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.

I love this photo because this wood duck is enjoying sunshine on a Fall day and there’s just enough of a breeze to create those waves on the pond’s surface, a perfect background for the beautiful shading and coloration on the duck. A nice, quiet composition of just a few elements give us a relaxing moment.

November 13, 2022. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400 mm, f/8, 1/500, ISO 400.

This one’s about color, composition and sharpness. I wanted that one petal that’s just above the center of the photo to be as sharp as it could be, with the rest of the photo fading off into the depth of field. Prairie dock flowers are a favorite of mine as both subjects and flowers, and the three flowers here work really nicely in that right-to-left composition, with the blue sky underneath. The petals on the middle flower have enough shape to continue the composition, and the leftmost flower is just a blur of color. This is in many ways a modest photo, but I really love how it came out.

September 13, 2020. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/11, 1/1,500, ISO 400.

A Chicago landmark that tourists adore is popularly called the Bean, actually titled Cloud Gate, a mirrored sculpture by Anish Kapoor, installed in 2006.

But, for all the people who flock to it whenever it’s open, one pigeon claimed it for its own this day.

June 6, 2014. Google Nexus 5 cell phone, 3.97 focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/2.4, 1/2,517, ISO 100.

Here’s another photo from one of the boat tours of the Calumet River industrial area, right near the entrance from Calumet Harbor, and I tell you what, I don’t for a minute trust this railroad. I in fact believe that it may well have been designed by one Wile E. Coyote with parts supplied by the Acme Co.

(In fact, it’s a striking photo, but there is matching track on the other side of the river, and the railroad bridge is well above us, having been designed on a lift so that boats can pass. It stays up there until it’s needed at track level. For all the captures of the site on Google Street View, not one photo shows the track lowered to connect the riverbanks.)

August 29, 2010. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 70–300mm Nikon zoom lens at 70mm (35mm equivalent: 105mm), f/13, 1/160, ISO 640.

On Chicago’s (so-called) Magnificent Mile, Gothic Revival collides with Modernism.

Seven years later, neither of these buildings look like this, though the Tribune Tower, now ludicrously expensive condos, has changed less.

April 17, 2018. Samsung S8+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/1350, ISO 50.

There was an idea going around years ago that given their weight, their wing size, and some other stuff, bees obviously couldn’t fly. The last line of those articles always seemed to be “But somehow, they do.”

This bee sure seems to confirm that part about the weight. The way she’s drooping under those wings! Even as the camera captures her perfectly sharp, the wings are just a blur, but the way she’s sagging into her landing would make anyone with a little empathy cheer her on.

August 2, 2020. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/11, 1/350, ISO 400.