The Early Hours

I drive by this lovely lit pavilion in Wash Park every morning on my way to work and never have my camera with me. This morning I was up at 430 and knew this was a perfect day for shooting this building. 


The best part of my morning was when two cute little old men that rousted themselves from sleeping on the benches to come check out what I was doing and marvel with me at how pretty this building is and how lucky we are to have the park.

Skate Park Kicks

This is a little outside of what I normally shoot, but I'm really trying not to limit myself to just shooting my favorite subjects (plants, architecture & bicycles!) so today I rode downtown looking for something new to shoot.  Admittedly, I was hoping to find some pretty fall trees dressed in bright shades of yellow, but there weren't any.

Eventually I ended up at the skate park by Coors Field and hung out with the skaters for a couple of hours. They were all so into practicing their jumps that I don't even think they noticed me.  Except for the little girls, who all moved to the other side of the park when I arrived presumably to keep from getting photographed.

I could watch racing skate boards all day long...  I just wish I could ride like that but I'm not sure my body would survive the learning curve to get there at this point.

52 Saturdays 2011- Rooftop Espresso

This weekend we biked to downtown Denver and stayed at the old Brown Palace Hotel to celebrate hubdude's birthday and the wedding of some good friends.  Our first stop on Saturday was the Museum of Contemporary Art where we had wine & coffee on the rooftop patio. 

52 Saturdays 2011- Casa Verde Community Garden

The first thing I generally see on Saturdays is my community garden.  A colorful, quirky little corner of the city that's a block away from our row house.  It's finally starting to fill in with greenery and we finally have a tomato turning orange.  Perhaps the best part of the garden, besides my plants, is the fun mural on the back wall and faux graffiti painted benches.  Next door is  a tiny little 'Tiendita' that has continual traffic and numerous pay phone users that stand next to the garden giving away their life story at top volume while we water & weed.  

The garden tends to collect a lot of trash- thrown in & blown in.  Today my plot had a bunch of cigarette butts in it.  It's annoying & really frustrating, but I like that I have a very small corner of the world where I can grown things in the ground and there is a working hose for watering.  The one in our micro-mini backyard has never worked and it's all patio- no dirt.  The community garden is a small luxury in my life.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Andrea

Casa Verde Garden, Baker Neighborhood, Denver

The End of an Era

I just found out that the historic pedestrian tunnel underneath Union Station in downtown Denver is closing for good on February 1st.  I made a last trip down there this morning to take some photographs and was a little disappointed to find that construction workers were already readying the place for destruction.

Union Station was originally built in 1870 for half a million dollars.  It survived a fire and 3 major reconstructions during its first few decades and the structure that we have now was finished in 1914.  It's a really neat building with all the old gates for the trains tucked down in what is now a pedestrian walkway that takes you from downtown to the lightrail station just on the other side of Union.  When you walk through the tunnel lined with these old gates, original white wall tiles and wooden benches with backs that are about 5 feet high, you really get a sense for what it was like years ago when the place was in full swing.  It's sad to see the tunnel go, but at least they're keeping the rest of the building.

These are few photos from what was probably my last trip through the tunnel this morning (unless I can squeeze in one more tomorrow....).

These next few photos are taken in the main hall which will remain. I was reading today that there are over 2300 columbines (the state flower) carved into the plaster. This is a beautiful three-story light filled room, which I'm afraid my photos don't do justice to.

Don't Underestimate the Baby

In the spring I picked up a Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera for about $2 on eBay.  The listing was about 3 words long and I had no idea if the camera would work, but for $2 it was worth the risk.

I really like these cameras because they're tiny and you can shoot square pictures on the 127 film.  I like square pictures and I like small cameras, so we were the perfect match.  When my mother saw it she said that the Baby Brownie Special was her first camera as a kid and she loved it.  So it only seems appropriate that one found it's way into my hands and now after getting my first photos back, I love it too.

Sadly I should note that while I'm excited about taking square photos on this camera, I had the setting wrong and my first rolls didn't come out square.  Doh!

This is my Baby Brownie Special.  To give you some perspective if you've never seen one, it's about 2 1/2 inches (6 cm) tall.

A Rare Gray Day in Denver

 Few weeks ago on one of the wonderful but oh-so-rare gray days in Denver, hubdude and I rode our cruisers downtown to explore and we both had new cameras to test out.  I recently got an old Italian camera, a Bencini Koroll CMF, that shoots 120.  The camera itself is incredibly beautiful and I'm really happy with these first photos from it too, though I could have used a bit more light.  And I love that I can shoot square photos with it.

This first one is an old church in our neighborhood.  Denver has dozens of really old stone and brick churches.  They're beautiful and I'm always fascinated by their proud steeples shooting into the sky.  I rarely seem to photograph any other part of the churches.

This is shot from the top deck of the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art.  It's a great place to get coffee and you usually have the deck and the view to yourself.  Well worth the price of a membership.  The second photo is the roof above the deck.

Downright Dramatic Denver Graffiti

I'll just state right off the bat that I don't advocate public graffiti without permission, nor do I enjoy seeing the crappy little 'tags' in one color that some graffiti perpetrators leave all over the city. But sometimes, you run across graffiti pieces that you can't help but smile at- like the huge Obama one that my neighbor did during the election that made it into the NY Times because the City of Denver insisted on fining him for putting up an 'election advertisement' that was larger than the allowed maximum. On his alleyway fence... Here's the picture NYT ran:



Yesterday I ran across some more artful graffiti around the corner from my house and went back today to take photos of it. This white field is normally full of weeds, broken glass and a dirty brown fence. I have to say, I was delighted to see this yesterday- it just looks so great with the snow and adds a little color to this drab corner of the Denver Art District.









While I was walking over to photograph the fence above, I wandered down one of the alleyways between here and there and saw this spectacularly purple graffiti- this is in the alley behind my house. What's not to love? Except maybe the home owner's that perhaps didn't give permission for this graffiti-mural on their house.... I particularly love how they just incorporated the pipe on the wall right into the man's face rather than painting around it.







I took my Polaroid camera along on this trip and will post some of those tomorrow.