uptownwalk17

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: A random shot near Lawrence and Kenmore, showing a big space full of stuff that's been knocked down, a -big- reminder of how this neighborhood used to be one of the worst slums in the country, a virtual textbook definition of the "white flight" that happened in American cities in the years between the 1950s and '90s, as the Caucasian middle-class fled en-masse to the suburbs and left these formerly grand neighborhoods to literally crumble. You still see sights like this one all over Uptown, nearly every other block still in some areas.