uptownwalk14

A random shot from a recent walk through the Uptown neighborhood where I live (in this case from Irving Park Road and Sheridan to Lawrence and Broadway), partly to test my new camera (a Nikon Coolpix S550), partly just to start collecting up the permanent set of images I've always wanted to own of my interesting neighborhood. And by the way, can I just mention again how flabbergasted I am by the richness of this camera's black-and-white mode? Maybe it's because I shot almost exclusively in black and white in college (for financial reasons, natch), which is why I think about it a lot more often than others; but the fact is that my little Coolpix just on any given day can naturally capture the kind of super-rich range of graytones I would've killed for most of the time in my old film-and-paper days in the '80s. The fact is that almost no "digital darkroom" work was done at all on these images; that's a far cry from my old physical darkroom days, when extensive work would have to be done nearly every freaking time I walked in there. Here: For those who only know Chicago's CTA transit system from the cutesy little tourist-friendly Disneyfield Beaux Arts stations down on State Street in the Loop, here's how many of them actually look out in the nitty-gritty of residential neighborhoods, out on the edge of town where all us creatives live. This is the Lawrence stop, for example, one of the very last of the red line to not have gotten a makeover yet in freaking decades and decades; as you can see, the tracks overhead make these stations all over the city a special, unusually dark thing, these little very urban spots all over the city that remind you on a regular basis that you're in Chicago. It's of course one of my favorite things about living here.