unfortunately, was not quick enough to get a clear shot of this dude, he was trucking on his skate board though.
there is something about this photo I like a lot, as technically flawed as it is. Again, looks better if you view the larger size.
Category: Photography
Photos on your screen are nice, but photos on your wall are better!
Framed, ready to hang prints, as well as licenses for reproduction in print and online, are available for order from my photography site — click here.
Hotel Sofitel Chicago Water Tower
very cold place inside too, imo
a friend stayed here a couple years ago, I wouldn’t really recommend it, unless you just loved the location, or got a cheap price.
Reading Around on July 8th through July 9th
A few interesting links collected July 8th through July 9th:
- The New York Times > Magazine > Second Gilded Age – “A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.”A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.”
- PDNPulse: New York Times Magazine Withdraws Altered Photo Essay – The New York Times Magazine has withdrawn a photo essay by Edgar Martins — described in print as having been produced “without digital manipulation” — because several of the photographs show signs of digital manipulation. The photo essay, which ran in the July 5 issue of the magazine, shows abandoned real estate projects.
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- Straight Dope Chicago: Followup: Is the late arrival of summer in Chicago proof of global warming? – “Here we begin to see a pattern. The long-term winter temperature trend is up, though not dramatically. Clearly the 1950s were an unusually warm time. Considered over a shorter period, however — from the bitterly cold winters of 1977-79 to the present — winter temperatures in Chicago have risen sharply. The past decade has been the warmest stretch in the past 60 years. That’s in line with the common observation among climate-change specialists that winters have warmed up more than summers.Now look again at the early fall chart. We see the same rising trend, although it started later. The average high temperature declined until 1993, but has risen markedly since then. Is this evidence of the seasonal shift some experts claim to have detected — an unmistakable sign of global warming? Eh, 15 years is too short a time to judge. But could “
“70INX70IN Versatol Tri-pod Screen Matte White Keystone Elim.” (Da-Lite Screen Company, Inc.)
Which End Has the Pot of Gold?
tonight’s rainbow over the west loop, about ten minutes before sunset, two photos, stitched together.
If you look closely at the large version ( Original ), you can see where I cloned the sky a bit. Otherwise, no out-of-the ordinary Photoshop corrections.
If I spent more time I could maybe make the clouds look less stitched, but unless you are looking, you might not notice them at all. (Upper right corner is copied from elsewhere)
Wild Apples and Thin Boards
sunset over the West Loop, Chicago
love how golden the light becomes.
Nicked the title from a William B. Yeats poem, apparently, which I half-remembered. I suggest reading it aloud…
via Google Books:
Awaken wanderings of light air
To stir their coverlet and their hair.
And poets found, old writers say;
A yew tree where his body lay;
But a wild apple hid the grass
With its sweet blossom where hers was;
And being in good heart, because
A better time had come again
After the deaths of many men,
And that long fighting at the ford,
They wrote on tablets of thin board,
Made of the apple and the yew,
All the love stories that they knew.Let rush and bird cry out their fill
Of the harper’s daughter if they will,VOL I Z BAILE AND AILLINN 337
Eugène Atget on Flickr
The George Eastman House has released 97 historic photos taken by French photographer Eugène Atget to The Flickr Commons1. Awesome stuff.
Purporting to make photographs not as art, but as documentary aids to artists, Eugène Atget left this world with an oeuvre that captured the transformation of Paris at the turn of the last century. Although Atget is now heralded as a canonical figures in the history of photography, his humble beginnings and methodologies during his photographic career attest to his simple desire to record his city as he knew it.
Born in 1857, in Libourne near Bordeaux and raised by his uncle, Atget’s youth was molded by his time as a sailor. Upon his return from the sea, Atget turned to the stage and pursued an acting career in provincial cities and later in Paris suburbs. After minor success as an actor, Atget abandoned the stage and at the age of forty took up painting, then quickly turned to his true life’s work as a photographer. For the next thirty years, until just a few short months before his death in 1927, Atget undertook a systematic documentation of the city of Paris, creating approximately five thousand negatives and nearly ten thousand prints.
