Tag: Photography

Margot and Harold Schiff Residences

Seth Anderson0 comment

Walked by here the other day, looks like it is doing well still

City Farm

Dorothy Barry says that she moved in to the Margot and Harold Schiff Residences on a “blue-sky, ain’t-nowhere-I’d-rather-be-than-Chicago” kind of day back in the summer of 2007. She says you can’t do much better than this sleek, new Helmut Jahn–designed building on the north side of the city: She gets a millionaire’s view of the skyline and is just a short ride from downtown and the beaches of Lake Michigan.

At Division Street and Clybourn Avenue, though, she’s also within blocks of the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing. Those towers are mostly torn down, replaced by mixed-income residential towers and townhouses—but their shells remind Chicagoans to do better when it comes to housing the less well-off.

Neighbors call the one-year-old stainless-steel Schiff Residences “the train,” and it does indeed resemble a polished railroad car cruising through the neighborhood. Its walls angle out as they rise up five stories, curving back over to form a roof before sliding down the other side. In a practical city raised on railroads this residential railcar is romantic. Strips of dark windows punctuate the walls, staggered to evoke forward momentum. In the ground-floor lobby, sunlight pours through great panes of floor-to-ceiling glass. Prada or Barneys could set up shop on the ground floor and no one would be the wiser.

But the Schiff Residences are permanent supportive-housing, with onsite case managers and other voluntary services. All of the 96 units are single-occupancy studio apartments. Residents here have struggled with physical and mental illness, substance abuse, and limited education. At the Schiff, you can stay as long as you follow the rules. It opened in March 2007, and already 300 people have expressed interest in moving in.

[Click to continue reading All Aboard – Ideas – Dwell]

Everytrail Photostroll in River North

Seth Anderson0 comment

River North

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Trip Sharing with Google Maps

I don’t know what has changed, but EveryTrail is a total battery sucker: an hour walk nearly completely drained my iPhone 3GS battery. Hmm, have to look into that, or else find a similar GPS application that does what EveryTrail does.

Anyway, if the Flash widget doesn’t load, here are some of the photos I took on this stroll with Flickr-eeno, phule

Union Missionary Baptist Church
Union Missionary Baptist Church
940 N Orleans Stmaps.google.com/maps?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari…

Hail to the Thief -July 30, 2009
Hail to the Thief -July 30, 2009
update of this photo:

No Coke, Pepsi
No Coke, Pepsi
Mr. Beef, 666 N. OrleansView On Black

Misdirected Remarks – Agfa Scala
Misdirected Remarks - Agfa Scala
West Loop, near Canal StreetBenefits by Viewing On Black

Recession 101 – Agfa Scala 200
Recession 101 - Agfa Scala 200
Kingsbury. Sort of a strange advertising message, no?

View On Black

Both panels read:

Recession 101:

This is the worst downturn since 1929.

According to economists who successfully predicted 14 of the last five recessions.”

wonder who the sponsor is?

Chicago 2016 Olympic
Chicago 2016 Olympic
River North, sans graffiti, at least at the moment.

Chicago 2016 Olympic City
Chicago 2016 Olympic City
River North, sans graffiti, at least at the moment.

GNIKRAP ON
GNIKRAP ON
or something.

City Farm
City Farm
Division and Laramie, or nearby.

www.resourcecenterchicago.org/70thfarm.html

Unknown building in the background with what look to be wind turbines for generating electricity

Flag Waving
Flag Waving
River North areaView On Black

Riverbend Blues in the sunlight – 3 Millions dollars?
Riverbend Blues in the sunlight - 3 Millions dollars?
Polapan version

View On Black

333 N Canal St #3702, Chicago IL 60606 3 br | 3 ½ ba | 4,163 sqft | Apt/Condo/Twnhm $3,100,000 www.trulia.com/property/1083824292-333-N-Canal-St-3702-Ch…

Riverbend in the sunlight
Riverbend in the sunlight
no way I’d pay $3,100,000 to live here

www.trulia.com/property/1083824292-333-N-Canal-St-3702-Ch…

Price/sq ft $745. Yeah, I don’t think so.

Sensational 360 vws from the Penthouse at Riverbend! See every significant bldg in Chgo, up the river & Lake Mich. Never before on the market! This home is beyond compare. 12′ ceil’gs w/flr-to-ceil’g wndws. All bdrms En-Suite. 2 enormous terraces perfect for entertaining. Kit w/Buter’s Pantry. Gallery for artwork.

a quickr pickr post

Faux Black and White in Chicago

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I’m having fun emulating the use of film1 and converting photos to black and white. A few recent snapshots – weren’t strong enough on their own, and still aren’t “print” worthy, but at least they are good practice fodder. For larger versions, click image, natch.

