There were actually a few hawks kettling, as it’s called when they fly in circles and loops looking for prey; the rest of them were a bit too far away to get clear shots, but this one came close enough that all I ended up doing for this post was cropping out the extra blue sky so it would show up larger here. That red tail is nicely backlit by the sun, isn’t it? Hawks look amazing flying around.

January 5, 2019. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/6, 1/2,000, ISO 400.

I’d spent an afternoon at the nature park and was waiting for the bus at the corner near the park’s entrance. The bus took a while to arrive on the hot, sticky Summer afternoon, and this woman was clearly lost in thought for some time — not reading, not on her phone or tablet, not sitting under some AC like I was so looking forward to, just there in the moment. It’s a mood I identify with very much, and that is why I love this photo.

July 12, 2016. Google Nexus 6P cell phone, focal length 4.67 (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/2, 1/125, ISO 60.

I love this photo because it’s about friends and the gathering of the tribe and the passing of a friend.

I’ve made many friends thanks to music, and occasionally fly here and there to see bands, live music, friends, cities, everything there is about travel. I first visited Austin in 1989 and, while I ended up deciding not to move there, it’s been a second home to me since then.

This is the water tower near Gruene Hall, about a one-hour drive from Austin that I’d enjoy with a good friend when one of our favorite bands was playing there. (The second photo I posted here, back in May, “Noodling,” was from Gruene Hall.) We’d meet up with a whole lot of other friends there, catching up, breaking bread, buying rounds, and then letting good live music wash over us.

In September of 2021, one of the people in our little group died. Most of the rest of us still get together to see other bands around Austin as best we can, and the first chance we had, we raised a glass to our late friend. How can I not love this photo.

May 12, 2019. Samsung S10+ cell phone, 4.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.5, 1/40, ISO 320.

On the way back from the eclipse, we flew really close to Wrigley Field. Some of us remember when the idea of lights on Wrigley Field was pretty gauche. Anyway, for the crappy cell phone cameras available at the time, it’s still a decent picture.

August 21, 2017. Samsung S8+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/200, ISO 50.

Thanks for looking at a terrible cell phone photo of a total solar eclipse.

I’d had this idea for a while for the 2017 total solar eclipse, and decided to pull it off only a few weeks before the event. I can be an impetuous sort. On August 1, I posted on Facebook:

Made my eclipse reservation!
Aug. 21, 10:30 a.m.: Flight to Nashville departs
12:01 p.m.: Flight arrives
I take any shuttle to any parking lot or car rental agency. I checked on Google Maps and they're all out in the open
1:27 - 1:29 p.m.: Totality
2:00 - 2:15ish: Board shuttle back to terminal, have a little lunch if there's time, hopefully with a southern view
3:50 p.m.: Flight back to Chicago departs
5:30 p.m.: Flight arrives

It wasn’t without a little suspense, but overall, it ended up being easier than my typical workday. I got to O’Hare in plenty of time — I wasn’t taking any risks. Once we had all boarded, we got word that Nashville was issuing a ground stop on inbound flights. Very considerate, so as not to block the eclipse… which was three hours away. But! It turned out that our plane was so full of astronomers from local universities that we were granted an exemption and allowed to head out on our way.

When we landed, I realized that I didn’t have eclipse viewing glasses. But! A bar in the terminal was giving away glasses with each purchase of Blue Moon beer. I don’t like Coors as a company, and it owns Blue Moon, but I didn’t want to go blind either. So I bought a beer, they handed me my glasses (which are still within reach as I type this), and I went out to the curb and caught a shuttle to the parking lot.

Scouting the airport out on Google Satellite View, I’d chosen a particular knoll in a particular parking lot for its spaciousness. I got there, and it was packed with people who had done the same thing I’d done — flown in earlier, scouted out a place in a parking lot, and gotten ready to watch. I talked to people from Tampa and Louisville as I set up my 360° still and video cameras.

And then this insanely large cloud blocked the sun. The shadows it cast were amazing to see, but that was small consolation. The sun was constantly just on the edge, coming and going, and we kept thinking we could move to another corner of the lot. But we stayed put and a couple of minutes before totality, the cloud just vanished and we had clear skies. Nailed it.

Totality is beautiful and amazing and like nothing I’d ever seen. The beads on the edges of the moon were stunning; the silver light that blankets Earth during a total eclipse was mind-boggling. Everything. The arrival of the shadow. The crickets. The planets and stars. The horizon on fire around all 360 degrees. People all over the airport were screaming and shouting and crying. I could hear people on a distant garage shouting.

Once totality is over, the eclipse is over. It’s fun to watch it getting darker, but getting lighter? The light is pretty normal again within just a couple of minutes, really. I waited 10 minutes or so, which was still well after most of the people on the knoll had left, and went inside to have lunch. I boarded my plane and, once we thought we were going to taxi to the runway, they said that thanks to that hours-long ground stop, they had a lot of catching up to do, and we wouldn’t mind being patient, would we?

