Back in Durham, this time with a DSLR

The past couple posts were devoted to a visit to downtown Durham, N.C., which was a spontaneous idea after a doctor appointment at Duke University. I used my iPhone 12 for all the shots. The visit also was brief. 

Lee Ann and I so enjoyed our meal during that trip, that we decided to return a week later, and this time, because the trip was planned, I brought along my Canon 6D DSLR camera to do some more walk-around photography. That is what this post is about.

We spent about the same amount of time doing the walk-around, largely because to go any longer probably would have pushed us into rush hour in the Triangle, and we knew from previous experience that it's no fun being on Triangle expressways in rush hour.

And yes, we returned to Bull City Burger and Brew for lunch, and are pleased to report our experience there was as enjoyable as the first. 

I devoted most of my walk-around to areas I hadn't visited last week, starting with areas along Highway 147 of particular interest to me, which included the Durham Performing Art Center and the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, home of the local Triple A Minor League Basball team. I wasn't able to get optimum available light for my shoot, which would have been early morning of late afternoon. But I did my best to do with what I could. 

The baseball stadium was not open for foot traffic, and portions of it were roped off while construction or remodeling work was being down, especially at the main entrance point facing Jackie Robinson Drive, which is a type of frontage road for Highway 147. But fortunately, by approaching the complex from the north and the Tobacco Road development, I had a nice elevated perspective of the field from the outfield area, beginning in left field and extending to centerfield. At that point, the high-level vantage point in rightfield was blocked off.

I didn't try to get inside the DPAC; if I'd had more time, I would have wanted to do that. But I was pleased I got the outside shots that I did. 

The Tobacco Road Historic District flanks the ballpark to the northwest. The district dates to 1874 and in 2000 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The district is loaded with red-brick structures and multiple "Tobacco Road" or "American Tobacco" signage. An example of one appears in the photo leading off the post. 

The site had once been home to the American Tobacco Company, once the largest manufacturer of cigarettes in the United States. Indeed, a large smoke stack and water tower in the middle of the development still bear the logo of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

For first-time visitors to the area, it's worth the time to stroll the district and appreciate the redevelopment, which has made this part of the downtown area aesthetically striking. 

A view of the Durham Performing Arts Center (above) from Vivian Street, and a closer slice of the structure (below), with the adjacent Aloft Hotel on the right.  

 

Above and below: Both of these shots were taken from Blackwell Street and Diamond View Park, which serves as a sort of buffer between the DPAC, Athletic Park and Tobacco Road, a building in which is seen in the above photo. In the photo below, the western side of DPAC is on the left and the Aloft Hotel is in front, extending to the right.  

Above: A view of the 27-story One City Center, the downtown's tallest structure (opened in 2018), from Blackwell Street and Diamond View Park. 

A colorful crosswalk (above) leading from the park to the Tobacco Road campus. Below, a map and tourist/visitor guide to the campus' various structures, offices and businesses.

 

Above and below are two views of the walkway behind the large Tobacco Road building (as seem in photo higher up in the post). The second photo below shows the Lucky Strike logo on the smoke stack and water tower. 

More red brick in a plaza (above), which is close to the site of the photos immediately above, and in the building below. This area also features a lot of black iron work, as illustrated below.

  

Above and below: Last photos of the Tobacco Road development. Above shows the large red-brick building on the left and One City Center in the distance. Below is an attempt at an artful composition integrating the tree with the architecture. 

 

Above and next seven photos below are images I captured while walking the elevated sidewalk behind the outfield wall of the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. I walked it from left field around to center. The one photo not of the ballfield is a building batters at home plate see behind the left field wall. Another red-brick building is in the background on the right field side for batters. 

Jackie Robinson Drive (above) serves as the south perimeter for the ballpark. Motorists have access to Highway 147 (below) from Jackie Robinson Drive. 

I had rotten luck getting a shot of the main entrance to the ballpark on this day. Construction crews were doing sundry work there (above). That left me difficult access to player jersey tributes (below) that included No. 8 for the fictional "Crash" Davis (played by Kevin Costner) in the motion picture Bull Durham.   

Above: Ticket windows for the Durham Bulls games. 

Above: I liked the concept for the Self-Help building facade, but I don't know the story behind it. 

