Apocalyptic sunset

I finished a photo assignment at a local hospital a couple of nights ago, then met my wife at a nearby shopping mall for a snack and a little walking inside. Afterward, as we headed to our cars in the parking lot, I glanced at the western sky, which until now was under a heavy cloud cover. A small section of the sky appeared to be a boiling mass of pink, similar in appearance to the sky in the movie Independence Day just before the alien ships arrived to destroy the planet.

I joked to my wife that we should hurry home because it appeared that Dekalb just got nuked. We watched the swirling mass grow, then slowly open to reveal pink and gold clouds beyond the portal. Rays of sunlight streamed out of the hole. I shot a few photographs from the parking lot, but having a Home Depot as a foreground wasn't quite cutting it for me. I wrote it off and decided to head home, while my wife drove off to a grocery store to pick up a few items.



I shot a few more pictures of the Home Depot apocalypse, then climbed into my car and headed out of the parking lot. My cell phone rang. My wife had called to tell me that the view was spectacular where she was. I turned west and onto the road she had just taken. She was right -- the hole was now closer, larger and shooting rays of light in a gigantic laser light show. My only problem was finding an unobstructed view.

I turned into a subdivision hoping for a clear shot of the sky over some rooftops. No dice. I gave up again and left the subdivision, turning east to head home. I glanced at the rearview mirror then decided to pull over. I got out and got a couple of shots of the roadway and trees beyond. A police car pulled up and asked if everything was OK. I explained I was getting a few shots of the sunset and Mr. Policeman nodded and drove off. I got another dozen or so shots, all hand-held, before the light faded.



Photographs © 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.

Rochelle, Illinois

Wandering through my photo archives yesterday in search of a photo and came across this forgotten gem taken last August. An electric generating facility and water tower in Rochelle, Illinois at twilight. The last light of the day cast rose colored hues as the sky darkened into a deep blue. The moon doesn't hurt things, either.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Firmaments

This is a worm's eye view of the moonrise -- if you're a worm in a boat on the shore of Lake Michigan, anyway. A nice combination of elements -- the earth, water, sky and the realms beyond.

The technique is pretty simple. Stand on a slippery rock and hold an expensive piece of electronic and optical equipment an inch off the surface of the water. Point it in the general direction of your subject. Click, chimp the image on the LCD and try again until satisfied with the image.

While I'm usually a fan of level horizon lines, this seemed tilted enough to look like it was done on purpose for effect. Yeah, that's it. It had nothing to do with the fact that I was nearly standing on my head and barely able to stay on the rock I was on with all that blood rushing to my head, let alone hold the camera level.

That's the ticket.

Location: Cana Island, Door County, Wisconsin. Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

The moon moved me so I moved it

Some double exposures of the moon and the goings on around the Sturgeon Bay lighthouse. As I packed up to leave, a couple of gentlemen arrived to do some fishing. I was nearly back to my car when I looked out to see them at work (good work if you can get it) on the pier. I zoomed in on them and got a shot or two, then added the moon in post.



While the telephoto zoom compresses and flattens perspective, I like how the waters on the shore side of the pier are calm while the open water beyond tosses and churns. I also like how one guy chose to anchor his net on the pier. It was pretty windy that night.

Photoshop tip: If you have a good shot of the moon in the semi-dark sky, you can select it with the elliptical selection tool, copy then paste it into another photo. This automatically places the moon on its own layer. It will have the dark ring around it from your selection, but not to worry. Select "Lighten" from the layer options menu. Voila. The moon is now seamlessly blended into the picture. You can then adjust the opacity (which will control the brightness of the moon) to your taste. Flatten the image and save.

Photographs © 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.

A moment of daylight

Saturday was gray. Low clouds blocked any hint of the existence of the blue sky beyond them all day long. But toward sunset, a small opening, a slit in the clouds, opened on the western horizon. The descending sun burst through that opening and shone for all of five minutes, then disappeared.

A half hour earlier, I had been wandering around the Isaac Ellwood mansion, home to one of the barbed wire barons of the late 1800s, taking in the Victorian architecture and snapping the occasional photo. Under the gray sky, it seemed more of an exercise than a meaningful gathering of photographs.

