Tag Archives: photo

ISAP Here I Come

Leave a Reply

It is that time of year again when ISAP members get together to share knowledge, learn knew things, see what each other have been up to and generally have a lot of fun.  Throw in some chances to shoot some great airplanes and you have a great time.  I can hardly wait.  Hopefully more to report from the trip.  We even have an air show tucked in at the end of the weekend so it should be fun.

You shall find out more when it happens – or a little while afterwards…  Blogging might be a bit sporadic while I am gone.

I Went to Woodstock – Well, Not That Woodstock!

Leave a Reply

We may have lived in Chicago for quite a while now but there are still plenty of places to explore that we haven’t visited.  One of those places is Woodstock IL.  Nancy found out about it from a website on great small towns in the US.  We decided to pay it a visit.  The day was supposed to start out overcast and clear up into a sunny day.  That bit didn’t quite happen to plan but everything else about the town proved to be a success.

It was about an hour from home to get to Woodstock.  The GPS had a location with a parking lot close to the town square programmed in and that worked out to be perfect.  We were a short stroll from the square and a small farmers’ market was underway.  We are always suckers for good food at these markets and so were soon carrying a few bits around.  We wandered around the square looking for somewhere for lunch.  This is always worth doing when there is food for sale because you otherwise end up buying way more food than is a good idea!

The town square is a great spot.  The buildings are a mix of styles but all look pretty impressive and in good condition.  The old style of the place is obviously appealing to movie makers.  Have a viewing of Groundhog Day and you will recognize the town as Woodstock – a long way from Pennsylvania.  It had some other treats but more will come about that in due course.

In one of these shots you will see a crepe restaurant.  We stopped there for lunch and the food was really good.  There were other places around the square that had more traditional fare but this one seemed to have a different approach and we were not disappointed.  This blog has never really been a dining review place but here is one recommendation for you!

Lightning Up the Mood

Leave a Reply

A little night shooting today and a confession about my role in what was going on. We moved to Chicago eight years ago. When we first got here, we were amazed by the storms we got. There seemed to be lots of them and they were really pretty spectacular. When looking out of the window we would see lightning all the time. Sometimes the storms went on for so long it was hard to believe that it was a storm and not someone planting an emergency vehicle outside the window – a neat trick at the height of our place!

Strangely, for the last few years, we have had very few storms. They seem to miss the city and go either north or south of us. Some people are getting a lot of them but not us. This was a bit disappointing to me because I love storms! They are so dramatic and very cool. They are, of course, rather destructive but watching them is exciting. This week we got a good storm. The sky was alive and it was a lot of fun. It was also rather late and I needed to go to bed. Consequently, I cheated.

My 17-40mm lens is not enough to cover the full view south of us so I went with the fish-eye zoom instead. I set the camera up on the tripod, added the intervalometer and basically set it on its way. The gap between the shutter closing and the trigger for the next shot was just long enough to allow the file to write out. Then I went to bed. The result is a LOT of pictures with almost all of them of no use. However, it did capture a couple of shots that I really like. I even tried using the new lens correction facility in Photoshop CS6. Our view is a little less impressive since the Trump Tower blocked a big chunk of the skyline but it still gives a nice look to the storm. Hope you like them too.

Lots of Work Down the Drain

Leave a Reply

No pictures in this piece and that is kind of the point.  I have been working for a long time on setting up a photo shoot.  The plan was to get some pretty unique shots of a rare jet that is owned buy a great guy I have worked with for a long time.  The plan was to charter a camera ship that allowed some options to get shots that are harder to get normally.  I had found an operator of the right aircraft that was in the right place and was happy to do the job.

We had the pricing agreed and they had even sent me the draft lease documents.  I had made some amendments to these and sent them back to be finalized and then suddenly everything goes quiet.  I send a follow up and hear nothing for a while.  Then I send another email and the response I get is not good.  They have found a more lucrative job and I am no longer on their schedule!  How about that?  You spend time briefing what is required, discussing all of the details, agreeing the pricing and you think that you have it all agreed.  You are finalizing a lease document which includes a down payment so you think they are serious.  Then you are dropped like a stone.

