USA – Page 4 – Larkvi.com Weblog

Storm over Abbey Church, St. John’s University, Minnesota, 2010

A summer electrical storm lights up the night over the modernist abbey church on the campus of St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minnesota. The impressive storm raged for many hours, but I was unable to stay even an hour, as the driving rain was rendering all my photos blurry, and could not be kept off the lens, and rising winds threatened the stability of my tripod. Not to mention that standing in an open field in an electrical storm is somewhat disconcerting. . .

20 seconds at f/5.6 iso 400.

Summer Sunset, Collegeville, Minnesota, 2010

The sun sets over ponds on the road to St. John’s University, ending another hot and humid Summer day in Central Minnesota.

Abbey Church, St. John’s University, Minnesota, 2010

An arch holding up the bell tower (if tower is the right word) hangs over a set of concrete seats, next to the entrance to the abbey church, St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota.

The modernist foyer and baptismal font in the Abbey Church. The statue is St. John the Baptist by Doris Caesar.

An overview of the interior, showing the altar, and behind it the futuristic throne of the abbot. The pews, angular and concrete, are extremely uncomfortable, apparently a purposeful design decision, coupled with the brutalism of the architecture and the bareness of the concrete, underscoring the ascetic quality of monastic life.

A stairway leading to the balcony shows the beautiful quality of the windows, contrasting against the bareness of the concrete, at the Abbey Church of St. John’s.

The front windows, as seen from the balcony of the Abbey Church of St. John’s. The backlit tops of the pews may be faintly seen in the dark lower section of the image.

And now for something a little different. . .

I wanted to experiment a bit with a punchier, more-saturated look, and this is what came out of a shoot with Pop the cat.

Strobist info: 1 SB-28 in a shoot through umbrella camera right to fill open shade.

I wanted to experiment a bit with a punchier, more-saturated look, and this is what came out of a shoot with Pop the cat.

Strobist info: 1 SB-28 in a shoot through umbrella camera right to fill open shade.

USAID Stove, Bilbala, Lasta, Ethiopia, June 2009

A teapot simmers atop a stove made from a ‘USA Fortified Vegetable Oil’ container distributed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It if a very common to see bags of grain and containers of vegetable oil with USA written across them, both in shops and being reused in other contexts, as Ethiopia receives about $1 billion of food aid ever year (though I do not know the percentage provided by the U. S.).