Another red-brick structure (aboveO just before the railroad tracks on my walk along Blackwell Street back toward One City Center, which I captured close up below at the intersection of Main and Corcoran streets. 

At Main Plaza at Parrish, Corcoran and Market streets sits Major the bull, a sculpture named for Durham philanthropist George “Major” Watts Hill, who had an important role in the city’s development. The sculpture was created in 2004 by Eastern Carolina University students — and future husband and wife — Michael and Leah Foushee Waller.

Above: I'm not positive, but I believe this building is the Durham Hotel on Chapel Hill Street. A short jog from the  hotel is the slice of Chapel Hill Street shown below.

Above: I was really struck by this church building on Cleveland Street. I was a bit puzzled by the three parked fire engines out in front, though. There was no discernible fire or smoke to be seen. 

Above: In the previous post of the downtown area, I had some closeups of the main library building. This is the same building from a distance, using the road to it as a leading line. 

At the corner of Parrish and Magnum streets is this slice of shops (above). Just before this scene is a modest park and rest area, where the swings and installation art (two photos immediately below) can be found. This is less than a half a block from Bull City Burger and Brew. 

Above: Dos Perros is just across the street from the park shown above. 

In my previous post on downtown Durham, I showed you one side of the very modern City Hall building. This is the opposite side, fronting Magnum Street, which actually appears to be the front. I close (below) with a bicycle secured to a pipe on East Parrish Street.  

Bull City Burger & Brew hit the spot

While in Durham on Tuesday, Lee Ann and I had lunch at the Bull City Burger and Brew on East Parrish Street. Pictures in this post are from that visit. The second photo below is a wall art impression of one of the appetizers on the menu -- fried pickles.

Our burgers were fantastic, and the Bryant Bridge Gateway Golden Ale I enjoyed was crisp and delicious. Lee Ann had an unsweetened ice tea. My burger was simple, topped with aoli and ketchup with a side of dirty fries; Lee Ann opted for the pimento burger and the Duck Frites (string potatoes friend in Duck grease). The picture of her meal is a tad out of focus because of the reach I  had to make to get it with the iPhone. 

Visiting Downtown Durham, NC

 Since moving to North Carolina 5 1/2 years ago, Lee Ann and I had been to Durham only a handful of times. That changed recently, when I went to the Duke University Eye Center seeking some relief of a couple of vision issues I'd been experiencing for some time. 

In the past two years, I have seen two optometrists, a cataract specialist (and surgeon), a glaucoma specialist, a retinal ophthalmologist and a retinal surgeon. And up to this point, each consultation has failed to rectify the issues. 

I'll spare you the details, but the most recent trip to the Eye Center in Durham was for an invasive surgery, called a vitrectomy, which was to remove a thin layer of membrane in front of the right retina, which the surgeon is hoping will solve both my issues -- slight blurriness and distortion. The blurriness I first noticed in spring 2021, and the distortion I first noticed after cataract surgery in October 2021. 

I'm in my second week of recovery from the surgery, and the surgeon says she might not know for certain if the procedure was a success for up to three months. Yes, it's a slow healing process. So we'll see. 

After a second follow-up visit to the surgeon's office Tuesday, Lee Ann and I decided to find a local establishment for lunch and (for me) a brew, and then saunter through the downtown area. The sauntering, which involved a flurry of picture-taking, was uplifting for me. 

I had missed indulging my community profile photography, and I was more than pleasantly surprised at how striking the Durham downtown was. And the architecture was pretty nifty as well. 

Leading off this post is one view of the amazing main Durham Public Library building. Immediately below is three sides of the modernist City Hall. The first two sides I came upon I found curious, but then that third side. Wow. 

And the Trinity United Methodist Church, which is just around the corner from City Hall. It's an amazing structure, rebuilt in 1924 after a fire destroyed the previous building, with a three-arch breezeway connecting the church with other facilities. The spire was added in 1985.

 

Trinity United Methodist Church, beginning with the side view (above), then a view of the doors and front steps (below), the triple-arched breezeway (second below) and a closeup of the front doors (third below). 

Above and below are two more views of different sides of the Main Library. 

Above is the first side view of City Hall you see when you approach it from Trinity United Methodist Church. Below is the straight-on front view. And then the second photo below -- the glorious view of the other side of the building!

