Glass Houses...

I shot this as part of a lens test in an abandoned train yard in picturesque Cicero Illinois.  Keep singing Billy Joel the whole time!

Herb Crusted Roast Beef

Last night about 12 coworkers and I made dinner for the residents at the Ronald McDonald House in Lincoln Park adjacent to Children’s Memorial Hospital.  

The temporary residents dined on chicken, roast beef, finger potatoes, asparagus and an ice-cream bar complete with frozen thin mints!

Great meal, great cause, great fun.

Here is a shot of the soon to be crust for the beef and the recipe is below.

Dirk

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/herb-crusted-roast-beef-with-horseradish-cream-recipe/index.html

The Perfect Job?

Two window washers in one week, both with my trusty G11, how cool!  This time they were cleaning my windows so I got to shoot from the inside.

I’ve always thought this would be such a cool job, I can’t imagine what it would be like 40 stories up in the wind and sun!

  I also can’t imagine what:

1)   the waver looks like for the dangling washer

2)   what the insurance policy costs for the company!

I also shot a couple frames with my Holga but I have to say, the flash did seem to freak him out a tad.

:)

Sprinklers, fences and dead grass

Carbondale, Illinois

Fuel holding tanks

 

Part of an ongoing body of work based all facets of transportation 

Window Washers

Suburbia-

It’s the one in the middle…well, not the exact middle...right next to the one that looks the same…only different, kinda...but not really...

Study Hall...

Spent the day with photo students at Vernon Hills High School.  Great bunch of students, fantastic teacher, they even have an AP photo class!  It’s cool to see an arts program that gives the students so many options.  Everything from photo classes that start in the darkroom before heading to Photoshop and Illustrator to jewelry making, pottery and both wood and metal shops are available to the students.

After an absolutely fantastic Portellos cheeseburger and chocolate cake for lunch (thank you JM!) we had a short study hall period before the afternoon classes and I was itching to shoot the big FAA something or another that was located behind the track.

I have no idea what it was but it sure looked cool.

Lost History

I am happy to announce that I am officially writing a book about Photographic Lighting for Wiley Publishing that’s due out by the end of the year.  So part of the process includes digging through every image that I've ever made in search for samples to illustrate various techniques that are being discussed.

Early this morning I found some Polaroid type 55 pinholes that I shot years ago and man are they cool.  I shot them with a super wide 4x5 pinhole camera that I made specially for shooting type 55 Polaroid.

We have all watched the price of type 55 go up to almost 200 bucks a box until Polaroid exhausted its supply.  If you need a good laugh (or cry actually) check out what it is going for on eBay right now!

So enjoy these lost relics, Paul Bunyan was a hot dog joint called Bunyan’s (which is actually a little gross if you think about it) found near the very beginning of route 66 in Berwyn IL and the other shot is the Great Hall in Chicago’s Union Station.

Dirk

 

(PS) I have 6 sheets of type 55 left...
       make me an offer!

Snowblower

Blog-go-round??

Not quite sure if I’m breaking some kind of unwritten blog-by-law but this is twice now I’ve reposted another blog on mine.

Harrington found an article I wrote, dusted it off and posted it in two parts on the schools blog.  It was a fun piece that was written for the Chicago ASMP bulletin a couple issues ago about photographers going green.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much I as enjoyed musing about it!

Here is part 1:

http://harringtoncollegeofdesign.blogspot.com/2010/01/putting-green-in-rgb-part-1.html

And part 2:

http://harringtoncollegeofdesign.blogspot.com/2010/01/putting-green-in-rgb-part-2.html

(PS) yes, I saw the freefoto.com picture as well…ironic eh 

Full Circle...

Fellow blogger Somak Ray found an old picture of some of my handmade panoramic cameras on Robert Monaghan old mega photo site and wanted to post them on his Magnorama blog.  His blog is dedicated to custom, one off and DIY pano cameras. Well worth checking out if you are interested in this in any capacity.  


Thanks to Somak for digging through the Robert's archives to find my cameras, here is a link to his posting: 


http://somakray.blogspot.com/2009/12/handmade-panoramic-cameras-by-dirk.html

'tis the season...

Over the past 6 weeks we've made a remarkable 4 round trips from Chicago to St. Louis and as the song says ‘shooting’ all the way.  The trips have included everything from fowl w/ all the trimmings, a big jolly guy, an 8x10 camera test at the Gateway to the West, several shopping outings and other family events.  Throughout (as usual) I’ve had a camera at my side, actually it’s been around my neck more-so lately, but that really doesn’t matter.

So ‘tis the season to bore one another with our travel and vacation pictures, here are mine, a tad left of center, but that’s the way we like it!

Enjoy!

If you’re going to make an omelet….

The final class shoot in my fall Modern Alternative Practices class is to explore high-speed flash photography using a quartz delay timer system.  After a couple ideas were discussed, we set out to break an egg over a one-inch paddle drill bit.  We thought the juxtaposition of the two would make for an interesting and unique image.

Now, when buying eggs in an urban convenience market, who knew to make sure they weren’t frozen.  Most of the dozen were frozen and the ones that weren’t currently frozen were at one time.  Even after we thawed them out (don’t ask how we did it) the insides were a yicky semi-Jell-O like consistency that didn’t splash well when broken by the bit. 

On some of the drops the drill bit pierced the egg and nothing came out, it just bounced into the catch tray.

So off to a different store and two-dozen small AA eggs later were in a little better shape.  Ideally, a large or extra large egg would have provided a more dramatic break and ultimately more dramatic ‘industrial meets domestic’ image, but alas, we learned a lot and made an even bigger mess. 

The second shot we tried was to capture a soap bubble that was filled with smoke as it popped.  This image was the idea of student Martina Josimovska (www.tinamarphoto.com) and was pretty straightforward to set up.

Smoke was blown through a toilet paper tube after being dipped in a small dish of soapy water.  Once the bubble was airborne it was popped and photographed. 

We didn’t use a timer for this image, just relied on the lighting fast reflexes of Beking Joassaint (www.bekingjoassaint.com) and shot a number of takes until we got some images we liked. These were shot with strobe with a D3x Nikon.  For the egg image, we used a shock sensor attached to the base of the drill bit which when tripped, began the timer which in turn fired the Profoto strobes. A Phase One P25+ back captured the egg image.

no words...

                            rest in peace Grandma Ruth