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.

Walking the lonely path

Taken last weekend on the shores of Lake Michigan near Evanston, Illinois. Recent weather has been more suited for late November than mid-May, and this picture is indicative of that.

Tempest

A look at the skies in northern Illinois while storms and tornadoes battered the southern U.S. Spring is the time when the cold of winter is replaced by the warm of summer. It does not change peacefully, however.

Peoplescapes

Amy Rose discovered my photographs on this blog awhile back. She started following my work here and on Flickr. When it came time to select a photographer for her wedding, she had a short list. Last May, we got together in a Starbucks and talked about what she was looking for in her wedding pictures. "We love your landscapes. If you could shoot our wedding the same way, we'd be thrilled."

She even chose a wedding venue that would be condusive to landscape photography -- the Wedding Canyon in White Pines State Park near Oregon, Illinois. Walls of exposed rock layers rise up to twenty feet above a beautifully landscaped floor of grass, trees, ponds and rocks.



I shoot landscapes with an eye for the light. Where is it coming from? What is it doing? Can I add some light of my own and have it make sense? I look for shapes and colors that I can work into interesting compositions. Then I go for contrast and colors in the exposures. Which is exactly what I did on Amy Rose and James' wedding day.



And had a blast doing it.

Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Summer

This is what summer in northern Illinois looks like once you escape the Chicago suburban sprawl, ditch the calendar and put away the e-mail and the cell phone.

I don't do that often enough.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

The aviator

My wife had a hankering for photographing dragonflies. I had a hankering to photograph storms expected to sweep through the lower tier of Wisconsin counties. What to do?

Make a stop at Volo Bog, near Ingleside, Illinois, just a few miles from the state line on the way to the Badger State. They got dragonflies aplenty there.

This fella (we could tell because we could hear the beating of his wings) continually circled a stand of wildflowers near the parking lot. He would dart about, then hover and glide, then take off again. After a lot of trial and error, I found that I could focus on him while he hovered. I moved around the bed of wildflowers, getting a good angle on the sunlight as well as a clear shot of the sky and waited for Mr. Dragonfly (a common green darner) to circle back and hover. One hover brought him to within a few feet of me and I was able to fire off three shots. This is the best one.

Dragonflying complete, we headed into Wisconsin to visit Kenosha and Racine.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

The light at the end of the storm

Let me start with a disclaimer. I don't advocate that anyone go out looking for storms without a lot of advance preparation, a plan and a backup plan. In the case of the line of severe storms that rolled through northern Illinois last evening, I had been keeping tabs on reports from NOAA most of the day and keeping Accuweather's rolling radar map within a couple of mouse clicks. NOAA let me know that developing storms would likely follow a path along the top two tiers of counties in Illinois after afternoon surface heating added the final ingredient necessary for the formation of a mesoscale convective system (MCS) -- fancy weather talk for a really big storm. By 4:00, things were developing rapidly along the Iowa/Illinois border. By 5:00 my wife and I had wolfed down a quick dinner and were in the car.

The plan was to drive west while staying north of the storm, then dropping south to catch the back side where hopefully things would be quite picturesque (and safe). While driving, my wife monitored the radio for reports of storm locations as well as warnings from the National Weather Service that we subscribe to on our cell phone.

After some zigzagging west and south and skirting the edge of the storm, it became clear that the extreme amount of moisture in this system would obscure most of the cloud formations in the storm cells. Bummer. By this time, we were in Elburn, Illinois and a wall of rain was coming in from the west. We decided to punch through it on state route 38. We were treated to an amazing lightning show along the way. We emerged from the rain just east of Dekalb.



I set up a tripod and set about to capture some lightning. The best way I know to do that is to frame up an area of the sky that is pretty active, set the camera ISO as low as it will go, close the lens aperture all the way down and let the camera pick a (hopefully) long exposure time. I had gotten it down to about a one-second exposure, then just kept clicking away, hoping that lightning would strike while the shutter was open. Out of about a hundred shots, lightning showed up in about a dozen. The image above was the most extensive lightning bolt I was able to capture.



From there, it was a matter of capturing some of the incidental clouds to the system, then sticking around for the aftermath -- in this case, a sky full of mammatus clouds at sunset.







Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Little bump on the prairie

A small glacial kame rises above the surrounding flatland at Moraine Hills State Park near McHenry, Illinois. A foggy morning helps to define the contours of the kame against the wooded backdrop -- I had been to the park several times and never really noticed this formation until this day.

Kames are formed by the flow of water through a narrow tunnel in a melting glacier. Dirt and debris form piles at the bottom of the glacier and are revealed as the glacier recedes. Kames can be the dominant feature in a post-glacial landscape.

So in this instance, it kame, it thawed, it conquered. Ba-dum.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Storm cell

This past weekend was a turbulent one in the Prairie State. This is the action northeast of Woodstock, Illinois on Sunday afternoon.

My wife and I were returning from Port Washington, Wisconsin and noticed a large storm brewing to the west and north of us. We eventually crossed paths at Lake Geneva. After we had driven through the storm, we kept an eye on it as it drifted eastward toward McHenry. I stopped three times to get photos of the churning clouds.

By the time we arrived home, the skies had cleared and you wouldn't have known that anything dramatic had occured at all.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Purple trillium

We don't seem to have white trilliums here in northern Illinois, but we do have these.

