Tag Archives: Chicago

Another Night with Dolby and Some Strange Camera Rules

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!

Final Overnight Time Lapse

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I mentioned before that I had tried to do an overnight time lapse video. In that post I detailed all of the ways I had screwed up the process. Rather than sulk, I did take all of those lessons to heart and went back for a second attempt. This time, I was a lot more successful. I hadn’t got around to figuring out how to make the tethering work properly but the alternative was acceptable and I had learned the rest of my lessons.

One minor hurdle still existed. Our windows are not at their cleanest at this time of year and shooting through the glass is the only option. We are due to have the cleaners take care of them shortly (although that will probably only guarantee some rain immediately afterwards). In low light and with a wide enough aperture, the dirt smudges are not too much of a problem. I have to make sure the shoot doesn’t include any time with direct light on the window which would make the muck flare up in the shots.

The other minor issue is a function of the double glazing. More intense light can show up the effect of the light bouncing between the glass panes. At night this isn’t a hassle except with the moon which is so bright. For some reason I should be able to figure out but can’t, the center of the window almost totally removes this effect and it gets worse towards the edges. However, the moon is so bright in the scenes it blows out and, since the whole thing animates to a video, the loss of shape in the shots becomes less apparent as the moon zips across the sky.

With all of that said, here is the video itself. It seems to have worked out well. Sadly, the messed up effort seemed to have got some more interesting light sequences from the windows of the building but you can’t have it all. Enjoy!

What a Balls Ups

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I have previously played around with time lapse videos made with an SLR, a timer release and some software linked to Lightroom to create the finished video. I decided to go a little longer with one and make a video throughout the night, starting before sunset and finishing off once the sun had come back up again. This did not prove to be as simple as I had hoped!

It should be pointed out that most of these problems are entirely of my doing. First of all, I did a calculation of how many shots I thought would be necessary to complete the clip. This was more than would fit on one of my compact flash cards. No problem, the camera has a second slot. It turns out that, unlike the MkIV which will switch to the second card when the first is full if you so desire, the MkIIN won’t do that. Okay, not problem. I shall tether it to Lightroom and download direct to the laptop.

This didn’t work. I believe this was also my fault as the MkIIN has a firewire connection as well as the USB and the USB tethering showed up on the computer but didn’t actually do anything. Okay, I can fix this. I shall let it run for a long time and change the card shortly before going to bed and the new card should work through the rest of the night. A fully charged battery and off we went to dinner.

Upon my return, I find that the camera is not shooting any more. Foolishly, while I worked out that a 16Gb card would be fine, I didn’t remove the 8Gb card that was in there so the card was full. I swapped the card with another one quickly and set it off. A while later I come back to check on it and nothing is happening. The new card is full. I hadn’t formatted it first. What a fool. I also have a flat battery. This is not going to be good. Fortunately, the MkIIN came with the DC adapter as standard (unlike the MkIV – how tight are you Canon?) so I swapped that in, put in a fresh card and formatted it. Then I went to bed.

This finally worked. The remaining shots worked fine. The result wasn’t too bad but, since it had some obvious jumps in it – the moon was traversing the scene when the gaps occur – it wasn’t usable. However, it did teach me a bunch of thing that I now need to deal with for the second attempt. let’s see if I can balls that up as well!

Turn the River a Slightly Different Color

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Since the birthday of this blog has just passed, I am now going to spend my time repeating previous blog posts from a year ago. Seems a lot easier than creating new content. In fact, for those of you with an inquisitive nature, I will make things easier and you can go to this post to see what I wrote before and decide for yourself whether I am being original or whether I am totally ripping off my own work. If it is different, has the quality of my posts improved???

This year St Patrick’s Day was a Saturday. I am not sure whether this really made any difference because the city chooses a Saturday to celebrate everything and that is the party day whatever the date. The odd thing this year is that it was warm. Mid 70s is not what you expect for this time in March. In fact, my first St Patrick’s Day in Chicago, we went to see the parade and gave up half way through because we were thoroughly frozen!

This time being too warm was more of an issue. I won’t go in to whether the madness that the city falls in to is any way related to St Patrick or even the Irish (and we shall leave the fact that Patrick wasn’t Irish anyway for another day!). Instead, I am going to focus on the tradition of dying the river green. I went down to join the crowds and see how things were developing. It was very busy with the weather really bringing out the crowds.

Dying the river went fine despite the coxed eights that didn’t get out of the way in time. The Police boats seemed mad but hadn’t made an effort to get rid of them ahead of time so what did they expect. It was funny to see the speed boats running close by and putting quite a wash over the eight who looked less than happy about how close they were to sinking!

