Napa Memorial tolerant

…I am begining to believe that Napa County and prehaps the area near the city of Napa is memorial tolerant. After finding the two memorials yesterday, I have now found a total of five in this area. One of which I must have driven past three times, but probably looking on the wrong side of the road. I have a little Paul Lester in me, such that if someone wants to stop and chat with me while I am photographing, I stop and chat! But I have learned the hard way many years ago, either talk or take photographs, I can’t do those two things at the same time. Okay, I’m a guy and I’m hard wired to do one thing at a time.

That is how I found a little more unusual memorial closer into Napa. While we were talking, this jogger asked if I had photographed the motorcycle memorial in town. Now as I was currently photographing the scooter memorial as the only one that I knew of concerning a cycle accident, I asked where this other one was. The jogger told me where and that every year a bunch of folks on their Harley’s come into town to work on this memorial and it was getting a little more elaborate each year.

I almost missed it a fourth time, as it incorporated the city’s speed sign, which is not where I would look for such a memorial. That is what I would consider as Memorial tolerant. And it was an actual growing memorial with all sorts of sunflowers and roses planted, as well as having solar lights near the Harley embrazen cross. Now I knew that this might be a bit different memorial photograph, so after photographing it during the day, I planned to return after dark to take advantage of the solar lights if they were working. …and yes they were working tonight.

This was my first night time photograph of a memorial, although I did photograph this at very late dusk evening to get some sky seperation with the background trees. I think that I ended up with about 8 night exposusers at 30 seconds. Since this memorial was near the highway, I do have some background car light streaks, but this could be an interesting photograph, or at least it is in color (yikes, the “color” word, I need to be careful that someone does not start thinking that I am a contemporary artist).  At the moment, I am having a little trouble post-visualizing these images in Black and white with the toning that I am using. So this should be interesting….

Best regards, Doug