A great year starts today!

Hope yours ends up on this side of awesome.

End of November

With winter closing in. This is the month my wife describes as existing in "two shades of brown." Toss in a little blue sky and the occasional snatch of color here and there, and it's not too bad.



Photographs taken at Jelke's Creek Bird Sanctuary in Sleepy Hollow, Illinois. I plan to revisit the huge old tree throughout the month of December.

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.

Cana Island twilight

Another day comes to an end in Door County, Wisconsin. Another night settles in. Another lighting of the lighthouse light. Another winter passing, another spring on its way.

Ironically, the sameness of every passing day provides cover for change to creep in. Little by little, imperceptively, patiently, change squeezes in between the seemingly immutable objects and routines that surround us and settles into place.

Life is funny like that.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

The sun went down ...

I've been away for a few days. To stand. To watch. To ponder. And grab some pictures of what I saw while standing, watching and pondering.

I specifically made a trip to Door County, Wisconsin to fill a few holes in the selection of photographs that will hang in a gallery there from May to October. The theme is twilight and night scenes around the county.

The scene above is a self portrait taken at the marina in Sister Bay. I had wrapped up shooting the sunset and as an afterthought, decided to plop down the tripod, set the self timer and walk to the end of the pier for a shot.

A few stubborn chunks of ice hang around the harbors, slowly falling victim to the warm winds that blow from the south. Their days are numbered. Buds are budding. Grass is greening. Taps and buckets are attached to sugar maple trees. A season ending, another beginning.



Technical stuff: Graduated neutral density filter used to balance sky and foreground tones, 30cc magenta filter to warm up the sky. Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Peekaboo barn

You may be able to clear the land to make room for a farm and a barn, but eventually, the land takes it all back.

A barn slowly being swallowed by nature just west of Elgin, Illinois on the edge of the Chicago metroplex. If it isn't nature, it's the steady advance of suburbia.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Watching the day fade

At the aptly-named Sunset Park. Door County, Wisconsin.

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.

River

Missing someone this Christmas? Yeah, me too.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Bound

At some point in the distant past, it was important for this wire to encircle this post. It set apart something of value from the wider world around it; it marked the personal property of the person who tied this and other strands of wire across the countryside.

Not so anymore. The property is no longer, the post and wire relieved of their duties long ago. Rusting and rotting, protecting nothing.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Cape Neddick lighthouse

Every once in a while, I have a reason to dig into my archive of negatives and slides to hunt for a picture. I received an e-mail from a gentleman in Iowa looking to purchase prints of lighthouses. He supplied a list of the specific ones he is looking for and I happen to have photos of five of the lighthouses on his list.

The one I had to work hardest to find was this one. It's the lighthouse at Cape Neddick in York, Maine. This shot was taken in August of 2001 during a trip through several New England states. I was still learning the intricacies of exposing film properly, and had the courage (or foolishness) to shoot the entire trip on slide film, which leaves little room for error.

After examining the scanned hi-res file, it looks like the rookie did OK. This shot was a tad overexposed, but it works. Actually, the photo above is a black and white conversion from the color transparency. The color version can be seen here.

Back then, I was about three years into following something inside me that made me want to learn everything I could about photography. I have to say that nearly nine years later, the fire is still there, continuing to push me onward. It's nice to go back every once in a while and take a look at some of the mile markers that have been passed along the way.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Portrait of November #4

I wonder if Stephen Covey is a photographer? The second of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is "Begin with the end in mind." I find that I employ that nugget of advice practically every time I trip the shutter on my camera. I usually have a very well developed idea of the finished version of every frame I snap. That vision guides my choice of settings on my camera and the frame that I capture is well within the range of that which I envisioned. Usually.

As I considered these two subjects at Glacial Park in McHenry County, Illinois, I imagined that these two photos would "sing" with a deep twilight sky in the background. The only problem being that at the time I took these, it was three o'clock in the afternoon on an overcast day. I took them anyway, intending to lay in some color later.



The sky color came from another photo taken in precisely the conditions I imagined -- deep twilight on a clear evening. I sampled several areas of the sky in this photograph that I took last summer and used the colors as the basis for a graduated fill, which was layered and blended over the nearly white sky in the two photos above.