Watching the crowds was also fun. You do see some sights on a day like today and some of them can be photographed. However, you also have to be careful since the drinking starts early and can affect the good humor of some people!

Up a Big Pole!

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Today we have a bit of a flashback. Regular readers will know that I shoot a lot of helicopter operations. Midwest Helicopters is the large local operator so they do most of the work in the city. However, there other operators that undertake similar work and some of them will work in Chicago at times. This is often a function of the weight of the loads to be lifted. Construction Helicopters of Howell MI are one such operator and their S-61N aircraft can lift 10,000lbs – a big increase over the 4,500lbs of the S-58T. If you need even bigger things lifted, Erickson Aircrane are probably your people!

This piece, though, is not about the helicopter so much as the people it was working with. A few years ago, the Trump International Hotel and Tower was built here in the city – in fact just across the street from us. We had the best seats to watch the demolition of the old Sun Times building and the growth from a hole in the ground to 92 floors of building. It was fun to watch, even if it did take a chunk out of our view! The building was topped off with a spire. The parts for the spire were lifted to the roof by the construction cranes before they were assembled but it was going to be significantly higher than the rest of the building so those cranes were not suitable for assembling it. The pieces would be lifted into place by helicopter.

The first attempt at this was unsuccessful as the winds were so strong that keeping each piece in place long enough to secure it proved impossible. There was a long wait before the second attempt but the job finally went ahead. The heroes of this story are the guys on the tower. If you think that the tower itself is over a 1,000′ tall and the spire is a significant (and flexible) structure above that, you can see that this is quite an exposed location to be working. From talking to the team that assembled it, the most senior guys are the ones at the very top – they want to be there.

Three guys were on the spire at the top. As each section was brought into place, they grabbed the tag lines and pulled it into position. When they had located it, they would put in a bolt in each corner. Then, one would climb up the new piece to release the lifting line. The other two would follow while a second group came behind them to insert the additional bolts to finally secure the section. While they were finishing that off, the next piece was coming in.

To add to the fun of this, the spire narrows as it gets higher so the working space gets progressively more limited. All the time you are dealing with whatever wind conditions there are at this height combined with the not inconsiderable down-wash from the helicopter and trying to make sure you maintain your grip and don’t drop anything on the team below you!

The job ran a little long but they did finish it off and put the final cap in place. They seemed to do a great job but were so far away from anyone else, I suspect that very few people appreciate exactly what they had done. It was only recently as I was culling a bunch of old images that I looked again at them as saw exactly what they were doing. I feel guilty for paying more attention to the helicopter operations when I first shot the job so decided to give them a little publicity now. Well done everyone.

Thornton Quarry Video

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The Thornton Quarry lift job with Midwest Helicopters was a full day job so it provided a bunch of opportunity to try different things. This was true for the stills but it also allowed me to experiment with the video as well. Since the aircraft was operating all day, I was able to get to multiple locations and see all aspects of the job as they happened. Normally, this isn’t possible since a lift will only last about 30 minutes. In that case, you have to pick the location that will get the shots you must have and accept that the alternative shots will not be made.

This time I was able to move around the whole site and capture as much as possible of what was going on. Some of the clips looked really interesting and the time but they actually proved to be no use. Some of the boring stuff as it appeared at the time actually ended up being really of use when it came to editing.

At this point, it is important for me to apologize to people like Gerry Holtz. Gerry is an editor and he does this sort of thing for a living. Anyone else who knows about editing professionally, you are all due my apologies and my respect. I am trying a bit with video editing but what I have learned is that it is bloody difficult to do.

On this shoot, most of the video was captured using my SLR. The rest of it was shot on a GoPro which is such a great little device to get something a little more unusual. It was handheld (or mounted in the case of the GoPro). No tripods or dollies and certainly nothing as impressive as a Kessler Crane!

I suspect that to be good at editing it is important to have had some education in the process. I am doing it the guy way – try something and then try something else and see what happens. Not even a manual to consult! Consequently, I make some progress but probably my approach starts from the wrong place. If I was going to do a lot more of this I would take the training aspect seriously. However, for the time-being, this is a little side hobby so I will probably stick with what I am doing.

Part of the fun(?) of the edit process is taking all of the disparate elements of the footage and trying to combine them into a coherent timeline. Part of the engineer in me thinks it should be delivered in the same order it happened. This is rubbish of course. The viewer has no concern of course. As long as the result doesn’t obviously have terrible jumps or continuity issues, no-one is going to be any the wiser.

