Dusk on Michigan Avenue - we were making our way from the John Hancock building to Millennium Park in downtown Chicage, passing some the most spectacular architecture this city has to offer.  I have never felt so much like a country boy as I did walking the streets of Chicago, my neck sore from looking up at the magnificent buildings we were passing.  I was looking for a shot that would capture a single building in a different way and was not having much success until the street lights began to come on.  These street lights were old and historic, matching the age of many of the buildings.  I decided to see if I could include one of these lights in a building shot so I gave it a try with the Carbide & Carbon Building, now a Hard Rock Hotel, and I am fairly happy with the results.

As this was a business trip, I left my usual Canon DSLR's at home and shot this with a much ligher Panasonic GF-1

Have any interesting stories about Chicago?  Share them with us here!

Floral is a small community - actually now just a railroad siding - southeast of Saskatoon best known as the birthplace of Mr. Hockey, Gordie Howe.  Ten years ago the grain elevator, marked with the now defunct Saskatchewan Wheat Pool emblem, stood on a railroad siding and was actually in use buying grain from local farmers.  Since then the railroad line is gone, the elevator has been removed and the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool has morphed into something quite different.  For all of these reasons I call this image "fading fast".

This was actually one of the first images I shot with my newly acquired Canon D30, my first DSRL back in 2001.  The original color image has nowhere the same impact as this converted black and white etching.  I don't do much of this artistic filter work, but in this instance I am very pleased how this worked out.  I think that any image that you are still happy with after looking at it for ten years can't be that bad!

There is not much to say about this shot other than it is great to be able to just walk out into your own backyard and find an image like this.  For all the journeys I take half way around the world, some of the most astonishing images I have are taken steps away from my back door!

First, don't touch that camera dial that gives you black and white or sepia photos right out the camera.  Yes, go ahead and use the VIVID or LANDSCAPE color settings, but please don't go so far as throwing out most of the color in your photographs.  Wait until you get back home and do just a little post processing to make your photo into an old time sepia image. 

This image was taken during a one day port excursion in Seattle.  As we pulled into Pier 66 it was dry but cloudy.  By the time we made it to the top of the Space Needle it was cloudy almost to the street and very rainy.  A wall of fog wrapped around the observation deck with no sense of whether you were one foot or a hundred off the ground.  As I stood there the fog lifted for a few moments and I was able to quickly take a some photos down into the city. 

Looking at the photos once I was warm and dry, I could tell that the rain had wiped out most of the color and some of the sharpness in the images.  Rather that try to take the pictures through post processing and make a sunny day out of a downpour, I decided to emphasize the fog and the wet instead.

Converting the image to sepia eliminated what little color was in the image and leaves the viewer to concentrate on the forms of the buildings instead.  Adding a bit of vignetting draws the viewer's attention to the center of the image and gives the entire picture a vintage feel.  I think the image works much better as one that embraces the weather conditions of the day.  What didn't work as a color image works much better as a simple toned image. 

Peter the Great built Monplaisir Palace, northeast of the main Peterfhof palace and beside the Baltic Sea, in 1723.  He entertained his closest friends in this small summer palace which offers views across the Baltic Sea to St. Petersburg and Kronshtad.  The palace is protected from the north winter winds by a wall with a number of archways.  These openings nicely frame the view of the Baltic that Peter the Great would have enjoyed almost three hundred years ago. 

If you are in St. Petersburg and make your way onto the Peterhof territory, save some time to visit the outlying palaces like Monplaisir; you will not be disappointed by the intimate feeling of these smaller buildings.

This picture was taken in Warnemuende, Germany.  My mom and I did a bike tour and this took us through farmlands, forest, and along the coast.  This forest, believe it or not, was along the coast.  The beauty of the trees swept me away with their colors and uniformity.  I felt like I was in the forest of Hansel and Gretel. 

This shot was taken with my Leica Digilux 1 (and I can blow it up to 11 x 14 with no pixelation!!).  One of my "bucket list" items is to go back here and take more photos at different times of day.  I have actually sold this photo in all sizes at local craft shows.  My biggest compliment was to have another photo enthusiast buy a copy and cry that she never saw anything so beautiful.

As an aside, this forest had an inn nearby that was reasonably priced and also rented bikes with their rooms!

We are very pleased that Gretchen Ziegler ([email protected]) was kind enough to write this guest blog and to illustrate it with one of her wonderful photos.  Thanks Gretchen!

I know that it seems that I must like orange - and I guess I do!  It was late morning and thankfully the sun was still low enough that the east side of this rock face received glancing light that illuminated the weathering while bringing out the rich color of the rock.  The Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada is one of my favorite places to shoot as the weathered rock is strewn across the valley floor, making it ideal to capture textures in all sorts of shots.  While I have a number of great, expansive shots of the desert rock formations throughout the park, I have a particular fondness for the abstract nature of the rocks when viewed up close.  I am pleased that the striations here run diagonally across the frame which almost implies a water-like motion to the rocks.  My advice: leave Vegas early in the morning so you can catch some of the early sunlight on these magnificent rocks.

This very early morning shot was taken as our cruise ship slipped into the old passenger/cargo port in St. Petersburg.  The land to the left is Ostrov Kanonerskiy Island that, while littered with derelict lots and ruins of Soviet era buildings, has a number of apartment blocks as well.  The air was still and cool and the water had hardly a ripple. 

I feel that the early morning photos I have of St. Petersburg hide most of the industrial detritus and let the view concentrate more on the mood of the day.  Passenger ships now dock at a modern cruise port that we have yet to visit, but I will miss the hustle of being in the heart of this commercial port.