Author Archives: Rob

Marina City

When you live in a city that has a bunch of recognizable landmarks, you start out by taking a lot of pictures of them. After a while, you figure that you have done all of that and move on. However, you have never done everything you could and so, every once in a while, it is worth trying again with something familiar in case you come up with something new.

So it has proved to be with Marina City. These two towers (also colloquially known as the corn cobs) are just a couple of blocks from where we live. When we first moved here I certainly shot them a lot. Recently, I was wandering back along the river and decided to pay them a quick visit. I was going for a couple of shots when I got there. One is to crop in close on the structures to turn them into something more abstract. The other was to get between them and shoot straight up to turn them into something different.

I had a wide angle zoom and a fish-eye with me, both of which can have advantages with these types of shots. The access to the buildings is very good so I had a lot of opportunity to mess around with variations on the theme. In the end, the ones you see here are some of those that I liked the most from the effort. I shall now ponder for a while whether there is something different I should try next time.

Trying the New Spot in Better Light

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I recently posted about a trip to O’Hare in some crummy weather when I didn’t end up with many good results. One of the better aspects of that visit was that I found a nice location directly under the approach to 14R. This provides some good head on shot opportunities. Head on shots are kind of fun I find. They are a different perspective to normal and mix things up a bit. You can’t do it all of the time or it is dull but it does make for some more dynamic shots that the standard side on pass.

I waited to see when the right combination of wind and weather would occur so that I could get the morning light just off the nose when this runway was in use again. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait particularly long. Things lined up quite nicely so I popped out to have a look. My desire to stay in bed meant that I was about five minutes too late to catch the ANA arrival from Japan but others were on the way so it was a nuisance but not a huge loss. However, en route I did take a look at the south side of the field for other possible shooting locations.

I had shot a few years back at a spot that provided a great view of aircraft departing off 22L, many of which turn quite early after departure giving some topside views. This spot ended up having a warehouse facility built on it which was a nuisance. however, further development in the area has provided some spots to park so I checked out one of these and it seems a reasonable option. Then I headed to the approach.

In good light it seems to work really well. I experimented with wide angle shots as they pass overhead as well as long lens shots that crop tightly in on the aircraft as it gets closer. Both seem to have some merit. I didn’t stay too long as there was a gap in the larger arrivals so I headed back to my other new spot to try a few departure shots. Then it was back to the approach for the last of the big jets and then home. Not a bad morning really and with the day only just started, plenty of time to do other things.

What Animals Are in Your Local Park?

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With a lovely spring weekend day, the city provides a lot of opportunities to hang out and enjoy yourself. One of these is Lincoln Park. Not a long walk from us but certainly a quicker bus ride gets you to the park. It is amazing how quickly the spring transformation is underway. The trees are rapidly filling out with leaves and the wildlife is also making itself obvious. There are certainly worse places to be on a weekend.

If you want to ramp up the wildlife, the park also has the zoo which is free to visit. It had been a while since we went there so we decided to take a look around. Since you can wander in and out at will, you don’t always end up looking at everything and this time was no exception. We did visit the big apes which is always a great experience. Taking in the bats was something I hadn’t done for a while as well.

We could have looked at more but I had a strong urge to find some lunch so instead we went exploring of a different kind. Maybe not as difficult as living in the wild but the results were certainly good.

I Thought These Bridges Were Moving

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Spring in Chicago does not always arrive promptly but this year the absence of a real winter has meant that it has. With nice weather comes the possibility of boating and that means the annual migration of the boats from their winter storage to the marinas for the summer. For anyone with some height to their boat, i.e. sailing boats, this requires you to make use of the bi-weekly bridge opening schedule.

A look online told me that the first opening of the season was coming up on Saturday so I decided to take a look. The weather was great and so some good shooting opportunities should have been available. I wandered along the river inland since no bridges along the main stretch were open yet so I had time to get to Wolf Point where the river splits. Along the way I grabbed a few shots of things that appealed to me.

At Wolf Point, I had two disappointments. First, the water birds were very active right in front of me but I only had a wide angle and a fish-eye with me so no good opportunity to get any shots. Second, looking all the way down the south branch, I couldn’t see any sign of activity. Since I had a limited amount of time before Nancy and I were planning on heading out, this looked like it was going to be a bust.

So it turned out, I wandered back towards home and we went out. When we returned in the middle of the afternoon, the bridges by us were just going down. That many hours would have been a disappointingly long time to wait. Maybe next week.