Also, how much do they need to see. About eighty lifts were done during the day. Does the video need to have eighty lifts? NO! In the end, I concluded that two lifts were enough to tell the story. One wasn’t enough but it didn’t need more than two. I cut the length down as I went but even then it was still quite a long piece. A pro would probably have it down to a couple of minutes but then, as I mentioned, I am not a video pro.

One lesson I have learned as I have practiced this video stuff is how many of the tools the software has are no use at all. There are a million transitions between scenes, all of which make it look like you are experimenting with the software but they are a distraction from viewing. I have learned to use simple transitions that are short so they are not obvious to the viewer. They just stop the jump being the item the viewer focuses on.

Anyway, the final part of this story is that I was very happy with the result for this video. Unfortunately, it turns out the company that was doing part of the work is very sensitive about their equipment and doesn’t like the equipment being shown on the video so I have had to remove it from my YouTube channel. Consequently, I can’t include it in this post. Oh well…

Winter Zoo Time

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A sunny winter weekend is often a good chance to check out the zoo. Since a lot of the animals are not fond of winter weather, there are only a few that will be outside at this time of year. Consequently, the zoo doesn’t charge for entry so it is good for those after a cheap day out. We are members anyway so it doesn’t make a difference to us but it is good to go anyway.

During our previous visit the Snow Leopards had been pretty active. We were hoping to see them again – they aren’t too bothered by the cold – but we also wanted to see what else was about. Since you aren’t paying, you can make a short visit without feeling like you should make a full day out of the admission price. As it happened, the Snow Leopards were soundly asleep while we were there but there were other things to see.

The Tiger was showing more action that is normally the case. This is one cat that likes to sleep. However, we timed our arrival well and saw a fair bit of movement. Tigers are also fine with the cold of course. Bears are similar. Both Polar Bears were about and one of the Brown Bears was wandering around its enclosure.

We also saw a few birds wandering around the place. The Pelicans were out near one of the ponds and another group of birds (I am thinking Guinea Fowl but you can correct me if I am wrong) were also strutting around. The light was very nice so not a bad afternoon.

Night Skating

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As has been the case a few times recently, I was down in Millennium Park recently at night. I was there to see something else but, while I was there, I took some time to watch the ice skaters. There is an ice rink beside Millennium Park that is free to the public to use. If you don’t have skates, they are available for hire. However, if you come equipped, you are free to skate!

The rink stays open relatively late each evening and I spent some time from above watching everyone having fun. Of course, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take some pictures (and also some video – I figure that all of these clips will one day be part of a larger montage of Chicago footage). Since it is dark, it is time to try other techniques.

I was surprised how well lit the rink was. I could get some quite fast shutter speeds if I wanted to. However, that wasn’t really the point. I can come during the day if that is what I want. Instead, the slow shutter speeds were actually what I was looking for. The question then becomes how slow.

I was mounting the camera to the railings with a flexible arm and clamp so my motion wasn’t a problem. If the shutter speeds got too long, the blur of the skaters became so vague, it was hard to see whether they were there or not. A slightly faster speed meant they became a bit more distinct. This was what I was after. You still needed to get the larger groups of skaters to make it show up noticeably though. The perfect combination was when someone would stay totally still (or close to it) during the shot. Then you had the juxtaposition of the movement and the lack of movement. That was my favorite.

Some O’Hare Arrivals

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A bit more time stuck indoors than I would ideally have liked had meant that I was beginning to climb the walls a bit. Some good weather had been about but I had been unable to get outside to enjoy it. However, I did get a Sunday when I was able to get out and the weather showed signs of clearing up. (It had been pretty murky early in the day but the forecast said it would get better and it wasn’t wrong!)

I decided to head to O’Hare to watch some European arrivals. A strong westerly wind meant the arrival direction would be reliable as far as sun angle was concerned and the low temperatures should hopefully avoid too much heat distortion. Apart from that, an afternoon out shooting the arrivals is better than plenty of other options even if it isn’t something new and unique.

As it was, there were a fair few interesting aircraft coming in along with the regular O’Hare types of traffic. I was able to keep close to the car which meant I could hop back out of the chilly wind between interesting targets and listen out on LiveATC’s app on my phone to know when something was coming my way. Flightaware also allows a bit of planning ahead.

It was a fun afternoon and some good results showed up. Some new bits to add to the catalog along with some of the familiar stuff and some that will soon no longer be familiar and need to be remembered before they are gone. Here is a small selection of the day.