The first and last

I spent the better part of the day yesterday photographing landmarks in Elgin, illinois as part of the Elgin 1440 photography event. Sponsored by the city's Cultural Arts Commision and a local newspaper, the event is designed to capture a day in the life of a city through the eyes and cameras of its inhabitants. The numeral 1440 refers to the number of minutes in a day.

I started the day at about 5:00 a.m. intending to catch the sunrise from the downtown area. While en route by car to downtown, the sky lit up with a sun pillar, a phenomenon where the first rays of sunlight beam straight upward in a pillar of light. Being in a moving car and not able to easily switch from the wide angle lens to a telephoto, I did not get a clear shot of the pillar. Ah, well. I hope someone else did.

I'm posting one of the first photographs of the day and one of the last. The photo above is the Elgin skyline at sunrise, featuring the Elgin Tower Building. The photo below is of the newly built Sherman Hospital at dusk with its geothermal lake in the foreground. In between were about 200 assorted pictures of places and people doing their thing on a pleasant spring Sunday in Elgin.



At midday, I met a reporter from the local paper who chatted with me for a bit about the 1440 Event and my part in it. The result of that conversation is a mention in the lead of a story in today's paper and a couple of quotes from me. Nothing terribly profound, I'm afraid, but at least they spelled my name right.

News story on Elgin 1440.

Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Main street

Port Washington, Wisconsin. Somebody's home town. And like every other home town, it has some residents who can't wait to leave it. Some who would never think of leaving. Some who treasure every day spent in that town, and others who let life pass as a blur.

I didn't have to stand in the middle of the street to get this shot. This was taken from a parking lot. A telephoto lens compresses the space and accentuates the downhill view. The wall of green beyond the houses in the upper left is a bluff that rises above the downtown area.

The view from there tomorrow.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Looking to the future

As promised, much better looking subjects in my subsequent strobe-at-night photos. This is from Thip and Suli's engagement photo session. Great couple, fun and energetic in spite of the cold temps. My wife assisted, acting as the equipment bearer and steady-er of the light stand, because the wind can play havoc with an umbrella. Who knew?



We started by wandering around Festival Park in downtown Elgin, Illinois then moved to the Riverwalk on the Fox River, stopping at interesting locales to shoot a few photos of the couple.



The top shot was taken at the Elgin Riverwalk's overlook of the Fox River dam. Light stand and wife was just out of the picture to the right. I was on the level below the overlook with camera tethered to the light via a 16-foot cable draped over the retaining wall from above. Someday I gotta get me a wireless flash trigger.



The final shots were taken from the overlook. I joined everyone back at the top to get catch some city light action behind Thip and Suli. Then it was time to head home and thaw out.

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.

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.

Monkeying around in Racine

A public art event in Racine, Wisconsin features replicas of the nearby Wind Point Lighthouse. From that starting point, local artists are free to create to their hearts' content, which they have, and their works are on display throughout the downtown area. The event, called Lighten Up! runs through September 15, when dozens of decorated lighthouses will be sold in a benefit auction.

King Kong runs amok in this artist's rendition of the famous movies, with the Wind Point light standing in for the Empire State building. A little vignetting in post-processing and wide screen cropping helps establish the cinematic quality of the scene.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.

Some things are just boring ...

Hope your weekend is not one of those things. Have a great one!

Art store display, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.

Take it easy

Let the rest of the world rush on by this weekend. Have a good one.

Evening, St. Charles, Illinois. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.