uptownwalk13

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: The...Uptown Building? I think that's the name of this, the last skyscraper left in the neighborhood from when it was an Art Deco upper-class paradise, in the swinging gangster-controlled 1920s. This is where Al Capone stored his money; there is literally still a tunnel underneath the street, from here to the speakeasy bar he used to own (the Green Mill, now a world-renowned jazz club, also coincidentally the international birthplace of the poetry slam).