I think it is fair to say I am really pissed off.  I am not going to name names because that isn’t going to help and one day I might need them for something else so I will keep the details out of this.  However, I try to always be professional in the way I deal with people whatever part of my work is involved.  I guess not everyone shares that approach.  If they found a better job, perhaps they might have tried to solve my problem as well.  They gave me a name for an alternative but this short a notice period is unsurprisingly meaning that an alternative is not available.  The other guys tried hard to come up with a suggestion and I am grateful to them for that.

Having ranted I shall now wrap up.  I was really hoping that you would see here the great results of what had been planned but I shall have to say instead that it just didn’t happen.  Now to see if there is something we can come up with instead.

Changing Your Name – Even if You Are a Building Pt 1

Leave a Reply

This story comes in two parts (if the title didn’t give that away already!) and it is one that is a little bit of luck.  Regular readers know that I do a lot of jobs with Midwest Helicopters.  This was a job of theirs but not one that I was involved with.  However, it just happened to take place outside my window so I got to watch anyway.  There I was on a lazy Sunday morning (I was being lazy even if others obviously weren’t) catching up on a bit of TiVo viewing when a helicopter comes in to view out of my living room window.  Familiar shape and colors but what were they up to?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turns out a building across the river from me was due to have its name changed.  The company had renamed from Unitrin to Kemper.  Unitrin was plastered on two sides of the building in large illuminated letters so they needed to come down.  The first week of the job was to take down the old letters.  I could have hurried outside and grabbed some shots but this was a lazy day (did I mention that before?) and so I just grabbed a camera and shot through the windows.

It was about an hour’s work to get the letters from each side of the building and drop them down to the truck on the street.  All of this from the comfort of my living room interspersed with a bit of Grand Prix watching!  Of course, if something comes down, there is probably something to replace it?  And so we shall progress to Part 2…

Floral Fun

1 Reply

This one isn’t a complicated post.  It is just some flowers really!  We had visitors for the weekend and were out wandering around the city.  The sun was out and so were plenty of flowers.  I don’t claim these flowers sprouted perfectly for me.  Usually someone has brought them in and transplanted them into the planters to make the place always look good.  However, some of them were actually growing where we saw them.

Anyway, I am not really a flower shooter but I was pleased to see them and thought I would grab a few shots.  No-one is going to be gasping over their brilliance but who cares?  They were pretty and the sun was out so what is there to worry about?

Skating Action

Leave a Reply

Some time last year I wrote a blog post about photographing some guys jumping bikes in a park here in Chicago.  If you want to check that out, this is the post.  I had been inspired by a great book by Syl Arena on flash photography and what can be achieved to freeze fast action and to add drama to the shots.  This has also got me interested in trying another sport, skating (the skateboard variety, not ice).  They are a couple of skate parks along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, one north of us and one south.  I had never before managed to time it right to get to one of them but finally I have done it.

I got the park and a few people were skating around.  I watched for a while to see who was a more comfortable skater before asking whether anyone would let me take their picture.  One guy, Konrad, was kind of okay with the idea but seemed a bit skeptical.  Most other people were not keen.  Konrad had one location he had been making some good moves on so we set up there.  We grabbed a few shots from different angles with me mainly using a single light triggered by cable rather than IR.  This is tough stuff to do so you can’t just have them do it over again until you are happy.  They get worn out.

We grabbed a few shots and then Konrad went off to skate some other parts of the park.  When I got back, the shots were not too bad.  The use of a single light was not ideal as, with the deck in front you get quite a shadow cast.  Also, it reflected strongly which tended to limit the light on him.  Two lights will definitely be better.  Fortunately, a little work in Lightroom managed to enhance the balance on him a bit.  A first time out and not too bad.  Plenty to improve on next time though.

Trying and Failing with Bad Weather

Leave a Reply

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!

Leave a Reply

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!