We didn’t mind. Stunning day. Over the course of the day, I managed to sleep in a bit, get to O’Hare in time to fly to Nashville, watch a beautiful solar eclipse, fly back, and be back in my apartment by 8. And that is why I goddamn love this photo.

August 21, 2017. Samsung S8+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/30, ISO 160.

When you have a thermal camera, what better place to use it than in an ice cream shop on a hot Summer day? The bright yellow blobs are of course the customers and the dark purple blobs are of course the ice cream; that’s a candy counter in the foreground. It’s a fun look at a fun place and I was really glad the photo turned out so well.

June 15, 2019. Flir thermal camera with Samsung S8+ cell phone. Exposure data unavailable.

When it comes to creating and building structures like this, there’s no room for error, and every single pipe, girder, rivet, and component has a purpose. I wish I knew what that purpose was. Natural gas? Gasoline or some other petroleum? If so, shouldn’t those be sheltered? Chicago has some pretty good thunderstorms and the (thankfully) occasional tornado. Why are there so many parallel pipes, going in so many different directions? This structure caught my eye from a distance on one of the Calumet River industrial tours, and this photo of it is by far my favorite. I wish I had the least clue what it is.

July 15, 2012. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 70–300mm Nikon zoom lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/16, 1/90, ISO 200.

It’s no longer the John Hancock Building; it’s 800 N. Michigan Ave. and nothing more. But that big black tower still casts a long shadow over the rest of Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood and nearby Oak Street Beach, let alone the lake itself, quite frozen on this day. At this point, we were about to fly out over the lake and turn around to approach O’Hare flying into the wind. This was one of my first aerial photos to come out so well.

January 19, 2020. iPhone XS Max cell phone, 6mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 140mm), f/2.4, 1/720, ISO 16.

I managed to capture a pretty great sequence of shots as this tern fished for lunch. Here it is heading off with its catch to enjoy a solitary moment with tasty koi.

April 22, 2018. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Nikon 70–300mm lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/5.6, 1/2,500, ISO 100.

Today, we have a sweet picture of a napping dove one warm afternoon. It isn’t about composition or color or some of the other stuff I talk about here this time. It’s just a nice moment.

May 2, 2021. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/9.5, 1/1,000, ISO 560.

This plant is the nodding onion, and although this photo was taken at the nature park, the nodding onion grows wild all over the place. Most sources agree that the source of the English-language name “Chicago” was the word in local Native languages for onion. That may be a detail best left in the weeds.

This is a really nice closeup shot with good depth of field, nice critical sharpness on that anther, and some pretty color. I also like that some of the flowers have bloomed, but a lot more are lurking behind, waiting their turn, and the stems all come together in a nice shade of red over on the right. Chicago has a lot of wildflowers that last all of a couple of weeks. These start appearing early in the season, but they hang around for a bit, and they’re always nice to see in the parks.

July 28, 2012. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/13, 1/1,000, ISO 400.

I love this photo because what is more nature than a new mom helping her new kid stand up for a little while. That’s it. I wandered past that little gap in the reeds at just the right moment to catch a couple of photos, and this was the better of them. The other one might still show up eventually, if we all think we can stand the cuteness.

June 5, 2016. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/16, 1/90, ISO 800.

One Saturday afternoon, I loaded the Nikon F5 with black-and-white film and walked along Irving Park Road, a major artery here in Chicago, for a couple of miles, shooting anything that I thought might come out interesting. I really like how these glass bricks came out in black and white. It turned out to be a fun way to remove color and just play with light.

October 26, 2024. Nikon F5, Kodak Tri-X 400, Tamron 100–400mm at 400 mm, ISO 400, other exposure information unavailable.

The Skyway, which crosses the Calumet River and surrounding industrial area to connect southern Chicago to northwestern Indiana, has a nice curve to it. The road itself is just another bridge, pretty standard stuff, but one big reason the Calumet River tours were so much fun for me was that I really like seeing what it takes to build something like that. I wonder whether there’s an engineering reason the bridge has that sweep to it, or a traffic planning reason, or some other situation.

July 15, 2012. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 70–300mm Nikon zoom lens at 70mm (35mm equivalent: 105mm), f/16, 1/90, ISO 200.

This scene was part of the same building as the “Thanks, Nelson Algren”/Best Meats Inc. photo I posted in mid-June, but on the other side. If you’ve seen that photo, you might remember that I talked about the neighborhood’s impending gentrification. These warning posts felt like they were giving workers a heads up not only about the stairs they could trip over but also about the growing collection of galleries and salons just past the barbed wire and chain-link fence.

Google Street View shows that the corner has just that history. The Best Meats signs vanished by Fall 2013. By October 2015, the building had been razed and the site was a parking lot. A year later, a sign surrounding the construction said that the new building would offer 75 luxury apartments along with office and retail space. Construction was complete enough in June 2018 to see that it was becoming a walk-in clinic affiliated with a local hospital — at least that part of the building might be a best-case scenario.

May 17, 2008. Canon PowerShot SD850 IS, focal length 8.6 (35mm equivalent: 52mm), f/3.2, 1/320, ISO 80.