Down Michigan Avenue

The view from about 24 stories above the streets of Chicago. Michigan Avenue, looking south from the Intercontinental Hotel. Taken during a break in a photo shoot there earlier this month.

Tribune Tower is at the left edge of the frame, Merchandise Mart is just past the Radisson. Sears Willis Tower is just peeking at the upper right.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Under cloudy skies

The city of Chicago, as viewed from the waterfront of Evanston, Illinois to the north.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Eisenhower Expressway, Chicago, 10:00 a.m.

Traffic was crawling, and as long as I had to crawl along with it, I thought I'd play with a camera. Set the focus and exposure manually (so the camera would fire immediately and not waste time focusing and exposing) and stuck the camera at arm's length toward the passenger side window (which was rolled down to eliminate reflections) to see what I could catch.

What I caught was a little slice of life on the freeway while idling. A different kind of street photography. Photography while stuck ON the street.

I saw the lady in her business suit talking on a cell phone. So I aimed and fired. Taking care of business in the backup? Phoning in that she'd be late to her next appointment? Just yakking to pass time?

I didn't see the truck driver giving me the skunk eye -- that was a bonus. Little did he suspect that his route that day was going to take him to the internets.

Even the accidental odd angle adds some tension to the scene.

One thing my wife and I noticed when we moved to Chicago about 18 years ago was that people tended not to get aggravated while sitting in Chicago's many traffic james. They just take it in stride here. It's a part of the deal, and it's no big deal.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Cityscapes

More photos from my rainy day visit to Chicago. And more experimentation with high density range (HDR) photographs. A camera can only capture (in one image) a small fraction of the tones in a given scene. HDR software allows you to blend several images taken at different exposures into one image with an incresed range of tones.



The effect can be jarring, because a) we're used to seeing a limited range of tones in a photograph and b) the resulting image is a type of hyper-reality.

I'm liking how HDR brings out the textures in a scene. I'll keep experimenting and let you peek in on how things are coming.

It was a busy weekend, photography-wise. On Saturday, I had the good fortune to photograph four young women, good friends who had gone their separate ways, became mommies and decided to reunite for a weekend. One of the mommies, from Idaho, located me through an internet search engine and hired me to photograph the group, along with individual mommies and babies. Lots of fun.

On Sunday, I photographed a number of jazz combos from Roosevelt University as they performed their "final exams" for the music faculty. The venue was not the staid halls of academia, but a Chicago nightclub called Martyr's. A long afternoon, but lots of good photos to be had (and processed).

I'd better get to work. I'll be posting sample pics from the two photo gigs on Your Best Light, my blog for contract photography.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

All that jazz

Rob Parton

I've been fortunate enough to have an ongoing assignment for Roosevelt University in Chicago to capture images of the various performing groups at the school's Chicago College of Performing Arts. Earlier this week, I photographed the school's jazz emsembles at the Jazz Showcase, a landmark of the Chicago jazz scene.

The club is currently situated in the Dearborn Station section of Chicago, which looks like it could function as a location for a 1940s vintage movie. Since 1947, jazz luminaries have passed through the club, which has the photos and news clippings on display to prove it.

I arrived at the gig fully expecting to shoot the two school ensembles scheduled that night and not much more. What I forgot was that college-level jazz concerts usually feature professional guest artists who jam with the band.

So, while struggling all night with low lighting and a stage that limited my shooting angles, I got to hear some excellent players who thrilled a nearly full house -- Trumpeter Rob Parton, who also serves as Chairman of the school's Jazz Studies Department and leader of the ensembles, local Alto sax man and RU faculty member Mike Smith and the evening's featured guest, Tenor and soprano sax artist Dick Oatts.


Mike Smith (left) and Dick Oatts

The night's shooting was a delicate tightrope act -- I pushed the ISO as far as I dared and shot with an 18mm lens (so I could hand-hold the camera at shutter speeds of 1/30 of a second or so) and a 135mm 2.8 prime with a monopod for closeups. The slow shutter speeds increased the odds of motion blur (those cats moved while they played - you can see Mr. Oatts in action here), so I just kept shooting shot after shot, trying to time the shots to their movements and the music. Out of nearly 400 shots, I was able to keep about 150 or so. By the way, these shots are as original as the conditions allowed -- no cropping, just some slight levels adjustments and a trip through Neat Image noise reduction software.

