have now become friendly atheist eating atheists. This is proof positive that atheists will eat anything, even their own kind.

(click for a full-sized pic)

He tasted like blasphemy.

Photography: Renfaire

A few weekends ago, Flimsy and I went to a Renfaire.

From my vantage point in the audience, I popped off a few good shots of the performers - the weather was cloudy and cool so it was actually perfect for photography.

Click the pictures for full-sized shots. 

This pirate chick was cute...

This guy... pretty much speaks for himself...

I like the contrast between his costume and the microphone on his ear, as he jumps...

Here is the same guy, doing a tightrope act.

This is my favorite shot:

Photography: Hey look, it's us!

Hey look, it's me!

And...Flimsy and I!

And Flimsy.

We're so precious.

Photography: Abandoned Church

For those of you who are new to my blog, I strong encourage you to go to the main page of my website and click the "photography" link on the left side. There, you'll find lots of pictures - mostly of abandoned buildings and odd things, but hidden in there are pictures of Flimsy and I.

Recently, we visited another abandoned church. This church is especially interesting because the roof has caved in and all that is left is the stone shell. There is a mostly intact social center attached to it, and people continue to worship in the social center on Sundays. Last summer in the sweltering heat we drove by on a Sunday, and we could hear the preacher belting it out from the street. Looking through the broken windows we saw unbalanced fans on high, and could smell a faint scent of sweat.

 

There are trees growing up through the floor and collapsed roof, reaching to the open sky - naturalistic congregants. 

 

Bits of weather beaten windows with intact stained glass panels lay scattered among the leaves.

  

Here, you can see an unsteady ground created by the collapsed roof. When we walked over it, we could hear echoes of bits of the roof falling into the empty space below.

Flimsy is looking on...

 

You can see the rest by going here, and you can also see the entirety of what I have published online here.

Photography: Gas station

As Flimsy, DelRoady and I were driving around looking for abandoned places to visit, we spotted this gas station with the old "Twin Oaks Gas" sign hanging off of it's pole as though it were pointing at the truck lot across the street.

This poor sign is literally hanging by a thread, and the gas station building is not much better. What really interests me is that there is absolutely no sign of former pumps - it looks like they were all taken up, holes filled, and then the whole thing covered with gravel.

All that's left is basically this shack of a gas station, which at one point featured a garage for auto repair. The whole mess is situated right before the Illinois side of the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which is known as the site of the murder of two young women in 1991.

We entered the gas station through an open door in the back and discovered that there was an uncovered pit remaining - once used to work on cars from below without a lift. Flimsy climbed in...

Undead zombie mechanic rises from the pit! (!!!)

You can see all of the pictures here. You'll also find by clicking the link, access to the rest of my published photography.

Photography: Abandoned chemetco plant

For those of you who are new to my blog, I like to explore abandoned spaces, especially urban ones. I've been to crumbling houses, rusting slaughterhouses, etc.

I mostly visit for the photography aspect - I think absence can be beautiful and photogenic. you can see all of my photography by clicking the "photography" link to the left - for some reason it does not show up in the individual posts if you're RSS or ATOMing, but if you go to my main site you'll find the link. One of these days I'll figure out how to fix that.

About a month ago, Flimsy, our friend DelRoady and I went to the abandoned Chemetco plant in Illinois. Chemetco was a copper refining company who went bankrupt after an inspector discovered a hidden pipe discharging toxic waste into the Mississippi and surrounding wetlands. The pipe had been there for ten years. Chemetco is also responsible for the discharge of airborn dioxin, the same stuff that caused Times Beach to be shut down. The former president is on the EPA's most wanted list, but he fled the country.

When we explore, we follow a few rules: take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints. We observe, and then we leave.

To see all of the pictures from our outing, go here!

Thriftstore find

I decided that since the last time I purchased a pair of pants, I have lost a few pairs of pants due to walking the cuffs off and then ripping the legs up the side. Because I am in a professional field (medicine), I can't go about wearing torn up pants to my lab, so I headed to the thrift stores in my neighborhood yesterday to pick up some pants.

You know how when you're in thrift stores, unusual or strange stuff will just catch your eye? Along with seeing an original NES (which I considered getting), I saw. a pair. of footed. pajamas. You know, the kind of pajamas you wore as a kid - a comfortable flannel jumpsuit with plastic feet you can slide across the kitchen floor in.

Only these looked like they fit ME.

