It’s a warm summer day, the trees are full, and the sun breaks through just enough to hit these leaves. The photo is just a bit overexposed, but it’s the lighting and composition that I love.
August 2, 2009. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/3, 1/1,600, ISO 400.
This monarch has lived a life. It isn’t just the missing chunk on its right forewing… all those scratches on its left forewing say that if you sit down with this butterfly at your local corner bar, you’ll be listening to its stories all night.
August 22, 2015. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), 70–300mm Nikon zoom lens at 300 (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/13, 1/350, ISO 560.
I love a few things about the photo. The graffiti, of course. That sign! The two shrimp bookending the vegetables like parentheses. Really: That sign! Is that two iterations of that sign or three? The corner of that building is pretty interesting. It looks like they’ve bricked up the doorway separately from the rest of the entryway? Including the second and (per another photo I took) third floor? There are patterns among patterns there, multiple stories we’ll never know. What’s that arch doing at sidewalk level on the right? And the crowns!
Chicago’s Meatpacking District was a glorious playground for photographers and just lovers of vernacular architecture. All these decaying buildings had so much going on. Most of them are gone now. Google bought up a lot of it and turned it into a playground. Other huge corporations and investment companies and private equity firms got in on it. Now it’s lots of stupidly expensive condos.
Another photographer’s take on this went viral at the time. We were apparently in the same place around the same time, but this is not that photo.
As I was winding up this day’s photography, I heard music, a song I knew. It was live music, and some band was playing one of the earliest blues songs, “St. James Infirmary.” I love that song and I will always stop in my tracks when I hear it, even in a deserted meatpacking district on a late Saturday afternoon. I turned a corner and Chicago oompah band Mucca Pazza was on the sidewalk playing of the best songs ever written. I bet that does not happen in what is now called Fulton Market District anymore.
May 17, 2008. Canon PowerShot SD850 IS, 12mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 72mm), f/4, 1/160, ISO 80.
That nature park I’ve gone to for 25 years keeps showing me new views. Every so often, it stays open until 8 instead of 4, as it did this August Friday evening; it’s on the hot side of warm and bullfrogs are croaking and dragonflies are zooming and deer are foraging and the warmth and the light and the sound and the smell all tell you that the entire park is alive. That’s why I love this photo.
August 26, 2016. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Nikon 70–300mm at 70mm (35mm equivalent: 105mm), f/16, 1/125, ISO 1100.
It’s always fun to try to freeze something in motion. One version of that was “Red Barn in Red Wing,” back on May 2, when I was what was in motion. I think this is a black-capped chickadee, though I’m not at all sure. And I was straining my camera’s resolution even in this good light. But there it is, pretty much frozen in midair.
September 26, 2021. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400 mm, f/6.3, 1/1,500, ISO 200.
For a display of solidarity, losing the rest of the word was kind of the wrong look.
Back in 2011, with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker facing a recall vote, there were weekly marches and parades around the capitol building in Madison to support and rally the cause. A friend organized rides up there for a few weeks, and there was a lot to love about both the participants and the crowds, but I think this moment far outweighs any other photo I took. It’s also one of the very few survivors of all the photos I took, sadly, but if I could pick just one survivor, it’s this one. If you search for solidarity cows in your favorite search engine, there are a few more photos from other sources.
March 12, 2011. Canon PowerShot SD850 IS, exposure information unknown.
There’s a really cool jazz club on Chicago’s Far North Side; I’ve taken some great pictures there. A lot of the pictures I’ve taken there have performers in them, and I’m still grappling with whether I will post pictures with recognizable people, including when I can’t identify them, so I don’t know how many of those will turn up here. But the decor is pretty photo-friendly too, as long as I aim carefully. Here’s one of those. Just a cozy little bit of ambiance from a nice jazz club.
May 24, 2019. Samsung S20+ cell phone, 1.8mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 13mm), f/2.2, 1/30, ISO 640.
I love neon. I’ve taken two classes in making neon, one in Boston in the mid ’90s, the other here in Chicago in December ’24. It’s hard and it’s fun and it’s rewarding. Both times, I came out with what could politely be called “abstracts.”
When I moved here, I loved how much neon filled the North Side. A lot of it is gone. LED signs are taking over. Austin still has a lot of really beautiful and well-maintained signs, though. I don’t know how much longer that will be true. Here’s a sign on South Congress Avenue in Austin. It’s a good one from the front, but no one ever thinks of looking at neon from the side. From the side, it’s just a big blast of light and color, which are two of my favorite things in the world.
January 12, 2017. Google Nexus 6P cell phone, 4.67mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/2, 1/125, ISO 175.
Have I mentioned (he asked rhetorically) that some scenes are things you just stumble upon that catch your eye, maybe puzzle you, maybe make you laugh? Here we are. I got a laugh out of how the four big turtles are all facing the little one at the left, which seems to be facing them down.
