Against the wind

The only thing I like better than photographing people is photographing people doing something they love to do in the environment in which they love to do it. Suzanne was kind enough set aside some time to model for me. More than once. Unpredictable weather canceled more than one scheduled session. We finally wwere able to connect on a chilly spring day to get the picture above. Several times running around the bend. Sun in her face. Wind blowing like crazy. But she loves to run. She loves to help others. By posing for me, she got to do both.

Let it snow

Sparrow

But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.

Matthew 10:29

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Hello, Spring

A photo of the renewing cycle of life and death in nature. Moraine Hills State Park, McHenry, Illinois.

I've been blogged. The folks at Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Illinois spotted a photo I took of the hospital at sunset. I was contacted for permission to post the photo on the Future of Sherman blog and to answer a few questions about photography in general and making the sunset picture in particular. See the photo of Sherman Hospital and blog post here.

Off to photograph some desserts at Blackbird in Chicago this morning. Photos will appear in a magazine and on the Blackbird web site.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Points of view

I shot a wedding this past weekend. Mostly on my feet. Sometimes on my belly in the middle of the aisle. I asked the minister ahead of time if doing so might bother him, and he said to go for it.



From the balcony ...



From between the main photographer and the videographer ...



From the wedding party's viewpoint ...



And a whole lotta places in between. Shooting's done. Now the processing's begun.

Photographs © 2010 James Jordan. Shot for Holly Birch Photography, Champaign, Illinois.

Gone fishing

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

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.

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.

Know when to ditch "Plan A"

I usually head into a photo session with a preconceived notion of what it is I want to capture. Nothing wrong with that. It's actually helpful as a starting point. The trick is to recognize when that plan is just no longer working for you, and as much as you are emotionally attached to that plan, to dump it in the rubbish bin. Otherwise Plan A becomes a dead weight around your neck, creatively speaking.

I stopped by the Bode Forest Preserve in Streamwood, Illinois this morning. Layers of fog lay draped over the trees and I wanted to capture bursts of sunlight streaming from between the branches. It looked oh, so pretty in my mind's eye. Reality, however, was not nearly so cooperative. It just wasn't happening the way I envisioned it.

So did I ditch Plan A to explore the other visual opportunities that lay before me? Of course not. I stubbornly tried to make the landscape bend to my will, wasting a lot of time and memory card space in the process.

I gave up and headed back to my car, passing a clearing that opened to Bode Lake. I stopped for a second, looked at the mist on the water and thought, It probably won't do any good, but I may as well look as long as I'm here. Not much of a Plan B, but there it was. I walked through the clearing.

Can't say the view was particularly spectacular, but I took a few shots using a fallen tree branch as the foreground interest, then decided to go for some "worm's eye" shots holding the camera an inch or so off the ground, pointing it in the general direction of the branch and seeing what would happen. What happened were some very simple abstract images that appealed to my Asian sensibilities. I varied the focal length between shots, and voila!



I meant to do that, yup. Yessir, that's the ticket.

(Side note: I was in Quebec a few years ago, and at my first meal in a restaurant there, the server brought my food and said, "Voila!" It made me laugh because it sounded corny. Then I realized those folks meant it up there.)

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Ah, motherhood

Just when you thought it was safe to visit this blog without seeing extreme closeup photos of bugs, I hit you with this. Mwah hahaha.

I was pulling weeds in my garden yesterday when I spotted what looked like a miniature white styrofoam ball (a little less than 1/4 inch in diameter) moving about in the dirt. Since miniature styrofoam balls tend not to move about in the dirt by themselves, I took a closer look and noticed a spider was attached to the ball. The ball was an egg sac and the spider was a female wolf spider (exact species unknown at this point).

The spider hunkered down under a clod of dirt. I placed a stone near the clod so I could find it again and asked momma spider to stay put for a couple of minutes while I dashed into the house to assemble my insect macro setup.

I returned with camera and flash unit five minutes later, located the dirt clod and was pleased to see that Mrs. Wolf had graciously decided to stick around for a photo session. I coaxed her out into the open (not an easy thing to do) and took several shots while laying on my stomach in the dirt (I wonder what the neighbors think).

Wolf spiders tote their egg sacs around until the young hatch, then the mother bites open the sac and the spiderlings climb onto the mother, where they ride around for a few days and gradually disperse.

And they never call after that.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Happy Mother's Day

Some flowers for you.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Sit a spell

During the peak tourist season in Door County, Wisconsin, a little piece of Americana greets hundreds of tourists each day as they head north on highway 42 on their way to catch a ferry to Washington Island. It's been decades since Gus Klenke tuned an engine or chatted with a traveler while filling his car's tank with gas, but Gus' legacy remains -- a fading sign that bears his name in 12-inch letters.

The corner lot in Ellison Bay features Klenke's white wood frame building, a faded blue chevy pickup truck -- always festooned with flowers and other artifacts reflective of the particular season -- and a formerly green metal chair, a reminder of the days when buying gasoline was as much a social event as a business transaction.

"Have to run so soon? Folks are just so busy these days."



Photos taken in "worm's eye" mode -- camera held two or three inches off the ground, thumb on shutter button, pretty much guessing where to aim it. It can take several attempts before catching something worth keeping, but the end result is always a unique angle on the world.

Note: A comment from Nate caused me to take another look at the Photomatix settings I used when creating these and other recent HDR photographs. I discovered that Light Smoothing was set too low, which resulted in haloing in areas of adjacent high contrast. The photos have been reprocessed and replaced. Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

A few days on the road

My wife and I spent the weekend in Door County, Wisconsin. The prime objective was to deliver a number of photographs to an art gallery in Gills Rock. Eight black and white prints of Door County scenery in the twilight hours will be on display starting May 2 and will remain for the season which ends in October.

The pieces were well received. So well, that the gallery owner and I are discussing the possibility of a 5-week solo exhibition next year. I'm slowly building a photographic presence in the county. A lighthouse photo of mine runs across two pages of this year's official county visitor's guide. The same lighthouse (different photo) graces the introduction page of the city of Sturgeon Bay's promotional magazine.

The secondary objective was to add to my overall volume of Door County photos. The photo above is one of those new photographs. This is Clark Lake Road, which travels across the Door peninsula. It crests the high point of the county, passing farms and fields along either side. This is the view from the top on a cold, misty, early spring day.

In between rain showers, I was able to photograph some old buildings and cars, capturing an older, weathered side of the county.

Oh, yeah. I was able to stack a few rocks here and there.



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.