Winter wood

Log pile and barn at Peck Farm Park in Geneva, Illinois.

Aaaaaand ... I'm back!

Spent some time in the northern parts of Wisconsin last week. Started by photographing a family on a Lake Michigan beach and ended with a few days in Door County. Experienced every type of weather Wisconsin can throw at you in July -- fog, heat, humidity, storms, sun, clouds, rain. Great for pictures.

This is the Sturgeon Bay North Pier Lighthouse, which I've photographed many times. This time, it was socked in by pea-soup fog. The lineup of seagulls on the overhead catwalk seemed to imply that air traffic control had imposed a ground stop on all flights around the lighthouse, save for one intrepid gull launching himself into the great unknown.

More pictures and stories to come.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Buoys and gulls

Saw plenty of both last weekend in Door County, Wisconsin. These two both had a nice blue background.

Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

But when it's nice enough out to fix that leak, it ain't rainin'

An old barn sits within the confines of the Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area near Morris, Illinois. I like old barns. I had a camera with me. You know the rest.



It's a real fixer-upper, which, unless there's some historic significance to this structure, will never get done. For now, the gaps, wood rot, rust and decay make for good photo fodder.



Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Framed

A long time ago, when I was a fledgling graphic designer and commercial illustrator, I landed a gig creating renderings of home designs for a local builder. Looking over the first set of rough drawings, the client said the houses looked good enough, but "you need to find a way to frame the subject to keep the viewer's eye from wandering off the page." We eventually settled on adding strategically placed tree limbs and other landscaping here and there to do the trick.

Taking a long walk on a long pier to get close to the Sturgeon Bay Canal lighthouse, I noticed the meandering overhead catwalk wrapped itself around the edges of the frame in an M.C. Escher-like configuration. Looked good to me. Plus, the Red Rule was calling.

I nestled the lighthouse just right of center -- I often try to imagine diagonal lines crossing the frame from the corners. I'll either place the subject along one of those diagonals, or put them in one of the four "V's" formed by the crossing lines. It's kind of a mashup of the rule of thirds and the golden mean. Weird but it works.

I finished it up with some High-pass post processing, which simultaneously increases and decreases contrast. Weird but it works, too. I'll explain it further sometime when I fully figure it out.

Until then , have a great weekend.

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.

... and the moon came up

The not-quite-full moon rises above the north pier lighthouse in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. This shot was one of those mad scramble type deals that happen to me occasionally. The lighthouse sits at the end of one of two piers that flank the Sturgeon Bay ship canal, which technically turns most of the Door County Wisconsin peninsula into an island. While the two piers are just a hundred yards or so apart, to get from one pier to the other requires mad swimming skills, a boat, or a ten minute drive to the nearest bridge and ten minutes back to the lakeshore.

I started out on the pier that the lighthouse sits on and waited for the moon to rise, hoping that the position would allow for a good juxtaposition of moon and lighthouse. Not being sure of exactly where the moon would appear made it a 50-50 choice. (Note to self: as the sun nears the horizon, shadows will point roughly to the point from which the moon will rise -- not exactly, depending on time of year or your location on the planet, but it gets you in the ballpark.)

As it turned out, I decided that being on the same pier as the lighthouse was a) not a good position from which to get the shot I was after and b) too close to the lighthouse to easily get both it and the moon in focus. Sooooo ... Hop in car. Begin the drive to the opposite pier. Make a wrong turn. Waste time backtracking to locate correct road to other pier. Park car. Grab equipment and begin rapid hike to the pier. Forget some equipment. Decide not to go back for it. Run like crazy up the beach to the pier, stopping to shoot along the way. Finally get to opposite pier. See that the moon is now much higher in the sky than I had originally wanted. Set up for the best shot under the circumstances. Take it. Rest. Relax. Enjoy the evening.

What's that about good judgement being the result of experience and experience being the result of bad judgement?