Lots of processing and noise reduction ahead of me. For a change of pace, I'll be listening to classical music while shooting the college's Wind Ensemble tonight.

More Bean

Passing rain clouds added some drama to the skies over (and the reflections on) Cloud Gate, aka The Bean, in Chicago's Millennium Park.

And then the sun came out.



And it made people smile.



Technical stuff: Photographs are single-image HDR. Individual RAW files processed into three separate images with 2-stop exposure difference and merged in Photomatix Pro. Original RAW images exposed for highlights, which diminishes stereotypical HDR artifacts like grayed-out highlights and halos around objects of high contrast.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

The Bean. In the rain. Yesterday.

I stayed up way past my regular bedtime last night to photograph the Roosevelt University Jazz Ensemble at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago (the pictures are still sleeping in my camera). I budgeted an hour and a half to two hours to get downtown from Elgin since I was heading in during rush hour. I got there in a little over an hour. Amazing.

That left me with an extra hour to kill, so I headed over to Millennium Park to photograph the Cloud Gate sculpture, aka The Bean before heading over to the jazz club. The day was cloudy and misty, and I hoped that I could make the best of the atmosphere. Even with the overcast sky, the difference in brightness between the sky and buildings/Bean was too much -- exposing The Bean properly turned patches of the sky completely white. Exposing the sky properly turned The Bean too dark.

I had just finished writing an article this week for Digicamhelp that deals with how to solve the problem (it will be posted in a week or so -- look for it or subscribe to the site's RSS feed). I decided to take my own advice. I switched the camera to RAW format (this technique works with JPEGs, just not as well) and exposed for the sky. Afterward, you can adjust the dark areas with the Shadows and Highlight feature of photo editing programs like Photoshop. Free web-based editing programs like Picasa and Picnik also have this feature that can be used to rescue muddy shadows. Shoot at the lowest ISO rating as you can when you do this; it cuts down on digital noise (graininess) in the final image.

I took this photo a step farther and processed the RAW file into three JPEG files -- one at the same exposure, one at one stop brighter and one at two stops brighter and imported them into Photomatix 3.1, which blended the exposures together to get the result you see above. Photomatix is available as a free download, although the free version places watermarks of the name onto the finished image. A downloadable "key" is available for $99 which disables the watermark.

More of the Bean and my night of Jazz to come.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

More street photography

Homeless

More images from my trip into Chicago last week. Above, a homeless man picks up his possessions to move on. I don't know where, but wherever it is, it will be temporary, just like the last place, and the place before that.

Below, a gentleman surveys the cityscape from the nook he staked out.


Temporarily Closed

And one more, taken as I was leaving Central Camera. If you look closely, the gentleman about to enter the store is eyeballing my camera. I can only guess what he was thinking. Mentally comparing my camera to his? Wondering what I was doing with a flash bracket, flash unit and diffuser (which I had just purchased) on my camera hanging around my neck on a fairly bright day? Wondering if the touristy looking Japanese dude actually took his picture? I like that I caught the guy in the side window looking at his cell phone.


Call Again

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Takin' it to the street

Under the El, Chicago

I had a couple of errands to run yesterday in Chicago. One, pick up my daughter from Roosevelt University to begin her spring break. Two, pick up some equipment from a certain 110-year-old camera store.


Glance

Since I was bringing my camera with me to try out some accessories at Central Camera, why not engage in some street photography while I was in town? I've described my technique before -- camera hanging around my neck, wide angle lens, thumb on the shutter as I walked along, waiting for something interesting to happen near me and tripping the shutter as it happened. The lighting was wonderful -- overcast day, no hard shadows -- I set the camera on manual exposure and fired away.

It's hit-and-miss photography. One the one hand, since I'm not looking through the viewfinder, I can't really tell what I've captured until I review the shots later. On the other hand, if I had the camera pressed to my face, I would not have gotten the shot above, top -- as I prepared to photograph the lady on the street corner, I saw the bicyclist coming down the street out of the corner of my eye, reset, then waited for him to get into range before pressing the button. The framing you see is exactly SOOC -- no cropping. Lucky enough to be good or good enough to be lucky?

After a while, you can get pretty good at being able to "see with your hands." More shots to come tomorrow.


Exile

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Hungry and homeless?

