Fright night

My wife and I had heard about the Pumpkin Walk that the village of Cedarburg, Wisconsin holds each year. Along with a fantastic array of Jack O'Lanterns along its historic main street, the local businesses stay open late to dish out treats to young trick-or-treaters.



I decided to try my hand at some camera trickery -- using a hand-held off-camera flash to capture the spooky fun. I set my camera's white balance to incandescent to give the ambient light a blue cast, then placed a full CTO (orange) gel over the flash to get a proper white balance on whatever the flash lit up. The flash was tethered via a pc cord to the camera. I held the flash at arm's length away from the camera and slightly above the subject.



It took a few tries to get aperture and shutter speed coordinated to balance the backgrounds and subjects (as well as perfecting my aim with the flash while composing the shot), but once everything was in place, I was able to fire away.



A complete set of shots from Halloween in Cedarburg can be seen in this set on Flickr.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Embracing the backlight, or how I lost my fear of blown out backgrounds

I admit I've suffered from OCD when it comes to avoiding the bane of digital photography -- blowouts. Areas of pure white in an otherwise nicely exposed photo slap me in the face and force me to look -- and once I do, I can see nothing else in the photo. Nowhere is the blown out highlight more evident than the backlit photograph. I would either A) try to avoid situations where the light was behind my subject or B) become faniatical about checking the highlight mode of my LCD display. I'd dial down the exposure until every last black blinkie disappeared, then hoped that I could recover the remains of the shadows later in post processing.

I'm a whole lot better now. It all started while photographing guests arriving at a wedding a couple of weeks ago. I stood on a covered walkway, bouncing a flash off the white "ceiling" to throw some light on my subjects. One couple stopped in a pool of sunlight and I fired. The result was one of those "I think I'm on to something" moments. The couple were lit perfectly by the flash in front of them. Behind them, the background glowed. Their shadows were thrown forward. The effect was cool. From that point on, I waited for arriving guests to reach the pool of sunlight before I clicked the shutter.



Fast forward a couple of weeks. I'm shooting some street photos at a fall festival. I'm walking up the street into the morning sun and people are coming at me. I remember the "ain't it cool" photos I shot a couple of weeks earlier. I set my exposure value to +2 to compensate for metering into the sun, set a manual focus to about 5 feet in front of me, selected an aperture of f/8 for moderate depth of field and fired away whenever I saw someone who looked interesting in front of me.





The effect is graphic -- everything in shadow looks normal. Everything else is transformed to almost pure white. Shadows reach out from the subjects toward the camera. Complex scenes are simplified.



Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Scenes from a flea market -- Waiters

So not everyone attending a flea market is an enthusiastic participant. They've agreed to come along out of duty, guilt or the promise of something enjoyable for them when the ordeal is over.

Waiters just kind of sit and stare. At the surroundings, at a distraction device they've had the foresight to bring with them, at nothing in particular. They're in suspended animation until they perceive a cue that it's time to get up and move on to the next location.

To wait some more.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Scenes from a flea market -- The hunter-gatherers

She: Positively exhilarated at the sight of the veritable smorgasbord of cast-off curios that stretches out before her.

He: Eyeballing the roasted sweet corn concession.

Kane County Fairgrounds, St. Charles, Illinois.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Eisenhower Expressway, Chicago, 10:00 a.m.

Traffic was crawling, and as long as I had to crawl along with it, I thought I'd play with a camera. Set the focus and exposure manually (so the camera would fire immediately and not waste time focusing and exposing) and stuck the camera at arm's length toward the passenger side window (which was rolled down to eliminate reflections) to see what I could catch.

What I caught was a little slice of life on the freeway while idling. A different kind of street photography. Photography while stuck ON the street.

I saw the lady in her business suit talking on a cell phone. So I aimed and fired. Taking care of business in the backup? Phoning in that she'd be late to her next appointment? Just yakking to pass time?

I didn't see the truck driver giving me the skunk eye -- that was a bonus. Little did he suspect that his route that day was going to take him to the internets.

Even the accidental odd angle adds some tension to the scene.

One thing my wife and I noticed when we moved to Chicago about 18 years ago was that people tended not to get aggravated while sitting in Chicago's many traffic james. They just take it in stride here. It's a part of the deal, and it's no big deal.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

B-b-b-bad to the bone

Here's a photo that has all the things that people who dislike HDR dislike about HDR. Halos. Screaming color of an unnatural bent. From-here-to-infinity focus.

