Winter wood

Log pile and barn at Peck Farm Park in Geneva, Illinois.

Storm story

My wife and I followed the progress of a storm system most of the day last Friday. OK, so I followed it. I just kept my wife updated throughout the day. I think she knew that if things got interesting that I might want to go out and meet the storm as it approached our area. The storm eventually cut a path across six states leaving flooding, downed trees and power outages in its wake.

We received a severe thunderstorm watch alert on my cell phone early in the day. From there I logged onto the NOAA weather site, which provides a daily forecast briefing that meteorologists across the country use as reference in preparing their forecasts. The briefing indicated that a large flying wedge of thunderstorms was sweeping its way across Iowa and heading to Illinois and points east. This storm was a surprise -- it had not previously shown up on any of NOAA's computer models.

A combination of strong convection within the system and high velocity winds aloft meant a pretty good show was on its way. The NOAA site hinted at the possibility of the existence of wind shears, which meant that all the ingredients were in place for the formation of supercells.

I hit Accuweather.com for their rolling radar pictures. Using their time stamps and a trusty old road atlas, I calculated the speed of the storm at about 60mph. Whoa. Nothing to do but keep an eye on the weather reports and wait for our uninvited guest to blow in.

Later that afternoon, when the system approached to within 60 miles of my home, I set out to meet it. My wife came along to monitor the radio and keep me out of trouble. The plan was to photograph the approaching storm, then skedaddle our way back home ahead of it. The whole thing was like one of those algebra story problems -- a severe storm with high winds and heavy rains is heading east at 55 mph. A Ford Escape with a crazy man inside is heading west at 50 mph. Where will the two meet?



We met just west of Illinois Route 47, a north-south road in western Kane County. As we got closer to the storm, the visual turned from a shapeless mass of dark gray to layers of churning clouds, including a rather impressive shelf cloud riding underneath the stack. Walls of rain hung from the snarling mass along the horizon like sheets on a clothesline. I turned onto a north-south road, located a red barn to frame against the sky, turned the car around so it pointed toward home, then hopped out into a corn field to get some images.



I've shot enough approaching storms to know when enough is enough. I called to my wife, who sat in the car with her window open (I presume to yell to me to get back in at the appropriate time), and let her know that when the lead clouds hit a certain point on the southern horizon, we would make our exit. That would be our cue to get out fast. The clouds didn't quite make it there before I could hear the slow sizzle of very large raindrops striking the leaves of corn on the opposite side of the field. Time to go. I ran back to the car and just got inside as the rain began to fall on us.

The rain eased, then stopped as we raced eastward, raising my confidence that we could outrun the storm if things worked out for us at a couple of stop lights along the way. At stop light number one, we found ourselves waiting for green behind a farmer on a small tractor hauling a trailer tank full of water. Either he hadn't heard or ignored the weather reports -- there was plenty of water about to be delivered today. Either way, he was about to learn a hard lesson. When the light turned, the tractor pulled out ahead of us at a painfully slow pace. A line of cars the opposite way prevented me from passing the tractor as the rain caught up with us. The tractor hinted at pulling off the road to let us pass, but then swerved back on as the farmer likely rejected the idea of becoming a sitting duck on the side of the road in favor of continuing as a crawling duck. Big raindrops began hitting the roof and windshield as we finally pulled around the slow moving tractor, leaving the farmer behind to deal with his fate.

About three miles from home, any hope of outrunning the system disappeared. A section of storm to the south had raced ahead of the mass behind us and closed in on us in a big wet sloppy hug. We slogged though pouring rain and howling winds the rest of the way, dodging fallen trash bins that littered our subdivision like so many casualties in the streets.

Little damage was sustained in our neck of the woods, although many other areas saw uprooted trees and a few are still waiting for power to return. More storms are in the forecast for the next several days.

I'll keep an eye on them.

Photographs © 2010 James Jordan.

Storm cell

This past weekend was a turbulent one in the Prairie State. This is the action northeast of Woodstock, Illinois on Sunday afternoon.

My wife and I were returning from Port Washington, Wisconsin and noticed a large storm brewing to the west and north of us. We eventually crossed paths at Lake Geneva. After we had driven through the storm, we kept an eye on it as it drifted eastward toward McHenry. I stopped three times to get photos of the churning clouds.

By the time we arrived home, the skies had cleared and you wouldn't have known that anything dramatic had occured at all.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Mill

I have an adage that I follow when out taking pictures: If the sky is doing something interesting, find something to stick in front of it and shoot it.

