Foreclosed

There are a lot of empty houses around, and if what I hear on the news is true, there will be a great many more in the months ahead. I recently was hired by a real estate company in Chicago to photographically document a number of properties they represent.



I was told to be very trigger happy when it came to capturing the condition of the properties. An old two-story structure with a full basement garnered about 250 frames to record the effects of age, use and abuse.

What started as a "just the facts" approach changed about midway through this particular home. As I framed up shot after shot of wear and decay, I began to see stories in the details of the old house.



Perhaps I've found a muse to keep me occupied over the winter months ahead.

And there's no lack of subject matter.

Mill

I have an adage that I follow when out taking pictures: If the sky is doing something interesting, find something to stick in front of it and shoot it.

The skies were getting turbulent out at the Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area near Morris, Illinois this past weekend. The park includes the remains of farms that once sat productively on the wide expanse of land. This windmill was selected for the job of acting as foreground interest to stand against the stormy backdrop.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

But when it's nice enough out to fix that leak, it ain't rainin'

An old barn sits within the confines of the Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area near Morris, Illinois. I like old barns. I had a camera with me. You know the rest.



It's a real fixer-upper, which, unless there's some historic significance to this structure, will never get done. For now, the gaps, wood rot, rust and decay make for good photo fodder.



Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

A moment of daylight

Saturday was gray. Low clouds blocked any hint of the existence of the blue sky beyond them all day long. But toward sunset, a small opening, a slit in the clouds, opened on the western horizon. The descending sun burst through that opening and shone for all of five minutes, then disappeared.

A half hour earlier, I had been wandering around the Isaac Ellwood mansion, home to one of the barbed wire barons of the late 1800s, taking in the Victorian architecture and snapping the occasional photo. Under the gray sky, it seemed more of an exercise than a meaningful gathering of photographs.

Heading back to meet my wife, the sun made its brief appearance, bathing the city in soft, warm light. I had just passed St. Mary's Cemetery on the city's north side. I turned around, headed back to the cemetery and pull up just as the sun disappeared. I hopped out of the car, framed some grave markers against the fading sky and fired off a few shots. And that was it. Color gone, gray sky fading to black. Sleeping grave markers all around, worn from a century or more of memorializing the lives of people long forgotten.

Life is as brief and fleeting as those few moments of brilliant sunlight. I just hope that my time will be seen as having brightened up the skies of those around me, if only for a little while.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Peekaboo barn

You may be able to clear the land to make room for a farm and a barn, but eventually, the land takes it all back.

A barn slowly being swallowed by nature just west of Elgin, Illinois on the edge of the Chicago metroplex. If it isn't nature, it's the steady advance of suburbia.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

12 significant photographs #3

Under the stars. Made on March 29, 2009.

Only a handful of times do I recall being in the presence of something spectacular with a camera in hand and thinking to myself, "Don't screw this up." The first time it happened, I screwed up. I was photographing the lighthouse in Escanaba, Michigan at sunset. After the sun slipped below the horizon, the sky exploded in a golden afterglow, bathing everything in an eerie yellow light. I shot two rolls of film of everything I could to capture the otherworldly sights before me. When the film came back from the photo finisher, I was angry -- they had managed to make all of the shots look, well, ordinary. Where was the yellow?

I stormed back to the lab and asked why they printed the pictures that way. "We just print what's on the negatives," was the reply. Determined to show these morons the errors of their ways, I took the negatives to another lab and asked for a contact sheet -- straight prints, no adjustments, no hank-panky from smartypants technicians to ruin my shots. To my dismay, there was no yellow to be seen on the contact sheet either -- actually, there was almost nothing to be seen at all. I thought back to how I metered the exposure in the golden twilight and realized I compensated for the diminishing light in the wrong direction -- instead of underexposing from the meter reading, I overexposed by two stops. I basically was the proud owner of two rolls of nothing. The fact that the first lab got any pictures to come out at all should have earned them a medal, not my scorn.

