by the light of the window

Here is my first entry in quite some time. I know I've been away for a while but hope to get back into the blogging game. This is a wonderfully lighted image that I just couldn't pass up.

Millennium Park

During my lunch break, I like to take a walk through Millennium Park downtown and take some photographs. Here is a sampling of what I've been shooting for the past month. More photos of the park will be coming soon.

Montrose Harbor, Chicago

It's taken us a while to break out of Winter here in Chicago and a few weeks back we got our first break in the cold weather. I was on the north side, around my old stomping grounds, and got a chance to spend an hour at Montrose Harbor. The sun was trying to break out but the clouds dominated that day. I had to do a little image recovery in an editing program to bring out the color in these photographs but it was there.

I left the last photo in to display a point about photography; digital photography in particular. Exposure is always a difficult thing to juggle when you've got a brightly lit cloudy sky and a dimly lit surface and you can see that I wasn't quite able to keep the highlights from being blown out on the last photo.

Normally, I would leave this photo out or go back and try to do some advanced editing techniques (things I could do in the darkroom, also) but I wanted to illustrate the fact that we should always expose for the highlights. Once these highlights take on the familiar glow of bright white, there is really no way to recover that information. It's much easier to exspose for the sky and then go back and try to fill in the darkened areas. The information will be much easier to recover and detail easier to bring out.

This is what happened in the photo that is second in this post. You can see that the sky is more detailed and there aren't any blown out whites. To get the bottom part of the image up to par I had to fill it in with some light but the image was more than recoverable.

The beauty of the digital age is that you can have your cake and eat it, too. With film, a photographer has to make a choice in a highly contrasted situation: take the sky and lose the subject or lose the sky and keep the subject. You can see this in many photographs where the sky is white or a whitish-gray color but the subject is exposed well. With digital production, you can literally take three photos and merge them together to get the best exposure possible. One photo for the highlights, one for the middle tones, and one for the shadows. It's a wild world out there!

And though I prefer natural exposures I appreciate the sophisticated things that can be done relatively quickly with digital images. This group of images took no more than 30 minutes to get looking relatively nice from the dingy RAW images I started with.

Remember, expose for the highlights and process, or print, for the shadows and your photographs, with a little bit of processing, will have more depth and be more impressive.

Chicago Remembers: A Vietnam Memorial

I was out and about the other day and decided to go to one of my favorite spots in the city: the vietnam memorial by the river. It was opened in 2005 by Mayor Daley to commemorate the lives of Chicago soldiers killed during the Vietnam War.

The area is a small, carved out section along the riverfront, which has been a point of revitalization in the downtown area. Few people, visitors included, realize that Wacker Drive (the road widing along the river on the south side of downtown) is actually a multi-layered road. It has undergone some reconstruction over the past few years and has been given a facelift on the lower side just along the river. It's now a place for people to stroll along the Chicago River and makes for some beautiful views of the city.

The memorial has been set up along a strolling path which runs the length of the river. I find it to be one of the most beautiful places in the city and it's always a spot that I can find some respite from the busy streets above. Being close to the area I thought I would go down to the memorial and hunt for some photographs. The following is a sampling of what came out of that afternoon of shooting.

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Harley-Davidson Sportster

One of the things I love most about living in a metropolis is that I come across a million things in places I never expect, like this Harley-Davidson Sportster. It was being raffled off at a concert in downtown Chicago and I had a chance to shoot it during a lunch break.

This is a nice series of photographs that have a lot of depth and punch. If you look closely, you can catch a glimpse of the surrounding city.