I took this photo back in July. It was on State Street in Chicago and my daughter and I were in the city for the morning. We had brought a sack of food with us and still had quite a bit left over after we had finished eating, so I gave what was left to a homeless man at State and Madison.

We passed this girl several blocks south and my suspect-o-meter went off. She looked too well groomed and dressed to really be in need. A nice jacket lay nearby in case the morning air got too chilly. It was slung over a fairly large backpack. She sported a nice set of shades and was probably trying to conceal an iPod. And the sign - neatly lettered, with swirlies, no less. And she was working a Sudoku puzzle. What homeless person does that?

I'm now approaching my sixth month of unemployment. And I'm not as judgmental as I was back on that July morning in Chicago. These times have created a whole new class of the homeless. And that includes people with nice shades and who know how to work a Sudoku puzzle.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Ready to rock some Wagner

Last November I had a chance to photograph the Roosevelt University Symphony Orchestra and Concert Choir in action for some promotional shots to be used in the school’s marketing materials. I was allowed onstage during the dress rehearsal before the performance and was given the run of the house during the performance. I even talked my way into the balcony, which was closed to the public that night. It helps to be friendly and polite to the ushers.

This was taken from front center of the balcony during the moment of silence before the piece – a portion from Wagner’s Ring Cycle - began. The crowd is hushed, the conductor has raised his hands and the musicians await the drop of the baton.

For the past 15 years, three of my kids have been involved in music and orchestras – my oldest daughter was a floutist through high school, my youngest son is a jazz studies major and drumset performer working on his doctorate at the University of Illinois and my youngest daughter is a senior studying cello performance at Roosevelt University in Chicago (she’s in the third row of cellos, second chair in). I figure I’ve attended more than 100 concerts and recitals during the last decade and a half. I’m just glad the music gets better the farther the kids go.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

We're soaked

We folks in the upper Midwest are drying out today. The Chicago area has been hammered all weekend with the remnants of Hurricane Ike. As much as eight inches of rain (an estimated 90 billion gallons of water) fell in the last two days, flooding roadways and, for a brief time, cutting off all ground access to O'Hare airport in Chicago and threatening to flood the downtown area.

Of course, this was just a taste of what the folks in the Houston area experienced with the full force of the storm. I can only imagine what that is like.

The photo above was taken at the Crown Fountain in Chicago on a very hot afternoon. Summer days will usually find a large crowd of kids (and sometimes adults) taking advantage of the water spray from the twin monoliths.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Meet the next up and coming band …

The “B” Sides. Just kidding. Actually it’s the David Yeager Band, headquartered out of Wheaton, Illinois. With a Dave-Matthews-Band-meets-Blues-Traveler vibe, these guys are looking to make an impact in the local Contemporary Christian Music scene.

I had the privilege to do a photo shoot for the band last weekend in downtown Chicago. Band member Steve insisted on a from-the-back shot with the soon to be completed Trump Tower in the background, so I obliged. The buildings reflected in the tower’s massive sea of glass are from across Wacker Drive behind (in front of?) us.

You can see a few more pics (which show faces) of the David Yeager Band in a Flickr photo set.

You can also visit the band’s MySpace page and listen to some sample tracks.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Drumming up business

A street drummer in Chicago lets it loose for a gentleman that just dropped a handful of coins in his collection box. The scene presented an interesting juxtaposition of past and present, and depicts two different battles for survival 160 years or so apart.

Taken at the Fort Dearborn site on Wacker Drive in Chicago.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Monolith

I'd like to say "Thank you" to all of you who left sympathetic comments yesterday about the loss of my day job. Today, the 24 newly unemployed from The Company will meet as a group with an employment counseling agency. It's sort of a last perk.

The agency will provide any and all of its services to each of us at no charge. We get to pick and choose those services which we think will benefit each of us. I plan to take advantage of whatever I can. Hey, why not?

About that face in the crowd from yesterday. I stuck around Crown Fountain until dusk fell and shot some photos of the monolith against the darkening sky. I could say something cliche like how the darkest times reveals what we're made of more brightly.

Wait, I just did. I also expect to be very proud of the gang of 24 today.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

A face in the crowd

I am that face in the crowd. Today I am joining a growing demographic group - the unemployed. The Company needed to relieve the pressure that months of declining sales presented. A number of us were told yesterday that our positions were eliminated. My departure was my final act of service to The Company after 17 years.

