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I went out last night to take pictures of the fireworks going off in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, it was raining earlier in the evening, and I think that discouraged some people from bringing out their fireworks. Several of the locations I usually hit were totally dead.

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To make matters worse, fog rolled in last night. That's a problem, because rather than hitting the official scheduled shows, I try to find groups of residents just having fun with their own (illegal) fireworks. My approach is just to drive around the neighborhood looking for people setting off interesting stuff in alleys, parks, and school yards.

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With all the fog out there, however, I couldn't see more than maybe 500 feet. That doesn't affect people's views of their own fireworks, but it made it hard for me to spot them from a distance and drive over.

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There were, however, almost endless opportunities to get shots like this:

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I posted a few more of them here. Try the slideshow.

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Well, I'm finished postprocessing the photos I took of Jennifer on Wednesday, and I think the photoshoot was a success. They're not all beautiful, and they're not as good as I'd like them to be, but I took them my way. This is the first step toward taking the kinds of photos I'd like to take.

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Some of them are just pretty-girl shots in an urban environment, like the headshot at the top, with its bricks-and-mortar background, or the beach-style backlighting above, with a shiny sea of afternoon traffic filling in for the glittering water.

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Most glamour photography is either lit evenly so you can see the model, or lit only from one side, so parts of the model are hidden in her own shadow. In street photography, as in the shot above, the shadows are cast by the environment.

Finally, here's one of my favorites, complete with urban texture and odd shadows:

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If you'd like to see more, visit the photo gallery, and click the "Slideshow" button in the upper right to see a slideshow of all 13 images in high-resolution.

I just took a quick look at the photos from Tuesday's model shoot. As with the other three model shoots I've done, my initial impression doesn't make me happy. It turns out that I took exactly 200 photos, and most of them aren't very good.

The first time that happened, it was horrifying: All that time and effort and I got nothing. All those shots I had high hopes for turned out to be disasters. (This time, at least, I'm not letting the model down because she got paid. I don't owe her anything for her portfolio.)

When I relax a bit and look at the photos with with fewer preconceptions, I start to notice that some of them are actually pretty decent. And as I get better with Photoshop, I begin to spot images that can be fixed with some image adjustments, or that will look better if subject to radical manipulation.

I'm starting to realize that this is part of the learning process. First I have to take the pictures and see what works. Next time around, I'll know what works and I can spend more time refining those concepts.

Of course, picking out images after the fact that can be made to look good in Photoshop isn't really skilled photography. The real goal here is to be able to envision the completed image, then plan the shoot, take the pictures, and post-process the images in photoshop to get the same image I had in my head.

[Update: I snipped out a few paragraphs here because they'll work better in my next post.]

I figured I'd post a couple of images this time.

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That's a composition similar to real street photography. I could easily have taken it of a random woman in the street instead of a hired model. In an ideal shot, there'd be something a lot more interesting than a city bus, maybe people arguing or a street vendor or just an odd composition of passers-by.

In this case, I did get what I wanted before going into Photoshop. The base image has lots of high-contrasts and the right composition. I then used Photoshop to deepen the contrast, darken the dark areas a bit more, and saturate the colors a bit. Then I applied a grain filter to make the image look like I used high-speed film.

(The only real surprise in this shot was how the "Senior Citizens" sign stood out. It was even more glaring than you see here, but I knocked it down in postprocessing. I think it must have a retroreflective coating that bounced my flash back real strong.)

The next photo is probably the most model-shot-like photo I took all day. My direction to Jennifer was "Do some of that model stuff."

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Note the harsh and sometimes ugly shadows. That was intentional because I'm not going for glamour here, but I have to admit it's not quite what I want either.

I'll have to see what else I can find.

It's been a while since I did any photoblogging---just posting a photo for no reason other than to look at a photo. I was up in Milwaukee a couple of weeks ago, so here's a photo I took of the Midwest Airlines Center.

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As my way of apologizing to poor Ken Lammers, who visited here to see the pretty girls and found my plunger story instead, here are a couple more shots from last month's model shoot. (I am way behind in processing these photos.)

