Tag Archives: photo

Michigan Avenue Bridgehouse

The Chicago tourist activities have been continuing. Another local attraction I have never been to – and this one has no excuse since I have known about it for ages and it is visible from my window! – is the bridgehouse for the Michigan Avenue bridge.

Chicago has a large number of movable bridges across the Chicago and Calumet rivers. A large number of them are bascule bridges. For those of you not familiar with French descriptions of bridges, bascule bridges are counterbalanced and rotate out of the way using very little power due to the excellent balance. (Bascule is French for seesaw.)

The museum is in the tower at one end of the bridge. It is a pretty small museum but it provides access to the mechanisms that move the bridge. This is something that interests an engineering type like me. I think they could have made things a little better though. There is very little lighting down there so it is hard to make out all of the parts of the machinery. They could also provide a bit more of a guide to this. As a photographer, the amount of fencing in the way is a nuisance but I doubt there is much they could do about that.

As a result of the relatively limited nature of the bridge, the rest of the museum is a history of Chicago, its rivers and the water supply. It certainly provides more to look at and is quite worth a look. There are also some slightly different views of the river. Since it was only $4 to get in, I think it was worth a look. Now to see how I can make some suggestions to them about improvements.

More Walking Around Chicago

Leave a Reply

The walk with my Mum also took in some spots I have been to before. Never one to travel sans camera I ended up taking some new shots. Whether they are better than ones taken before, I have yet to decide.

We stopped off in Union Station. No trying to repeat the gun battle from The Untouchables for us. Just a look around. It is a very impressive hall and it would be nice to think that there would be some larger use for it but the commuters never come this way so it is a smattering of travelers that end up here – plus tourists and film buffs of course.

We then wandered up along the river and stopped off at the Holiday Inn. Its location on the confluence of the north and south branches of the Chicago River gives it a great view of the city. The clouds had started to roll in so it wasn’t at its best but still worth a look.

Sunset at the Botanic Gardens

Leave a Reply

I have had my Mum visiting . We try and find some fun things to do while she is staying and maybe even tie them in to things I have been meaning to do. One of these things was a trip to the Botanic Gardens. The thing that made this different is that, during the summer they have been having a late opening until 9pm. The evening light should provide some good opportunities with the camera.

It certainly is a good time to visit. The crowds are not there as they would be normally (although there are still a fair number of people around) so you have less of a feeling of being rushed by people around you. Also, having a tripod is not a problem! As the evening draws in, the light gets lovely and then, once the sunset passes, you can play around with some night photography.

You do have to pay attention to which areas will get the nice light since the terrain will block certain parts of the gardens but, apart from that, you can really have a nice time wandering around and looking for nice shots.

Here are some more samples of what I saw.

Stormy Skies

Leave a Reply

The forecast the other morning was for some big storms. I decided that this would be a good time to head down to the lakefront. When a storm hits us, I see a lot of lightning around us but there is little that I can do to get a good shot since the buildings are too close to get any perspective. Before Trump was built, there was a lot more to see but that is no longer the case.

Instead, i thought the Adler planetarium would provide a good view of the city as the storm rolled in so I hopped in the car and headed over there. There was a local TV crew setting up when I got there so I thought they must agree with my planning. The sky was certainly looking darker.

As it turned out, we were both wrong. The sky got very moody and some crazy looking clouds bubbled across but no storm showed up. Instead, it just started raining and my enthusiasm reduced significantly! Eventually I headed home and the storm ended up skirting south of us. Oh well.

Looking down on the world

Leave a Reply

After a bit of a false start this week, I did a short job for a local company in partnership with some people I have worked with before. This job was to get some aerial shots of a tractor factory in the Chicago suburbs. The job was tied to another sortie so the timing was based on when that would happen. However, the aim was for a morning launch, hopefully to get some reasonable light.

The plant was not far from the base of the helicopter so I strapped myself into my harness and sat in the door of the S-58 to get the shots. A few orbits of the location later, a selection of shots were in the bag. They were looking for something straightforward so no great artistic expression on these. However, hopefully we got something that they like.

The main shots are going to them at the moment but here are some from the others I got on the trip.

Indianapolis

Leave a Reply

Aside from the visit to the zoo in Indy, we also too the opportunity to look around some of the city center. We were staying close to the canal and the capitol in the downtown area so were able to take a wander around without having to drive anywhere.

The canal seems to be a popular area with a bunch of development having gone on around it. I imagine it has been developed in stages since some of the areas seemed very new while others had obviously been around a bit longer.

There were some nice fountains, cafes, residential developments and bridges along the canal. It was nicely laid out and seemed to be popular with people riding bikes and running along the banks. Obviously not just tourists like us taking a look.

There are a couple of monuments along the canal. One is for medal of honor recipients and another is for the battleship USS Indianapolis which was lost with a heavy loss of life towards the end of the Second World War. Both where simply done but very interesting.

We also wandered over to the Capitol and the surrounding area. One part of it is something that I have seen many times whenever the Colts have a home game and the TV crews show surrounding city shots between plays. Interesting to finally see something for real that has been on TV so many times before.

Had a really nice time in Indy and found everyone to be unbelievably friendly and helpful. I wouldn’t be surprised to head back at some point.

More lighter than air fun

Leave a Reply

Again you are going to receive an abbreviated post that is directing you to another location for the fuller story. In this case, it is a piece I have put together for Global Aviation Resource. The topic is the Zeppelin NT airship operated by Airship Ventures, a company based just outside San Francisco in California.