Above, a full view of the Durham County Court House; below, a closeup of its doors. 

First Presbyterian Church (above) and its more modern school building (below). 

Above: The Durham Parks and Recreation building; below, one side of the county judicial annex, which is across the street from the courthouse, although this view is along a perpendicular street. 

A couple of full-building murals, the one above on the side of Bull City Burger and Brew on East Parrish Street goes back quite a few years. 

 

Above, and the two photos below are simple slices of the downtown merchants' district. 

Salute to the MagMod on-flash modifier

Those of you who have been with me and this blog for a while might remember the post I did nine years ago when I put my then-new Graslon on-flash modifiers to the test while photographing a rehearsals for one of the  Garfield Shakespeare Company productions in Indianapolis. 

While I was mostly pleased with how the Graslon performed, I made a point to mention my biggest grievance, which was that the modifier did not stay attached to the flash as it was supposedly supposed to. 

The Graslon company had someone monitoring the Internet at the time to detect references to the modifers in news articles, blog posts and the like. They saw my post and responded to my beef about the lack of secure fitting of the modifier. They offered suggestions, which I promised to try -- and I did. To no avail. I found that the attachment continued to not be securely afixed no matter what I tried. I stopped using it.

Then a few years later -- it's probably been five or six years now -- I came across another modifier that promised the same light-diffusing benefits as the Graslon but with much better flash attachment security, so I tried it on a money-back guarantee. 

I fell in love with the MagMod MagSphere on-flash modifier immediately, and I have not had a lick of trouble with it from the get-go. The sphere attaches to the top of the flash unit with a magnet drawn to an open-ended grip, or sleeve, that you first slip over the flash head. (The magnet is the "mag" part of MagMod). I simply leave the grip on the flash at all times; the silicone sphere, the actual modifier, is easily removable from the magnetic grip after use to pack away. 

The MagMod sphere nicely distributes the light from the flash when I use it, filling in dark spaces nicely and not over lighting faces. It also does not produce red-eye.

I used the MagMod last week for the first time in probably two years when I took a multi-generation picture of Lee Ann's family who had gathered at her daughter's home for an early Thanksgiving dinner while we were there.  

I hadn't used the MagMod a whole lot in recent years. largely because the volume of my photography in general dropped considerably as a result of the COVID lockdown and aftermath. So turning to it for the family pictures required a brief reacquaintance, but not so much with the modifier which is a snap to get on. The real reacquaintance was with my flash unit, a Canon 580 EX. I put it on TTL and manually set the flash zoom to about 55mm (I was using a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens on my Canon 6D).

I used the manual shooting mode, setting my ISO to 400, my shutter to 1/160 and my aperture to f/8 because we had three rows of people, which I felt necessitated a safe depth of field to get everyone in the picture in focus and sharp. The images require minimum adjustment in Photoshop Elements afterward. 

These were not formal portraits -- we just got the people together and tried to shoot quickly, mostly because of the youngster in the front row who was not an easy one to persuade to sit still or coach how to pose and smile. 

Afterward, the girlfriend of one of Lee Ann's grandsons asked us to take the shot of the two of them with her dog (below). Again, we weren't striving for perfection in the pose here, but I did spend some time in Photoshop healing some issues I came across on each of the couple's faces. Hopefully you won't detect any major problems there. I took this photo in vertical orientation, and the MagMod had no trouble following the flash when I cranked it upward from a position perpendicular to the camera. 

I will mention that Lee Ann and I both tried to talk the couple into using a solid-color background, which was actually very handy and nearby. But they wanted the black-and-white wall hanging showing the urban community as their background. I elected not to argue. The photo below was the only one I shot; they were pleased with it.  

To be clear, I present these not to be a study (and certainly not a lesson) on portraiture. Indeed, in retrospect, I do wish we'd taken more time to better pose the ladies on the ends of the middle row of the group photo, for example. 

I present these to show you how the MagMod Sphere performed in very little time or preparation. The importance of the photo was to include Lee Ann's 99-year-old uncle and 97-year-old aunt (seated in front on either side of Lee Ann's youngest grandson in photo leading off the post) in a picture of some kind with extended family. The group includes Lee Ann's mother, sister, oldest daughter, three grandsons and son-in-law. So in the sense that we got everyone in one photo in a rare confluence of family, we considered it a success.