The brand is "Me & My Pals" and I can find no information on this brand of clothing whatsoever. I had to buy them, because I figured for $3.00 it would be worth the silly pictures and perhaps some tongue-in-cheek roleplay. Can you say random daddy/daughter sexual roleplay? Ha. The best parts are the cute little bears. Infantalism is so fun. I'm not really into it myself but I know people who are - and I would totally be willing to be someone's mommy.

I put them on and felt this overwhelming sense of childlike comfort come over me. I put my hair in pigtails and had Flimsy snap some pics of me.

I think they are magical pajamas. I ended up wearing them most of the night, until it was time to go to bed, but slept in my underwear so as not to deprive Flimsy of precious girl skin.

This might be the best thrift store find ever. Have you found anything bizarre at thrift stores?

The one-room schoolhouse

This was the last place we visited in Lincoln County, MO. This one-room schoolhouse is near New Truxton.

We parked on the dirt and gravel driveway of this place and while we were snapping pictures, a woman pulled up beside us in a car. She told us that the building used to be a school and had been in her family for years. Her family was considering tearing it down, and since they made this information known to the locals, the locals had been coming by to pick pieces off of it - she joked that if she waited long enough, they might tear it down for her. Apparently her husband's grandmother had attended school there, along with the rest of her family.

After a somewhat extensive search on the web, I can't find any information at all about this little school. I like that it was, essentially, just hanging out on the edge of a field, with absolutely nothing around it.

You can see the cool tin roof of this place. Inside, there were some very old flourescent light fixtures. The interior was unremarkable, so I've only got one picture of that for the curious. I do like the way the grass around it has been laid down by the wind and turned golden by the winter. You can see the rest of the pics here.

Satan's tunnel

While we were out Urban Exploring in Lincoln County, MO., we passed by this tunnel.


According to the locals, it is very haunted. Lots of stories abound as to why this is. Of course, we saw nothing abnormal, though the tunnel did echo quite a bit when I walked through it to the other side to snap some pictures of it. I've only got a few because it wasn't especially impressive from a photography stantpoint. We considered driving through it, but the standing and frozen water on the bottom was fairly deep in some places, and we had already gotten stuck once that day. Plus, it's private property.

Unfortunately, the tunnel was heavily tagged. The nearest house had several baby dolls hanging by their necks from trees. I wonder if they were trying to scare people away.

The Missouri Paranormal Society investigated this tunnel and according to them, most of the haunted tunnel stories were made up by a neighbor who lived nearby, hoping the stories would scare away the locals who tried to visit. Obviously, it has only served to attract attention.

Do you know any places near St. Louis worthy of my camera's attention? Please let me know, my friends and I are always up for adventure.

Purple means no trespassing

Continued from yesterday...

Dave and I get a closer look at the house. It's wood siding is gray, like the ashen corpse of a body washed ashore. Against the cloudless sky, it is ethereal, looming and silent. It is a remarkably well-preserves specimen, the roof still mostly intact - they don't make houses like this anymore. No wonder the Truxton, Mo locals think it's haunted. We don't.

Always willing to be blatantly conspicuous, I drag Dave's 6-foot folding suitcase ramp out of his car, assemble it, and drop it over the ditch. We roll up and munch through frozen grass, shoving pale sycamore logs out of the way. There are several ways in. We could climb through any window, up the foundation and through the missing wall of the kitchen, over the collapsed porch roof and through the back door, or through the brush and fully grown weed bushed of the front door. I go inside alone with my camera.

Light meanders slowly across a floor littered with crumbling plaster, slats of wood and faded pine flooring. Wallpaper peels from the walls yet leaves an imprint behind, as if the design bled through. It is windless and cold, but somehow dry and inviting.

I come back, and having decided that the collapsed roof is remarkably sturdy and somewhat gently sloped, we grab the ramp again. We lay it over the holes in the roof, assemble rappelling gear, and give gravity the middle finger to slide inside.

The house us absolutely void of all personal artifacts. There is no furniture, no cabinets, no beds, newspaper clippings, dates, or clues as to the lives of the people who called this place home, save for the selection of wallpaper, which curls and flakes away. It has a personality that belongs to the house itself.

Someone built this house. Every last board was touched at one time by human hands. It tells us a conflicting story. The lack of any wall outlets or light fixtures tells us that this house was never wired for electricity. There are no remnants of bathrooms but we can see that there was once a single sink - the drain pipe is left standing. there are no fireplaces, but several chimneys for woodburning stoves. With no electricity, we can't imagine that it has been inhabited in the last 60 years, perhaps. Yet it is in remarkable shape. It lacks the telltale signs of teenagers trampling and tagging, breaking it down artificially. Nature is it's only tagger, and she creeps in - in several open windows, vines snake around the sills like fingers, grabbing on to pull nature in.