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Here are a couple of photos of some of the models from last week's shoot just, you know, takin' a load off and actin' casual...

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(The shot of Jessica is just for you, Ken.)

I spent most of last week doing stuff for my paying job, and I thought it might be interesting to blog about that. I was planning a series of posts on the wonders of the X12 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) guideline for the Benefit Enrollment and Maintenance (834) transaction required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) act of 1996. The main standard document is 228 pages, but I figure I could boil it down into a series of five posts of about 2000 words each.

At the last minute, however, I realized you all might be more interested in seeing a few photos from last Sunday's model shoot instead.

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Here are a few of the pictures of Theresa from the model shoot I did a couple of weeks ago.

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I did a model shoot a couple of weeks ago with three other photographers and two models. The other photographers were all more experienced than I was, so I learned a lot by watching what they did.

Here are a few of the photos I took of Nicole:

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I took a couple of pictures in and around the hotel where we stayed:

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Larger ImageU.S. Cellular Arena

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Somehow, I don't think the Grand Avenue Mall is the most fun place in Milwaukee for teens to hang out. I think it was this huge list of Stuff You Can't Do that clued me in:

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Here's a close-up of the rules:

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Apparently, I am in violation of Rule 17:

These activities are PROHIBITED on The Shops of Grand Avenue property:

...

17.  Taking unauthorized photographs of The Shops of Grand Avenue, storefronts or other areas and events.

What can I say? I'm a rebel.

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Blogging was a bit slow last week because my wife was on vacation and we were out doing stuff together. For a couple of years running, we've gone to the Bead&Button Show in Milwaukee. The deal is, she has fun at the convention, while I try to get some interesting pictures. Last year, I posted pictures of some of the sights along the way.

This year, I have a few shots from the convention, starting with this coiled-copper tarantula from Pattern Perfect.

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I don't know much about beads, but I liked the bright cheerful look of these beads from Karen Moyer Glass.

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I know that when the beads are complicated and artistic, like those above, the artists are concerned about people poaching their designs, so I ask permission before taking any pictures.

However, when the booth has hundreds of thousands of beads on display, like the Jane's Fiber and Beads display at the top or like India Gems below, I don't usually bother to get permission, because where's the intellectual property in a big pile of beads, right?

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Or so you'd think. Yet when I took the picture below, the booth operator came up to me and told me he doesn't allow pictures of his booth. I chuckled, because I thought he was kidding—a few hundred vials of seed beads aren't exactly a trade secret—but he told me he was serious.

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I just walked away from him, because there was no point in arguing, but I was on pretty firm legal ground. It may be his booth, but whether I can take pictures of it is not up to him, it's up to the show organizers. In this particular case, the show doesn't have a photo policy, so once I bought a ticket, I could take pictures of whatever I wanted.

Even though I don't need permission, I'll usually ask anyway if I think the booth operator might be worried about theft of intellectual property, but it never occurred to me to ask permission to photograph these rows of seed beads. I mean, they're just millions of tiny little colored beads. What secret could he have thought I'd be stealing by photographing them?

Sometimes I feel the urge to photograph building up, and I have have to take a picture of something, anything, just to release the tension. This was one of them:

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I didn't say it was going to be a good picture, but there's something about it...

This photo has caught my eye half a dozen times, but I keep skipping it because I can't figure out why. It probably has something to do with the crisp white light contrasting with the shadows and the night. Let me know if it makes sense to any of you.

I'm still clearing out my photos from 2005. Speaking of clearance...

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This next photo interests me because of the pattern of shadows on the ground.

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Actually, that photo doesn't really work for me, but I'm not sure why. I like the idea of shadows playing on the ground like that, but I don't know why, and I don't know why this picture is unsatisfying. I have the feeling that if I figure out what I like about shadows like that, I'll know how to make shadowy pictures that I really enjoy.