Trying and Failing with Bad Weather

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Every once in a while you have what you think will be a good idea and it turns out you were wrong. This is the story of one such event. A weekend morning was looming and I felt like getting out and shooting. The flights from Asia are morning arrivals at O’Hare and so are not often something I shoot. A few of them appear and that is it. Back to the RJs and 737s so I often don’t bother. Also, the normal arrival pattern is not great for morning light.

This time they were coming in from the west so heading in to the light. However, the weather forecast was a bit crummy. The traditional thought is not to go since dull skies and mainly white planes are not a great combination. However, two things made me think otherwise. One was the possibility of the sun breaking through and illuminating the aircraft against a dark sky background. That can look good. The other was the possibility of a lot of vapor in the air making for some neat vortex effects and vapor clouds over the wings.

Consequently, I decided to give it a go. I headed out having scoped out a potential location to shoot from that would give me a view of the arriving aircraft. I have not shot over that side much before so a good location is not something I had. There is a lot of industrial space over there so buildings can obscure the view and the ever present power lines are another consideration. As it turned out, the spot I chose turned out to be quite reasonable.

That is where the rest of the plan starts to go wrong. The sun did make a brief appearance. The opening shot is probably the only one that really achieved what I was hoping for. After that, the cloud cover thickened up and then the skies were pretty unhelpful. My second hope for the moisture to give some good effects proved to be a little too optimistic. There certainly were plenty of trailing vortices and occasional puffs of cloud above the wings but the gray background did not help make them stand out.

I decided that I was probably done for the day and started to drive south on my way home. I then happened upon a few cars parked up at a spot directly under the approach to 14R. I thought this might be worth a look and it certainly made for some good angles. I grabbed a few shots before heading home but this was a spot I decided was worth a further visit. More to come on that…

How Soon I Forget!

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As I have mentioned in previous posts and my regular readers will know, I have been going through a process of culling old images that will never (and should never) see the light of day again. This is part of my desire to be a lot more efficient in keeping good images and ditching bad ones in part to reduce storage requirements but also to allow me to focus back on the good shots when I need something.

One of the things it has also done is remind me of just how many good projects I have been involved with. While many projects are one off jobs, there are quite a few regular clients that I shoot with on numerous occasions. I have my new workflow for going through those images and creating Smart Collections in Lightroom to help me manage them. I decided it would be helpful to go back and create similar collections for previous jobs before I changed the workflow.

I added a bunch of these collections from memory but then started going through all of the shots from the clients by searching on the keywords. It was really surprising to me to find some of the jobs we had done together a while back that I had quite forgotten about. I had a bunch more Smart Collections to create as a result but the outcome is that I now have better access to images from some regular clients in a more organized way than my previous searches based on keywords alone.

A second outcome of this is that I changed from using stars to identify good shots to using the Pick flag. Since I have a mix of methods, I will be going back and reassessing which are the better shots and marking them as Picks. Interestingly, some of the ones I had starred previously have not made it through my recent cull since a second look showed they were really not quite good enough. Often an adjacent shot is actually better so now I need to make my selections anew.

This is going to take a long time. I am well advanced in culling shots of civil aircraft but my military stuff has yet to be dealt with. I’m sure we shall have some crummy days ahead which I can put to good use. Of course, my rate of shooting is going to be going up so maybe I will be struggling to stay ahead of this for a while!

Another Night with Dolby and Some Strange Camera Rules

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A couple of nights ago I went to a Thomas Dolby concert at Park West here in Chicago. I had been to see a smaller event with him last year that I also blogged about but that was more focused on some dumb stuff more related to me than to him. Since the disappointment I had then was entirely down to my own stupidity, when he set a date for a full concert back here, I bought my ticket swiftly.

This is not going to be a concert review. I know I wander about on stuff on this blog but it is supposed to be more focused on the photography side of things and I promise that the heart of what I am talking about is actually photography related. However, I shall start off by pointing out that it was a great evening. The support act were a fun pair although possibly not your usual support act in that they were a duo playing predominantly bluegrass music. They were good and funny although possibly not what a bunch of electronic music fans might be heading out to see. Then again, the demographic of a Thomas Dolby concert is not what it once was – although you could argue it is exactly what it once was, just they are all a lot older now!

The main event was a lot of fun for an old fan who has continued to follow his newer music and the advantage of seeing an act that is no longer quite as big as once they were is that they play smaller venues and you feel a lot closer to the performer – because you are!

So, for those patient photography types out there who have stuck with it so long, where is the photography reference? Here it comes. I had popped up to the venue in the afternoon. Thomas has a steam-punk trailer called the Time Machine that he has been towing around behind the tour bus. I was interested in grabbing a few shots of it so went up ahead of time assuming it would be there. It was and I got a few images although the afternoon light was a bit harsh and the polished metal finish didn’t help in those conditions.