But a bad bike in front of a bad biker bar seemed to call for some rad, mad and bad post processing.

Fat Boyz is located in downtown Sycamore, Illinois. I noticed several bikes parked out front on a visit to the town a couple of weeks ago and took some worm's eye view shots. This one captured most of the front of the pub as well as a nice imposing view of the bike. Nice.

One of the establishment's employees, who was taking a break out front, noticed me taking photos and mentioned that I should beat it take a look at the owner's bike, which was parked out back. I said sure (with some relief), and was escorted through the bar and out the back door into the alley behind the building where I was beat senseless a bright red Harley was parked, nose-in, at the building's back porch.

I took a few snaps, but the nose-in orientation didn't do much for composition and as much as I wanted to, I couldn't bring myself to ask to have the bike turned around.

I thought that maybe someone might be interested in the above photo as a memento of their ride, or even as a promo pic for the pub's web site. But alas, the pub has no internet presence outside of a local business directory or two. Not even an e-mail address.

One of these days I might call up the owner (the place does have a phone -- or I could write a letter or maybe send smoke signals) and see if she (yes, she) might be interested in having me stop by to shoot her fire engine red Harley (which I was told was designed by her) in front of the place.

It'll be interesting, if nothing else.

UPDATE: I've posted a photo of the back alley red Harley on Flickr.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Ducks on the town

The town being St. Charles, Illinois to be exact.

She: "Dear, are you sure we can afford to do this?"

He: "Don't worry babe, I'll have them put everything on my bill." Ba-dump.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

More street photography

Homeless

More images from my trip into Chicago last week. Above, a homeless man picks up his possessions to move on. I don't know where, but wherever it is, it will be temporary, just like the last place, and the place before that.

Below, a gentleman surveys the cityscape from the nook he staked out.


Temporarily Closed

And one more, taken as I was leaving Central Camera. If you look closely, the gentleman about to enter the store is eyeballing my camera. I can only guess what he was thinking. Mentally comparing my camera to his? Wondering what I was doing with a flash bracket, flash unit and diffuser (which I had just purchased) on my camera hanging around my neck on a fairly bright day? Wondering if the touristy looking Japanese dude actually took his picture? I like that I caught the guy in the side window looking at his cell phone.


Call Again

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Takin' it to the street

Under the El, Chicago

I had a couple of errands to run yesterday in Chicago. One, pick up my daughter from Roosevelt University to begin her spring break. Two, pick up some equipment from a certain 110-year-old camera store.


Glance

Since I was bringing my camera with me to try out some accessories at Central Camera, why not engage in some street photography while I was in town? I've described my technique before -- camera hanging around my neck, wide angle lens, thumb on the shutter as I walked along, waiting for something interesting to happen near me and tripping the shutter as it happened. The lighting was wonderful -- overcast day, no hard shadows -- I set the camera on manual exposure and fired away.

It's hit-and-miss photography. One the one hand, since I'm not looking through the viewfinder, I can't really tell what I've captured until I review the shots later. On the other hand, if I had the camera pressed to my face, I would not have gotten the shot above, top -- as I prepared to photograph the lady on the street corner, I saw the bicyclist coming down the street out of the corner of my eye, reset, then waited for him to get into range before pressing the button. The framing you see is exactly SOOC -- no cropping. Lucky enough to be good or good enough to be lucky?

After a while, you can get pretty good at being able to "see with your hands." More shots to come tomorrow.


Exile

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Hungry and homeless?

I took this photo back in July. It was on State Street in Chicago and my daughter and I were in the city for the morning. We had brought a sack of food with us and still had quite a bit left over after we had finished eating, so I gave what was left to a homeless man at State and Madison.

We passed this girl several blocks south and my suspect-o-meter went off. She looked too well groomed and dressed to really be in need. A nice jacket lay nearby in case the morning air got too chilly. It was slung over a fairly large backpack. She sported a nice set of shades and was probably trying to conceal an iPod. And the sign - neatly lettered, with swirlies, no less. And she was working a Sudoku puzzle. What homeless person does that?

I'm now approaching my sixth month of unemployment. And I'm not as judgmental as I was back on that July morning in Chicago. These times have created a whole new class of the homeless. And that includes people with nice shades and who know how to work a Sudoku puzzle.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.