(By the way, the exposure for this was only 1/200 of a second, so the ball he's throwing should be visible in flight as a short blur, but I don't see it. The girl receiving the pitch looks relaxed, so I don't think she's caught it yet.)

Anyway, here's another shadowy picture. I've really screwed with the luminence curve to increase the contrast and deepen the shadows. That makes it more interesting to me, but it doesn't quite work for me either.

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This last one is a combination of colors and shadows, and despite the banal location, there's something about it that holds my attention.

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Here's the background image for my MySpace page:

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A friend and I spent about an hour and a half driving around the neighborhood last night, grabbing pictures of some of the fireworks going off. We stayed away from the professional shows and just found groups setting stuff off in the parks or right outside their houses.

Here's one at Portage Park:

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Here's another from Portage Park, a little low this time:

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Over at Chopin Park, on the other hand, some of the action was too high:

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This one turned out a little better:

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Here's a close-up of the launchpad action:

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These people were just setting off stuff outside their home:

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Just down the street another group was setting off some starburts one at a time. They shot up so far that I couldn't keep the launchpad in the scene:

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I continue to sort through my old photographs.

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We got hit with a hailstorm late this afternoon. I was too slow to get a picture while it was falling, but this is what the parking lot looked like minutes later.

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No damage to the car, as far as I can tell, but the alarm went off.

Update: And another:

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Here are a few more photos from my Z3 backlog.

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I'm still working through my backlog of Z3 photos. Try clicking to look at the larger images. Instead of linking to the raw JPG file, I've got an HTML page that provides a black background for better viewing.

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One of my neighbors has this in their front yard. I have no idea what this means. I suspect it's just some Catholic thing that I'm unfamiliar with, but for all I know they've converted the building into a small church.

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I was walking down Milwaukee Avenue near my house when I saw this big plume of smoke rising from something a few blocks away. If I'd been in my car I would have driven over to take pictures, but it would have been out by the time I got there on foot—I was about 100 yards from a firehouse when I took this picture, and the truck and engine had already left.

Life in the big city: I never even bothered trying to find out what had burned.

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Nothing artsy-fartsy here, just a picture of a dog. Cookie belongs to some friends of mine.

I was at party at their house, annoying people by taking lots of pictures, when I snapped that one of Cookie. These next two photos are from the same set. Nothing special, but I liked the way all the light and colors were turning out. Here are a couple more:

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That last one is from a visit to the Morton Arboretum a few miles west of Chicago. Like the two before it, I just like the way the light and color worked out.

This is another view from the rotating restaurant at the top of the Hyatt hotel in Milwaukee:

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Just a few photographs around the neighborhood.

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This is just a building at the Six Corners shopping district a few miles from my house.

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I just grabbed this shot for the heck of it as I was waiting to make a turn. I didn't care for the result at all. However, my wife got me a book for Christmas published by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany their Lee Friedlander exhibit. His signature photo style included a lot of street-level city shots with many overlapping components. After spending hours looking at his photos and learning to appreciate his compositional style, I think I may have a hint of something here...a small hint...

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I just liked the way this couple looked. (Although, looking at it now, she looks like she could be his daughter.)

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I took a picture of the woman with the stroller. The guys in the background are a bonus I didn't see until later.

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Nothing special here. It's just a snapshot. But I remember it because about two seconds later the guy smiled at me and gave me the finger.

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Found this rack of non-Windows computer magazines at a local magazine shop.

While I'm trying to learn how to use my new Nikon D200, I'm going to publish a lot of my photos from earlier this year. It's sort of a clearance sale to empty my inventory.

Here are some nice ones from the Naperville Riverwalk.

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Follow this link for about two dozen more Naperville Riverwalk photos (some of which I've posted before).

Just a quick grab shot today.

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As we head into the cold winter here in Chicago, I thought I'd post a few shots of the Naperville Riverwalk from last Spring.

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I'm going to miss all this for a while.

When the wife and I were at the Bead and Button Show, I got a few pictures of Milwaukee from inside the revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt.

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These are from the June 2005 Bead and Button Show in Milwaukee. If you know the maker of the beads in the last picture, let me know.