I figured that a camera would be a problem in the evening so the afternoon recce was the alternative I went with. When I came back up for the show itself, there were some big signs on the doors saying that video and audio recording were not allowed but feel free to take as many stills as you like. CRAP! I hadn’t brought a camera. I did have my phone but nothing else. I was feeling pretty annoyed about this but I was there for the music and the photos would have been a side benefit so not the end of the world.

I ended up sitting just behind a guy that had a camera with him. It was not long before one of the venue staff payed him a visit. They were checking his camera and that of everyone else around. Apparently, they had a rule (not on the signs) about professional cameras. What is a professional camera you ask? Apparently, an SLR of any sort counted. If the lens could come off, it was verboten. No explanation of why but that was it.

When I was a more regular concert goer, cameras were always a problem so I had assumed nothing was allowed. When I saw something was allowed, I was then confused by their arbitrary rule. Some of the cameras people had were pretty capable. A Canon G12 would have been fine for example? How does that work? Who knows. Anyway, since I had not brought my stuff, I didn’t have a problem.

One amusing footnote to all of this, the support guys made a big deal of pointing out that they didn’t care if you videoed the whole of their performance. They just wanted to make sure that you got their names right! Great stuff. The shots I did take I grabbed occasionally with my phone. I think they came out quite well actually. However, I was there for the music and didn’t allow the shots to distract me more than a little. Fun night!

Cranes – Probably Not Here!

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A sign of spring is when wildlife starts showing up that you haven’t seen for a while. I had a couple of experiences within a day of each other of exactly this. One seemed perfectly reasonable but the other was probably not the best idea. We were walking in a state park up in Wisconsin when we heard a lot of noise. At first I thought it was geese but, as the huge flock of birds approached, it became obvious that they were cranes.

The cranes flew around a lot as we walked, some were high but others were quite low. We walked on with not too much more attention to them as they honked their way around the area. However, the following day I was down at O’Hare. I saw something large and wispy in the sky and realized that it was a flock of birds. As they came closer, lo and behold but more cranes were coming to town!

Now, O’Hare is not exactly a bird friendly location. Having flocks of pretty substantial birds in the vicinity of so many aircraft did not appear to be a particularly good combination. The birds swirled around for a couple of minutes, fortunately a little higher than the aircraft on approach. Then they drifted off in a different direction and i didn’t see them again. Not a great idea but, thankfully, no harm done this time!

Lightroom 4 Impressions

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It is a little while now since I upgraded to Lightroom 4 from the previous version (I will let you fill in the name here!). There were a few aspects of the new version that made me want to upgrade and I had played with the public beta version when it first came out. Of course, having ongoing support and updates is always helpful so staying with the old version was never going to be likely and when they halved the price, no further thought was required.

Now I have been using it for a while, what do I think? Well, on the whole I am reasonably pleased with the changes. The new sliders in the Develop module seem to be an improvement on the previous develop version. I was pretty happy with the way it worked before so the changes had to sell themselves to me. They have modified the way I think about the development settings since I used to be able to use Exposure alone to bring back a sky and maintain the shadows. Now I have to consider the White and Highlight sliders a lot more. I am not convinced that Highlight does a lot. White seems to be far more effective in my new approach. Similarly the shadows slider is now more important to me than the blacks which is a change.

Another issue is with converting previous develop settings. Since the change of sliders is significant, going to the new develop version tends to result in all sliders being reset to zero. This can turn a reasonable image into something far worse initially. Lightroom does not have a conversion algorithm to get you somewhere close. It is back to the beginning. Maybe this makes a lot more sense.

The Map capability is a big improvement for me. Canon cameras are not well designed for adding a geotagging capability so I have ignored it on the whole or experimented with Jeffrey Friedl’s plugin. This is a very user friendly method and I shall make use of it a lot more I think. I like the book creation capability but would welcome some other outlets getting in the game. I have used Blurb before and they are fine but I have liked Adoramapix and have contacted them to see if they will be making templates soon. Let’s hope so.

So, is there anything wrong? Oh yes! It is slow!! The Develop module is awful at the moment. I have a pretty capable system but the sliders we very slow to react. The real time view of what you are changing is not there yet. You pick a slider, hope that the mouse click has actually selected it and then move to where you think works and then wait to see what happens. Is this acceptable? Not at all. Am I annoyed? Yes I am. Is it the end of the world? Probably not. I seem to recall that Lightroom 3 had similar issues when it first came out and was slow. Adobe released some updates pretty quickly and it ended up being a great tool. I am not going to revert back and will manage the sluggishness until they come up with a fix. If they don’t, I may have to consider but I am not the only one having an issue so I suspect it will be dealt with in the coming weeks. Turning off the second screen makes a substantial difference but is not very useful so hopefully that will be tweaked. A release candidate for version 4.1 is out now so, while I won’t try it out, hopefully that means the formal release is pretty close.

