Storm is over

Drove through a very heavy thunderstorm on the way home from Wisconsin on Labor Day. Torrential rain, lots of lightning. As my wife and I approached Port Washington, the rains lightened as the tempest headed out over Lake Michigan. We drove to the Port Washington harbor to see what we could see.

What we saw, just for a few moments, was the sun breaking through the clouds and casting rays over the harbor. Some large drops of rain were still falling as I fired off a half dozen shots. The tricky thing about this kind of shot is to make sure you've exposed properly, otherwise, you get blown out areas of pure white, and nothing in post processing can adequately fix those. I'd fire a shot, take a peek at the image's histogram and note with dismay the large areas of pure white, make an adjustment, meter on a bright but not too bright area of the scene and fire again, all the while hoping the magical view stuck around until I got it right.

Number six was the charm. And then the scene disappeared.

In post processing, where I only adjusted levels, I noticed that the dark areas of the image were riddled with small white spots. I thought to myself that I must have done something to mess up the camera's sensor while changing lenses in the rain. Great. I checked other images taken after this scene, and strangely enough, the spots weren't there. What was up?

It was only after I had meticulouly removed each and every white spot that I concluded that the spots were backlit drops of rain. Oh.

Maybe I should have left them in.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

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.

Silent sentinels

The old guard standing watch over the foggy winter morning.

Photograph taken last week at the Paul Wolff Forest Preserve near Elgin, Illinois. After the candle photos taken with a strobe setup, these straight-up shots were a breeze. A warmer, drier breeze to be exact.

More fog photos to come, and at least one more candle shot. Stay tuned.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

The obligatory "first snowfall of the season" shot

Because the first snowfall of the season happened overnight and I needed a photo to post today. Taken with a rental Nikon D90 fitted with a 17-55mm f/2.8 lens. That lens alone is a honkin' big hunk of metal and glass about the size of my D60 and its kit 18-55 lens together. But it do take some sharp, purdy pitchers.

I'd love to have both items on a permanent basis, and I probably could if I could talk all of the companies I pay bills to each month into letting me go a month without sending them any money. Hey, I'm just one guy and they probably wouldn't even miss it.

"Worm's eye" photo taken by holding the camera an inch from the ground (even I'm not crazy enough to lay on my belly in the snow, even though I've done it before to get a picture). I let the D90's 11-point autofocus do its thing.

Let's see. Wireless flash triggers, Nikon D90, mondo lens. I wonder if Santa reads blogs?

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Late bloomer

Seen in the chilly early autumn air. You go.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Creation, Day 3

What the dawn of time may have looked like. Taken at one of my favorite places on earth -- Cave Point, Door County Wisconsin.

Taken with a circular polarizer, 2-stop neutral density filter and graduated ND filter. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Balanced

Taking advantage of some beautiful September weather to do some rock balancing. Tyler Creek Forest Preserve, Elgin, Illinois.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Fall balance

I know, it's an oxymoronic headline. It really should be "Autumn balance," but hey.

Rock balance in Tyler Creek in Elgin, Illinois. Hints of autumn are evident.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Know when to ditch "Plan A"

I usually head into a photo session with a preconceived notion of what it is I want to capture. Nothing wrong with that. It's actually helpful as a starting point. The trick is to recognize when that plan is just no longer working for you, and as much as you are emotionally attached to that plan, to dump it in the rubbish bin. Otherwise Plan A becomes a dead weight around your neck, creatively speaking.

I stopped by the Bode Forest Preserve in Streamwood, Illinois this morning. Layers of fog lay draped over the trees and I wanted to capture bursts of sunlight streaming from between the branches. It looked oh, so pretty in my mind's eye. Reality, however, was not nearly so cooperative. It just wasn't happening the way I envisioned it.

So did I ditch Plan A to explore the other visual opportunities that lay before me? Of course not. I stubbornly tried to make the landscape bend to my will, wasting a lot of time and memory card space in the process.