Heading back to meet my wife, the sun made its brief appearance, bathing the city in soft, warm light. I had just passed St. Mary's Cemetery on the city's north side. I turned around, headed back to the cemetery and pull up just as the sun disappeared. I hopped out of the car, framed some grave markers against the fading sky and fired off a few shots. And that was it. Color gone, gray sky fading to black. Sleeping grave markers all around, worn from a century or more of memorializing the lives of people long forgotten.

Life is as brief and fleeting as those few moments of brilliant sunlight. I just hope that my time will be seen as having brightened up the skies of those around me, if only for a little while.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Winter dance

In the nearby forest preserve that I frequent, I regularly pass this grouping of trees, and every time I do, I'm struck by their choreographed appearance. Leaning, turning, twisting, reaching like a dance troup frozen in time.

Usually, their limbs and branches mesh into a confusing mishmash of busyness in a photo, but a late winter snowfall helped to define the lines of the branches and really bring out the gracefulness of their forms.

Sometimes it takes the hard times to bring out the grace in us. Hopefully, others will see a defining choreography of our lives and not a chaotic scrambling when that happens.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Sure, why not?

When you're standing in a field of ice chunks the size of dining room tables, and they're a crystal blue color, and the scenery is all other-worldly to start with, why not try to augment the feeling by pulling out a flash unit to see what happens?

I had brought a couple of lights and stands along with me on the trip to Door County, Wisconsin to photograph ice sculptures that were carved as part of the Fish Creek Winter Festival over the weekend. Those didn't pan out the way I had hoped (not many sculptures to choose from, and not a very high quality of art in my opinion, but that's for another blog post).

After I had shot a number of photos out on the ice in available light (see previous posts), and with the night closing in on the scene, I packed up and headed back to my car. Spying the bags of lights and stands in the back of the car, it hit me. Take a stand and a flash unit back out on the ice, dummy. So I did.

I set up a wireless trigger on a flash, placed a couple of warming gels over it and set the white balance on the camera to incandescent. I started by pointing the flash on the light stand directly at the ice chunks and firing away while walking around, but that wasn't doing it for me. It impressed the snot out of a bunch of people nearby, though. I then tried to backlight some of the more translucent ice with varying degrees of success. I finally took the flash unit off the stand and placed it inside some spaces in the ice and hoped the wireless signal would be able to pass through several feet of ice to set off the flash. Better.

As the daylight continued to fade, the gels on the flash created a warmer and pinker tone. I would have loved to have gotten a person in these photos, but by this time, the dozen or so folks that were present when I arrived had gone their way. And only posessing two hands, I did not bring a tripod along to go with the camera, flash unit, and light stand I had to carry to try some self portraits. Plus it was a bit treacherous walking around out there. Who would have thought that ice would be so ... icy?


Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Field of blue

Massive chunks of blue ice along the Green Bay shore, Peninsula State Park near Fish Creek, Wisconsin.

Two-stop graduated neutral density filter to balance sky and foreground tones.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Blue, blue, the ice is blue

I was photographing the Anderson Barn in Door County, Wisconsin this past weekend, when a couple pulled up, got out of their car, and pulled out a camera of their own. On their way to the barn, the wife turned to me and asked, "Have you seen the ice, yet?"

Seeing that Green Bay was frozen as far as the eye could see, I started to figure whether or not I had been asked a trick question and stood there for a moment with a blank look on my face. The woman's husband came to the rescue. "There are chunks of ice along the shore near Fish Creek and in Peninsula State Park. They're huge and they're blue."

I told them that I would be sure to check it out. Then I went to check it out. Just off shore from one of my favorite parks in Fish Creek were chucks of ice. They were huge and they were blue, all right. Apparently, the wind and waves of a winter storm had broken up six- to twelve-inch thick sheets of ice along the Green Bay shoreline and stacked dining room table-sized slabs one atop the other, in some places more than six feet high.

And in a phenomenon usually reserved for glaciers, the clarity of the ice, combined with its thickness created a blue-green hue. I had found my photographic muse for the weekend.

More icy blue eye candy to come, along with some of the goings on at the Fish Creek Winter Festival and some wintry landscapes in general.

All in all, it was a good weekend to be out and about in the icy north with a camera.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Portrait of November #5

An autumn tree situated on a glacial kame, Glacial Park, Ringwood, Illinois.

