I stayed in one New Year’s Eve, watching it snow from my living room windows with the cat on my lap and a book in hand. As partiers drifted home and the snowfall ended, I decided to stretch my legs and see how the neighborhood looked. As it turned out, the street I lived on looked pretty nice.

January 1, 2008. Canon PowerShot SD850 IS, exposure information unavailable.

Milkweed plants are among my favorites. They’re great pollinators, they attract milkweed bugs, the pods have this weird nubbed appearance, they burst open and release seeds that are much cooler and more photogenic than dandelion seeds (which I am not putting down in the least). I love the texture here and the composition and the color this shot gave me.

October 21, 2017. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/16, 1/1,000, ISO 400.

Each year as we slosh and trudge through Chicago’s midwinter and early spring, one of my favorite sounds is woodpeckers searching for their next meal. Usually they’re happy to hammer away a few times, hop to another spot, and return to hammering. Here, though, this woodpecker seems to be a little more thoughtful about its next move as its brown eye catches a glint of sunlight.

Incidentally, this is called a red-bellied woodpecker, which leads me to believe ornithologists are frickin’ colorblind.

March 17, 2019. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/6.3, 1/250, ISO 280.

Without Ellie, this would be a nice still-life composition with the two wine glasses in the front and the two planters in the back forming a gentle curve. But, interrupted in the middle by a yowling cat in warm afternoon light, it takes on life and action.

I know Ellie well enough to know I had only a moment before she jumped down to get up close with her caretaker, and one of the reasons I love this shot, aside from the composition, the warmth, and the yowl, is that I got my cell phone out fast enough to get a shot this good.

(When Ellie’s mouth is closed, that black spot looks like a fang; just a little piece of it peeks out. She is endlessly cute.)

April 21, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 6.06mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 47mm), f/1.6, 1/175, ISO 50.

This is, technically, likely to be the worst photo you’ll see here. But it’s also cool because it was the International Space Station flying over my old apartment one evening.

There is not a lot of reliable information about getting a photograph of the International Space Station, especially using a handheld camera. What I know is that it’s 280 miles away when it’s directly overhead, but farther at this angle, and traveling at over 17,000 miles per hour, and I managed to take a couple of shots this good-ish out of 25 times the shutter clicked, and you can make out a little bit of the solar panels’ color and angle and the blob in the middle that is everything else you can take a picture of with a DSLR and a biggish lens under those conditions.

June 1, 2021. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/6.3, 1/1,500, ISO 1,600.

Studying this, I think there is one edge of one petal that is in true focus, and that is exactly what I was trying to do with this shot of a butterfly milkweed plant, and that is why I love this picture.

July 12, 2015. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/5.6, 1/2,000, ISO 200.

Digital cameras have lots of software in them to interpret the light that’s hitting their sensors. Based on the settings we choose, the camera guesses at what we want and saves it into a JPG file. But often, it doesn’t match what we see when we take the photo. While this site’s introductory post explains that I only edit photos to try to bring the photo closer to what I saw as I pressed the shutter button, I brightened this one in software quite a bit because I love that, in the frog’s pupil, you can see the reflection of the nature park and, right in its middle, the photographer.

May 22, 2016. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Nikon 70–300mm lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/11, 1/250, ISO 800.

In 2015, I bought a thermal camera. It’s low-resolution, but along with its thermal sensor, it has a separate lens to try to fill in the detail the thermal sensor misses. I really like seeing the world in another spectrum and street photography has turned out to be a pretty fun use for this.

December 8, 2015. Flir thermal camera with Google Nexus 6P cell phone. Frame capture from video.

There’s nothing like having the biggest and ugliest goddamn tadpole in Chicago and perhaps the universe swim up to you and sneer at you for a really long, uncomfortable moment.

February 22, 2020. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/11, 1/180, ISO 800.

I love taking pictures of empty stages. Maybe something’s about to happen; maybe something just happened. This shot is before a gig at the now-closed Townshend in Austin. Any time I post a photo of an empty stage, the identity of the band won’t matter. The point is that there is a place set aside to share a spontaneous creativity for an hour or two and then it will all vanish, and no two are ever the same.

May 10, 2019. Samsung 10+ cell phone, 1.8mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 13mm), f/2.2, 1/9, ISO 2,500.

For this photo, I’m in Austin, on the same hotel room balcony from which I took the photo of three white cars under a streetlight (but during another trip), but it’s early afternoon and this church roof is really showing off in the sun. All the lines, all the shadows, all the shapes, all the angles. I love this photo and that’s why.

January 31, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 13.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 140mm), f/2.75, 1/625, ISO 50.

I love this photo because it’s mid-March and all the plants and shrubs and trees have Spring on their mind but Chicago will always teach them a lesson.

If you can find a way to zoom into that little ball of snow, you can see all the grains and flakes. Maybe someday I’ll come back to this with a crop that shows that off.

March 15, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 6.06mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 47mm), f/1.6, 1/280, ISO 50.

I guess I could call this “Why I Love This Cliché.” The most interesting thing about a photo stroll after an ice storm is how many times you come close to certain death by slipping and falling. But it’s a good urban shot of wires and an alley tree coated with ice.

December 11, 2017. Samsung S8+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/10, ISO 250.

You’ve already seen heron pictures and you’ll see more — oh, you’ll see more, even from this particular session. I love when herons look right in the camera’s direction (or very close, like here) because, honestly, they end up looking like a Gary Larson character. Googly eyes, a goofy little beak, a vacant expression.

This Winter day, it was out for a stroll on the ice, and something to my left caught its attention. These birds look graceful in flight, but they sure look silly just standing there staring at something.

December 26, 2019. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/6.7, 1/350, ISO 1,600.

For a few years, a local group and site called Forgotten Chicago sponsored some cruises down South Side rivers that were kind of more canals than rivers. These were a real change of pace for me, even less than a decade after I’d started photographing, moving from mostly nature to heavy industry, both active and dead.

This is the first of many photos I’ve culled from those trips. We went down the Calumet River for a few miles; one of the sights we passed was this very exposed mountain of blue salt that Chicago keeps handy for salting roads. It was a few stories tall and pretty impressive. I zoomed in and out as we passed; this was my favorite shot. But we’ll see this site again, along with others from those trips.

August 29, 2010. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 70–300mm Nikon zoom lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/8, 1/2,500, ISO 640.