The house is actually quite large. There are four large rooms on the first floor with a foyer between them. On the second floor, there are three, though these rooms seem smaller due to the slope of the roof. I would guess it is 2,500 square feet or so. There are sections of the roof that allow light to pass through, yet somehow the wood floors underneath have yet to crumble.

The second floor has a landing or foyer with a door leading to nowhere. Our guess is that there used to be a porch overlooking the road in front of the house.

Dave and I are in the house snapping pictures for over an hour. We both end up on the second floor (FYI - when you have a spinal cord injury, they don't teach you how to climb flights of stairs in abandoned houses with no handrails in rehab) and I am exploring the former master bedroom when I hear him call out to me.

A truck has pulled up beside his car, and the people in it are telling us to leave. they inform us rather loudly that the color purple (which is spray painted in a small square on the house and on a few trees) means "No Trespassing". Good to know I guess, but a sign would have been more obvious - though a sign would not have been a deterrent. I quickly exit the house and explain that I only intend to take pictures. They seem apologetic when asking us to leave. I hop in Dave's car and they back up the hill and drive off.

I return to the house. We descend the stairs and make our way out.

To see the full album of pictures of this house, click here.

To be continued...

The house that crumbles

Dave and I drove down a highway outer road near Truxton, MO (population: 96) and slowed to a stop before pulling his little car off onto a dirt road. The old ruts from truck tires lay frozen solid, refusing to give as the car rolled over them. Morning dew hung suspended from naked tree branches and yellow grass. We had arrived.

A few days earlier, Dave had described to me something that gets both of our hearts going - the flash of glassless windows blazing by at 65 miles an hour. On his way from Columbia, he had spotted a beautiful derelict Victorian style farmhouse. We cannot leave it alone.

From the distance, we see that the roof is slowly caving in. It's winter, and evidence of nature taking over is clear. Grass and weeds rise up to meet the house, engulfing and trapping it.Yet, the house is free of the telltale signs of other explorers - no tags, no foot-beaten paths, only grass grown so tall it is laid down by the wind and frozen air.

It's just below freezing, but the sun feels warm as I open the door and step out of the car. I can audibly hear my pulse rise. We don't know what's inside, what pieces of people's lives have been left behind for us to see - a tiny bit of someone else's story.

I slip my backpack on my shoulders, walk to the back of the car, open the trunk, and pull out Dave's wheelchair. There's a ditch, but that's just the first obstacle.
 

To be continued...

Photography: Hunter meat packing plant

One Sunday morning, my friend The Beautiful Kind (probably nsfw) and I decided to go urban exploring at the Hunter Meat Packing Plant in East St. Louis. I have been to this site twice before.

The guy who went with us informed us that while doing some cleanup on the site, he once found a dead body. holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, we were scared!

Just kidding. We weren't scared at all. We're so hardcore.

We didn't find any dead bodies. Instead, we surprised him by informing him that we wanted to take some artistic nudes. I liked the juxtaposition of  The Beautiful Kind's smooth female flesh against rough, crumbling structures.

The following series of photographs contain artistic nudes. Obviously, if you're offended by exposed artistic nudity, you might not want to look. Here is a sample without any nakedness:

 

You can find the rest of the photographs here (nsfw).

Okcupid unsucking: Thumper

I'll let my new readers in on a little secret: Before the Ever-Present Flimsy came into my life, I was single and into the dating scene on OkCupid (see my profile here, ooglers). I noticed that lots of people on Okcupid have pathetic crappy dating profiles - so much so that I decided to do something about it. I've decided to undergo a little classic portrait photography project, to visually unsuck all of the sucky profiles of the guys I met. My most recent unsucking is for Thumper.

Thumper is a friend of mine and a regular commenter on this site. He's had quite a fun time getting to know me and my gf The Beautiful Kind. We went from this:

 

To this:

 

Unfortunately, Thumper came over during a very flipping cold cloudy lighting-lame day, so the pictures I took of him outside were kind of wishy-washy pale and looked better in black and white with the contrast turned way the hell up. We moved inside and the rest of the pictures were taken in my apartment with ambient lighting, a five dollar shop light, and a twenty dollar reflector/diffuser. I really want to grab some more/better lighting equipment. 

If course, you can see the rest of the photos here!

Also, the guy is on Okcupid and at the moment is single, ladies! View his profile here.

