WALKER'S POINT: QUIRKS

Walker's Point is an older neighborhood on Milwaukee's near south side.  It is diverse both culturally and in terms of property use and is slowly undergoing an economic revival.  A lot of the shops are, well, quirky and present interesting photo opportunities, and last week I spent an hour or so walking around with my camera, something I had done a number of times last summer.

Here are a couple of shots of storefronts.

I actually took a few shots of this second story window before realizing that if I shifted my position a little to the right I could eliminate most of the reflections that were plaguing the window, allowing the little white ghost to show up better.  A lesson about working the shot.

Note the signs in this tavern window.

I think this place was only a couple of doors away from another bar with the name Walker's Pint.  Clever.

Jeremy Novy is a street artist who recently relocated to San Francisco but not before gracing Milwaukee with any number of stenciled graffiti of koi.  I ran a cross a few in Walker's Point and caught this shot of one of them.  Simple and graceful, I thought.

I wound up being a little dissatisfied with this shot, not for its technical quality but for its composition.  I would have preferred having more negative space around the graffito.  Alternatively, there were actually a number of koi on this exterior wall of peeling paint, and I could have figured out how to include more koi in the shot.  I will need to go back, I think.

We're all familiar with the metal plates that are anchored into sidewalks at points where it is sloping down to street level to accommodate those in wheelchairs.  I had always thought that the plates, which all feature a similar pattern of raised knobs, were intended to provided added traction on sloped surfaces.  But I have been informed by a knowledgeable party that they are actually intended primarily to provide warning to blind persons of a change of slope.

On our recent visit to Austin, we attended an art festival one of the featured photographers of which included a nicely framed photograph of one of these plates.  His was a bit more interesting--and cleaner--but I thought, what the heck.  I picked this one for its unusual color.  Again, I intend to play a little more with this subject.

On my walk I also ran across a more than 50 year old Chevy truck that at some point had undergone restoration and painting with a rust colored primer.  Here's one of the detail shots I took that worked OK.

Following is a detail shot of a portion of a medallion for an overhead light fixture in the entryway for another Walker's Point bar.  (There are a large number of bars in Walker's Point.)

I have photographed this medallion previously but keep finding myself going back.

There wasn't much to the neon sign for the following bar (yes, another bar), so I decided to play around with the image a little, eliminating all color except the red of the neon.  Just OK, I thought.

Finally, here is the stark and frankly unattractive entryway of a nondescript industrial building.

I actually like this photo.  The composition's redeeming quality, if there is one, is the series of concentric rectangles that it presents.  The siding is cheap and ugly, but the shadows the seams create add nicely to the texture, I think.

John