Tag Archives: Chicago

Dying the River Green

A couple of weeks ago, Chicago had its annual celebration of St Patrick’s Day.  The city goes quite nuts for this and it certainly isn’t a good day for dropping into your local bar for a pint unless you want to be with several thousand of your closest friends!

Anyway, part of the celebration involves dying the river green. If you are celebrating a Welshman who went to Ireland with a vendetta against snakes, this makes perfect sense.  It is good fun though.  This year, I was not feeling particularly well having gone down with a bit of a cold.  March is not the warmest month in Chicago and the temperatures were being matched by quite a strong breeze.

Consequently, I took the chicken’s way out and watched the whole thing from my window.  The two shots here are actually from a few year’s back but I thought it would be fair to show you what is going on.  Instead, I tried shooting some video with the point and shoot from our vantage point.  Below is the result and you can get an idea of what is going on.

 

Making the new site work

So, I have finally taken the plunge and moved the old version of the website offline and transferred to the new version.  I immediately notice that my two trial posts when the site was in beta seem to be in reverse order.  I have no idea why that might be so I will keep on posting and see whether everything shows up in the right place eventually.

The photo life has been a tad restricted recently.  Other work commitments have had me on the road and basically without a camera for a while so I have been plotting my next ideas.  One good opportunity was, of course, the moon coming so close to the earth.  Saturday was a lovely day here in Chicago so I was hopeful of some good shots.  However, when I made my way out to the planetarium (and I was not alone out there!!), the cloud cover drifted in.  It started out on the horizon but with clear sky above.  Patience my young Padawan.  Of course, as the moon rose, the clouds spread out and covered the sky.  Lots of disappointed people went home.

I actually tried the next night but the result was just as bad.  Ho hum!  The results you see here are not impressive although given the low light and the shutter speeds, they could have been worse, I assure you!