Storm chasing

It's been a quiet spring and early summer here in northern Illinois so far, weather wise. Not too many storms brewing up this way. A lot of good my online storm spotter training has done for me, huh? Storm spotter training has taught me the best position from which to view a storm (useful for photography) as well as the worst. Best position also means safest position.

We recently had a small storm system move through late in the day. I followed it on radar via my iPhone as it approached from the west and mapped a route to intercept it (also on the iPhone -- what a great tool. Thanks, Mr. Jobs). My wife and I then drove through the storm and followed it as it headed east. The image above shows the storm retreating over some northern Illinois farmland late in the day. Late afternoon sunlight played across the open fields as menacing clouds snarled overhead.

This image is a combination of two pictures. One was exposed form the sky, the other for the field, then both images were combined on computer.

Against the wind

The only thing I like better than photographing people is photographing people doing something they love to do in the environment in which they love to do it. Suzanne was kind enough set aside some time to model for me. More than once. Unpredictable weather canceled more than one scheduled session. We finally wwere able to connect on a chilly spring day to get the picture above. Several times running around the bend. Sun in her face. Wind blowing like crazy. But she loves to run. She loves to help others. By posing for me, she got to do both.

What's on the horizon?

You can sit and wait to see what happens or you can go out and meet it.

Sunset in the park

Sunset is a spectator sport in Door County, Wisconsin. The harbors, parks and marinas on the western edge of the peninsula begin to fill with people about a half hour or so before sunset. They come to watch, reflect and photograph while the sun dips below the horizon. I come to watch the people watching the sunset.

Fish Creek, Wisconsin is home to the aptly-named Sunset Park, a clearing on the west end of town on the shore of Green Bay. It seems like I always come away with an interesting picture whenever I visit. This time was no exception.

I spotted the couple on the park bench and noted the folks in the distance sitting on a low retaining wall on a short bluff. The picture pretty much composed itself. I liked the shadows cast by the low-angled sunlight. I set myself up about three feet behind the bench and made several exposures to be sure I had all the elements -- sky, sun, bench, foreground -- properly exposed at least once, with plans to assemble the final image later in Photoshop.

Then I left the sunset watchers to finish out their day.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

I got peace like a light bulb ...

These things were pretty popular back in the 1970s. Light bulbs that contained symbols, messages, logos, you name it. They didn't give off much light, but that wasn't the purpose. You could have bought one for a couple of bucks back then. They're going for around 20 dollars on eBay these days.

I got hold of a couple of oldies but goodies from a friend to see what I could do with them, photography-wise. This was the first thought off the top of my head. A composite photo. Shot the lit bulb in a lamp fixture, then took a shot of my hand holding the same bulb. Put 'em together in Photoshop.

Speaking of "off the top of my head" ... I have an idea ...

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

And the windows of heaven were opened

So if you heard a loud gasp at about 3:00 yesterday afternoon, it was me. I had just looked into my viewfinder and saw this thing bearing down on me.

Not that I didn't know there was a storm approaching. I had been out shooting exteriors for a local hospital and took a break because of excessive cloud cover. I went home to monitor the weather and saw some storms approaching. I decided to go out to meet them.

I'm still getting used to a new wide angle lens. It has a field of view that is much wider than my peripheral vision. I saw nasty clouds, but I didn't see all of them appearing to open the bomb bay doors to drop a gusher on me until I peeked through the lens.

After a few shots at a rural crossroads near Elgin (the electric lines at the edges of the picture were going in opposite directions -- that's how wide the view is through that lens), I booked over to the hospital to catch the creeping crud passing over it.

Then I caught my breath.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

On the prairie

An old fence post seems to play tug of war with the remains of a barbed wire fence while stormy clouds swirl overhead. Seen at Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area, Morris, Illinois.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Gone fishing

Good photo for a Friday. Norman General Store, Norman, Wisconsin.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

April showers

Every winter causes me to forget it. Every spring brings it back again. The smell of rain on a warm day. Nice.

Photo taken along the riverwalk in Batavia, Illinois. Four-stop HDR from a single RAW image. Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

12 significant photos #4-6

Night comes rolling in. Made on May 8, 2009.


Garfield barn. Made on April 4, 2009.


Pondering. Made on June 30, 2009.

High dynamic range photography consists of merging several different exposures of a scene via computer software, then applying various filters to control contrast and coloration throughout the image (called tone mapping).

