This is, technically, likely to be the worst photo you’ll see here. But it’s also cool because it was the International Space Station flying over my old apartment one evening.

There is not a lot of reliable information about getting a photograph of the International Space Station, especially using a handheld camera. What I know is that it’s 280 miles away when it’s directly overhead, but farther at this angle, and traveling at over 17,000 miles per hour, and I managed to take a couple of shots this good-ish out of 25 times the shutter clicked, and you can make out a little bit of the solar panels’ color and angle and the blob in the middle that is everything else you can take a picture of with a DSLR and a biggish lens under those conditions.

June 1, 2021. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/6.3, 1/1,500, ISO 1,600.

Studying this, I think there is one edge of one petal that is in true focus, and that is exactly what I was trying to do with this shot of a butterfly milkweed plant, and that is why I love this picture.

July 12, 2015. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/5.6, 1/2,000, ISO 200.

Digital cameras have lots of software in them to interpret the light that’s hitting their sensors. Based on the settings we choose, the camera guesses at what we want and saves it into a JPG file. But often, it doesn’t match what we see when we take the photo. While this site’s introductory post explains that I only edit photos to try to bring the photo closer to what I saw as I pressed the shutter button, I brightened this one in software quite a bit because I love that, in the frog’s pupil, you can see the reflection of the nature park and, right in its middle, the photographer.

May 22, 2016. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Nikon 70–300mm lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/11, 1/250, ISO 800.

In 2015, I bought a thermal camera. It’s low-resolution, but along with its thermal sensor, it has a separate lens to try to fill in the detail the thermal sensor misses. I really like seeing the world in another spectrum and street photography has turned out to be a pretty fun use for this.

December 8, 2015. Flir thermal camera with Google Nexus 6P cell phone. Frame capture from video.

There’s nothing like having the biggest and ugliest goddamn tadpole in Chicago and perhaps the universe swim up to you and sneer at you for a really long, uncomfortable moment.

February 22, 2020. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/11, 1/180, ISO 800.

I love taking pictures of empty stages. Maybe something’s about to happen; maybe something just happened. This shot is before a gig at the now-closed Townshend in Austin. Any time I post a photo of an empty stage, the identity of the band won’t matter. The point is that there is a place set aside to share a spontaneous creativity for an hour or two and then it will all vanish, and no two are ever the same.

May 10, 2019. Samsung 10+ cell phone, 1.8mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 13mm), f/2.2, 1/9, ISO 2,500.

For this photo, I’m in Austin, on the same hotel room balcony from which I took the photo of three white cars under a streetlight (but during another trip), but it’s early afternoon and this church roof is really showing off in the sun. All the lines, all the shadows, all the shapes, all the angles. I love this photo and that’s why.

January 31, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 13.3mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 140mm), f/2.75, 1/625, ISO 50.

I love this photo because it’s mid-March and all the plants and shrubs and trees have Spring on their mind but Chicago will always teach them a lesson.

If you can find a way to zoom into that little ball of snow, you can see all the grains and flakes. Maybe someday I’ll come back to this with a crop that shows that off.

March 15, 2025. OnePlus 12 cell phone, 6.06mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 47mm), f/1.6, 1/280, ISO 50.

I guess I could call this “Why I Love This Cliché.” The most interesting thing about a photo stroll after an ice storm is how many times you come close to certain death by slipping and falling. But it’s a good urban shot of wires and an alley tree coated with ice.

December 11, 2017. Samsung S8+ cell phone, 4.25mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 26mm), f/1.7, 1/10, ISO 250.

You’ve already seen heron pictures and you’ll see more — oh, you’ll see more, even from this particular session. I love when herons look right in the camera’s direction (or very close, like here) because, honestly, they end up looking like a Gary Larson character. Googly eyes, a goofy little beak, a vacant expression.

This winter day, it was out for a stroll on the ice, and something to my left caught its attention. These birds look graceful in flight, but they sure look silly just standing there staring at something.

December 26, 2019. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm lens at 400mm (35mm equivalent: 600mm), f/6.7, 1/350, ISO 1,600.

For a few years, a local group and site called Forgotten Chicago sponsored some cruises down South Side rivers that were kind of more canals than rivers. These were a real change of pace for me, even less than a decade after I’d started photographing, moving from mostly nature to heavy industry, both active and dead.

This is the first of many photos I’ve culled from those trips. We went down the Calumet River for a few miles; one of the sights we passed was this very exposed mountain of blue salt that Chicago keeps handy for salting roads. It was a few stories tall and pretty impressive. I zoomed in and out as we passed; this was my favorite shot. But we’ll see this site again, along with others from those trips.

August 29, 2010. Nikon D90 (DX sensor), 70–300mm Nikon zoom lens at 300mm (35mm equivalent: 450mm), f/8, 1/2,500, ISO 640.

I really like thistle. Even before the petals unfurl, it’s picturesque. Sometimes they grow in nice compositions. I’m a little surprised I shot a macro shot at 1/15 second exposure, I have to say. I got lucky.

June 21, 2014. Nikon D7100 (DX sensor), 105mm Nikon macro lens (35mm equivalent: 155mm), f/22, 1/15, ISO 200.

A nice macro film shot of those stamens coming out of those anthers, with others just starting to emerge. For shots like this, I focus the lens manually and lean back and forth a bit until I think I’ve actually got the subject in focus. With a DSLR, that’s pretty easy; just take a dozen shots, show the keeper, and no one has to know how many failed shots there were. Every one of those 36 exposures counts on a roll of film, though, so I’m always glad when I get the results back from the lab and feel like “Yeah, that was what I wanted.”

August 11, 2024. Nikon F5, Fujifilm Color 200, 105mm Nikon macro lens, ISO 200.

This photo from my window seat on takeoff captured Austin’s downtown pretty nicely. The partly cloudy day shows off the sky well, the view includes the East Side far off into the Hill Country, Lady Bird Lake and the rest of the Colorado River look pretty good, and of course there are a lot of nice big buildings smack in the middle. A nice shot of one of my favorite cities.

February 4, 2024. Samsung S20+ cell phone, 5.9mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 28mm), f/2, 1/300, ISO 25.

With a good long lens and a perfect solar filter — I don’t mean that in the sense of “gosh, what a great solar filter”; I mean it in the sense of “don’t risk going blind if you don’t trust that that solar filter isn’t perfect” — you can get some pretty good views of our favorite star. The sun is considered to be at its most active now, so there’s always something to see. This WordPress site doesn’t offer an easy way to zoom in, but if you can find a way, you’ll see some fun grain and detail on the surface.

March 8, 2025. Nikon Coolpix P1000 (1/2.3-inch sensor), focal length 287mm (35mm equivalent: 1,600mm), f/8, 1/640, ISO 100.