Main Street, Laurel

When you read a novel or watch a movie on TV, a town’s main street is often depicted as a bustling center of activity, the busy heart of town where all the locals shop. Perhaps that is still true for many places, but in the suburban town that I grew up in, we didn’t even have a main street. Instead, we had a highway.

Today I live in College Park. Although College Park does technically have a main street — and the city proclaims it from colorful banners that hang from the streetlamps through the central part of town — that street is U.S. Route 1, a heavily travelled thoroughfare that bisects College Park on its way north towards Baltimore.

Route 1 is traffic congestion central. Crossing this busy strip of asphalt is no easy task for a pedestrian, and the main street that results has more in common with a strip mall that it does with the mild-mannered, pedestrian friendly main street that most people associate with the name.

In contrast, Laurel’s Main Street is the kind of road that you associate with the name. It has restaurants and stores, a church, a post office, and even apartment buildings and homes. The only thing missing on Main Street is a gas station — but for that you need only to drive a few more blocks south or west.

Although it has a variety of stores, Main Street is a curious mixture of past and not-quite-present. That’s because it really isn’t the center of town life anymore — that title goes to our friend, Route 1. Sidelined but not out of the game, Main Street has instead become a haven for art galleries, antique stores, and one-of-a-kind boutiques.

At the western end, Main Street boasts a professional center, built from brick and styled to blend in with the existing local architecture. There, dentists, doctors, and lawyers ply their trades alongside the barbeque restaurant and sandwich store. The professional center’s parking lot is behind the buildings and backs up to the Patuxent River. To the east there’s a railway station which is still in use as a busy commuter hub.

I decided to do my photojournalism class project, which I finished in May, on Laurel’s Main Street. As luck would have it, every weekend when I had time to take photos, it rained. No matter, though, because I like rainy weather photos. There is a timeless nature to rainy days, and the diffuse lighting offers a chance to take pictures without having to worry about which direction the sun is coming from, or whether or not the harsh shadows will lose detail in the photograph. Also, the reflections can be wonderfully artistic additions to an otherwise bland photograph. It’s just a matter of how you use them.

End of an Era

The area we live in has been changing, sometimes quickly, sometimes too quickly. It’s not that new stores are being built in addition to the old familiar things, but that the one-of-a-kind stores are being run out of business and replaced by clone stores. Now I know that Tastee-freez is a franchise and that there are more than one of them, but in the Washington D.C. metro area they are very rare.

The TasteeFreez sign. Aperture: f/22; 20mm lens.

Laurel is about 8 miles away from us, and we end up doing a lot of shopping there. At least, there are several stores there that we visit on a fairly regular basis, anyway. One of our rituals was to drive to Laurel, stop at the Tastee-freez for cheeseburgers and the world’s best french fries, get a Starbucks coffee, and be fueled to do a bit of shopping.

Oh no! No more french fries!

It was with horror that we ended up in an empty Tastee-freez parking lot one Saturday only to find “going out of business” signs plastered on the windows. Was it our fault? Didn’t we buy enough cones, enough fries, to keep them in business? When Ben asks me what I want to do for lunch on Saturday, I keep having to check myself to keep from saying “Let’s go to TasteeFreez.”

I miss TasteeFreez. But I did what photographers do; I took some shots of the store, the sign, the empty parking lot. Like they say, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

Baltimore’s Inner Harbor

Following up on the post Thoroughly Modern Ducky, I have a few more images from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to share with you. The day we were there was bright and sunny, without much of the haze and humidity that besets Maryland sometime in mid to late April. That made it an excellent day for photography; reflections were bright and crisp and allowed for some quick shutter times. That was important, since we hadn’t brought our tripods.

Paddle boats awaiting summer’s tourists

The Inner Harbor area is a curious mix of old and new. At one end of the harbor the U.S.S. Constellation is moored. The Constellation holds the distinction of being the last sail-powered warship built by the U.S. Navy, and is now a floating museum. The complexity of the ship’s rigging and masts contrasts with the smooth contours of the U.S.S. Torsk, which is anchored directly in front of the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Another ship, the lightship Chesapeake, also calls Baltimore’s Inner Harbor home.

The U.S.S. Torsk, SS-423, has made Baltimore her home since 1972.

The National Aquarium in Baltimore (and seagull).

Thoroughly Modern Ducky

This male mallard duck is swimming through the reflection of Baltimore’s World Trade Center, seemingly unaware that he is a part of modern art. I took this image with my Nikon D70 and a 28-75mm lens. No digital manipulation has been done to this image — it’s exactly as I saw it!

We had gone up to Baltimore so that I could take photographs of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which was held this year on Sunday, March 11th. I’ll be posting the story behind that, as well as some of my favorite photos from the parade. It was certainly a colorful event, and not all of the colors were shades of green, either!

After the parade, and fortified with food and drink, we wandered over to the Inner Harbor to take a few photos before heading home. Baltimore isn’t very far for us, about 30 miles, but we don’t get up there much and it always seems like we’re tourists. I guess we are, kind of — just call us the “out of towners”! I’m taking a photojournalism class at the University of Maryland University College and this photo trip was for a class project.

I saw reflections of the World Trade Center in the water and thought they were interesting. As the water moved up and down, lapping at the docks, the reflections formed circles that continually moved, first breaking apart and then reforming, reshaping themselves into ovals and circles. It was pop art in motion. I was mesmzerized!

I wanted to do some aperture work and see how the images of the reflection would come out at different depths of field. I took about 8 photos of the reflection, not noticing that there was even a duck nearby. Mallards tend to travel in pairs, and this one was no exception because the female was close behind him, although I didn’t manage to get a photo of her because she was busy skimming the dockside looking for handhouts. The male just happened to swim into view as I was taking pictures. Carpe diem! I kept clicking the shutter and managed to get the bird in good focus. Notice how he has a small wake behind him, and how he broke up the reflection and allowed blue water (actually, a reflection of the sky) to show around his body like a halo.

This photo was taken with the D70 in Shutter Priority mode, with an aperture of 7.1 and a focal length of 75mm. I love how the image data is saved with the image! No more carrying around notepads and forgetting to record exposure data!