So there I was, standing out on the sidewalk in front of somebody's house at midnight, holding an umbrella over my camera, which was mounted on a tripod and aimed out over the rooftops toward where some people I don't know were shooting off fireworks. I'd had to drive around to find a place with fireworks and enough trees to block the streetlights without blocking my view of the fireworks. Then I had to wait for the fireworks to go up. Meanwhile, people all around were launching fireworks, even though it wasn't the 4th yet, and even though it was raining slightly (thus the umbrella to protect the camera lens and electronics), but my camera wasn't aimed at them.

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I did get a couple of nice shots, though, which proved I'd had the right plan for taking the pictures. I'll try to get more of them tonight.

Update: Severe thunderstorms predicted for the Chicago area, so maybe there won't be any more fireworks photos.

Mother and Child

These are a couple of the street photographs I've taken lately.

Skater

I've been taking pictures for about 3 months now, and much to my surprise I've developed an interest of sorts in portrait photography. There's something I like about the careful effort to take very good photographs of people. I appreciate the detailed care that goes into the lighting and the posing.

I don't have the equipment for doing real portraits. My camera is basically a point-and-shoot camera with a strong zoom lens. That might be good enough with the right lighting, but I don't have studio lighting gear, and I can't justify the purchase. Good portraits require shadows, and without studio lighting I have to find them in the real world. But real-world shadows come with real-world darkness, and my camera doesn't handle dim lighting very well.

Without the camera and lighting, there's not much point in asking people to pose. What I end up doing is taking pictures of people at parties or on the street and hoping they come out well. To put it another way, I'm trying to take extra-nice snapshots.

Here's one of my favorites. This is my friend Monica, caught in a thoughtful moment:

Thoughtful Monica

There's something about this photo that works for me. The thoughtful look on her face, the disdain for the camera, the way the fingers of her hand are curled. Probably the most artsy-feminine picture I've take so far.

Monica doesn't like that one. She thinks it doesn't look like her. I think it does, and I've probably seen the side of her face more than she has. But she's right in a sense. The photo is peaceful and quiet, and Monica is a little more rock-and-roll than that.

She prefers this one:

Monica in a More Intense Moment

For some reason, it's easy to get good photographs of Monica. She photographs well. That's an important thing for a beginning photographer like me. I need to find good subjects, because I'm not good enough to take good pictures of difficult subjects.

That makes this a lot like street photography, which is all about finding interesting people. With that in mind, here's a picture of Isaac, who I found selling M&Ms on the street corner near my house.

Isaac

If you have the bandwidth, click for the big picture and take a close look at his face. Even I can't take a bad picture of a guy with a face like that.

Lately this blog seems to be all about the photography. I can live with that.

Here's a picture of some closeup damage of a burned-out house I passed near Elgin.

Burnout With Mermaid

I was trying for irony, but I don't think it quite works. I'm not sure why.

Here's a nice shot of the street in front of my house:

Street With Trees

Last week I drove into Indiana to visit a couple of old friends from my days at the IIT Research Institute. I decided it would make a suitable topic for this week's photoblogging.

The trip started—as all trips beginning in Chicago must—with mind-numbing traffic. I had to drive from my house on the northwest side of Chicago straight through the city to the Illinois-Indiana border. This leg of the trip is only about 25 miles, but it took almost two hours, and looked like this the whole way:

Mind-Numbing Chicago Traffic

By the time I got out of the Chicago traffic mess, I needed to stop for gas. I always get a kick out of the name of this place:

Gas-A-Roo

The rest of the trip went much faster, even though it was a greater distance. In no time at all, I had reached George's house in Beverly Shores, Indiana. The South Shore rail line passes through town, so I know right where I am:

Beverly Shores Platform

George doesn't photograph very well. He's a warm, friendly, and energetic guy, but that that doesn't show up in my pictures at all. This picture isn't too bad:

George

Rich was already there. Rich doesn't photograph very well either. (Notice how I make my lack of photographic skills seem like it's their fault.) I was experimenting with the black-and-white mode of the camera, and I got the only good picture of Rich all evening:

Rich

We ate dinner at a place called Redamak's. It's a local pub/burger joint/family restaurant. (For all I know, Redamak's is 250-location chain and this is just the only one I've seen.) The slogan on their sign is "Legendary Food—Good Times—Come Get Some." They are distinguished by their fast food service. And by their use of what I'm pretty sure is Cheez Whiz on their cheeseburgers.