When I was in art school, one way the instructors taught us how to make better choices regarding our illustrations was to force us to use a limited pallete of colors. It helped instill some discipline when confronted with hundreds of possible choices regarding color and prevented too much of a reliance on any one particular color in our work.

Every so often I try to limit my photographic options to break an over-reliance on a particular mode of operating. I pretty much live with a wide angle lens on my camera. During the visit to Glacial Park, I put a 55-200mm zoom on camera and forced myself to view the world through a tiny 200mm window. With all the possible views available at the park, I wanted to forego wide-angle shots in favor of detailed "pieces" that could convey the sense of the end of autumn and the onset of winter.

I think that for the most part, I succeeded.

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.

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.

Looking to the future

As promised, much better looking subjects in my subsequent strobe-at-night photos. This is from Thip and Suli's engagement photo session. Great couple, fun and energetic in spite of the cold temps. My wife assisted, acting as the equipment bearer and steady-er of the light stand, because the wind can play havoc with an umbrella. Who knew?



We started by wandering around Festival Park in downtown Elgin, Illinois then moved to the Riverwalk on the Fox River, stopping at interesting locales to shoot a few photos of the couple.



The top shot was taken at the Elgin Riverwalk's overlook of the Fox River dam. Light stand and wife was just out of the picture to the right. I was on the level below the overlook with camera tethered to the light via a 16-foot cable draped over the retaining wall from above. Someday I gotta get me a wireless flash trigger.



The final shots were taken from the overlook. I joined everyone back at the top to get catch some city light action behind Thip and Suli. Then it was time to head home and thaw out.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Self portrait with garage and driveway, 6:30 a.m.

So why am I taking pictures of myself in my driveway at 6:30 in the morning? Because I can, that's why. Actually, I have an engagement photo session this evening and want to try out some off-camera strobe-assisted shots of the happy couple in an urban setting around sunset. So I'm using myself as a guinea pig to test some lighting setups.

I'll be working simply -- one strobe with an umbrella on a stand, balancing flash with ambient light. Shooting pictures of myself over the last couple of days in different scenarios has helped me to be able to quickly determine my camera settings when faced with a tricky lighting setup. This shot, which includes interior and exterior house lights, a strobe and the pre-dawn sky, took just three shots and adjustments to balance. It has also helped me to come up with a routine to quickly set up, tear down and move the strobe/umbrella combo from location to location. I may even try something in the middle of the street at a crosswalk.

And I'll have better looking subjects to work with.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

The things that remain

This is the remnant of a pier located at the Wind Point lighthouse north of Racine, Wisconsin. I had gone there hoping to catch the moonrise, but the area was socked in with clouds. So I shot what was there.

Yeah, the processing is severe on this shot, but it was done on purpose to ramp up the surreal feeling I wanted to get across.

We all have things that were once a vital part of our lives that have fallen by the wayside. Although the waves of time continue to wear away at them, they continue to sit below the surface, still influencing, still guiding. And sometimes still tormenting.

I think this shot would make a great cover for a great book on this topic.

Five-image HDR from a single RAW file, exposed to retain highlights. Straight and graduated neutral density filters used to even out tones of water and sky and allow for a long exposure to smooth out the water. 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.

An old friend

When I first picked up a camera to begin the task of seriously improving my photography back in 1997, one of my first subjects was the lighthouse at Wind Point, just north of Racine, Wisconsin. I've lost count of the number of times I've returned. I can't recall ever having been disappointed with any of my sessions there.

On a recent visit, my wife and I arrived at sunset as a half dozen windsurfers were packing up and heading home. Brisk winds kicked up some rather large waves on Lake Michigan that day. As the sun descended past a bank of clouds, I was hoping that the sky would burst into a sea of flaming red, but what you see above is as far as things developed. Oh, well. A stack of neutral density filters helped me get a nice long exposure of 20 seconds or so to catch the movement of the clouds behind the lighthouse.

Since I first laid eyes on them 12 years ago, the lighthouse and grounds have undergone several makeovers, most of them to my liking.

Then again, so have I.

UPDATE: This photo was selected as Photo of the Day at the Karma group on Flickr and posted to the Karma POTD blog. Thanks!

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Somewhere in the middle of Illinois

Seen while pumping gas.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan