It’s always bugged me about the sign for the closed L-Ken’s Drive-In in Colonie.
Take a look.
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This photo of L-Ken’s was shot in 2010. And right away, you can see the big distracting issue that ruins this photograph.
Yep. It’s that big real estate sign that’s become part of the marquee.
Ugh.
It even ended up in my photo Re-Lighting L-Ken’s, which you can see here.
Yeah, I know this photo won an Honorable Mention silk at Altamont in 2014, but still…
Recently, however, as I was going through my old legacy photos on a restored-from-crash hard drive, I remembered that I took photos of the L-Ken’s sign in 2009 and 2010, mostly during my Kodachrome test shot period, and there it was. An L-Ken’s sign WITHOUT the realtor information.
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Well, hello. No realtor information, just an artistic rendering of an ice cream cone.
But this Kodachrome shot is too dark. And those striped shadows across the ice cream cone… Damn it Miller, have you no concept of the proper placement of sunshine in your photos?
I kept looking. And the only other photo I had of the ice cream L-Ken’s sign that DIDN’T have shadow striping was a 2008 HDR attempt that, in retrospect, kinda looks like clown vomit.
But if I could find the original 2008 photos that were used to create the HDR shot… the original, non-clown-vomit HDR photos.
Looking, looking, looking…
Well, hello.
Okay, let’s see if I can do a little adjustment here. I cropped the 2009 photo down to the ice cream sign, and pulled up one of the photos from 2014 that I used to make the Re-Lighting L-Ken’s sign.
Stretch. Tilt. Superimpose. Adjust levels.
And…
Here it is. L-Ken’s sign, realtor-free.
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Much better.
So what can I do with this reconstructed photo?
I can’t re-enter it in competition; a superimposition of two images from half a decade apart would disqualify the photo from entry in the Big E. I’ve shown a similar picture like this at Altamont, so I can’t re-show it there. New York State Fair? Nah, for them it would be just a neon sign, nothing remarkable. Same thing for the Durham Fair.
Maybe I’ll just hold on to this picture until Charity Season 2016, when I can offer it to help raise money at something like the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society’s Art Saves Animals, or Historic Albany Foundation’s “BUILT” event.
Or maybe the best thing for me to do is to just keep this picture … keep it as a reminder of what L-Ken’s used to be, and what good memories it still provides.
It’s nice to have options like this.
Really nice.
Chuck The Writer 
Enter it in the state fair. Even though nobody from outside the Capital Region may recognize L-Ken’s specifically, it’s representative of the sort of drive-ins that are/were ubiquitous across upstate.
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My parents lived in the neighborhood behind L-Ken’s
I spent a lot of time there and knew the owner.
Are you able to use my fathers Argus (the brick) camera?
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I’ve used it a couple of times, but I’m still getting used to it. There’s a part that I need to replace on it, as soon as I can do that I can shoot more with it.
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