I don’t know, but it feels like this might have been created, or at least posted, by the same folks who did the illustration of Betty Boop on the laundromat wall that I posted some time ago. This was just off Chicago’s commercial Magnificent Mile strip, on a wall of a grimy area on E. Grand Ave., and was one of two things that made that area just a little better, the other being an upscale donut shop.
The image seems — this is a best guess but I’m comfortable with it – to be a portrait of a local musician and producer. The city of Chicago painted over it a couple of months later, just slapped a muddy brown rectangle of dark brown over it, because Chicago hates too many nice things.
May 24, 2016. Google Nexus 6P cell phone, focal length 4.67 (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/2, 1/220, ISO 60.
A counterpart to my experience shooting the thistles against the cardinal flowers that I posted not long ago, this was one of the first photos I took with the macro lens, designed for closeups. This stalk of grass in the nature preserve had gone to seed and I wondered whether I could take a good picture of it, isolating the green stalk against the green background, and using depth of field to isolate just a few moments of sharpness. It turned out that I could. I’ve always been really happy with this photo.
August 2, 2009. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/4, 1/640, ISO 400.
If you’ve been reading for a while, you may remember the Dorkasaur post, in which I caught a hawk kicking through scrub as if it had lost its keys. In that post, I noted that, as long as the raptor is above us — flying or perched — there is no doubt it is an apex predator.
Case in point — this is the same hawk, well before the moment it landed in the brush. It saw something, and hawks obviously can’t think the way people can, but it knew something was there and it was calculating how hard it would be to catch it and how worthwhile that effort would end up being.
That it studied very specific spots in this way was what made the Dorkasaur photo stand out to me. Clearly it heard and saw a lot going on around it, and yet it just jumped to the ground and started kicking around.
For my last few years of work, I’d turned my cubicles into galleries of my photography. I’m happy to say that this was always prominently placed and got a fair amount of attention from passersby.
April 9, 2022. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400mm, f/9.5, 1/250, ISO 64.
As I was reviewing photos, I came across this and I stopped. The same way I’ve mentioned sometimes I’m walking down the street and I see a moment and have to capture it — that happened here just looking at it, and it’s because of the textures; do whatever you can, whatever you must, to see this photo as large as you can see it.
The gorgeous roughness of the leaves anchored in the corners, the amazing folds and velvet of the monarch’s wings, and the pink and cream ball of milkweed flowers in between, with the soft blur of the lush summer green background, make this a photo I really love.
July 9, 2022. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400mm, f/6.3, 1/2,000, ISO 800.
When I took this photo, I’d just set aside my old point-and-shoot and moved on to my very first DSLR, very much a beginner model; this was a couple of months in, and I was still learning about exposure. And my primary lens was the beginner-level model that came with the camera. But I started to take pictures like this, and felt like I was starting to get good enough to think this was a hobby I’d be able to explore. I love cardinal flowers, and the soft red blur in the background complements the thistles really nicely. Both the visuals and the nudge it gave me to continue with the hobby are pretty good reasons for me to love this photo.
August 22, 2009. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), Nikon DX 18–105mm lens at 105mm (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/5.6, 1/800, ISO 400.
In mid-March in Chicago, there’s still plenty of ice. I loved how the sun caught the texture on the ice, especially around the reeds. It’s thin ice; there’s all water under that skin. But I do like a good texture, and the bubbles and the waves caught frozen create plenty of texture.
March 16, 2019. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 270mm (35mm equivalent: 405mm), f/6, 1/4,000, ISO 280.
I like milkweed bugs a lot. They’re not much bigger than a grain of rice and tend to be found in swarms, drinking up the milky sap that gives the milkweed plant (and the bugs) the name. Plus, although there isn’t a lot of room for variety on their tiny backs, they’re decorated with patterns that could be little bug Rorschach tests. Also, considering how itty-bitty they are, they seem to have a smidgen of curiosity. This one marched to the end of a leaf to stare me down, and I’m happy to say that this photo is completely unedited.
And yeah, I got the picture, and I was really happy with the picture, so I moved on. Then I noticed that it was still perched at the end of the leaf, so I took another photo, but it doesn’t matter: It won.
July 25, 2010. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/5, 1/500, ISO 640.
The Civic Opera Building in Chicago, designed by a whole lot of architects, is a mostly beautiful building (if you know, you know) dating back to 1929. Like any high-rise building in the Loop, most of the space is devoted to offices, but the Civic Opera House is home to the Lyric Opera of Chicago. The art deco interior is fabulous, worth going there to see it, and if you’re at the right landing to get a photo of the amazing chandeliers, you may end up with something like this, because they are that beautiful and wry. Yes, I said “wry.”
