No Boundaries

Pepper: The Official Photography Project Dog

It has been a miserable spring here in the mountains of Utah. Very similar to the Cubs season this year, the weather has reached 500 (the statistical midpoint between a good year and a bad one) numerous times only to collapse into an abhorrent free-fall requiring a good sense of humor.

This unfortunate spring has been made all the worse by the fact that my children were attending different high schools and their vacations did not coincide. So the photography project should evolve into an almost year-long thing in this instance. Hopefully anyway.  This year, in particular, I’m looking forward to my kids’ release from academia more so than are my kids.

Right now I’m fleshing out my new site with photography and illustration galleries that have been long promised but not delivered. Something more important invariably pops up. I’m giving it a good go now so I should be posting quite a bit of the imagery that has been laying about my desktop for a while.

These should include some studio food and spirits and portrait work (separate projects), Vancouver photography from last November, Saline Environments project work as it crops up, and some more resort HDRI.  That’s all I can think of at the moment, but there are probably more bunches of unprocessed photos in hiding here and there on the occasional hard-drive.

I’ll also be posting the periodic babble regarding the state of the digital world, films and so forth. So I should be hitting the blog a bit more than I have lately over the next month or so.

I’m switching over to a Cannon 7D as my main camera and am tempted to include a bit of video here and there as well.

The Saline Environments Project, thus far, has brought Kate and I out on four short trips. One to Stansbury Island and the Saltair area on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, two to Antelope Island (an island on the southeast side of the lake populated with, ironically, bison) and a very early Spring trip across the Utah West Desert on Route 80 to the Bonneville Salt Flats ( in the vicinity of Wendover Nevada), which were, at the time, covered with water. It is a pleasure doing a project that has so many pieces so close to home.

I vividly remember my first trip to Death Valley National Park about five or six years ago. It was intended as a three-day excursion from a longer trip in Las Vegas. We drove well into the night, camped and, on waking, took a short drive in the middle, lowest elevation parts of the park, only to realize that we had gone so far and had ended up in what is, essentially, the Great Salt Lake (hotter, drier version). We do intend to make it back there as part of this project, but largely as a matter of completeness. It is, after all, the capital of the terrestrial-brine world.

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The Sears Tower: Exemplar of American Ambition

Chicago has never looked better. I’m referring to the city and not my photography. I spent another couple weeks in the city; two days of which were given to wandering around the loop (the city’s lofty core) with a couple of cameras.  I had intended to spend five days photographing but found myself returning to Utah on short notice.  So the diversity of images isn’t as great as I would like. Everything, almost, is wide-angle HDRI of architecture.

I keep finding myself back there. So after another couple of winters I should have a good set of photographs.  The very urban provides a nice balance to the bulk of my nature-based work.

I’m fond of HDRI for a place like Chicago.  The world is crawling with images of the buildings of Chicago and HDRI offers a lot of artistic potential to make things weird when you want to go that way.  Also, the dynamic nature of a big metropolis, where people are of less significance relative to their environment, fits HDRI very well.  Walking people and moving cars on a city street become ghosted and part of the image in a way that suits the ephemeral reality well.

The images were all processed initially with photomatrix and then with camera raw and standard photoshop techniques.  The new photomatrix exposure fusion technique was used extensively (and I really like it).  Several images are blended composite panoramas.

Also I love it when it’s cold.  I think it is the low level of the sun in the sky and clarity of the air, in addition to the hard nature of the subject matter. Chicago photographs best when below freezing.

I’m not sure where the source of Chicago’s current good-looks lies.  The city may simply be all decked out for the Olympics that wasn’t.  Or it could be an artifact of the economy that shouldn’t have been.  Now, the general tone of the people I met, the conversations I overheard, and the chatter over the airwaves was decidedly down.  More so than when I was there this past summer or last winter.

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Some of Chicago's unrivaled architecture

For a week in early February, I found myself back in the Chicago of my youth. I had moved there when I was seven and left when seventeen.  For some reason, I’ve spent very little time there over the past thirty years and have never photographed the city before. I had my equipment with me, so I hit the streets for a total of a couple days in half-day stints spread throughout the week.  These included periods when the temperature was around one, and others with the mercury hovering just beneath sixty.  Go figure.

I left with a bunch of images that I think are fairly good and a few that qualify as splendid. Techniques used include HDRI with both Photomatrix and Photoshop post-processing, sequences of jpgs for Photoshop panorama blending, and Cannon camera RAW with Adobe Camera RAW and Photoshop post-processing. The areas shot include: Michigan Avenue, the Loop, the island across from Soldier Field, the Near North Side, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Belmont Harbor, Wicker Park, Evanston, Old Town and Wrigleyville.

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