That picture of Rich is probably also the best picture of Redamak's I have. All the rest are blurry or underexposed. Redamek's is normally a roudy place, but it was so quiet that evening that I was uncomfortable using the big flash on my camera.

Actually, I did get another good picture at Redamak's:

Beer at Redamak's

After dinner, we drove down the road to an ice cream stand called Oink's. I didn't manage to get any pictures of Oink's worth posting, but I got a nice long exposure of the mean streets of New Buffalo:

Mean Streets of New Buffalo

My wife didn't come with me, so we decided to do what any three guys out on the town would do. We tried out the time exposure feature of my camera.

Here's a photo taken in the middle of the night on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, looking west:

Southern Shore of Lake Michigan

The distant lights are probably the harbor facilities of Gary, Indiana. The tall buildings in downtown Chicago are sometimes visible from here, but there was too much fog on the lake this evening.

We also took a group portrait. The flash fired to illuminate the three of us standing there, then the shutter stayed open to expose the background. It's a neat trick.

Technogeek Night Portrait

The final night picture is of a small lagoon near George's house. I think the structure in the middle of it is a monument to the attempt by Steponas Darius and Stasys Girenas to beat Lindberg’s non-stop distance record, which ended when their plane, the Lituanica, crashed at Soldin, Germany in 1933.

Lagoon and Monument

Nearly all the light for these scenes comes from distant incandescent sources, either directly or scattered off the trees, water, and fog. In this photo, I remembered to set the white balance for the low color temperature. Too bad I didn't think of that for the others, huh?

Anyway, after all this I started the 65-mile ride back home. Well, not quite. I had lost the diffuser for my flash unit, and I was pretty sure it happened in the outdoor patio at Oink's. I drove back to Oink's—15 miles in the wrong direction—and sure enough, there it was. The place had closed right as we were leaving, so nobody had stepped on it or anything.

Now I started the drive home. It was 80 miles of fast, relaxing driving. Except, well, if there's congestion, you must be in Chicago:

Skyway Toll Platform

Other than that, it was a peaceful trip back.

I think I've had enough template tweaking for a while, so how about some content? My wife gave me a digital camera for Christmas, so I've decided to try to learn photography. I'm just taking pictures of things, trying to teach myself how the camera works, and something about composition. Now that I've upgraded my server, I can do some photoblogging. It's fun, and it's less work than writing stuff. Onward...

First, a sample of the weather in the windy city:

A Stormy Day in the Windy City

Now here's a picture inside the Commons building at the IIT campus:

IIT Commons

They say that a good picture tells a story. I'm not quite sure what that means, but I think I'm starting to understand just a little. This next picture doesn't actually tell a story, but it does seem to at least convey the idea of a student studying:

Studying

Gumballs

I'm starting to get interested in photography. This Christmas my wife gave me a new digital camera that has all the features I need to practice my picture taking without being able to blame the camera for the bad ones.

Yesterday, I was driving around and got caught at an intersection that was blocked by a funeral procession. That always peeves me, but it wasn't until it had passed by that it occurred to me that I could have hopped out of the car, photographed the procession, and then photoblogged a peeve about it. I resolved to keep my camera ready.

An hour ago, I was waiting in my car at the Jewel grocery store for my wife to come out. I was debating with myself whether or not to break out the camera, just in case I saw something worth photographing. I was still thinking about it when a dwarf walked by pushing a grocery cart.

Grrrr.

[Note: An earlier version of this story had used the m-word, which I replaced on finding out it was considered derogatory by many little people.]