Foreclosed

There are a lot of empty houses around, and if what I hear on the news is true, there will be a great many more in the months ahead. I recently was hired by a real estate company in Chicago to photographically document a number of properties they represent.



I was told to be very trigger happy when it came to capturing the condition of the properties. An old two-story structure with a full basement garnered about 250 frames to record the effects of age, use and abuse.

What started as a "just the facts" approach changed about midway through this particular home. As I framed up shot after shot of wear and decay, I began to see stories in the details of the old house.



Perhaps I've found a muse to keep me occupied over the winter months ahead.

And there's no lack of subject matter.

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.

Gone fishing

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

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Mixed messages

I feel so welcome, in a get-out-of-here kind of way.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Lonely hearts

Isn't that all any of us ask?

Still playing with Valentiney still life ideas. Helps to keep me occupied in the bitterly cold January of northern Illinois.

Good old box of Sweethearts candies on a light box with a gridded flash high and behind the subject.

Photograph © 2010 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.

Primary colors

A sign in the clouds. Rochelle, Illinois.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Green (energy) acres

With a kid in college in Urbana, Illinois, my wife and I occasionally make the trek from our suburban Chicago home to visit. Taking the backroads route down Illinois highway 47 this spring, we noticed dozens of wind turbines standing in the fields south of the town of Dwight. We recently swung by again so I could grab a few photos of the windmills.

The answer to some of the energy needs of northern Illinois, along with how to increase county revenues appear to be blowing in the wind. Iberdrola, an energy company headquartered in Spain, paved the way for the launch of several wind farms in a four-county area southwest of Chicago.



Between the towns of Emington and Odell, 65 turbines of Iberdrola’s Cayuga Ridge Wind Farm have sprouted since last fall, located in farm fields along with corn and soybeans. Motorists on Illinois Route 47 can view many of the towers.



The company plans to finish the installation of a total of 150 towers over 15,000 acres of land sometime in 2010. Several other energy companies, taking advantage of incentives provided by Washington, D.C., are in the process of planning additional wind farms in the development zone, a cooperative effort of the four counties involved.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Oh, the changes I've seen

I was in sixth grade when the conversation turned one day to the turn of the next century, which was still another 31 years away. Doing the math in my head, I calculated that I would be 42 years old when that happened. I couldn’t even imagine being that old at the time. I can barely remember ever being that young now.

The first video game I ever played was the first video game to be mass marketed – Pong. You remember it, don’t you? Big old electronic box that had to be hard wired to a television just so you could break bricks with a bouncing ball? I now play a version of that game on my cell phone when I’m not connected to people halfway around the world via the internet.

I rode my bicycle without a helmet on my head, didn’t ride in a car with seat belts until I was seven, owned toys that had small removable parts, slept in a room decorated with lead-based paint and even played with a chunk of asbestos that my parents bought me as a gift. Medicine bottles didn’t have childproof caps, and drug commercials didn’t list the devastating side effects that could occur while using their product. It’s a wonder any of us survived to see the turn of the century at all.

My cell phone has more computing power than the computers that helped send men to the moon, which I watched in my living room on a muggy July evening in 1969 in a non air-conditioned house on a television set that only got four channels that could be changed only by physically getting up and turning a dial.

I had to wait about a week and a half for pictures taken on an Agfa 35mm camera to come back – in stunning black and white. Photo labs eventually got the wait time down to two or three days, then 24 hours, then an hour until they were trumped by digital cameras, where the wait time to see a photo is now an agonizing three-quarters of a second.

Yup, we’re living in amazing times, we are. It’s a concept that Brad Paisley has captured so well in his recent song, Welcome to the Future:

Look around it’s all so clear,
Wherever we were going,
Well, we’re here.

See the video here.

Well, gotta go. I’m sitting in the parking lot of a cheap motel, glomming off their wireless internet while writing this on my laptop computer while waiting for an appointment down the street.

Something else I could never have imagined in sixth grade.

Photograph: Self portrait taken while testing out a two-flash off camera setup, with wireless connectivity, which is amazing in itself. © 2009 James Jordan.

Somewhere in the middle of Illinois

Seen while pumping gas.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan

So, tell me again what you do here, Wray?

A contradictory sign near Altamont, Tennessee.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Southern hospitality

Seen on a rural road in central Tennessee. Paw done got an itchy trigger finger. Y'all don't come back now, y'hear?

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.