I gave up and headed back to my car, passing a clearing that opened to Bode Lake. I stopped for a second, looked at the mist on the water and thought, It probably won't do any good, but I may as well look as long as I'm here. Not much of a Plan B, but there it was. I walked through the clearing.

Can't say the view was particularly spectacular, but I took a few shots using a fallen tree branch as the foreground interest, then decided to go for some "worm's eye" shots holding the camera an inch or so off the ground, pointing it in the general direction of the branch and seeing what would happen. What happened were some very simple abstract images that appealed to my Asian sensibilities. I varied the focal length between shots, and voila!



I meant to do that, yup. Yessir, that's the ticket.

(Side note: I was in Quebec a few years ago, and at my first meal in a restaurant there, the server brought my food and said, "Voila!" It made me laugh because it sounded corny. Then I realized those folks meant it up there.)

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Today's sunrise ...

... as seen from Sleepy Hollow, Illinois. Yes, there really is a Sleepy Hollow. It's located in Chicago's northwest suburbs. The town is a blend of three-quarter-million-dollar homes and large expanses of open space. If you skip the mansions and stick to the open areas, you can see some very nice views of nature.

"But yesterday you said you were starting a series of insect macro photographs to clear out your backlog of bug pictures." Yes, I did. And I'll hop right back on that tomorrow.

Unless, of course, today's sunset looks promising.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Pasture, Northcutts Cove, Tennessee

Another "had to stop" moment on a drive through Northcutts Cove, just off Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau. I saw the horses, the hills and the pond and that was it. Brakes applied.

It took a while to arrive at a composition I was happy with, and also to catch the horses at the right angles. They were wandering about, crossing in front of each other or just plain turned wrong. I wanted them separated slightly and facing somewhat the same direction. Another horse on the other side of the fence had his backside turned toward me the entire time. He got removed from the photo.

This also started as a vertical composition with some roiling clouds overhead. I felt they were a distraction from the serenity of the still pond and reflection of the horses, so I cropped the photo to horizontal.

Sometimes a photo takes a lot of work.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Family dynamics

Family photo sessions that include young children are simultaneously fun, chaotic, maddening, heartwarming and totally unpredictable. You start with a plan and work toward it, but in the end, you take what you get. In that regard, they’re a lot like normal family life.

This family features Aiden, a two-year-old bundle of energy who had a slightly different agenda for a morning spent in his favorite park. It didn’t include sitting for stretches of time posing for a guy with a camera. Not when there's a swingset and a pond full of ducks nearby.

These three photos, taken one after the other, offers a nice insight into family dynamics.



Photo 1: Aiden steals the show. One-month old brother Liam is probably pondering what he has gotten himself into being born into this family.



Photo 2: Mom and Dad admonish Aiden to sit still and smile for the funny looking man with the camera. Liam is digging the whole older-brother-in-trouble thing.



Photo 3: The stars align. Maybe not perfectly, but pleasantly enough.

Isn’t that the essence of a family?

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Here comes the sun

And I say it's alright.

Gotta give a shout out to Sandy, who kindly steered the readers of her two blogs here yesterday. Thanks, all, for the kind words about my pictures. Glad you like.

I'm finishing off the series of foggy woods photos with this one taken at the Burnidge Forest Preserve in Kane County, Illinois, not too long after the shots posted yesterday and the day before. By then, the sun was quickly burning off the fog and making its presence known. Just a few minutes after taking this image, the magic had disappeared.

Fog presents an interesting challenge to a digital camera. The automatic focus mechanism struggles to latch onto something solid and the auto exposure can be fooled into making the fog too light and/or everything else too dark.

Tip: Use your camera's spot metering function (I don't use anything else) and place it on an object that you are featuring in your photo -- in the case of the last two photos, I used the trunk of the foreground tree and grass/reeds in the middle ground -- then push your shutter button halfway to lock the exposure, recompose, then click. Check to be sure you haven't blown out any large areas -- if your camera has a highlights feature for the LCD, which causes pure white areas in an image to flash, use it; it's a life saver. Make exposure adjustments if needed and try again. For the record, I metered on the area midway between the sunburst and the ground in the photo above.