Where was I going with that story? Oh, yeah. For most of us shutterbugs, the spectacular happens only very rarely. Unless maybe you live on a mountaintop or a rainforest or are a storm chaser or something. The rest of us lead fairly ordinary lives. For us, the trick is to find ways to make the ordinary look extraordinary. It can be done. Either through relationship of the subject to its surroundings, angle, lighting, distance -- the name of the game is to try to look at old things in new ways.

Visiting family in Tennessee last spring, I became enamored with some old trucks abandoned in a field nearby. I spent night after night with a tripod and a hand held flash unit trying to get something interesting to show up on my camera. I'd set the camera for a long exposure, then trigger the flash from different angles to create the picture. After two nights I didn't have much to show for my efforts.

The third night, I set out again. When I shoot at night, I usually set the camera low on a tripod -- usually no more than a foot off the ground. It makes the night look more imposing. As for exposure, instead of keying on the trucks, as I had the previous nights, I set the exposure to catch the night sky. While the camera's shutter opened for the 30 seconds necessary to get the stars to register, I ran around the truck with my flash, firing six or seven bursts of light, finishing off with a burst in the cab with a blue filter placed over the flash head.

Other than adjusting contrast, the image above is as it came out of the camera. The orange glow in the sky came courtesy of the lights in a town about ten miles away.

So an ordinary truck in an ordinary setting (in Tennessee, at least) became extraordinary by picking the time and method of making the image.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

12 significant photos #2

A barn that time forgot. Made on February 14, 2009.

Continuing the retrospective on significant photos taken in 2009.

I photographed this barn while on the way to a photo session. I live on the edge of the Chicago metroplex and it's not uncommon for the occasional barn to intermingle with shopping centers and subdivisions. This barn sits behind a CVS pharmacy south of Crystal Lake, Illinois.

Normally, the barn would have been mostly hidden among the trees and brush, but a dusting of snow the night before painted the roof white and covered the foreground grass. It looked interesting, so I pulled into the pharmacy parking lot, walked over to the edge of the barn property and shot a few frames. I was finished in less than five minutes.

I didn't even bother to post the photo anywhere for a few days, but when I did, the reaction to the picture was instantaneous and deep. Views and comments poured in on Flickr and for a time, the photo appeared in the rotation of featured photos on one of the site's main pages, which generated more views and comments.

I'm still not exactly sure what the fuss was about, or what drew people to this particular image. I was definitely thinking "Red Rule" when I made the picture. The doors hanging askew adds some quirkiness to the barn and quirkiness is good in a picture. The doors perhaps add to the feeling of neglect and abandonment. And maybe I should have known about the fuss, seeing as how another picture of a barn after a winter snowfall is one of my most viewed online photos -- it's received nearly 30,000 views and after two years, still gets 70-90 views every day.

Hey, it's snowing today. Maybe I should go look for some barns.

NOTE: Fixed the link. Sorry.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

12 significant photographs #1

New Year's Day, Forrest Illinois. Made on January 1, 2009.

It's happened before, when the current crop of photos on my memory cards and hard drive just don't seem to be cutting it or I'm just stuck on finding topics about which to blog. My solution? The photographic retrospective! Of course -- pull out some old pictures and come up with some thoughts to make them relevant (or seem that way).

Ansel Adams, the dean of American landscape photographers, has a lot of quotes that I like. Among them, "You don't take a photograph, you make it." "A good photograph is knowing where to stand." "There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."

Ansel also said, "Twelve significant images in any one year is a good crop."

The photos on my computer are stored in folders according to the month they were taken (I'm sorry -- made). So I thought I'd go through each folder from the past year and pull out the best image and expound on it a little. I'm fully aware that some months may contain more than one significant photo and others may not contain any, but ah well.

The photo above was my first one of 2009. My wife and I were traveling to Urbana, Illinois on New Year's Day to visit our son who is at the University of Illinois. We like to take back roads in lieu of highways. As we rolled through the flat farmlands of central Illinois, I noticed a magnificent display of clouds overhead.

There are some photographic rules I try to follow. One of them is, if the sky is doing something interesting, find a place to take a picture, and quickly! I told my wife I was going to pull off on the next side road we came to to take a couple of shots because the sky was just too darn cool. She nodded in that way of hers that says, "Here we go again." She knows me.