Inescapable Rhythms
Inescapable Rhythms
The color version for reference – actually used the Kodak 25 slide film emulation, which added contrast and richer colors to the image. View On Black

Inescapable Rhythms -TRI-X 400
Inescapable Rhythms -TRI-X 400
black and white version, TRI-X 400, a film I used to use quite extensively in my Nikon N8008 35mm camera. View Large On Black

Conceptual Silence
Conceptual Silence
Blue Line platform. Kodak T-Max p3200 speed film, another I used fairly freqently. I never owned a flash for my 35mm camera, plus was more frequently in nightclubs and bars in the 90s, situations that high-speed film was useful.View On Black

Intelligentsia Barista
Intelligentsia Barista
www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/locations/view/Broadway+Coff…. More high-speed film – adds grain, and masks blurriness. Still a lame photo, actually, but not quite as bad.

Modes of Transportation Number 6832 –
Modes of Transportation Number 6832 -
T-Max P3200 added grain. I always use Alien Skin Exposure 2 in its own layer, and sometimes change the opacity to allow a little bit of color to shine through. View On Black

The Chicago Gallery 1973 – TRI-X 400
The Chicago Gallery 1973 - TRI-X 400
Union Pacific is slowly (and I mean slowly!) rebuilding this over-pass.View On Black

State of Mind – TRI-X 400
State of Mind - TRI-X 400
underneath the Loop train track (at Quincy, or nearby)View Large On Black

James H Sammons M.D Way – Agfa APX 100
James H Sammons M.D Way - Agfa APX 100
random street scene. Who the hell is James H Sammons, M.D., and why is the street named after him?

Don’t recall ever using Agfa APX 100 film before, seems very fine grained. Again, let a small percentage of the underlying color to bleed through. Subtle effect though.

CLTV Truck
CLTV Truck
May Day, 2007

forgot which filter I used, but I’m guessing Ilford Delta 3200, based on the grain.

Unitrin Building – Plus-X 125
Unitrin Building - Plus-X 125
1 East Wacker, Chicago, IL

Plus-X 125 – used lots of rolls of this film.

Public Enemies – TRI-X 400
Public Enemies - TRI-X 400
taxi in front of Chicago Cultural Center

WH Salisburn Since 1855 – Ilford HP5 400
WH Salisburn Since 1855 - Ilford HP5 400
www.whsalisbury.com/

Self Portrait Jan 2006 – toned
Self Portrait Jan 2006 - toned

toned in Alien Skin, sort of emulating the Ilford black and white film that could be color-processed like C-412 and had this brown tonality.

Empty Blue Number 2

Empty Blue Number 2
Fulton Market

More 1049 Nostalgia – TRI-X 400
More 1049 Nostalgia - TRI-X 400
biked by my old apartment: corner of Cortez and Paulina. I rented the bottom floor (unfinished death trap that it was), something like 3500 sq. feet for $780.The neighborhood was slightly different in the mid-90s, but some structures are still there.

a quickr pickr post

Footnotes:
  1. using the Alien Skin plugin, Exposure 2 [↩]
  2. and thus could be taken to any photo developing lab. Think it was called XP2 Super [↩]

Danger! X-Rated grocery stores and Gas Stations! Oh my!

swanksalot0 comment

so, one of these seemingly innocuous Apple iPhone applications could lead to adult material, and now requires a warning. Wonder which one?

View On Black

Let us speculate.

1. AroundMe? a mapping program? are there porno theaters nearby? Bathhouses? Congress?

2. Cheap Gas!? maybe there are some perverted gas station restrooms. Or maybe the magazine section has nudie rags?

3.Grocery IQ -a grocery list application? There are *adult* things one can do with produce, or whipped cream.

4. Instapaper Free? a program that transfers webpages from Safari (you know, that web-browser program on your iPhone)

5. RN Dining? – a dining rewards /restaurant reservation app? Maybe certain restaurants haven’t paid their Apple tax recently?

[if you really want to know, the answer is answer number 4. Instapaper allows you to transfer John Yoo’s torture memos to your phone, and thus qualifies as objectionable content]

more Apple Store foolishness, in other words.

Skate Boarding – Ilford HP5 400

swanksalot0 comment

Pulaski Park. Unfortunately, was not quick enough to get a clear shot of this dude, he was trucking on his skate board though.

View Large On Black

the dudes lounging on their stoop is what makes this photo interesting to me (view the bigger version to get a good look)

A moment in Pulaski Park – Ilford Delta 3200

swanksalot0 comment
A moment in Pulaski Park - Ilford Delta 3200
A moment in Pulaski Park – Ilford Delta 3200, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

unfortunately, was not quick enough to get a clear shot of this dude, he was trucking on his skate board though.

View On Black

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.

Reading Around on July 8th through July 9th

swanksalot0 comment

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.

  • 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.)

Wild Apples and Thin Boards

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Wild Apples and Thin Boards
Wild Apples and Thin Boards, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

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

Seth Anderson0 comment

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:
  1. no known copyright restrictions [↩]

Whip It!

swanksalot0 comment
Whip It!
Whip It!, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

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?

Reading Around on July 3rd

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 3rd from 14:02 to 18:15:

  • 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.”

  • 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

Infinite Jest

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Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

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

http://infinitesummer.org/