By the way, do you have a song stuck in your head now? If not, maybe this will do the trick:

Into the forest

Fog and trees go together quite nicely.

I walked back and forth in front of this stand of trees at the Paul Wolff Forest Preserve near Gilberts, Illinois to find the angle that would best distribute the trees throughout the shot. I settled on placing the two larger trunks just left of center and splitting the distance from the closest tree to the right edge of the frame with the three thinner trees in the distance, though at the time I wasn't thinking about subdividing the space, it just looked balanced to me.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Ghost trees in the forest

The remains of a tree appears in the mist. A memory of what once was, framed within the light and life of the present.

I took advantage of the foggy backdrop that was provided one morning last week to do some shooting at a couple of forest preserves near my home. A little Orton processing was added to this photo to heighten the dreamlike quality of the scene.

Hope you're making your way out of the fog on this Monday toward what will be a great week.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Red barn at morning

Another quick post in a whirlwind week. Youngest daughter gets married tomorrow. Dad's taking pictures at the reception.

Have a good weekend.

Photo: Barn on the Timothy Garfield farm, Geneva, Illinois. Single image HDR. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Morning over the meadow

And a good morning it was, too. Taken after a passing storm.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Country morning

An outtake from the Garfield Farm photo shoot last weekend.

I was there to shoot one particular barn, but I couldn't help but to get views of the other structures as well. I couldn't waste the dramatic skies and the soft morning sunlight filtering through the treeline across the road. And the red rule was calling from that cart.

5-image HDR from a single RAW file.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Summer morning at the Garfield farm

I received an e-mail last Friday from one of the principles of Trillium Dell, a timberframe construction/restoration firm in Galesburg Illinois. He was writing an article on restoration work the company was involved in at the Garfield Farm near Geneva, Illinois and was looking for images to accompany his piece.

He Googled "garfield farm" and my blog posts from last April and May popped up on the first page of search results. After trading several e-mails, I offered to stop by the farm the next morning to photograph the various structures.

The structure at the center of this photo is a barn built in 1842 by Timothy Garfield. The Garfield farm featured an inn which served travelers crossing the prairie.

I arrived shortly after a rain shower had passed through. The clouds were breaking up and the sun was just reaching over the tops of the trees on the opposite side of the dirt road that bears the Garfield family name. I couldn't have asked for better conditions. Interesting sky, soft morning light. And cows.

Photo: Single image HDR from a RAW file exposed to retain highlights. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Northcutts Cove Chapel

The Cumberland Plateau features communities nestled into the many coves that cut into the rocky outcropping. Northcutts Cove, north of Altamont, is a mixture of farms, new homes and old shacks in a quaint, picturesque setting.

Northcutts Cove Road winds its way from Altamont down the plateau through thick woods. As you enter the clearing of the cove, one of the first sights is the Northcutts Cove Chapel, built by members of the Church of Latter Day Saints in 1909. LDS missionaries began their work in Grundy County, Tennessee two decades earlier. The chapel was built by volunteers who donated the materials for the building.

Shortly after the chapel's opening, a local Church of Christ minister named Mansfield challenged the LDS' southern states leader, Charles Callis, to a debate on the beliefs of Mormonism. The debate took place over the course of three days in October of 1909. Reverend Mansfield was apparently not too successful at dissuading people from their Mormon beliefs since Grundy County to this day has the highest percentage of Mormons in the state of Tennessee.

The cove was named for the Northcutt family. H.B. Northcutt formed a family business of building coffins, which makes a great segue into the photo above, taken behind the chapel in the first light of morning. No doubt some of the Northcutts' handiwork lies beneath the earth's surface in this photograph.

The chapel, along with H. B. Northcutt's home in Altamont, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.