Similar-but-different tale from a guy who spent three decades as a shooter for Life, Sports Illustrated and National Geographic.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

The rose

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
- W. Somerset Maugham

A single rose can be my garden ... a single friend, my world.
- Leo Buscaglia

Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.
- Arthur Miller

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.
- Clive Bell

As someone who deals with a constant stream of strange activities going on in my mind, I can fully appreciate that last quotation. This photograph was inspired by signage seen in Macy's during the previous holiday season. I fully suspect that those signs were achieved through a combination of photography and computer illustration -- but I wanted to try to achieve a similar effect in-camera.

So ... off to my studio, which is a room in the basement. The setup for this shot took many hours over the course of several days. I set up a white seamless paper backdrop and a gridded strobe fitted with a red gel aimed at it. Fiddled with the flash intensity and distance to the backdrop until I was happy with the effect.

I attached a plastic flower to a light stand and used it as a stand-in for the rose that would eventually take its place. I set up a gridded strobe to light the flower from the left, set up a white foam board attached to yet another light stand just out of the frame to the right to bounce some light into the shadow side of the flower. Nice.

I did some timer-assisted self portraits to see if the crazy idea would work at all and discovered that all kinds of red and white light were spilling onto me from the two strobes. Argh. Not nice. Fiddled with the lights to try to solve the problem. Created new problems in the process. Gave up for a few days.

Came back several days later and re-set the lights in the original setup. Taped, clipped and balanced more sheets of foam board on yet more light stands and spare tripods to block excess light from spilling onto me. The final setup looked like a maze of light stands and foam boards, but I finally got a shot of myself in silhouette with a nicely exposed plastic yellow daisy.

Went out and bought roses. Kept one, gave the rest to my wife. Nice. Convinced a model to walk through the maze and stand in place. Three exposures. Done.

This picture is kinda like love -- simple yet complicated.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Valentine take-out

Mmmm ... loooove.

Technical details: A coupla flashes, some red gel, a coupla grids, beaucoup reflectors. Mix well.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Lookin' at the world through love-colored glasses

We just might be amazed at how differently we view others.

Picked up a bunch of cheap Valentiney-type stuff over the weekend to play with setting up some Valentiney-type still life shots for my own amusement and for the editors over at Getty Images to consider. It's a nice way to spend some photographic time when it's grungy outside -- rain and warm temps pretty much nuked all our snow and left behind a soggy, muddy mess.

More to come.

Technical stuff: One flash camera left behind a diffuser panel to soften the light and put a nice little reflection in the lens of the glasses. Another flash camera right, low and aimed through the lenses, set at half the power of the main flash. It's counterintuitive, but a flash shot through a colored gel or other colored semitransparent material will register better with a lower level of light. A quarter-inch grid added to the flash to focus the beam to throw a more defined shadow.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Actually, I didn't want it to

Stop, that is. Great foggy/frosty mornings over the weekend. Hadda geddout and shoot. Saw the stop sign against a backdrop of white, and the red rule* called.

*Red rule: If you see red, shoot it! Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Have an original New Year, or What are you going to do with YOUR blank canvas?

For the past several years, my first blog post of the new year generally features optimistic anticipation of the 365 days to come and displays the first meaningful photo I've taken for the year. This year, the thing is, I have yet to take my first meaningful photograph (OK, aside from the quickie I set up to illustrate this post).

Not that I haven't toyed around with some shots, but so far, nothing has emerged that I can look at and say, "That's worth sharing with the world." For the most part, I've spent the last couple of weeks with family, enjoying the holidays and only occasionally taking time to think about photography-related stuff. Then I received a piece of mail on Flickr from someone who has been following my photos both there and here asking for some advice, which got me thinking some more.

So here's what I've thought about. Perhaps you can use some of it to inform your own picture taking, or maybe even apply it to other things in your life.

It's OK if you're not original, but do be yourself about it. It's true that there is nothing new under the sun. There are only about three dozen basic story plots, upon which all of the novels, plays and movies of the world are based. Every innovation of humankind has been or will be achieved by applying one of 40 basic principles. Dozens of hit songs over the years have been based, in whole or in part, on the same four-chord progression.

It doesn't matter what you're setting out to do. Most likely, it's already been done, and done remarkably well by someone else. Or maybe a thousand someone elses. So what to do? Go ahead and do it, but make it your own. Theoretically, there is no one just like you, so whatever you do, imbue it with your distinct personality and outlook on life.

