Photography Tuesday: A Day in Chicago

I had a random day off on a Wednesday a few months ago and the hubs and I decided to head downtown.  I suggested going on the Architecture Boat Cruise because we'd never gone.  Then we decided to invite our friends who recently got married.  The bride is a transplant from Atlanta and so it was a great opportunity for her to see and do things in her new city!

We started the morning off at the Bongo Room in the South Loop for breakfast.  It was DECADENT.  We ordered 3 dishes to share among the 4 of us and that was plenty!

Red Velvet Pancakes

White Chocolate Pretzel Pancakes

Architecture Boat Tour: After Breakfast we drove & parked near North Pier Docks.  We went with Chicago Line Cruises because they had the longest tour (about 90 minutes) and the reviews on yelp seemed to be the best.  Our docent was very knowledgeable and fairly entertaining.  My dad was an architect and though we never had gone on a tour, I thought of him often during the cruise.  Our friend, who's an engineer, really enjoyed it too but my hubs & his wife were not quite as excited.   I also personally LOVE any history of Chicago so I was totally in my nerdy element :).  It also helped that it was a GORGEOUS day!  It's very photo intense from this point onward but I promise there is a "sweet treat" at the end!

See the beautiful blue sky?

Thought this reflection was interesting

This is an example of all the condos around the city that were remodeled from older buildings.
You can tell because of the balconies kind of "tacked" onto the exterior

Thought the pop of red was cool!

Dear old Sears... I mean Willis Tower

I love Sears Tower... quintessentially Chicago.  Sigh... Willis Tower.  I haven't gone up yet to see the clear balconies where you can step into "mid-air."  I went to undergrad in the city and from my dorm room I could see these two buildings every night. Very awesome, I miss you tall friends...

The Marina Towers, lovingly known as the Corncobs

 This structure in particular brings the memories flooding back.  My dad was the one who taught me that they were nicknamed the Corncobs.

Looks so stark, yet beautiful

I photoshopped this picture with Maggie Holmes Urban Action.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the tour.  I thought it was educational and I learned a thing or two about the basics of architectural styles in Chicago.  I've heard of walking tours in the city, kind of doing the same thing... I think I'll have to do some convincing... maybe next summer :).

Now our next stop was what my husband was excited about...Morton's Steakhouse.  I'd never been and I love me some steak.  We went for an early dinner so we were able to get the lunch special.  So for the price, I think the food definitely lived up to the hype... enough that I didn't get any good pictures!  This is from my friend Yane.

Delicious looking, isn't it.  This was hub's surf 'n turf.

So, now, here's your reward for reading down all the way to the bottom!  They opened a Sprinkles Cupcake in Chicago!  On the way out of the city we picked up 1/2 a dozen.  Ginger Lemon, Strawberry, Red Velvet & Chocolate.  So GOOD!  Again, I think they lived up to the hype... hubby just doesn't get the whole cupcake craze... oh well.

Yummy!!

It was a really fun, being outside on a rare beautiful August day... with adults, that was a bonus :).  I love my in-laws...

I know there isn't much photography talk in the post, other than photos.  I will say that this was a rare time when I was shooting outdoors - using ISO 200.  I'm usually at ISO 800, aperture wide open taking pictures of the little guy.  So it was fun playing around with the settings.  Let me know if you have any specific questions!!
Have a great day!

Photography Tuesday: Project 365 fail... sort of

Alrighty!! For my inaugural Photography Tuesday post I will tell you about what was going on at the beginning of this year!

In my post introducing Photography Tuesdays, I told you that there was this "perfect storm" of sorts going on where I started an online class, found out about Project 365, and purchased Photoshop Elements.  As part of the online class, I also purchased a 50mm lens.  This type of lens is a fixed lens, in the sense that it does not zoom in & out.  From what I learned, people like these kinds of fixed lenses for the fact that you can "open them up" or have a wide aperture to let a lot of light in.  And if you need to zoom in & out you move your feet as opposed to the lens.  I am NO expert so I'll leave it to the experts to answer any questions but if you have any feel free to ask me and I can refer you to where I go to find answers :).

Getting the 50mm lens CHANGED my photography.  Well the class helped a lot too :).  It focused on basics and eventually the end goal was to get you to shoot in Manual mode where you, the photographer, choose the ISO (film speed), the aperture (amount of light) & the shutter speed instead of letting the camera do it.  By having full control, you could control the kind of images you capture. 


This scrapbook page is my first week of pictures for Project 365. It is also a good sampling of the first photos I took with my new 50mm.  This was when I had high hopes for taking all the new stuff I learned and taking a picture everyday!  This is also where you read my title and realize that it didn't happen, hahaha!  But I don't think of it as a total fail, at least I tried, right?  And I do have pages for the whole month of January & February.  I even did a special layout to document Tyler's surgery - I can share that at a later time.  So you see how everything came together?