It seems that lighter than air vehicles have suddenly become a big thing for me. I blogged not long ago about a blimp that was circling my home (not that it was aware that I was there of course – I think it was doing other things). Then I saw the Zeppelin of Airship Ventures floating over the Chicago lakefront while I was watching fireworks on the 4th of July. They were at Oshkosh and got a lot of coverage while there and now have passed back through Chicagoland.

I had the chance to go out and watch the team at work recently and that is the focus of the article that can be found at this link.

Metal Printing

Leave a Reply

One of the things that I am always experimenting with is the alternatives available when it comes to reproducing the images I produce. I am always a fan of printing things. My home is full of prints that I have made on my printer or I have bought from MPix. There are far more of them than I will ever be able to hang or frame. However, while it is nice to see pictures on the monitor, I find a physical print to be a lot more satisfying.

Recently, though, I have been trying out various different methods of printing. I have blogged before about my experiments with canvas prints and I have previously tried some metal printing on tiles to make up larger images. I was introduced to another company that prints on metal via a couple of fellow ISAP members, Bill Fortney and Moose Peterson. They have used a company called Image Wizards. I decided to give them a try.

The website provided all of the image requirements for setting up the file for them to use. Unlike my previous experiences with metal printing, they wanted a high pixel per inch count for the file. I have no idea whether this is really necessary or not but I followed their guidelines which obviously increases the file size. I contacted them about the order and took some advice on what the different finish options would be. I uploaded the file through an FTP upload and they also had a discount from my NAPP membership.

About a week later a very large box showed up. They certainly pack the print well for shipping and buried in the middle of the protective material was my print. I have to say that I love it. It was an image I was already pleased with and the metal finish both looks great and also is very accessible to the viewer since there is nothing to get between you and the lovely print finish. The metal base gives it a very attractive look.

My problem, as with all of my printing experiments is what to do with it. Where I live does not have a huge amount of wall space and my wife is not keen that what space there is gets filled up with my aviation prints. Storing them is possible but still takes space so this one is actually going to go to the guy whose plane is featured. I just hope he likes it as much as I do!

Bears Training Camp

Leave a Reply

It is that time of year when large men start practicing to inflict pain on each other – and if you are a Bears fan – on us too! With the negotiations over, it is time for training camp. The Chicago Bears hold their camp at a university down in Bourbonnais Illinois. With some spare time now on my hands, I decided to make a trek down for one of the public sessions.

With the temperature in the 90s, this might not have seemed like the best idea but it was windy and that really made things feel a lot better – although I think some of the receivers might have been using it as an excuse! I went to the camp for the first time last year. I had checked on what camera gear they allowed and the person I had spoken too said nothing too big. That time I took a 70-200 as my biggest lens and got there to see a fair few honking pieces of glass.

This time I took what I wanted and I’m glad I did. Not only does it make shooting easier but people are amazingly accommodating when they see big lenses. While they were all fighting each other for a spot when they were shooting with their phones, as soon as I wandered up, people would drag their relatives out of my way without me ever having to say a thing. Great stuff. Don’t see that at an air show very often!

I didn’t stay for the whole session. it was a bit toasty and lugging the gear around to different spots to try different things doesn’t help to keep you cool. However, I was happy with what I saw and slightly happier in the car with the aircon cranked up! It is a great thing if you like football. The price of a ticket for Soldier Field is astronomical but this is free and you get to see a bunch of stuff. The staff were all universally welcoming and you felt good about being there. Plus, some of the shots came out quite well!

Time to get brutal

Leave a Reply

When I first started shooting digitally, I didn’t delete any pictures. I’m not sure how this started but, as time went by, I found old shots that benefited from more modern processing and software capabilities. It was sometimes surprising how a shot that previously I didn’t think was any use could actually be turned into something better.

Of course, this was a tiny proportion of the shots. Most of the crappy shots were still crappy shots whatever the software that was used. Being horribly out of focus or even something taken accidentally like the floor or the inside of a camera bag is never going to be fixed with some miraculous software. However, for a while storage was cheap so I didn’t care.

At various times additional drives have been added to the computer and the back up NAS has been rebuilt with ever larger drives. (I have lots of spare drives if ever you need one!) The problem is that I keep taking ever more pictures and the cameras have ever larger file sizes. Besides, how many pictures do I actually need? Each time I re-shoot a subject I get a few new shots that are keepers and some of the previous shots of that subject go down the priority list. Am I ever going to need a thousand different shots of a Strike Eagle?

Consequently, I have finally grown up. I am getting rid of stuff. (I should point out that I do have BluRay backups of everything made early on so, if I really wanted to, I might be able to drag out any file!) I am now getting brutal with stuff as soon as it is shot. Meanwhile, I am progressively going through a lot of older stuff to get rid of the crap. This is a two stage process. First I am going through to take out shots that are clearly not good – blurry, poor focus etc. If I spot that half of the subject is missing at the same time those will go. However, zooming in to spot the duds sometimes means you don’t see that the shot is also crap.

Those will get picked up in the second phase. Then I shall assume the shots are basically useable but remove the ones that just look bad as well as weed out the obvious duplicate. However, phase one is taking a long time so phase two will come later. Also, this is a great crappy winter day job and now it is summer. I am spending more time doing fun things.

Will anyone else see the benefit of this. Certainly not the hard drive manufacturers but hopefully I will. The shutter actuations on the cameras won’t reduce but at least I will try and make life easier for Lightroom!