I always love going down to the beaches in Chicago in the winter, especially at night. There is no one around, it’s very quiet except for the sound of the lake swelling against the break waters and distant fog horns. When staring out across the dark water and sky to the east, it almost seems like it’s a bigger body of water than it is, like an ocean. It’s so dark out there it’s almost like staring into a vacuum, your eyes struggle to see anything at all. And then you realize, hey, that’s Michigan. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s was a brutally cold evening in Central Illinois as I was driving north on IL Route 78, just about to cross under the BNSF Railway at Laura, IL. Quick glances in both directions across the table-top flat middle Illinois terrain revealed a westbound train approaching, probably two miles away. Out here you can see forever. Since my car was warmed up, and I didn’t count on much waiting, I took the first left I could, and began to run parallel to the tracks as the sun rapidly set in front of me. The road was packed with drifted snow, and I found a place to park where I wouldn’t manage to get stuck. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes you really plan out the lighting in a photo, getting your lights set up just so, adjusting and adjusting, and still everything fails (haha). And sometimes, you don’t set up any lights, spend no time at all adjusting anything, and everything just works. Such it was on Labor Day evening, as I was setting up at Nelson, IL, on the Union Pacific’s busy mainline. Read the rest of this entry »
After picking up yet another new strobe for my gear bag last night, I ventured out onto the plains west of Chicago in hopes of putting that new flash to use. I really did, in fact, I completely drained the batteries. As I was heading into Rochelle, IL, clouds had began gathering on the horizon and lightning was becoming visible amongst the thunderheads, yet it was still too light out to begin shooting interesting lightning shots. Thankfully, as the sun went down, the storms only got larger, and the lightning really became intense. I skirted the storms to the south and north, offering good views of the storm at a safe distance and without that pesky rain that usually comes along with T storms. After most of the storms had rolled through, I was to the north of the cell of lightning and I found this neat field with a shiny combine sitting right along the road. Setting up the tripod in the field, using a long exposure, and running alongside the combine popping the new flash as many times as I could in 30 seconds yielded a pretty neat photo, and luckily the lightning cooperated a few times as well.
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It’s hard to appreciate just how big the Byron Nuclear Power Plant is until you drive right by it. It usually just off in the distance as I’m driving through North-Central Illinois, dotting the horizon with its twin columns of steam. It’s also hard to understand how imposing and spooky this thing looks until you’re driving around dark country roads at 11pm, and the only thing lit outside of your headlights are the twin concrete cooling towers, looming overhead everywhere you go. But spooky and dark or not, I had an idea for a photo, and I wanted to use my colored gels to do something a bit funky. A night down at the atom mill:
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