St Louis Gateway Arch

St Louis Gateway Arch

One of our many stops on our trek to San Antonio was in St Louis. We approached St Louis after dark and were hoping to catch a glimpse of the iconic Gateway Arch through our sleeper car windows. 

This was not the start of our trip but I thought I would start with my most difficult photos from the trip. (I really want to get these problematic photos behind me so I can move on to the much more beautiful photos.) These nighttime photos are so poor that I have been hemming and hawing for the past 24 hours hours trying to decide if I should even share them at all. Needless to say, I decided to show a few of the best of these lousy nighttime photos.

As we had hoped, we did see the arch as we entered the city but getting a nice photo of this sight was difficult at best.

The arch itself was not illuminated so that posed some problems in the dark of night. The only illumination was ambient and reflected light from surrounding buildings. The city itself is rather small also, relatively speaking, so that minimized illumination. Needless to say, the available light for photography was disappointing and I knew it would be extremely difficult to get some good photos.

In addition to the poor light, I had more complications with photographing this nighttime city scene because we were on a moving, rocking, clickity-clackity train... and I was shooting through a double pane of safety acrylic glass... these windows were tinted... and the windows of this sleeper car were a bit dirty and scratched. Each of these conditions when presented alone would present major problems for decent photography. When all of these poor conditions present themselves at the same time, shooting photos becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible.

When we passed through this city on our way back home, the city was flooded in daylight so that made it much easier to photograph as you can see in these photos below. The sun was beginning to set as we made our way through this city which made for some really nice sunset photography behind this iconic Gateway Arch.

All that being said, I did manage to get a few salvageable nighttime shots. These are still poor shots and not worthy of printing but I managed to get a few images to share here online and to remember our stop in St Louis. The photos I shot in daytime came out nicely... quite nicely in fact. By comparison, the differences between the daytime and nighttime shots is night and day! (pun intended)  :)

Now I can get busy with much nicer photos from the rest of our long trip!