The skies were getting turbulent out at the Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area near Morris, Illinois this past weekend. The park includes the remains of farms that once sat productively on the wide expanse of land. This windmill was selected for the job of acting as foreground interest to stand against the stormy backdrop.

Photograph © 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.

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.

12 significant photos #2

A barn that time forgot. Made on February 14, 2009.

Continuing the retrospective on significant photos taken in 2009.

I photographed this barn while on the way to a photo session. I live on the edge of the Chicago metroplex and it's not uncommon for the occasional barn to intermingle with shopping centers and subdivisions. This barn sits behind a CVS pharmacy south of Crystal Lake, Illinois.

Normally, the barn would have been mostly hidden among the trees and brush, but a dusting of snow the night before painted the roof white and covered the foreground grass. It looked interesting, so I pulled into the pharmacy parking lot, walked over to the edge of the barn property and shot a few frames. I was finished in less than five minutes.

I didn't even bother to post the photo anywhere for a few days, but when I did, the reaction to the picture was instantaneous and deep. Views and comments poured in on Flickr and for a time, the photo appeared in the rotation of featured photos on one of the site's main pages, which generated more views and comments.

I'm still not exactly sure what the fuss was about, or what drew people to this particular image. I was definitely thinking "Red Rule" when I made the picture. The doors hanging askew adds some quirkiness to the barn and quirkiness is good in a picture. The doors perhaps add to the feeling of neglect and abandonment. And maybe I should have known about the fuss, seeing as how another picture of a barn after a winter snowfall is one of my most viewed online photos -- it's received nearly 30,000 views and after two years, still gets 70-90 views every day.

Hey, it's snowing today. Maybe I should go look for some barns.

NOTE: Fixed the link. Sorry.

Photograph © 2009 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.

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.

In storage

An old truck (just barely) protected from the elements. Seen near Viola, Tennessee. Black and white conversion of a color photograph. Created a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop to adjust gray tones.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Golden field

On Wisconsin route 83 north of the town of Mukwonago lies a field of soybeans turned golden with the chill weather of early autumn. A lonely tree stands nestled between rises in the landscape.

Also in this location is a puzzled farmer who probably still wonders why the guy with the camera stopped to take pictures of his soybeans. He stood in his driveway watching me the entire time.

If he could only see the view from his place.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Meanwhile, back at the alpaca ranch ...

Cross another item off my life list of things to do. Visit an alpaca farm. Check.

The Waldron Grove alpaca farm is located a couple of miles west of Elgin, Illinois. Susan and Ron Waldron love their herd of wooly wanderers. They are now spending their retirement caring for dozens of alpacas, while building a business around Susan's alpaca fiber art.



Susan designs wall hangings, scarves, shawls and sweaters using hand-dyed alpaca fiber graciously donated by members of the Waldron herd. The Waldrons recently were afforded an opportunity for wider promotion of their products and Susan contacted me about creating some professional photographs of her products.



After meeting the herd and taking a close-up look at Susan's work, I'm enthusiastic about heading back to the ranch next week to do the photo shoot. More to come.

Waldron Grove is located at 39w856 McDonald Road in Elgin, IL 60124. Susan's designs can be seen here.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Tennessee barn

I saw a lot of these in rural central Tennessee -- high gabled barns with one or two "wings" to the side, quite different from the boxy barns located farther north.

This photo was taken in Northcutts Cove, one of the valleys adjacent to the Cumberland Plateau in central Tennessee, on a gray, foggy morning as the sun was steadily making headway into burning off the fog. Lots of low clouds drifting by.

I spotted the barn going by as my wife drove our car through the cove and asked her to stop and back up so I could get a couple of shots. The open gate, path to the entrance of the barn, tranquility on the ground and drama in the sky caught my attention (and oh yeah, the Red Rule), so I caught it right back.

HDR image from a single RAW file processed into five images at 1-stop intervals. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Signs of summer

Here in the Midwestern U.S., you can count on seeing seeing summer thunderstorms and fields of maturing corn. Sometimes you get to see them at the same time.

Storm clouds roil over a corn field, photographed just west of Elgin, Illinois on a tempestuous afternoon. Two HDR images from single RAW files -- one for the corn, one for the sky above it -- assembled in Photoshop.