I used to be a photographic purist who only accepted what came out of the camera, for better or worse, with no manipulations afterward. Back then, I probably wouldn't have taken these photos in the first place, and if I did, they probably would have gone unpublished. These days, I let my vision be my guide and when necessary, employ Mr. Covey's sixth habit -- Synergize.

Photographs © 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 #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.

Autumn ivy

It's too late to see fall colors on the trees in southeastern Wisconsin. The leaves have fallen. But there are still patches of colors in other places. This was spotted on the exterior wall of the Stage Coach Inn in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

For the most part, autumn has put away its coat of many colors and settled into something more plain and simple to await the arrival of winter.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Passages

Cemetery in Burlington, Wisconsin.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Life goes on

Some time ago, I granted permission to display the above photograph to a web site dedicated to helping survivors of suicide deal with their grief. I hadn’t thought about it much until I received the following e-mail today:

Just had to tell you I ran across your photos on the Suicide Survivor website. They are ABSOLUTELY breathtaking! Your work is BEAUTIFUL-brought tears to my eyes! Much gratitude –Lisa

This particular photo was taken just a few days before my father suddenly took ill and passed away in October of 2007, so it holds a high degree of meaning for me. I’m happy that it and others are helping someone else like Lisa deal with her own grief.

UPDATE: I wrote to Lisa to thank her for her kind words about my photography. She wrote back:

My brother killed himself on the 4th and your pictures are very peaceful, calming and soothing. I saved your site so I could keep looking at them-I can’t tell you what comfort they bring-Incredible.

Thank you again for your beautiful work-it does make a difference to someone.

The green leaves of summer ...

... won't be green for very long. The leaves are beginning to turn here in northern Illinois. Autumn's coming.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Out from the misty sea

A shot like this one would have driven me nuts back in the days when I shot film. Fussing over the exposure, taking shots at a full range of shutter speeds hoping to capture the effect I was after, waiting for the film to be developed, then either celebrating or agonizing over the results.

Digital photography made this a breeze. Place a stack of neutral density filters over the lens to slow down the exposure and turn crashing waves to a dreamy mist. Set camera to aperture priority and dial down to f/32 for maximum depth of field. Meter on the rocks in the distance, click. Check and evaluate. Adjust. Click. Repeat as needed.

This is the beach at Wind Point, a few miles north of Racine, Wisconsin. Two-foot waves were breaking just offshore. An exposure time of ten to thirty seconds turned the breakers into misty clouds on the rocks in the middle of the photo. A hunk of driftwood was brought into the picture to complete the composition. I mean, I just happened upon this unique alignment of driftwood and rocks and thought I'd photograph it. Yeah, that's it ... that's the ticket.

Wink, wink.

Happy Friday.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

The bride wore Chuck Taylors

It was a wedding known as much for its footwear as its location and participants. My little Miss is now a Mrs. and starting her new life with a talented and promising young man in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The wedding itself was a reflection of Kara and Eric – a mixture of adhering to tradition and throwing it to the wind. The location was a century-old pavilion in Lord’s Park in Elgin, Illinois – something old. But there were plenty of examples of something new, too.



Bride and Groom decided to make a statement with their wedding footwear and outfitted themselves, the bridal party and parents with high top Converse sneakers. Bride, Groom and Moms sported custom colors; attendants and dads wore black.





Along with the expected (bride and groom stuffing each other’s faces with cake, for example) was the unexpected (the cake – actually several cupcake trees) were adorned with his and hers Star Wars action figures in place of the traditional bride and groom). Kara was in charge of the sheet music for the cello quartet that provided the music for the ceremony and slipped in the Beatles’ All You Need Is Love for the recessional as a surprise to Eric – and everyone else expecting Midsummer’s Night Dream. Eric had his own surprise up his tuxedo sleeve and jammed with the reception’s jazz combo to serenade Kara with a rendition of All My Lovin.’



A twenty one thousand bubble salute sent husband and wife out into the world.



Dad got to photograph the portraits of the wedding party and families as well as reception activity. Another photographer was hired to shoot the ceremony. Something about me not able to do two things at once.

All went well, Mom and I only melted down a little, friends and family have returned to their homes and the house is quiet today.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.