Unexpected challenges

This past Saturday I woke early with plans to meet up with a friend of mine to do a photo walk somewhere in downtown St. Louis.  Although we had been planning our walk for over a week we still hadn’t come up with a destination.  Luckily though by the time I picked him up we were able to agree on heading down to the old Lemp Brewery which sits in the shadows of AB’s St. Louis brewery.  We were blessed with a beautiful morning, wonderful temperatures and plenty of hot coffee.  With much enthusiasm we headed down the road with high expectations of getting some great shots of the brewery and it’s internal complex.

We arrived at the brewery and quickly found a parking spot and heading to the main gate.  It was open and it appeared that no one was around.  (For those of you unfamiliar with Lemp it is an old brewery that hasn’t been in operation in decades.  However the building does get used for various projects including some steel work, etc.  But for the most part it is abandoned.)  Our intent was to walk around the inside of the complex to get some shots of internal buildings and architecture which you cannot access from outside the compounds walls.  Unfortunately we found ourselves staring into a giant NO TRESPASSING SIGN that was pretty intimidating.  We discussed ignoring it only to quickly encounter several cars pulling through the gate “reporting to work” whose occupants quickly convinced us through their stares that we should not enter without permission.

Deciding to live to fight another day we quickly resigned ourselves to being stuck outside of the walls of the brewery.  This was clearly not what we had planned and I found myself quickly upset that what I had intended to spend my morning shooting was no longer an option.  But fortunately the weather and coffee were stronger than my disappointment and we decided to see what we could shoot around the brewery and over the walls.  We spent the next 90 minutes walking around the entire complex shooting whatever caught our eyes.  While we didn’t necessarily get shots we were looking for we did have a great time just being out in the mix and enjoying our passion.

What I took away most from this shoot was that sometimes you just have to adapt.  You never know when you will be faced with a situation like mine or perhaps worse – rain on a wedding shoot perhaps?  No matter what gets thrown at your way you have to learn to adapt and take advantage of the unexpected.  Because you never know when something least expected will turn out to be the best shot of your life.