This past year, I experimented with the technique, and the months of April through June saw my hard drive filling up with multiple exposures as I got a feel for when and when not to go for an HDR image. These three photos show what I like best about HDR -- color saturation, enhanced textures and the ability to capture a range of tones that would otherwise have been impossible.

NOTE: I still have yet to have anything land on a memory card that I feel like publshing to the world and January is almost half over. Yikes! It's not for lack of trying. I stood out in near zero temperatures over the weekend photographing winter scenery and captured what I thought were some killer sunset images from a forest preserve near my home. Only thing is, a mistake in a lens setting rendered every image unusable. I hate when that happens. Despite advances in technology, a camera still can't fully compensate for a clumsy person standing behind it. I went out to the same spot the following day hoping that the magic would return, but conditions weren't cooperating. They gave me my chance the day before and I blew it. Ah, well.

Photographs © 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.

Autumn journey

If you haven't noticed, today's image is a little different than what's usually posted here. Or is it?

The photographs I make and share with the world are not so much depictions of things -- they are depictions of the feelings created by viewing those things within a particular setting. At least that's the goal I have in mind when setting out to create pictures.

The photo above started as a contrasty, lens flare-y, moderately underexposed shot of the hillside, the tree and the hiker against the afternoon sun. I punched the contrast even further, added a background photo layer of dried field grasses (blurred beyond recognition), then added another photo layer of stone tile to add some texture.

The result is an image of a person leaving the comfort of a life that is past (note the windmill in the lower left) and beginning an arduous journey into an uncertain future that grants no promises (note the dead tree) while at the same time harboring hope that things will work out well (note the bright sunshine amid the chaos).

In many respects, this photo is a self-portrait.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Against the storm

Racine, Wisconsin.

Kitchen sink processing -- five-image HDR from a color RAW file, conversion to black and white (figured out what a blue filter can do) with sepia filter applied. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Harbor lights

A pair of lights mark safe passage into the harbor at Racine, Wisconsin while storm clouds pass over Lake Michigan.

Five-image HDR from a single RAW file.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

The domes

The Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory opened in the mid-1960s. The conservatory consists of three beehive-shaped domes (the world's first conoidal domes) covering 45,000 square feet of displays and thousands of plant species.

The Show Dome features rotating seasonal exhibits, the Arid Dome houses desert plant species of the Americas and Africa while the Tropical Dome is home to plants from warm, moist environments. The Tropical Dome also houses a number of tropical bird species.

This image is a three image panorama stitched with Hugin and converted to HDR via levels adjustments in Photoshop and compiled in Photomatix. You can see the panorama bigger here.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Birch tree-o

A three-pronged birch tree in my neighborhood in Elgin, Illinois. Played with really narrowing the depth of field. This shot is a panorama of 38 separate images shot with a 135mm f/2.8 lens and stitched together with a software program called Hugin (free download). By the way, Hugin is nice in that it takes into account the focal length of your lens and camera sensor's crop factor before starting the stitching process to ensure that distortion in the final image is kept to a minimum.

The cemetery shot from yesterday was also made using this technique and was composited from 26 separate images. Useful if you realllllly want to separate a subject from its background.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Passages

Cemetery in Burlington, Wisconsin.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Up in smoke

Motorists making the drive from Chicago northward into Wisconsin on I-94 will see a plume of smoke rising a few miles past the state border. The plume belongs to a coal burning electric power plant in Pleasant Prairie, just south of Kenosha.

The plant just completed a test of technology that can reduce carbon emissions by more than 90 percent. It's unclear whether the plant will permanently adopt the technology due to the cost of maintainance and the need for a place to store the tons of carbon particulates that are trapped by the filters. Can anyone say NIMBY?

Meanwhile, the plant continues to belch away 24/7/365.

Five-image HDR from a single RAW file. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Oops

Happy weekend. Play it safe. Don't lose your head.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

The things that remain

This is the remnant of a pier located at the Wind Point lighthouse north of Racine, Wisconsin. I had gone there hoping to catch the moonrise, but the area was socked in with clouds. So I shot what was there.

Yeah, the processing is severe on this shot, but it was done on purpose to ramp up the surreal feeling I wanted to get across.

We all have things that were once a vital part of our lives that have fallen by the wayside. Although the waves of time continue to wear away at them, they continue to sit below the surface, still influencing, still guiding. And sometimes still tormenting.

I think this shot would make a great cover for a great book on this topic.

Five-image HDR from a single RAW file, exposed to retain highlights. Straight and graduated neutral density filters used to even out tones of water and sky and allow for a long exposure to smooth out the water. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.