Anatomy labs

The other day, I visited a friend of mine who is going to college to be a veterinarian, and my friend took me to the anatomy lab/

There I got to see row upon row of animal parts in glass jars, a huge fridge full of hanging horses, a pile of heads in bags, and bunch of skeletons, and a few dog cadavers.

Of course, I took pictures. You can find them here. These might bother the squeamish, but they are pretty tame I think.

I asked my friend where the school got their cadavers, and said friend told me that the animals are raised specifically for research purposes. I wondered why they didn't use cadavers from euthanized animals. In Missouri, it is illegal to do so.

It seems rather silly to raise an animal to be used in research when you could use the bodies of animals that had to be euthanized, but I understand there are ethical issues with this. Most people probably would not want to know that their lost dog or cat could end up as research fodder, or know that their beloved euthanized pet was hacked up by a bunch of veterinary students.

If there was a system in place where you could donate the body of your animal to science if it is euthanized, that might work. We do it for humans.

During my first year in graduate school we had human cadavers in our anatomy lab. I was one of the few people not bothered by dissecting the hand. Her nails were painted pink. We weren't allowed to know the names of our cadavers, or give them new names, but we were allowed to know the cause of death. It said that my cadaver died of depression and cardiac disease. When you donate your body to science and your body gets used to teach students about anatomy, your gift has the potential to help millions.

I am absolutely donating my body to science, and if I ever get killed accidentally, I want as many of my organs and body parts harvested as possible. 

buying glasses over teh interwebz

The other day I got fed up with my seriously scratched lenses, so I decided I needed new ones.

I am a grad student, and grad students are almost universally poor, and so rather than spend $300 on some eyewear at a brick and mortar retailer, I decided to follow the advice of Ira over at Glassyeyes and buy my glasses online.

Buying glasses online requires a bit of finesse. First, you have to have your prescription. you also have to have your pupillary distance, which is actually not usually measured by the optometrist who gave you your prescription, but by one of the sale assistants at a regular store. There are instructions for doing this online because sometimes sales assistant do not want to give you your PD - because they know you're taking your information somewhere else. When I asked the sales lady for my PD, she looked at my prescription, and said, "there's no place for me to put it". I told her to write it on the back.

After you get your prescription and your PD, you're off. If you already wear glasses, you need to measure your glasses in millimeters so you know about the size you are looking for. My old ones measured 135mm from temple to temple, and the lenses were 28mm tall and 45mm wide. The temples were 135mm. Armed with the measurements from my old glasses, I hit three online retailers.

You might wonder how I knew which glasses would look good on me. You can figure this out by trying on frames in the store, writing down the information from the frames, looking up the same frames online, and then looking for frames with a similar shape. That's basically what I did.

Online, glasses can range from super cheap (I paid $25 for one pair) to super expensive designer frames. Who needs Ralph Lauren frames anyway? Seriously, they are all made out of the same stuff. I ended up buying three pairs. One is a pair of titanium hingeless frames. I had my choice of colors and lens shape and they were $80. The second was a pair of dark blue frames ($25), and the third a pair of maroon frames ($25).

Today, two of the three frames came in the mail. The quality seems just like any of the frames in the store. My prescription has changed from last time to like with any new pair of glasses they will take a few days to get used to. There are no halos, which has been a problem for me in the past - two pairs of glasses I owned had these little ghost images of lights, which made it hard to see at night. The brick and mortar retailer I purchased them from told me it was normal to see two ghost images of every single streetlight just above each streetlight, one for each eye. They were full of it. Once I changed brands, the halos were gone. I can't believe I put up with that for three years.

The bottom line is that there is no reason to pay $300 for some bits of metal and plastic with lenses made by machine, when you can just as easily pay $30. Eyewear stores pay pennies on the dollar for their frames and lenses compared to what they sell them for. What if you break them? So what. You could buy ten pairs, and do you think Lenscrafters is going to replace your glasses ten times if you buy their extended warranty? Can you replace a nosepiece yourself if it falls off?

Another cool thing about cheap glasses is that you can have several pairs. Buy five of a style you love and never worry about going to the eyewear store again to find your design no longer exists! Buy five different pairs and coordinate them with your wardrobe! Just dropped your glasses into Lake Michigan? No big deal, you've got a second pair.

Here is how the two pairs I've received so far look. (Flimsy took these pics - I'll make him a photographer yet.) ZOMG! I put my face online without makeup! I'm not taking pictures of myself in the bathroom using my cellphone held at arms length! I am such a renegade.

 

  

  

 

Okcupid unsucking: Bastion

In my ongoing campaign to unsuck people's online dating profile, I present to you Bastion83.

