I’ve seen the St. Louis Gateway Arch countless times over the years but only been close to it a few times. During a trip to St. Louis this weekend I decided to photograph it. Most of the time I was using a wide angle lens and a Cokin polarizer on a mount. Unfortunately, the mount sits just a little bit away from the lens and is enough to cause vignetting. While I think this shot would have been better with a polarizer because of all of the reflections, I needed to go full wide on this shot and could not afford to lose the corners.
While my brother Jesse and I were out, there was a little bit of an altercation going on with a guy and what appeared to be Arch security. This guy was ejected from the visitors center for an incident involving a knife and him grabbing it back from someone. He was acting like a general asshole about the whole thing, ranting about how he had FBI government clearance and the authorities were blowing this whole thing out of proportion. After things continued to escalate, he refused to take the ticket saying, “I’m not gonna take the ticket. Take be to jail! You are not going to give me a ticket. You’re gonna have to take me to jail!” So, the police arrived and promptly took the man to jail and away from his ashamed wife and surely soon to be delinquent children. That along was worth the trip.