One other thing I will tag on her and that is the arrival of the beta version of Photoshop CS6. When the beta was released, I was not sure I would bother to try it out just yet. Photoshop is still part of my workflow but, as Lightroom has become more capable, Photoshop has been used less often and for more specialized tasks. I could probably wait, or so I thought. However, I watched some of the demonstrations of new features online and liked some of what I saw, especially the video editing. Since I shoot mo video these days, having an alternative video editor rather than upgrading the package I have might be good. It does seem to have some good basic capabilities and that is all I do most of the time. What isn’t there at the moment is good bio integration with Lightroom. Version 4 has some video clip editing for end points. It would be good if you could send the video to Photoshop in the same way you can an image. Since it would then come back to the catalog when you had finished, it would help in managing everything. Now I finish an edit and I have to import it – if I remember. If they could allow you to take multiple clips and open them as layers (again like you can with images), that would be even better since that lines up with the way video editing is set up in Photoshop. I commented on this on the Lightroom blog but we shall see if they are already working on this.

In conclusion, I am pretty happy with the new Lightroom. With the price halved I am even happier not least because the Photoshop upgrade is obviously not far away. Now to see whether they can tweak it enough to fix the minor problems.

Changed Workflow

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I have changed my approach to editing my pictures quite a bit recently. This has served two purposes. The first is to make better use of my storage requirements and the second is to focus more quickly on the better images. Sadly, this has highlighted to me how I have actually missed out on some of my better work in days gone by. Not a happy lesson to learn but a valuable one.

I never used to delete images since storage was not a problem. I did occasionally find images that newer RAW processors could do something with. However, to be honest that was a rare occasion and, even then, I wasn’t likely to have an outlet for that image. However, by not getting rid of stuff, I really cluttered up what I had. Moreover, I would scan through and find images I liked the look of and mark them as favorites. When I would come back to them later, I would find they were a bit flawed – not sharp enough usually being the problem. What was worse was that I would search based on ratings and so wouldn’t bring up the next shot which actually might have been almost identical but sharper!

Consequently, I had a workflow that hid the good shots and encouraged me to pick the wrong examples by mistake. I have now changed all of this. Part of this is driven by trying to keep storage requirements under control. I have been shooting a lot of rotor-craft and getting good rotor blur requires low shutter speeds which often means shooting lots of frames to get a few sharp ones. When you are being buffeted by the down-wash, no amount of good technique is going to be enough! I do generally shoot more these days anyway so I have a lot to work through.

The first thing after downloading is to generate 100% previews of all images. I can then set up Lightroom with one side as the full image and the other has the 100% view. This way I can determine sharpness of the shot at the same time as seeing whether the overall image is okay, i.e. no poles across the shot or noses cut off! I have copied a process I saw demonstrated online where I assign a job descriptor in Lightroom and then set up smart collections for that job of Picks, Not Rejects and Rejects. I have also started separating out video clips to another smart collection. By reviewing the Not Rejects folder, anything rejected gets automatically removed so it thins out as I go.

This certainly brings the numbers down but not always as dramatically as I would like. I suppose I should be pleased that I am not shooting such a low percentage! Once I have done this, I can now trust that the shots that are left are all considered usable. Then I can go through again and weed out the obvious duplicates by picking the best of a given type. This will really help to thin things out. The other thing I will do (which I also tend to start as I get further through the first review) is culling those that are just not interesting. I have come to the realization, far too late, that only the best shots are ever going to see a use somewhere (and most of them won’t either). Therefore, a relatively uninteresting shot that is sharp and well composed might as well go in the trash unless it has something unique about it. Most don’t!

This has resulted in me thinning down the shoot far more rapidly. The review also includes marking as Picks those I particularly like. Hopefully, this will make it a lot simpler to get to the good stuff in due course. Now I am also gradually following the same process for the large selection of previous images. Maybe I won’t have to upgrade my hard drives for quite a while with all of this space I am freeing up and the reduced rate at which I am filling space.

One footnote to all of this. My NAS runs a backup of everything every night. When images get deleted, they will be gone from the backup the following night. However, before anything is deleted, it is all backed up to Blu Ray discs. That way, nothing is truly gone forever. However, it would require some serious effort to go back to those discs to find something that is deleted since they are gone from the Lightroom catalog. However, they are easy to backup so why not?