I was hoping to find something -- anything -- to use as some foreground interest at the next crossroad to feature against the sky. As luck would have it, a whole lot of junk had been left at the edge of a field, the tires and cable being the largest items. I have another rule, which is to try to avoid shooting into the sun. I broke that rule. I shot two exposures, one for the tires in the foreground and one for the sky, then merged them later in Photoshop.

This particular image is significant in that while making the exposures, I accidentally shot them "too dark." My camera was still relatively new to me, and the LCD display on the back is pretty much useless in bright daylight. Getting the exposure to give me something I could see on the back of the camera actually made them very dark (I've since learned about histograms, but that's another post). In post processing, I was amazed at the range of tones I could recover by playing with the Highlights and Shadows sliders, and this was even with a JPEG image (I've since learned about RAW, but that's another post, too). In effect, this image represents my first high dynamic range (HDR) photograph, despite making adjustments to the tonal range manually. The making of this picture laid the groundwork for other pictures to come in 2009.

On top of that, it's just a good picture. Abandonment, desolation, distance -- along with some hope in the sky and the road that leads over the next hilltop. Perfect depictor of what I was experiencing at the time, having lost a job a few months earlier. I guess I saw myself in those discarded tires.

What you might witness in the rest of this series is the process of me becoming retreaded.

January 2009 significant picture runners up number one and number two.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Bound

At some point in the distant past, it was important for this wire to encircle this post. It set apart something of value from the wider world around it; it marked the personal property of the person who tied this and other strands of wire across the countryside.

Not so anymore. The property is no longer, the post and wire relieved of their duties long ago. Rusting and rotting, protecting nothing.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

In storage

An old truck (just barely) protected from the elements. Seen near Viola, Tennessee. Black and white conversion of a color photograph. Created a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop to adjust gray tones.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

The covered bridges of Ozaukee County

Okay, make that bridge, singular. Ozaukee County, Wisconsin is home to exactly one covered bridge -- the last one still standing in Wisconsin. So, in one fell swoop, I managed to photograph every covered bridge in the state. Whew.

The bridge is a neat piece of engineering, it is held together with wooden pins -- no nails.



So why did they cover bridges? Local folklore holds that teams of oxen got skittish when crossing a bridge with a view of the flowing waters in the creek below. This bridge is situated on Cedar Creek near the town of Cedarburg, itself a place filled with the history of the German immigrants who settled there in the early 1800s.

UPDATE: A little Googling has revealed that there are in fact more than 40 covered bridges in the state. What the heck? Even though the majority of the bridges are less than 30 years old, this discovery makes me suspicious of the Wisconsin towns that claim the invention of the ice cream sundae, Flag Day and the Republican party.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Scenes from a flea market -- Tie dye guy

How many relics from the sixties can you spot in this photo? VW bus? Check. Love beads? Check. Tons of tie dyed fabrics? Check. Guy that looks like a cross between Jim Henson and Chewbacca? Checkaroo.

A couple of weeks before my daughter's wedding, mom, dad and daughter spent a Sunday afternoon at a flea market in St. Charles, Illinois. Mom and daughter went to search out antique curios, knickknacks and assorted junk for items to possibly adorn the future wedded couple's apartment. Dad went to look for interesting stuff to photograph.

Right out of the gate (or rather, right inside the gate) was Tie Dye Guy selling stuff that I never really cared for the first time around. My mom and dad must have done a masterful job of instilling middle American values in this baby boomer because I found nothing much of interest in the countercultural lifestyle of the sixties.

OK, I did wear cutoff jean shorts back then and I did disavow materialism until the 1980s. Does that count?

More flea markety goodness to come.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Summer prairie

What the entire state of Illinois used to look like.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Romancing the rust

At the Fox Valley Trolley Museum in South Elgin, Illinois, South Shore & South Bend Railway car number 14 slowly oxidizes along with a number of other relics from the days when inter-urban travel by rail gave folks a reason to keep the cars maintained.

What is it about people that causes us to hang onto stuff long after its usefullness has past? I have a basement full of things that I haven't used in years, but can't find it within myself to ditch them. Why is there romance in the rust and dust?