Options are being weighed. Contacts have been initiated. We'll see where this road leads. Until I find out, though, I'll identify myself with a crowd of people in this struggling economic picture. Call us the Class of 2008.

By the way, anybody looking for a media-savvy writer/producer/creative communicator with a background in publishing and marketing? Just thought I'd ask.

Photo: Crown Fountain, Millennium Park, Chicago. Two-stop graduated neutral density filter. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Something different

There’s something about a kidney bean shaped blob of polished steel that attracts attention in a landscape of straight lines and rectangles like Chicago.

It’s not like nobody’s ever taken a picture of the Cloud Gate (also known as “The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park. People were snapping all around me as I visited there one evening last weekend. So my photos became just a few of the millions that are taken in Millennium Park each year.

But if there is one difference, it’s this. My photos were taken by me and no one will look at the Cloud Gate sculpture in quite the same way I do. And that will make its way into how I approach photographing the structure, whether it’s the angle I shoot from, the exposure setting I use, what I choose to include or leave out, or the combination of real and virtual filters I use.

Some of these shots were taken with a two-stop graduated neutral density filter to even out the tones between the sky and objects on the ground. The twilight photo used a deep blue filter applied in Photoshop to correct the cast of the vapor lights in the scene. Yeah, I know I could have adjusted my white balance at the time, but I didn’t think of it.

A million people at a bean in a park in Chicago. And no two the same.

Click on pictures to enlarge. Photographs © 2007 James Jordan.

Running with the brides

So my daughter, who is getting married in a year and who has decided to do nearly everything by her(our)self(ves) - and cheap - had a plan for obtaining her wedding gown. The plan involved getting up at four in the morning and driving to Chicago to participate in the Running of the Brides at Filene's Basement.

So a team of seven (including dad), waited outside the store on Friday morning for our chance to grab, bargain and barter with 1200 other people for a chance at one of 275 wedding gowns - many of them priced at just $249. Firmly positioned in the middle of the pack (the frontrunners had arrived the night before to camp out on the street), we discovered that the racks were cleared out probably before we even got to the door.

Two hours later, we had begged and bartered our way to "the gown."

I had often seen news clips of the mayhem that is the Running of the Brides on TV, but never dreamed that I would actually participate in one. I actually got to take some photos and shot enough video to put together a five-minute clip of our adventure.

One more item for the bucket list, I guess.

So what did you do this weekend?

Note: My apologies to those who have commented on this post - an editing accident wiped out all of the comments. Bad Blogspot! Bad!

A later note: The comments are now back. Good Blogspot. Good!

Shakin' in Illinois

I've been involved in three earthquakes in my lifetime. I didn't notice the first one and I slept through the other two. Early this morning, a magnitude-5.2 earthquake hit central Illinois. Slight damage was reported near the quake's epicenter. People reported feeling the earth move as far away as Chicago and Milwaukee.

I may have experienced some ripples in the waterbed in which I sleep, but I slept through it, just as I did an early morning quake that struck Michigan three decades ago. Another quake rippled Michigan in the 1980s during the day. Co-workers at my place of employment came into my office describing the tremor they felt as it passed through the building. I hadn't noticed anything.

Guess I'm not a seismic kind of guy. And I was born in Japan. Go figure.

Playing koi

Several years ago, famed glass artist Dale Chihuly installed a number of works throughout the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago, a two-acre tropical greenhouse on the near west side of the city. The Persian Pond is one work that remains at the conservatory, its brightly colored discs reminiscent of water lilies.

According to Chihuly’s Web site:

In the Garfield Park Conservatory context, the blossoms on the Persian Pond evoke Claude Monet's gardens in Giverny. They are a witty inversion of Monet's transplantation of real water lilies to a pretend Japanese garden based in turn on the Japanese woodcuts that inspired Monet's paintings. Chihuly's brilliant yellow forms, on the other hand, reflect real light and color, as opposed to translating them into highlights on canvas. This triple inversion, with its multiple implicit referents, lends the Persian Pond installation particular piquancy.

I guess my interest was piqued as I saw the glass blossoms on the tropical pond with curious koi swimming among the reflections of the glass discs.

More Chihuly on Flickr.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.