Pictures in Chicago with James!

So James is one of my friends from college, and he's been into photography for awhile now, but recently decided to upgrade his camera and take a class, which I think is awesome. He's from Chicago and his parents still live here, so he's around fairly often, this past weekend he made a special megabus trip up for an afternoon of hanging out and taking pictures with me! And it was so awesome!

You can check James blog out here--I don't think he's put his Chicago pictures up yet, but I'll try to let you know when he does. I think it's so beneficial for photographers to shoot together, because you can learn so much from each other and because it's really interesting to see how different two people's pictures of the same things can be.

So, here's a picture looking down the subway (that's the Red Line, for you locals). I love the perspective and shadows, but I think I might like to shoot this again. I can't wait for you to see James'--he was looking the other way, and caught a great one of the train coming around the bend in the tunnel.

We started out in Chinatown, both for pictures and for lunch, and this hilarious sign was on the door and begging for its picture to be taken. The sweat drops and the crazy mouth really complete the effect for me. If anyone is curious, we ate at The Three Happiness, which was really good and reasonably priced. Although James did get something with potatoes in it, and we're pretty sure those potatoes were frozen crinkle-cut french fries. Funny, but still tasty. :)

James actually caught this and commented that it would be a cool picture, but I think he was a little shy about taking pics of strangers. I was like, "I'll do it!" I think he did end up taking a couple too--this was the only one I shot, but I love it. I feel like I need more of this.

Just a little snapshot of a butcher shop--these drawings of animals are cuter than what was hanging in the windows, I can tell you that! (Just to avoid confusion, I'm a total meat-eater and in no way a vegetarian, but I do prefer to just see it when it's cooked ... and headless.)

A bike ... I'm not sure how much I'm loving this, but I do like bikes (especially my own, a bad ass '73 Schwinn Breeze, green) so I think I'm going to have to keep exploring the possibilities. Also, I did a lot of black and whites in this shoot, which reminds me of being in school. Fun!

WHAT?!?! I LOVE this sign. It's so 70's. The only thing that could make it better is if the lights were on, but I still love it like this. :)

Oh, and speaking of signs--I love old, rusted out, turned off neon signs. This was actually a really tough picture to take--the angle was odd, it was a long sign (it actually said "Overseas Art & Travel", but since I like art and travel both so much, I decided that I could take one of just those two words), there was no good way to get into the street to take it ... but I think it turned out pretty well in spite of the challenges.

This is the Winter Garden in that big fancy library downtown (I totally forget the name of it--help?). James set off an alarm by walking down a hallway, which made me laugh because I am ALWAYS setting off alarms and getting my own private security guards in places like that. But we could take pictures in the main room, and I loved the shadows.

This was on a bridge ... I think on Roosevelt? We were around Roosevelt and Congress. I remember looking down over train tracks when we were in the (miles long) line to get into the Obama election-night rally in Grant Park, and I was glad to see them again and get a shot. I think I'd like to get one going the other way at some point, but this was the best view from this bridge.

This is down by the lake, which is where we were heading when we were on Roosevelt. No significance to the 58, it just happened to catch my eye and I liked the cracks.

We found this SWEET little row of boats ... I know nothing about boats, actually, so I have no idea what kind these are, but I am SO excited for it to get warmer and to see all the boats out on Lake Michigan (and take pictures of them!). Having a giant lake here is almost as good as an ocean and it makes me happy every time I see it.

You could definitely see the storm clouds rolling in, and I loved the one lone boat.

And a similar shot in color.

This one was my favorite, though, with the little boats in the foreground. I'm in major love.

It was starting to sprinkle by this point and most people were clearing out, but I had to stop and take this picture of the two couples walking there. And I love how the people in the shot totally put the whole thing into perspective, because without them, you'd have no sense of scale whatsoever. Also, I really enjoy cropping with the 1 to 2 ratio and think I might have to do that more often.

James and I ended up hanging out under this bridge outside the Field Museum (it's just a pedestrian walkway, not a road or anything), and obviously plenty of other people had the same idea. And I loved the silhouettes of people trying to wait out the rain.

And this is the same thing on the other side of the bridge. I like the bike there, but really my favorite part of this picture is the misty museum in the background. I thought both these pictures were really fun.

I had THE best time with James on Saturday! And he's going to come back so we can do the architectural tour with Amy and Billy, which James will kick butt at (since he's awesome at the architecture pics ... I try to keep up). And we always have a good time together!

I've been enjoying my camera so much lately, especially as it gets nicer out.

Still waiting for some sunshine to get the cattails, but hopefully it won't be long!

My cute little pets!

So, some photographers post pictures of their kids but I don't have kids, so pets it is! I love them so much, and I may be biased but I think they're the best models in the whole entire world. :)



This is sweet little Ricker laying on Billy's homework.



We left for a little while to run errands and when we came back, she had eaten the corner off of it. And in true cat form, she didn't even pretend to be sorry.