Five images taken with circular polarizer and combined in Photomatix Pro. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

DeKalb depot

To further contribute to the eclectic nature of my recent photography efforts, I submit this shot of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad depot in DeKalb, Illinois.

The stone and brickwork, overhanging roof and the half-round window encasing the main entrance are marvelous architectural details, although the two panel aluminum storm door does nothing for the ambience of the place.

The railroad itself dates to 1853 when it was built by the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, the first to be constructed in DeKalb County. This particular building replaced an earlier depot and was constructed in 1891 when a second track was added to the line. The railroad brought growth to the towns situated along its tracks.

The east end of the station served as a passenger station, while the west end was used for freight.

The Chicago & Northwestern Railroad later bought the road and developed it into a lucrative enterprise. Running from Dixon to St. Charles, the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad was the only double-track road to span the entire width of the county.

Today the building is used by a track maintenance unit for the Union Pacific railroad. There are hopes that the station may once again see use as a passenger station should a commuter rail line ever be established from Chicago, but that possibility extends far into the future, perhaps as far as this building and the tracks along which it stands extends into the past.

Worm's Eye shot taken from two inches above the cobblestone entryway. Single image HDR.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

In the parking lot of time

Then again,aren't we all there, too?

Taken near Ellison Bay, Wisconsin. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Coming unhinged

I returned to an old one-room schoolhouse in Door County to hopefully get a closer look at what remained of the building. The story of how I originally stumbled onto this structure is here.

I walked around the building, peering into a window or missing door here and there to get a photo of the decay within. At one point, I leaned a bit too heavily on the exterior wall while trying to photograph the interior and the entire building shifted a few inches.

The building had two entry doors, both of which opened into the single room inside. I imagine that boys and girls used separate doors to enter the schoolhouse, but don't quote me on that. This is one of the twin foyers that lead to the large open room beyond.

This is the room beyond:



Somewhere along the way, this building was used to stash a large number of paint cans and lids after much of the floor had been removed.

Entry door into the other foyer:



The view through the rear window:



Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Sit a spell

During the peak tourist season in Door County, Wisconsin, a little piece of Americana greets hundreds of tourists each day as they head north on highway 42 on their way to catch a ferry to Washington Island. It's been decades since Gus Klenke tuned an engine or chatted with a traveler while filling his car's tank with gas, but Gus' legacy remains -- a fading sign that bears his name in 12-inch letters.

The corner lot in Ellison Bay features Klenke's white wood frame building, a faded blue chevy pickup truck -- always festooned with flowers and other artifacts reflective of the particular season -- and a formerly green metal chair, a reminder of the days when buying gasoline was as much a social event as a business transaction.

"Have to run so soon? Folks are just so busy these days."



Photos taken in "worm's eye" mode -- camera held two or three inches off the ground, thumb on shutter button, pretty much guessing where to aim it. It can take several attempts before catching something worth keeping, but the end result is always a unique angle on the world.

Note: A comment from Nate caused me to take another look at the Photomatix settings I used when creating these and other recent HDR photographs. I discovered that Light Smoothing was set too low, which resulted in haloing in areas of adjacent high contrast. The photos have been reprocessed and replaced. Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Trolley triptych

Three photos from the Fox River Trolley Museum in South Elgin, Illinois.

Keep your wheels safely rolling this weekend. Have a good one.





Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Rod's wrecker redux

My, oh my!
Look how the time flies.
Look how the world changes
in the blink of an eye.

My, oh my!
Look how the years have flown.
Turnin’ around before you know it --
Up and gone.
Oh my, oh my, oh my.

These lyrics fit the picture of the abandoned old wrecker truck in more ways than one. It's the chorus of a song recorded by a country music duo that called themselves The Wreckers.

Photo blogging: Digicamhelp.com is a Web site devoted to helping beginning to intermediate photography enthusiasts get the most out of their digital camera equipment. I've been a contributing author to the site since January -- you can check out articles on everything from basic exposure and composition to post-processing and visual effects. You can sign up for Digicam's newsletter and alerts for new posted content.

Picture too big? Here's a smaller version. Hand held flash unit fired six times around the truck during a 30 second exposure at deep twilight. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.