I don't have a before picture, but I will assure you that I had no idea what this guy looked like from his pics. Here's an after:

And ladies... the man is single!

Want me to unsuck your online dating profile pictures and do you live near St. Louis? E-mail me!

Ecology of Absence: Hyde Park House

For this weeks EcoAbsence, you get to see the destructive power of neglect from two perspectives: Mine, and my good friend DJ_Silikon.

DJ and I spend a day exploring abandoned places in northern Saint Louis. We first drove to Hyde Park, a quiet, surprisingly safe, yet run down neighborhood.

One thing you'll note in the pictures is that DJ is using a wheelchair. He has a spinal cord injury. I find the photographic aspect of this very intriguing. In our photographic series, we're not just documenting the disintegration of someone's former home. We're saying something else.

Like in the photo series of the abandoned church, we're saying something about change, about abandonment of ideas, concepts, lives, and memories. We're saying something about hope amid pieces of traumatic change. The structure and setting itself is a metaphor.

I don't want to spell it out for you: go see for yourself.
Hyde Park House

Ecology of Absence / Faith Infiltration: Abandoned Church

I am drawn to architecture, especially historic. I've lived in Saint Louis my entire life and the history of this city is both amazing and depressing.

In many parts of Saint Louis, historic buildings are crumbling. It's clear that buildings survive when human beings care about them, and they fail when they are ignored, when no one cares to preserve them. Gravity, nature, and brick-thieves take their toll. It reminds me that nothing is permanent. These buildings have been around longer than I have. If someone cares for them, they can last centuries. They will not and cannot last forever. Buildings are seen as something more permanent than our mere flesh and bones.

One of the things I do with my camera is document urban decay. In the sadness and anger I feel when I see structures left to destruction, I also see a certain beauty. I know that in a way this is like seeing the beauty in a swarm of maggots enveloping a body that was once alive. I am aware that this is counterintuitive. Perhaps that's part of my love for it.

In August, Flimsy, Saint Gasoline and I spent a few hours in an abandoned church located in northern Saint Louis. It was like visiting a slice of a post-apocalyptic world. The images I captured are, in my opinion, glorious, stunningly beautiful, and haunting. I love how sunlight cuts through holes in stained glass windows, how green mold creeps up the walls, how roofs rot and let moisture inside. The building is dead and yet unmistakably alive. Paint peels away, revealing brick and plaster underneath. Gray dust settles over everything. I hope you enjoy the images as much as I do.

See the beauty of absence here.

Okcupid unsucking

So, when I started browsing Okcupid (a dating website) some months ago, I quickly noticed something - Sometimes, even though a person with a profile had several pictures of himself up, they either sucked so horribly it made me laugh, or they sucked so horribly I couldn't tell what he looked like.

I made it my personal mission to unsuck those profiles.

Starting with Flimsy.

We went from this:

To this:

<---See more by clicking the photography link!

Do you live in Saint Lou and do you want me to unsuck your online dating profile? E-mail me, Ziztur@ziztur.com

Ecology of Absence: Armour

I am an urban explorer.

Urban exploring is the delicate art of visiting urban spaces for the purposes of discovery. Most urban explorers like to explore abandoned spaces - houses, hospitals, industrial sites, mines, etc. Some urban explorers like to explore spaces that aren't abandoned, but that are typically cut off from humans - sewer tunnels, rooftops, etc.

It's dangerous work I suppose, putting yourself at risk of getting escorted out by the police, running into squatters, or exposing yourself to toxic chemicals and mold. But I absolutely love it, and I've never felt like I was in any real danger.

When we go, we bring a backpack with water and flashlights. We prefer Maglights, as they can be used as a weapon. We don't deface property, even though most of it is already defaced, crumbling, oozing, and beyond repair.

I think abandonment is beautiful. Haunting. It's a little slice of nothing-is-permanent.

Don't take my word for it though. See for yourself. I've been to the Armour Meat packing plant three times, and have taken pictures once. This site has been abandoned for nearly thirty years.

Armour plant pictures

You can also see more of my photography, which I am in the process of uploading, by clicking the "photography" link on the left sidebar.

More information on the history of Armour:
Ecology of Absence: Armour
Hog History of E. St. Louis

Photography: cute cats

I've updated the site, and posted some more photography. This time, it's several pictures of my cats, for those of you who like cute things

Cats are here!

Elephant rock photos

My guy and I went to elephant Rock State Park yesterday, climbed into a cave and took a few shots. They can be found here: Elephant Rock

The lighting was natural, and the photos have not been manipulated save for some minor cropping.