Day Two Hundred Seventy Seven. October 3. Countdown 89 Days. Picture # 277. "Corks & Crown tops". There is a one gallon decorative glass jar sitting on a shelf just outside of my kitchen. One day for no reason that I can think off, I dropped a bottle cap in the jar. Then another and another . . . Corks got added to the mix, sometime along the way. I do not drink much, so the jar is only half full after four years. Or for you optimists, only half empty. Crown tops were invented around 1890. The earliest crown top bottle necks were still hand finished after the body of the bottle was blown in a mold. I have a few early examples in my bottle collection. Another memory of mine from childhood was "curb markets", the forerunner to the modern convenience store. The stores were all the same. They were not very big and they had a large garage door that opened all the way across the front of the building. There was a side walk that extended about 8-10 feet in front of the store that formed the "curb" for parking. Hence the name "curb market". Now back to bottle caps. The parking lots for the stores usually were topped with a coating that everyone called blacktop. It's surface would get soft during hot weather. In the 1960s before enviromental awareness became the norm, people would toss their caps on the ground and some store owners just emptied the cap catchers off of the top loading drink boxes on the parking lots. So over time the caps would get pressed into the soft black top. Some older stores lots were virtually paved with crown tops. Same as now, I was always fascinated by the colors and patterns. Canon Rebel T3i, handheld. Canon 28-135mm lens. Focal length 100mm. f/5.6. ISO 800. Exposure 1/200 second. Flash +1 with a sheet of paper handheld as a diffuser.
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