I've got that going for me, which is good: I received an e-mail from Getty Images yesterday. They've selected ten more of my images for representation in their image library. Their selections include a couple of my recent lens-reversed, insect macro shots. Cool.

Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.

"As a matter of fact, I do mind if you take my picture."

A perturbed pullet at the Kline Creek Farm, West Chicago, Illinois.

I've lived in Chicago's northwest suburbs for 18 years and didn't realize how many farms still existed within the confines of the metroplex. The Kline Creek Farm is a vintage 1800s farm that is owned and operated by DuPage County, is manned by volunteers and still raises crops and livestock.

Visitors can get a glimpse into late 1800s farm life through interpretive displays in the visitor center and by touring the farm's barns, outbuildings, livestock pens and restored farm house. Interactive demonstrations allow kids to participate in the "chores experience."

Kline Creek Farm is open daily and admission is free.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Red barn at morning

Another quick post in a whirlwind week. Youngest daughter gets married tomorrow. Dad's taking pictures at the reception.

Have a good weekend.

Photo: Barn on the Timothy Garfield farm, Geneva, Illinois. Single image HDR. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Country morning

An outtake from the Garfield Farm photo shoot last weekend.

I was there to shoot one particular barn, but I couldn't help but to get views of the other structures as well. I couldn't waste the dramatic skies and the soft morning sunlight filtering through the treeline across the road. And the red rule was calling from that cart.

5-image HDR from a single RAW file.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Summer morning at the Garfield farm

I received an e-mail last Friday from one of the principles of Trillium Dell, a timberframe construction/restoration firm in Galesburg Illinois. He was writing an article on restoration work the company was involved in at the Garfield Farm near Geneva, Illinois and was looking for images to accompany his piece.

He Googled "garfield farm" and my blog posts from last April and May popped up on the first page of search results. After trading several e-mails, I offered to stop by the farm the next morning to photograph the various structures.

The structure at the center of this photo is a barn built in 1842 by Timothy Garfield. The Garfield farm featured an inn which served travelers crossing the prairie.

I arrived shortly after a rain shower had passed through. The clouds were breaking up and the sun was just reaching over the tops of the trees on the opposite side of the dirt road that bears the Garfield family name. I couldn't have asked for better conditions. Interesting sky, soft morning light. And cows.

Photo: Single image HDR from a RAW file exposed to retain highlights. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Sunset barn

At the Garfield Farm Museum, near Geneva, Illinois. The sky was just begging to be photographed and I came across the barn at the right time.

Photo from early April. I still have a huge backlog of photos to process. Such a problem to have.

Three-image HDR via Photomatix Pro with a spin through Neat Image noise reduction software.

Have a great weekend.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Garfield Farm

One of the perks of living on the northwestern/western edge of the Chicago suburbs is that I’m never very far from open land and farms. My wife and I were heading back home from our recent trip to Tennessee when I noticed a nice sunset developing. At the time we were about 4 miles west of Geneva, Illinois driving through a developed area of retail stores. We turned west on a state highway and headed for open space.

We’ve chased sunrises and sunsets before and learned that once you are clear of suburbia, you need to turn perpendicular to the sun (head north or south) as quickly as possible in order to find something of interest to frame against the sky. Driving toward the sun just doesn't work unless you want a picture of a road and the sun.

I determined to take the first road that allowed a turn north of the highway we were on and see what turned up. What turned up was a 1840s vintage barn and farmstead. We had stumbled onto the Garfield Farm Inn and Museum located west of Geneva, Illinois.

Timothy Garfield and his family built a brick inn on the family farm in 1846, which became a center for community activity. The inn hosted hundreds of teamsters and travelers, served as a ballroom for 4th of July dances, a meeting place, and a place to drop in for good company and a mug of cider.

Three original buildings -- the 1842 hay and grain barn, the 1849 horse barn and the 1846 inn -- survive along with three barns built between 1860 and 1906. The farm is listed on the National Register of Historic Sites.



We arrived just as the site was closing for the day, but a worker graciously allowed me to take some photos of the sky behind the barn and other buildings. I took a number of shots of the barn with the sun setting behind it, bracketing my exposures and blending them together in a software program called Photomatix Pro (available as a free download and a $99 upgrade). The result is a high dynamic range (HDR) image that captures a much fuller range of tones than a single digital image, coming close to what the human eye can distinguish in a scene.

The site is extremely picturesque and we’re definitely heading back sometime for more photos. On purpose.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.