(I hate my key board....I got about half way through this and hit something wrong and it deleted popped back to the home page and I lost everything! WTF! Oh well.)
I shot this at the Kater Street Garden. I shoot there quite often as I am near there every two weeks. My voice teacher lives up the road a piece.
The garden is about 8 feet wide and runs the entire length of Kater Street from 17th to 18th Streets. It is a neiborhood project but the main gardener seems to be this guy named Bob who I have met and talk to when I see him working on or watering the garden. He has made this a major hobby of his though I know other people do have their own sections of the garden. The garden is quite wonderful and a colorful oasis in its urban surroundings. It was also selected by Project Green as the best neighborhood garden in the City of Philadelphia within recent years. Bob, for reasons unknown to me, rejected the award. Bob does maintain a lot of the garden and donates at lot of time and money to it.
Here are some challenge entries shot there in the last two years:
So....here is the story, or rather the rest of it.
One Saturday in February of this year, I was shooting on 17th Street near Spruce. Many people who live in the neigborhood know me by sight as I am there so often. One of the women from the neighborhood spotted me and came up to talk to me. She told me the new owners of the building that is behind the garden had let it be known that they intended to put 'two small dumpsters' in the garden on the 18th Street end. Well the neighborhood was up in arms about this and she told me there would be a neighborhood association meeting (South of South) a couple of weeks hence and would I come and lend my support. I said I would and she gave me information for the association's web site so I could find the time and date of the meeting.
So I decided to go. I went to the web site and gor the information and went. Know that I have not ever been to my own neighborhood association's meetings. I found this meeting quite interesting seeing the dynamics of the group and individuals at work.
We were in a small double room at a City recreation center. There was a leader and secretary who announced the presentations being given. Mostly there were rehabs of existing dwellings in the neighborhood and plans for each project were given mostly with pictures and documentation. Some did not have pictures or artist renderings of the designs of the projects being presented and those presenters were advised to return with same at a future meeting.
The main concerns of most of the projects were Decks and Parking. Seems this one woman who has lived in the area for some time was not having anything to do with Decks. And unfortunately for the presenters, all of them seemed to include a deck or two in their designs. Apparently one loud party a year from any one of the existing decks in the neighborhood were all this woman could deal with. She blackballed anything with a deck. I thought it a bit much but she was on our side in the Garden proposal so I let it go.
I was confused about the parking issue. It seems like they wanted the projects to include plans for off street parking. Most parking in the area is on street so off street is preferred for new construction and for rehabs. But I thought...hmmm....if your plans do include off street parking that is entered/exited of the street into the dwelling, aren't you getting rid of some premium on street parking? I do know. So I kept quiet....not my neighborhood anyway.
One of the presenters was the pastor of a church who owns 25 or so rental dwellings in the neighborhood. The rents collected from the dwellings help to support the church and the properties were given to the church as part of wills and other dcnations. The poor pastor was chastised quite a bit about work that had been done on some of the dwellings and the eyesores that some had become. Particularly one large building that had been vacant for over 20 years that is on the corner of 18th and South and abutts the building in the rear of the garden.
So our part of the program came up. The building was represented by an attorney and the maintenance engineer.
They made it quite plain that they did not understand the concern of the neighborhood and also made sure that everyone knew who owned what. Well, it seems that when this building was built, the neighborhood made a concession to the builders and the original owners, the University of Pennslyvania, that they could have an easement of part of the land that should be 15% of open space dictated by city ordinances if the neighborhood could still have the garden. The agreement was mediated by a city council person. Unfortunately, know one knew about this as it is not in writing any where thay anyone could find. But the building is beyond its open space allowance.
People tried to argue another location and the Pastor's empty building came up. But nothing was really resolved and the Lawyer and Engineer for the building said that they were not asking for permission, they were just introducing themselves to the neighborhood and the dumpsters were going to go in. Where upon, the wonderful Deck Lady said, "Welcome to the neighborhood!" and the majority of the room got up and walked out.
Well as of time I took this picture, no dumpsters were in the garden. There was a big one on the street near where the proposed ones would go and it blocks the sidewalk with a fence around it at the end of the garden. But nothing in the garden yet. It would be said if they did this. The dumpsters would go right where Bob's beautiful daylilies are and they are about to bloom.
Post: Camera Raw adjustments in PSElements 6.0. Convert to jpeg. Cropped first for 1.25:1 and then adjusted with a few more crops for composition. Layer adjustments for levels, brightness/contrast and hue/saturation. Spot edit small bits of glare on the bee. Sharpen. Small dose of USM for clarity. Resize Sharpen.
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Absolutely gorgeous photo! I wish I could take such a great one. Having said that, I don't see a story here. There should be additional elements which combine to tell a story. This is just (fantastic) picture of a bee in a flower. On the technical merits of the photo, it deserves a ten. But you should have entered it into the free study.
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