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.

I love this photo because it captures her personality so vividly. I could say nothing more than that for many, maybe most, of the pictures I’ll post of her. She was just about three months old here, and over the next 18 1/2 years, we became the best of pals. But here on a Sunday afternoon — 27 years ago today, in fact — when we were still getting to know each other, she was lying on her back on my bed, not giving a damn about me or anything else.

May 31, 1998. Apple QuickTake 200, focal length 5.7mm (35mm equivalent: 38mm), f/2.2, 1/4, ISO 100.

I love this photo because, like falcons, hawks are kickass birds that are here to talk about their dinosaur heritage while they eat your dog. When you see them essentially anywhere above you — flying or perched on a branch, scouting for food or eating it — they manage to look pretty majestic. You know that’s an apex predator. But one Sunday afternoon, I spotted this hawk on the arms of a cross above a convent across the street from the nature preserve. I started snapping and it slowly flew in closer, jumping from branch to branch. It’s unusual for a hawk to start from that cross and come inside the nature preserve, let alone linger the way it did. But finally, after all that, he decisively jumped down into some scrub only a few feet from me and started kicking through it as if he had gone on a Saturday night bender and was hoping to find his car keys. Once he was in that scrub, literally kicking at the twigs and growth, he looked very tiny and silly, and he must have realized that, because it didn’t take long for him to fly off to a more distant tree.

Dork.

April 9, 2022. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400 mm, f/8, 1/350, ISO 100.

Bees don’t care how close you get, as long as they get what they want, so I leaned into this one pretty closely. (This was a macro lens; there was no zoom lens here to give me safe distance.) The sharpness of the bee (especially her eyes) and the part of the flower she’s working on makes me really happy. Look at the pollen sac on her hind leg! Really, it looks like she’s coated in pollen all over, even the ridges in her abdomen.

September 5, 2016. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/13, 1/180, ISO 800.

Some of the most fun you can have photographing architecture is slicing a building into pieces. Here’s a view of the RBC Gateway building in downtown Minneapolis, which has lots of details and highly reflective windows to keep all the views interesting.

October 12, 2024. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 13.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 140mm), f/2.75, 1/250, ISO 50.

I love this photo because it’s three white cars near a streetlight. That’s about it. It’s just a nice composition.

November 29, 2018. Samsung S20+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/10, ISO 400.

There I am, walking home from work on the last evening of Spring, and, yes, it’s Christmas in June. They’re all there: One-Eyed Santa, the Two Wise Guys, and the Two Headless Angels, one of whom seems quite plotzed, maybe in multiple senses of the word. At least they’re staying hydrated. No notes on what Santa was singing since the angel couldn’t hear him.

June 19, 2014. Google Nexus 5 cell phone, 3.97mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/2.5, 1/120, ISO 138.

Falcons, of course, are among the fiercest of raptors, among the birds that really say, “I was a dinosaur once, mofo.” Kestrels are pretty small, but I’ve seen them (and photographed them) as they balanced on a branch with their much larger prey, which disappeared one beakful at a time.

But then you see one on a really blustery day and that wind is kicking everything up and the poor little predator can’t even feign the modesty Marilyn Monroe coyly did. Sorry not sorry, dude.

March 21, 2021. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/6.7, 1/350, ISO 560.

Ah, that feeling when you really have only a moment to nail a shot, and you do. The symmetry here is just so good. There is only one spot from which this photo can be taken, and I found it; there were neither people nor trains in the station, which is really rare. (Someone’s standing far down on the right platform, but far enough away that they don’t disrupt the flow of the lines.)

When I posted this on social media, a few people thought I jumped down onto the tracks to take this picture. This is Kimball station, the terminal of Chicago’s Brown Line. If you’re really curious, you can find the layout of the station online, but quickly, there are three spurs, one on each side of the right platform and then the leftmost track that you see here. There’s a nice safe walkway to get you to that platform on the left; that’s where I was.

This was the cover to my 2023 calendar.

November 16, 2021. Samsung S20+ cell phone, 5.4mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.69, 1/40, ISO 250.

One of the sites I love in Minneapolis is the Mill City Museum. It is pretty much in ruins, made safe with more girders than you really think you’ll see on a building. It’s central to the city’s history and there’s a lot going on in those walls. It’s near the Mississippi River, and I really like how the two windows that long ago lost their glass each has a very different view of Minneapolis’ very much loved Stone Arch Bridge. All of the textures and shadows play around on the masonry and the iron work in front of those two windows, with one of the arches of the Stone Arch Bridge visible through the left window and the girders supporting the center of the Bridge visible through the right, and, all the way in the back, the river. Multiple views of a single scene.