September 24, 2022. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400 mm, f/8, 1/180, ISO 100.
For maybe a little too long, I lived in a third-floor apartment ambiguously between Chicago’s Andersonville and Edgewater neighborhoods. It was a nice, big place, and my downstairs neighbors were pretty cool. Mostly, I loved the semi-enclosed back porch. That porch was pretty generously sized, and while there was framing for a window, the landlord (who built the porch in his basement workshop) knew that I didn’t even really want a screen. It was nice to feel like it was connected to open space.
This isn’t a technically good picture per se, but it’s what I saw for 15 years as I sat in some relatively comfortable chair and read the night away with my cat on my lap. I liked taking pictures of some of those architectural and vernacular details at night and some of those photos will turn up here eventually.
June 12, 2014. LG Nexus 5 cell phone, 4mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 30mm), f/2.4, 1/9, ISO 2,450.
One of the buses I used to take every so often goes through some more well-off areas and some less well-off areas — not rich, not poor, just maybe a few demographic groups apart — and these two women ended up next to each other in front of me on an otherwise nearly empty bus.
The woman on the right in the amazing embroidered jacket got on first, in one of the less well-off areas — again not a poor one by any means, not a ’hood, just a few blocks that showed the wear and tear of age and weather. In her right hand she was carrying three cloth tote bags stuffed full. She sat in that frontmost aisle seat.
The woman on the left got on later, as the neighborhood was just starting to spruce up a bit, hefting an old-style covered cloth pram past the farebox and edging past the woman in the embroidered jacket to take the window seat, parking the pram in front of the other woman.
Every few moments, the woman on the left would lean over in front of her seatmate and gently lift open the edge of the pram, peek in at her charge, and make a few cooing noises. The woman on the right would patiently lean into the aisle to give her seatmate the room to do that, maybe a little accommodating, maybe a little resigned, but not with any apparent frustration.
After a few peeks and coos, it was clear that the pram held not a baby but a cat. It hadn’t responded to the first coos, but it became quite chatty as its owner interacted as the bus rolled on.
A few minutes later, the woman in the embroidered jacket called out, “Driver, could you let me know when we get to the public aid office?” And her seatmate got very excited: “It’s here, it’s right here!” The woman in the embroidered jacket got up and stood by the door. “Not this stop,” said the woman with the cat in the pram, “but it’s coming up soon! You’ll see it from the street!”
As the bus passed more stops — with no public aid office in sight — the woman with the pram returned to her peeking and cooing, but suddenly reached up and pulled the cord to signal her stop. As the driver opened the front door, she got up and silently pushed the carriage past the other woman and off the bus. The door closed and the bus pulled away; the woman with the jacket turned around, not making eye contact with me or the woman a few rows behind me but looking off into the distance. A few minutes later, we pulled up to the stop outside the public aid office and she stepped off.
December 7, 2015. Google Nexus 6P cell phone, 4.67mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/2, 1/60, ISO 100.
Mostly I like flying when the world is showing off all the colors, but this flight proved to me that there’s a lot to be said for keeping my eyes open during takeoff even on a chilly Winter day.
(This is, by the way, an unedited full-color photo.)
November 30, 2018. Samsung Galaxy S8+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.53, 1/640, ISO 50.
When the day is nicer than every forecast promised, all you can do is enjoy the space between the lush green grass and the clear blue sky.
September 6, 2022. Samsung S20+ cell phone, exposure information unavailable.
An earlier post referred to the first time I’d shot a roll of film with my Nikon F5. I actually shot a roll with a borrowed F5 a year or so earlier, but even before that, this was the best shot from the first actual roll of film I’d shot since college. In 2013, I backed the Ondu Panoramic Pinhole camera, handmade from wood by a guy named Elvis in Slovenia, on Kickstarter. Elvis was a cool guy and it was a really great project, and the camera worked pretty well; unfortunately, it vanished during a move a few months after I received it, so I got to shoot only one roll of film. He’s done a few more generations of the camera and as I wrote this post, I decided to buy one and bring this back to my work. You’ve already seen a number of shots from this nature preserve and you’ll see scores more from there, but this is the only shot that shows it like this, and I really like the look of it.
The date I took this is long forgotten, and the camera was fully manual, so there is no exposure information. The Kickstarter page for the camera says the focal length was 25mm and the field of view was 113°. Tri-X film generally comes in ISO 400, but sometimes other ISOs are available, and under the circumstances, I would have used the fastest film I could buy.
Enjoy your stay.
Chicago’s Blue Line goes out to the western suburb of Berwyn, which, once you get out of the station, is pretty nice. The Blue Line runs along the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) and there are actually many tracks, not only for the El but also for commercial rail, so it’s important to protect us passengers as we enter and leave the station. Still. Your first view is a little stark.
July 3, 2023. Samsung S20+ cell phone, exposure details unknown.