Here are a few more pictures from February. I picked them because I wanted to highlight "bokeh." Here's wiki page that explains it better but here's my attempt. Bokeh is the blurry quality of an image that is not in focus. When you control the aperture, you are controlling the amount of light you will capture but it also affects how much or how little it's in focus. By changing the aperture you can change how much or how little you want the background to be in focus.

The wider the opening the blurrier the backgroud. I love taking pictures this way because your subject is in focus but the laundry that's folded but not put away is not. So to say that in January & February I took tons of pics of Tyler with a blurry background is an understatement. Just to note, the 50mm lens I purchased was a great lens but it didn't autofocus with my D40 and though it was easy enough practicing on inanimate object, it was crazy hard using it with a squiggly child. So, I ended up selling the 50mm and got a 35mm that autofocuses... best of both worlds.

So how's that for my first Photography Tuesday?  What do you think? Interesting?  At least there are cute pictures!
Ok! Thanks for reading and have a great rest of the day!

Photography Tuesdays

So in the past year a so, I discovered Google Reader. It's awesome in the sense that I don't have to go clicking on to each blog link that I'd saved to see if there is anything new - it just shows up in your reader and you read it! You do lose a little bit of the personality of each blog because you don't see the title and decoration that people have up. But it's nice because it's sorta like my daily newspaper except that it reports on people's craftiness or "mom-ness." I'm subscribed to mostly crafty & mommy blogs :).

One thing I've noticed that people do a weekly feature, whether it's a particular manufacturer, project or open forum. So I've decided to focus on photography on Tuesdays. I feel like photography & scrapbooking go hand in hand. If you love scrapbooking, you want to have great pictures to scrap. If you love photography, you want to somehow document the great pictures you take. So I will try and take Tuesdays to focus on what I've done with my photography.

I've always been interested in photography. My dad was an avid hobbyist, I have pictures of me as a toddler playing with tripods and lens brushes :). And I took photography in high school - even learned how to develop my own film and prints! I remember vaguely learning about f-stops and aperture but it never stuck. Most of high school and into college I had a point & shoot that I toted around everywhere. My interest sorta started petering out, when I became busy with pharmacy school and residency. But I always had a few key pictures and/or scrapbooks to commemorate important moments. I used my dad's old digital camera for a few years, especially once I started dating and then during the first year of marriage. I forget the exact impetus for wanting to upgrade but I bought a digital SLR in 2007. It probably was the start of reading people's blogs that made me want to buy one - most likely... actually, I think that's why - I wanted to take nice pictures of my cards and scrapbooks - hahaha!

And when I got my Nikon D40 SLR, like most people, I shot my SLR in Auto mode... sometimes in "P" mode based on what I read on Ken Rockwell's site while researching which SLR to get. I started taking pictures of my cards and immediately posting them onto my then-new blog and on forums... this is all obviously my A.T. (before Tyler) period. I took the D40 on a few vacations and made a few digital scrapbooks (wow... that's a whole 'nother topic, I might need to do Digital Thursdays) and was generally happy with the results.

But to get to where I am currently with this hobby/passion of mine I have to explain a few more things. Like I just mentioned, I was generally happy with how my pictures were turning out. I knew that I was not utilizing the full potential of my camera but I was ok with that. I didn't carry it around with me too much, I ended up getting a new P&S Canon that was easier to carry around. So that became my default camera. The "big one" only came out around holidays or family gatherings/trips.

The biggest turning point - as I'm sure it is for most people - is having a child. When you have a child and if you have even the slightest inclincation towards photography - you WILL take pictures. I was even taking pictures of ultrasound pictures! But the first few months it was easier to use the Canon P&S. That thing basically lived on the coffee table and captured everything... every burp, spit up & smile -we even documented those sleepless nights when he would still be up at 2am. So the first 3-4 months I rarely used the D40. Then around the 4 month mark I started using the D40 to take "portraits" and I think this is also when my Google Reader reading was kicking into high gear.

I started reading Maggie Holmes' blog because other people were talking about her and also about her photography class. I decided that I should take a class and see if I could unlock some more potential out of my camera and I did! The husband even agreed, which was surprising - he's VERY supportive and usually ignores the amount of money & time that goes into my hobbies - but the cost was kinda high, so I was surprised at how easily he said yes. It could have been because I really hadn't done anything for myself in a really long time :). So I took the online class, re-introduced myself to the basics and started taking pictures more often. I also found out about Project 365 around the time of taking the class - it's where you take a picture a day to document your year. (I started but haven't kept up... details in another post :)). I even tried carrying my D40 around everyday but that didn't last long - though I do carry it around more than I did before. It's really true that practice makes perfect.

With the combination of new baby, reading blogs with gorgeous pictures, getting Photoshop Elements, taking an online photo class, and hearing about & starting project 365 - it was the perfect storm for me to start trying to get into photography again, with the key word being "trying." :)

So hopefully you'll join me for Photography Tuesdays and see what I've been shootin'!