Part 12: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Remember when I said earlier on thishereblog that beauty and art are subjective?

Let's continue with that theme.

Because I planned this trip at the last minute on a holiday weekend, I was unable to find a hotel room that met our needs for all three nights.

That means that we were nomads during the day, and switched hotels each night.

The second hotel we stayed in was downtown. I had high hopes for it. It had good reviews online, and I was excited about staying downtown.

It turns out, that hotel sucked.

It wanted to be a cool place for hipsters, but it just failed on so many different levels. (It missed the mark like a 23-year-old journalist fresh out of school used to miss the mark on stories all of the time.)

I had a lot of fun with the door knob that went into the our bathroom at this hotel. Um, where am I supposed to grab it? I felt kind of dirty every time I touched it.

Across the street from the hotel, my Mom took a photo of another "art" sculpture.

Oh, Saint Louis. I loved you. I want to go back to you.

Look for it.

One of my favorite things about photography is that you don't always have to know what you're doing.

This weekend I took up the task of taking photos of a race in my hometown. I'm not crazy enough to be on the racetrack, people (seriously, do those photographers have a death wish?). I settled for taking photos in the pits and from a few areas in the stand instead.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I would describe myself as a pretty good photographer. I got my first camera in second grade, and I've had one ever since.

One of my favorite tricks in photography is to cheat. I tried for years to take photos of windmills at sunset, but it never really worked out.

Capturing motion with the sun going down is hard, after all.

My favorite photo I've ever taken of wind mills was taken with a cheap point-and-shoot camera. It was December in western Kansas six years ago. And, I cheated.

What was the cheating part, you ask? The wind farm I was taking photos of was still under construction, and those long blades that are tricky to photograph moving were not moving.

Ha! I showed that wind farm who's boss that day.

I think there's a perception that you have to go exotic places to take good photos. I learned growing up that that isn't true. There's beauty everywhere, you just have to look for it.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic here. So Saturday night I knew I was going to take photos of cars going something like 90 mph at night.

To be honest, I didn't have high hopes. That's a lot to expect out of me. Like I said above, capturing motion with lights is hard enough, but to add total darkness into the equation?

Yikes. What a challenge.

I had an idea of what I was doing, so I wasn't completely clueless. Once the main race started, my mission was to keep an eye on my camera settings to see if there was enough light. Once I got that somewhat right, I didn't put my camera down.

I took around 400 photos. There's a string of them, about 50, that are perfectly in focus.

Success!

It also helps that the cars slow down during cautions. Like I said, sometimes photography involves cheating.

I'm okay with that.

I can honestly say that being a race photographer is something I officially don't want to do with my life. It's dangerous for the photographers on the track, it's hot, and it's dirty.

After the race was over I had dirt in places dirt should not be.

But I'm glad I owned up to the challenge and kind of succeeded. I don't think they're award winning photos, they may not even be a home run, but I think they're a solid base hit.

And now I'm getting my sports mixed up.