And this is my cute little Flash! We were on a walk and I asked Billy to run around with him, so he did, and look how happy Flashy looks! That dog looooooves running. :)



And here's his cute little face from the front! He's loving spring--sometimes we'll be moving around or getting ready to take him out and he'll just sit there and smile at us.

Yay for spring, and yay for me having such cute animals! Woo!

J4F

J4F totally means nothing to anyone unfamiliar with Plainfield, but it stands for Just4Fun, which is the go-kart and putt-putt place where my good friend Maggs worked through high school, and I also took these pictures just for fun. So there you go.

Anyway, I made an effort not to take any pictures in focus the other night--a few snuck in, but mostly not, and it was really fun.

This is the creek that runs through my apartment complex, and I like how it looks like a painting. Also, Billy has been taking me around and doing vision experiments on me for school (nothing major, just like ... can you read this sign from here) and a couple nights ago I had to walk around without my glasses on, which was kind of bizarre, actually. I realized that I recognize a lot of things I can't actually see, which is cool, and it's totally weird when I suddenly realize there's someone coming toward me. But anyway, the point of all this is just to say that I think this picture is not entirely unlike how I see without my glasses or contacts.

Some school buses! This is actually one I'd like to try to reshoot, or some variation of it. The flare is a LITTLE fun, but I don't love the blown out sky, and I think I might want a smaller aperture. You don't think aperture is going to matter much when you're shooting out of focus, but you can start to see where it makes a subtle difference.

It's Flash! My little golden sunshine puppy! This isn't actually my favorite picture ever of him, because he usually looks happier and more thrilled about life, but he was just NOT in the mood to model for me and this was about as good as it got with the sitting still. But he's still the cutest puppy in the universe, so he can be on my blog.

This is where the sun started going down behind the trees behind my apartment, and I liked it. I'm going to REALLY like it when those trees grow some leaves. Any day now.

Blurry lights at Chili's! Yeah, I totally took my camera in. I had been having a mad craving for this fried tilapia that I'd had there a few weeks ago, but they didn't have it and in hindsight, they probably were only serving it for Lent. So I went for a blackened tilapia instead, and seriously, if you are trying to watch your calories (as I am, and I've lost six pounds, so yay for me!), that is the thing to eat. It was so spicy that I didn't even finish it, nor did I eat probably more than a cup or so of the rice that came with it, and I was STUFFED. I had leftover calories galore that day. And now I'm getting hungry again. I always start talking about food right before lunch, and I've gotta stop doing that.

This is Portillo's, which, if you don't live up here in the Chicago area, is a hot dog place. This one also has pasta, which I'm into. But it's so funny and kind of amazing--until we moved up here, me and Billy had never really seen just a free-standing hot dog restaurant. But anyway, I love this pic and I took it from the car, and that's another I might like to revisit sometime. The colors are so fun, and again, it's not unlike my uncorrected vision. In fact, I can look at this and see blobs of light and be pretty sure which one is a streetlamp, which I think is kind of weird.

This is also Portillo's, just with a different split tone on it. I thought some of the nerds out there might be interested in seeing how different split tones change a picture, and as for me, I just liked them both and I'm the boss of this blog.

That's me! I don't make appearances in my own blog much, but I figured while I was taking blurry pictures, I might as well take one of myself in the mirror too, right?

This one, obviously, is more or less in focus. I can't decide if I like it or not. This tree is outside my apartment complex and there's a light that shines on it and it's like entirely yellow against a black sky, and it's really stunning. But in the picture, the yellow was like ... blowing out. So I adjusted the color temp in RAW (just space out if this is all jibberish to you, I'm sorry), but in hindsight, I maybe should've just adjusted the saturation. Maybe I'll try that tonight.

Anyway, I totally took this picture squatting down, with Flash's leash around my bicep while he tried to yank me over in hopes of getting a closer whiff of goose poop, or whatever it is that he does. So it's a miracle that I got such a clear shot, under the crazy conditions.

And finally, this is one I took of the lights reflecting off the creek, and it's one I'm kind of interested in trying out again with a different lens. But I LOVE the colors, the blues and golds, and I'd like to give it another shot. And that was the really fun thing about the shoot--I felt like I got in some good experimenting I had a lot of fun doing it, and it made me want to take more pictures. Yay!

Blue Heron

So Billy told me a couple days ago that he had seen a heron down by the creek that runs through our apartment complex, and I was so sorry that I'd missed it. We were out again yesterday and he spotted it (I swear, I am so unobservant), so I ran up to get my camera and I ended up following this bird around like a crazy person, just snapping away. In fact, I am probably going to go on to bore you with how many blue heron pictures you're about to see, but totally whatever, I'd doing it anyway.

So I know that some of the people who read my blog know that a couple years ago, I lost my friend Ginny Buehler to breast cancer. She was one of the most beautiful and special people I have ever known, and I still miss her like crazy. She loved blue herons and just thought they were the prettiest things around, and especially after she died, they became kind of a symbol for her to the people who knew her. Her team for Race for the Cure is called Team Blue Heron, and while I'm sad that I won't be there in her memory this year, it was still really special for me to get to see the heron and think of her and feel connected to her in a small way.