The story is told of a budding photographer who is waiting while famed photojournalist James Natchwey, who has covered every major world conflict since 1981, is reviewing his portfolio. Natchwey silently and quickly flips through page after page of the studen't photos, which represent, up until that time, his life's work. When he reaches the last picture, he looks up at the student, who eagerly awaits the master's critique. "I'm afraid," Natchwey intones, "These pictures tell me nothing about you as a person." End of session.

Do your photos provide a glimpse of you as a person? The things you care about? How you feel about your subjects? If you can do that, then you will have accomplished something -- work that is unlike anyone else's.

And that's a good thing.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

River

Missing someone this Christmas? Yeah, me too.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

This little light of mine

I've been thinking about this shot for a while. Ever since I did the red Christmas ornament shots a week or so ago, I've been pondering what to do next and thought of photographing a candle out in the woods. I've just been waiting for the right time. The right time being either a fresh coating of snow or a foggy winter day.

The foggy winter day came today, so I packed a candle, lighter, camera, boom stand, flash, gels and grid and headed out to a local forest preserve. It was a pretty straightforward shot once the light was set up - the boom allowed me to place the flash directly above the candle to create a ring of light with a grid attached. A double layer of CTO gels allowed me to shift the color balance to incandescent to simulate twilight while maintaining a warm white light on the candle -- this was shot mid-morning.

The setup for the flash is shown below. After that it was just a matter of laying on my side in the melting snow until I framed up a few shots that I liked. Then home to change out of my wet clothes.



Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Snowy day decor #1

Was out this morning shooting some of the overnight snowfall. Took a red plastic Christmas bulb with me for some Red Rule action. Played with available light as well as some off-camera strobe. Last time using the Nikon D90 with the 17-55mm f/2.8 -- gotta go back to the rental company today. Sigh. It's been a nice camera/lens combo. Used it at a gig over the weekend. It rocked. Sample pictures here. (While you're viewing the photos, become a fan of my photography page on Facebook -- you won't be sorry.)



Used a hand held flash with a grid and full Color Temperature Orange gel to get some warm spotlights on the cold snow. Played with color balance as well to get different effects. Now I gotta shovel my driveway before the big freeze hits later today, then head to a FedEx location to send the camera back.



Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Home is where the hearts are

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. There's a lot to be thankful for.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Red ... rules

I was looking through my archive of images from Door County, Wisconsin last night to pull some submissions for a publication when I came across this photo of a maple tree north of Sister Bay, taken last October.

There was some major red rule action going on here. I took several shots of the tree at various focal lengths, but this particular crop seemed to do it for me the most. The result is a natural abstract image, a tapestry of red and black.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Tennessee barn

I saw a lot of these in rural central Tennessee -- high gabled barns with one or two "wings" to the side, quite different from the boxy barns located farther north.

This photo was taken in Northcutts Cove, one of the valleys adjacent to the Cumberland Plateau in central Tennessee, on a gray, foggy morning as the sun was steadily making headway into burning off the fog. Lots of low clouds drifting by.

I spotted the barn going by as my wife drove our car through the cove and asked her to stop and back up so I could get a couple of shots. The open gate, path to the entrance of the barn, tranquility on the ground and drama in the sky caught my attention (and oh yeah, the Red Rule), so I caught it right back.

HDR image from a single RAW file processed into five images at 1-stop intervals. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

"As a matter of fact, I do mind if you take my picture."

A perturbed pullet at the Kline Creek Farm, West Chicago, Illinois.

I've lived in Chicago's northwest suburbs for 18 years and didn't realize how many farms still existed within the confines of the metroplex. The Kline Creek Farm is a vintage 1800s farm that is owned and operated by DuPage County, is manned by volunteers and still raises crops and livestock.

Visitors can get a glimpse into late 1800s farm life through interpretive displays in the visitor center and by touring the farm's barns, outbuildings, livestock pens and restored farm house. Interactive demonstrations allow kids to participate in the "chores experience."

Kline Creek Farm is open daily and admission is free.

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.