Seen in Trout Park, Elgin, Illinois.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Into everyone's life, some rain must fall

And sometimes, it looks like the world is about to end. These are some glimpses of the sky late last Friday as storms rolled through Elgin, Illinois. My wife and I did a little storm chasing since this type of photo op is fairly rare here. While we get our share of storms, we're usually on the side obscured by rain and clouds.



We tracked some nasty looking clouds down gravel roads, then swung through a large subdivision of homes. Many of the residents were unaware of what was passing overhead. While I shot this photo, a resident of a nearby house pulled into her driveway, ran to the door and yelled at someone inside to come out and see this.



Despite the manace in the sky, all we got out of this particular storm was wet. After some heavy rain, the turbulence moved on.



And all was peaceful once again.

Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Itza bird

And that's about all I know about it at this point. A kind of speckled-stripey-sparrowy-finchy looking thing. Spotted at Moraine Hills State Park, McHenry, Illinois.

Perhaps one of my more ornithologically persuaded friends can help with an ID.

Thanks in advance.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Hello, Spring

A photo of the renewing cycle of life and death in nature. Moraine Hills State Park, McHenry, Illinois.

I've been blogged. The folks at Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Illinois spotted a photo I took of the hospital at sunset. I was contacted for permission to post the photo on the Future of Sherman blog and to answer a few questions about photography in general and making the sunset picture in particular. See the photo of Sherman Hospital and blog post here.

Off to photograph some desserts at Blackbird in Chicago this morning. Photos will appear in a magazine and on the Blackbird web site.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Sit down and soak your feet

Lots of rain recently has our streams and rivers jumping their banks around here. Nothing like what's happened to places like Nashville, of course.

Roadways get wet. Parks get flooded. Ducks and geese have a great time.



The above photo was taken where a swollen stream met the swollen Fox River in Geneva, Illinois, creating a swirl of turbulence. Happens every spring, and most people here are used to the temporary inconvenience.

Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

My daily requirement of greens

Got them at Starved Rock State Park near Utica, Illinois.





Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Earth. Why not give it a day of its own?

Photographing parts of the earth, I've come to appreciate its diversity, resilience and wonder. Why not give it a day of its own?

Of course, it's our attitudes and actions toward the planet on the other 364 days that really matter.

The photo above was taken in August of 2008 on a walk in the misty morning air in Dundee, Illinois. Beams of sunlight danced across the water of the Fox River. As my wife and I crossed a footbridge, I caught this image of a small tree perched on a rocky outcropping on the river. At this point, the tree was mostly dead. It has since become all dead, but for a brief moment, the sky reached down and the tree reached up and the two connected.

Enjoy your day, planet.

Photograph © 2010 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.

Portrait of November #3

More photographs from Glacial Park, north of Ringwood in McHenry County, Illinois. If you're wondering why I placed the subject where I did in the frame, the answer is simple -- I didn't have much choice. A brisk, chilly wind tossed the seed head back and forth. Since I was using a telephoto lens, I had to chase the pods back and forth, snapping as I went and hoping for a good shot. As it turned out, this shot was the most sharply focused of the several that I took.



The second photo was much easier to accomplish. The wind was gusty, but not enough to move the fallen branches (thankfully). I took my time and composed the shot to juxtapose the diagonal lines of the fallen tree against the verticals of the foreground grass and background trees which continue to live while the dead tree returns to the earth to nourish future flora.

Photographs taken with white balance set to "Cloudy" to add warmth and color to the scenes. Levels adjustments and slight color saturation added in post processing. Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Portrait of November #2

"Great minds run in the same channel." Or is it "All fools think alike?" No matter. Over at Listing Through Life, Roger is posting photos from Glacial Park that were taken the same weekend that my wife and I visited. Rog shot up the place on Saturday, I ionized a memory card there on Sunday.

We took our photos in basically the same weather and lighting conditions -- overcast. Roger had the foresight to visit the place on a warmer day. I lost the feeling in my face about a third of the way through my visit.

What's interesting is the way we're approaching the photos -- pretty much the same things photographed in similar conditions. Roger decided to embrace the monochrome -- since the palette of November is limited to begin with, why not take it further by going black and white?



Me? I decided to try to wrest every bit of color out of the landscape that I could. I set my camera's white balance to "stun." No wait, that's my phaser. White balance was set to "Shady" to pump some warmth into the photos and take advantage of the amber backdrop of prairie grasses. And -- confession time -- I pumped some additional color into some of the photos via Photoshop. None of the photos posted thus far have been enhanced. I'll let you know when I post the color boosted pics.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Portrait of November #1

Over the weekend, my wife and I hiked a couple of the trails at Glacial Park, just north of Ringwood, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. The area has been described as "biological eye candy" and I can see why. The park is a mixture of rolling kames, prairie, ponds, kettles, bogs and oak savannahs. Nippersink Creek meanders its way through the northern reaches of the park.

In early autumn the prairie grasses turn a burgundy color. By this November day, it had settled into an amber hue. Large flocks of cranes circled overhead.



I had recently decried my annual photographic funk that hits in November. If ever there was a cure, this was it. What emerged from the day is a composite portrait of the month of November. While on the surface, everything appears still and asleep, if you look long enough, you'll see signs that life continues. The juxtaposition of the end of life and the continuation of it is what makes November what it is, and is what I'll present here over the course of the next few days.

Stay tuned.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.