July 12, 2024. OnePlus 12 back camera, 13.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 140mm), f/2.75, 1/375, ISO 50.

Oh my frickin’ god do I love this photo. I’m flying from Austin to Chicago and, Chicago being goddamn Chicago, it is completely overcast. Underneath that layer, the city I live in is gray and grim and grimy. But I specifically chose a flight that would approach the city as the sun was getting low, and as we slowly started to descend, we got close enough to the clouds to really see all that texture, with the sun bringing it out so cleanly. With the cirrus clouds above having their own fun with the light, and the sweep from the bright highlights on the left to the increasing shadow on the right, and all that blue in the upper right, this made me feel like I could deal with the city’s utter lack of sun for a little while.

February 2, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 6.06mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 23mm), f/1.6, 1/1,500, ISO 50.

I’m sorry! That title isn’t at all accurate. The anthers — those little footballs on those threads, which are the stamens — are obviously quite golden. But sometimes you know you’d rather go for the completely wrong joke rather than just say “Hey, Have Some Pollen.” The anthers are each full of pollen, and insects that bust open the anthers carry the pollen around, including to you and me. And they are gold and we are still going to chuckle over my little pun, right?

In late Spring 2024, I bought a Nikon F5, a film camera that was made well into the digital age because it was so well-made and so popular. If you say you shot a photograph with The Beast, every photographer will know you used a Nikon F5.

This was from the first roll of film that I shot with the F5. I don’t take notes on exposure like the pros do. And I trust that camera’s autoexposure a bit more than I do my digital cameras’. But what I wanted was a great close-up shot with my macro lens of those anthers, and the second picture I took with my new film camera nailed it. I love doing close-up work with that macro lens. I believe this is a climbing rose, per the flower identification site I use. But mostly, I love how those anthers are so freakin’ sharp on film on a nice warm day at the nature preserve.

July 20, 2024. Nikon F5, Amber D100, 105mm Nikon macro lens.

I’ve lived in Chicago since late 1997, and am preparing to move to Minneapolis, which is nearly as relentlessly flat. But a half-hour’s drive east of Minneapolis is Stillwater, on the St. Croix River, so picturesque and (cough) tourist-ridden, but hilly and very pretty if you’re there during that good foliage time.

With three spires and a few roofs peeking through the foliage, it reminded me very nicely of the rolling terrain around New England that I grew up loving, and I’m happy that I saw this picture come together as I aimed the lens this way and that. A blue sky would have been wonderful, but Fall in the Midwest only gives so much.

October 21, 2023. Nikon Coolpix P1000 (1/2.3-inch sensor), 24.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 135mm), f/4, 1/400, ISO 100.

I’m not exactly an amateur astronomer, but I love the sky: night, day, looking up at it from the ground, flying through it in a little metal tube. Here’s a waning gibbous moon. We think of the man in the moon, but different cultures have seen different things. There’s a rabbit to be found there that I’m sure will turn up in a photo here, but in this photo, you can nicely make out the woman in the moon. I won’t belabor it much, but the mares along the terminator are her hair, even including a bit of an ear; there’s a darker spot for her eye, a line for her mouth, then a chin, neck, shoulder.

Anyway, Nikon’s Coolpix P1000 is really made for lunar and (with a filter) solar photography, and does a decent job with other subjects as long as the light is good. The craters along the terminator are nice and crisp here and there’s a bit of a sense that this isn’t a flat disk the way it seems to be at night, but a real globe.

October 2, 2024. Nikon Coolpix P1000 (1/2.3-inch sensor), focal length 503mm (35mm equivalent: 2,800mm), f/8, 1/500, ISO 1,600.

This is the last of a sequence of photos I took as they started to climb the stairs. They were a couple of stairs apart at first, then she waited for him, then she leaned back and he leaned in — click, click, click. Patience is always rewarded.

(I’d been pretending to take pictures of the ferris wheel for a couple of moments, hoping they’d go up the stairs at all to add some human interest and scale to the scene. They gave me more interest than I’d hoped.)

November 3, 2018. Samsung Galaxy S8+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.53, 1/30, ISO 160.