Daily Mnemonic

Pretty much anytime you are using a tilt/shift lens and combining it with trains you’re going to get a great miniature effect. Of course if it’s the end of October in Chicago and you want to get this shot at night you are going to have to brave some pretty frigid weather. This particular night I was out with a couple of friends doing the long exposure thing. I love doing night photography, and even though it’s always hard to overcome laziness or simply staying in and staying warm I’m always glad when I go.

We kept driving past this power plant on a trip we took Rhode Island in 2007. Only I didn’t have a tripod with me. Ultimately I thought it was cool enough to break down and buy a cheap tripod to capture the shot. This story is pretty boring, but the moral is that cheap tripods suck, and a sturdy pair of legs do wonders in image stabilization.

This was the one of the last long exposures I took in Chicago before I moved to Portland. It seems like a million years ago. Towards the end of my stint in Chicago I couldn’t wait to leave, it all just felt weird to me. Looking back now Chicago felt more like home to me than Portland ever did. The Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park is the subject of millions of photos, and quite a few of my own. The other night I posted a couple of photos, one of the San Diego skyline and the other of a lone fisherman at night motion blurred on a pier. I thought the fisherman was an infinitely more interesting shot than the cityscape, but everyone is excited about that shot. I really enjoy night photography, but sometimes it’s difficult to really make it interesting when you are tethered to a tripod.

There is a bridge that we went over the other day that has some pretty cool graffiti under it. Graffiti fascinates me, mostly because I can’t read it nor can I usually figure out how they physically got to a lot of the places it is, and had time to do it presumably at night. Freight trains are great for graffiti, but I still do not understand how they have time to do such intricate work. Take the skull on this car for instance. How did they even get to the upper portions of it? Train cars are not that short. Total unsolved mystery stuff for me.

Chicago has a park called “Oz Park” that has statues of many of the characters in the movie the Wizard of Oz. The biggest disappointment in the park is that there are no flying monkey statues. How they could overlook flying monkeys is beyond me. I saw a clip of the Wizard of Oz the other night that made me think of this shot. It was really cold that night.

On a cold day in the beginning of April Melissa and I walked over to the Canal street market in Chicago. We were there with Archie FlorCruz whose website I had actually been following for quite awhile before we moved back in Chicago. I always like the vast empty feeling of this photo.