June 4, 2023. Samsung S24+ cell phone, 5.9mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 28mm), f/2, 1/60, ISO 160.
I have said this here only once before: Oh my frickin’ god do I love this photo. I guess that should technically be “these photos,” but I love them because they are, when you do that Magic Eye thing crossing your eyes just a little bit, 3D.
The layers of depth are remarkable. Those little puffs are right up front; that nice big fluffy cloud has its own sense of depth. The ground below recedes to the horizon perfectly. A few other clouds float here and there between us and those contrails in the distance. (The contrails and the cirrus clouds are too far away to show up in 3D.)
This is a pretty comfortable size for you to try it even on a laptop, and a phone works really well too. Phone screens are glossy, and you should try to avoid reflections. If it feels too big for you to nail it, you can push the screen away or hold it a little farther out. Use that big cloud in the middle as your eyes’ focal point and the rest will fall into place.
I’ve long been interested in 3D photography; every time I take my DSLR out, the first two photos I take are handheld 3D shots, moving the camera a few inches to the right for the second shot. They’re partly test shots to make sure I haven’t forgotten to adjust any settings, but they’re also a chance to indulge my love for 3D photography. Once I step into the nature preserve, I’m reacting to what’s going on around me, and chances are pretty good that whatever bit of nature I’m photographing, it won’t give me the time to take two photographs to get the effect properly. Noticing, as I was saving a bunch of recent photos into my gallery app, that my timing on these gave me some real possibilities — that got me excited, and I’ll confess that when I saw the small clouds in this pair of photos leap out at me and the others recede, I shouted “Oh!”
June 29, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 13.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 70mm), f/2.6, 1/540, ISO 50.
Here’s another scene that stopped me in my tracks. For some years, the large plaza across the street from the office building I worked in had a series of advertising statues. They were dumb and garish and tacky.
That plaza is adjacent to Chicago’s Riverwalk, where some construction was taking place. A lot of cranes have counterweights that are just big, heavy squares, but whoever designed the cranes being used at the construction site… maybe they really were a videogame fan, maybe they were going for a unique look, maybe they were just eccentric.
Anyway, there’s a guy with a sweater listening to Lincoln as he gestures with his hat toward the alien descending from the heavens; there is no other story this photo could tell, and the title explains why I love this photo.
May 19, 2017. Samsung Galaxy S8+ cell phone, focal length 4.25mm (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/230, ISO 50.
This facade was around the corner from the neighborhood bar I’d go to when I was too lazy to cook. Being lazy paid off this night. I didn’t give much thought to the facade as I walked past it and around the corner to the bar. But leaving the bar — that’s when I saw this. This is cool. At 10 p.m. in this light, it was the kind of view we rarely get to see of a building. This was the entire preservation effort; there’s now a three-story modern building behind it, mostly hidden, as if everyone knew this original facade was really what everyone wanted to see anyway. This was one of those moments I felt like I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
April 4, 2018. Samsung Galaxy S8+ cell phone, focal length 4.25mm (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/10, ISO 1,600.
Have I mentioned how much I love to see, and photograph, herons when they look a little silly or awkward or goofy? Here’s one just about to take off. Unfortunately, it’s going in the other direction from me, but that might be what makes this photo work. Look at that ice: As scrawny as those feet are, they still melted it, and he realized that just in time to realize he had to GTFO. One foot’s dangling there, the other’s desperately trying to find enough purchase to get traction, the beak is just agape enough to suggest the word he might be squawking.
December 26, 2019. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/11, 1/500, ISO 1,600.
What a hackneyed title for a cool photo like this. Some friends and I are wandering around on a Saturday afternoon, checking out little shops and boutiques, and I don’t even remember what kind of stuff no one really needed was for sale here; I just remember looking down through the stairway and seeing what wasn’t readily accessible when we were down there, a nook with all of these plants. I thought it might be their break room. The grate of the stairway gave it a whole lot of contrast and texture, and I really love this photo.
October 5, 2019. Samsung S10+ cell phone, 4.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.5, 1/40, ISO 800.
After I moved from my point-and-shoot camera to my first DSLR, and got a really good lens for it, this was the first photo I ever flat-out loved. I have loved willow trees since childhood, when I’d read under one in its shade on warm Summer days. And here’s one at the nature preserve, on the edge of its pond, keeping its bright green color as the world around it falls into the muddy brown that Chicagoans think of as Fall. The sun is low enough already to give us that great light, and this is another example of the macro lens, designed for closeup photography, just working with the scene to give us some gorgeous color and light and shade. I take credit for the composition and the camera settings it took to capture this, and not much more.
October 30, 2010. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/4.5, 1/500, ISO 640.
