Pink Arches

The gang got together tonight for dinner downtown. The arch was being lit with pink light in the cause of breast cancer awareness, so I wanted to head that direction to take some photos of it.

Our dinner choice was Jake’s Steaks, self-proclaimed as the coolest steak house in St. Louis. Dunno about that, but the food was really amazing. They use a lot of rubs and other flavorings on their steaks, and I’m amazed how much that added to the flavor of the steak. I got the Old Judge Coffee Steak treatment for my ribeye. It’s encrusted in French roast coffee grounds and ground black pepper, and then laid on top of a Kahlua and cream sauce. Man, was that good!

We walked the few blocks down to the arch, and shot some photos at various points on the arch grounds. The pinkening of the arch was really a low-tech operation. Pink (slightly purple to my eyes) plastic sheets were laid atop the regular white lights that illuminate the arch nightly. The odd thing was that the amount of color you could see depended greatly where you were with respect to the arch. Some angles made the pink/purple light vivid, while others gave almost no indication that anything special was going on.

I got a few decent shots, and I’ll try to get them posted later today.

I really found the pink arch to be a difficult shoot, as the color on the arch made it difficult to find focus sometimes, and I had a rough time with movement on the camera body. I used my Hakuba, so I’m surprised at the movement evident in the photos. Guess I need to work on long exposures again and get my technique down!