Because he refused to work with the latest advances in photographic technology, Atget’s images evoke a sense of timelessness, due in part to the slower exposure times and the pre-visualization of the final image that was required. Atget produced glass plate negatives, using an 18 x 24 cm. view camera that was fitted with a brass rectilinear lens and had no shutter. Rather, Atget would simply remove the cap from the lens and capture the scene before him, allowing any motion to appear as a blur. Atget carried this large camera around Paris as he worked to document its essential elements: streets, shop windows, building facades, architectural details, and the landscape of the public gardens and parks in and around the city.
Atget’s unique documentation of the French capital captured the eye of surrealist photographer Man Ray who worked to promote Atget as one of the pre-eminent photographic modernists. Later, the efforts of Berenice Abbott, who acquired Atget’s negatives and prints after his death, finally situated Atget’s work in the history of photography where it continues to gain in stature and influence.
[Click to view photographs by Eugène Atget – a set on Flickr]
The best way to view these photos is to click on the slideshow option, and be transported.
His photographs really blazed the trail that I (in my humble fashion) and so many of my Flickr compatriots follow: taking photographs of the city we live in, warts and all. Photos of strangers on the street, of shop windows, of public art, signs – all of these are subjects I revist over and over.
Footnotes:- no known copyright restrictions [↩]
Whip It!
Whip it good!
Ahh, to be young again, sitting in a park, sucking down nitrous oxide from a can of whipped cream…
I just noticed all three slackers are wearing Converse Chuck Taylor shoes. Nothing like a little uniformity among iconoclastic compatriots, right?
Long Term Future – E100S
Beaux-Arts former refueling station, now a mixed use office/retail spot
from the Green Line train at Clinton
Reading Around on July 3rd
Some additional reading July 3rd from 14:02 to 18:15:
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- Photos of Sarah Palin from RunnersWorld.com – “I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, ‘I go wading.’ Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up.”
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Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – Goldman Sachs is reeling under public pressure – True/Slant – That a company as rich and powerful as Goldman would stoop to peering through the web version of a locker-room peephole to make a few extra pennies either front-running random trades or somehow using visitor data “not for their benefit” shows how completely and utterly morally absent this company is. There is not an ill-gotten dollar they will not chase, no matter how small or insignificant the sums might be.
Word should be spread about this and anyone who used the Goldman 360 portral for trading should seriously investigate this situation, as it is entirely possible you’ve been ripped off …
More to the point, the fact that Goldman is getting enough public pressure that it feels it has to respond to these queries shows that the company is reeling. And the fact that their public statements have been so hilariously transparent and clumsy shows that they’re rattled and don’t know how to handle this kind of heat, which they’re not used to getting
- Email Full-resolution Photos From the iPhone 3G S | Geek stuff – “What I found was, the photos contained in the email were full-resolution 2048×1536 photos, not the puny 800×600 photos that get sent via the “Share” method.”
basically, use copy/paste
Jonas Brothers vs Matt Taibbi
www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_am…
Rolling Stone is so schizophrenic. The July 9, 2009 issue has the Jonas Brothers on the cover, and a great article about Goldman Sachs by Matt Taibbi inside. I wonder what the overlap is?
Forgive the lame Venn diagram, this is the first I’ve ever made
Yes, its true, I don’t really want to work today…
Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference – Kodachrome
Coal plant looming over Indiana Dunes.
From my vast, unknowable photo archives
Republished at WBEZ
www.chicagopublicradio.org/Daily_Photo.aspx?photoID=961
Infinite Jest
My reading list
There’s a web-based reading group for this allegedly challenging book, but I haven’t started reading David Foster Wallace’s tome yet, still have about 100 pages left of American Pharaoh
SNACK is such a strange word
closeup of Artist’s Snack Cafe sign, on South Michigan Avenue. The cafe is a throwback to another era, no doubt.
republished:
latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/07/entertainment…
Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference – Blue tone
Coal plant looming over Indiana Dunes
From my vast, unknowable photo archives
the original photo (from my first digital camera, an Olympus C3040Z) was a little generic, so added a blue tone for atmosphere.
385 parts per million – Polapan Blue
Indiana Dunes, April, 2003
strolling through my archives yielded some shots of a coal plant from 2003.