Dodge and Shoot / Joseph Dunphy's Personal Flickrgroup / Discuss

Dodge and Shoot / Joseph Dunphy says:

This all began as I walked past a familiar Chicago landmark that looked like it might soon vanish. As you can see in this unaltered thumbnail taken at the same time, there was some reason for concern. This was taken over the doorway, just to the right of the Cathedral.

This was a little further down.

Your eyes do not deceive you. That's a venetian blind on the other side of that glass door, with nothing behind it but the great outdoors and a demolition site. To put this in context, here's a picture taken from the Northwest of the Cathedral. Shopping has been limited to darkening, sharpening and increasing the saturation on the image; as usual, I'll upload the unshopped version later for reference.

See that little archway in the lower right hand corner of the last picture? That's the doorway you saw in the previous two photos. So, this wasn't looking good, especially since if you look at the unshopped version of that last picture - yes, that is wood over those windows on the north side of the building. Usually not a good sign.

Thinking I had no time to waste, I reached for "my baby", a manual pentax with automatic rewind, aim and ... discovered that the automatic rewind was doing its job all too well, kicking in after the first shot. At this point, I had just barely opened the owner's manual for my new digital, shutting it immediately. It had been written encyclopedia style, explaining the features of the camera in alphabetical order. Not having time to wade through that, I call around, seeing if anybody I know had a camera he could lend to me, before the impending destruction of my subject. The sign you see to the right displayed the soon to be constructed condominium building.

One camera could be found, a venerable old piece that dated back to before the invention of automatic ... anything. The thing had been given as a hand me down before my parents met each other. Clearly, not a bad piece of equipment, as it still works today, but using a light meter - also from the Big Band era - takes practice. And time.

A few months and a half dozen rolls of desperately snapped experimental shots later, I found out that the Cathedral was due for renovation, not demolition, though the block behind it didn't fare as well. I'm not sure of why they would demolish their way between two buildings along a three foot wide passage. Maybe Donald Trump was hoping to squeeze a new office tower in there? If so, nothing came of the negotiations.The last time I looked, the cathedral was still there, a pleasant surprise under the circumstances. Note how many buildings you saw on that block. This was the permit I had seen posted inside the cathedral's glass doors.

Leaving me with a few hundred washed out photos begging to have their existences justified in some way, which is where the picture I just uploaded came from. The worst photos seem to make decent raw material for adobe, sometimes, so perhaps something came out of a wasted summer afternoon.

Lemons, Lemonade ... sometimes you do what you can, and it works out. Sort of.