5 posts tagged “images”

Yeah, I know, for now this personal-personal blog of mine continues to mostly rely on photo updates, now that I finally own my first-ever decent digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix S550) and have been shooting just a ton of shots around the city for the last several months. And hey, I guess that's not so bad, to just rely for a little while on mostly photo updates to this personal blog; I spent four years when younger, after all, primarily expressing myself through images instead of words, so I guess that's not such a bad thing to rely on again for a bit, while I go through an especially productive time in my professional writing life right now. (I'm managing to get four to five book reviews written per week these days, each of them a thousand words long, plus a new guest essay for the HarperCollins UK blog twice a month, plus am working behind the scenes a lot right now on the next couple of CCLaP's original books, coming out this March and April, as well as a virtual book tour for the center's first published author, coming later this month.)

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know that I got a new photoset up at my Flickr account recently, a collection of random shots during a winter walk this week through the Uptown neighborhood here in Chicago where I live; they came out really nice, I thought, so wanted to let you know about them. Here's what I have to say about the set over at Flickr...

"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."

Anyway, hopefully more personal updates coming here more regularly this winter; but for now, at least lots of new photo updates regularly. I hope you enjoy.

I'm always forgetting about this, since before this week I'd never owned a camera that could take advantage of this -- but it turns out that more and more modern ones are now embedding information about themselves as metadata within digital photos, in a way so that a service like Flickr can scan an uploaded photo and tell automatically what kind of camera was used to shoot it. Whenever Flickr determines this, in fact, it runs a mention of the camera brand in the lower-right corner of the webpage; and if you click on it, it will take you over to a centralized page at Flickr concerning just that camera itself.

The page is cool enough just for the interesting statistics it presents -- how many fellow Flickr members own that camera, how many photos from that camera brand were uploaded yesterday, how fast new people are buying that particular camera -- and of course it's very smart of the Yahoo-owned Flickr to link on each page to the section at Yahoo Shopping where a person can actually buy the camera, as well as read consumer-style reviews. But here's the deal-maker, and why it makes so much sense to go automatically to Flickr anymore when wanting to know more about a particular camera; on the same page, they also display a good 10 or 20 thumbnails of photos taken with that camera, sorted by what other members find to be the most interesting images in the system. And this is just so much better a way to instantly and profoundly understand what you think of that camera, and whether or not you should buy it -- by simply getting a broad cross-sample of actual images shot with that camera, from a variety of people with different skill levels, just about the only really important aspect of a digital camera altogether. Believe it or not, for example, all five photos shown above were taken with the exact same Nikon Coolpix S550 I now own (shot respectively by Flickr members sefosse in Italy, NANIPOLLITO in Spain, rumble maso in Italy, cocoi m in California, and .stephen. in Canada); and that means that I too now have the theoretical opportunity to shoot photos just as cool as these, for the first time in my particular life since way back in the early '90s when I was a film-based photography major in college, running around with a Pentax K-1000 and a box full of Ilford Extra Matte.

Anyway, just wanted to point this out, for those who didn't realize this existed at Flickr, and who are currently on the lookout for a new camera themselves. It's a great place to get an instant and powerful look at whatever particular brand you're thinking about getting.

So, just a few weeks left until it's finally bicycling season again here in Chicago; long-time followers of the moblog, in fact, know that I first got heavily involved with bicycling last year, when not coincidentally I initially quit smoking. Of course, this being nerdy GTD me, I needed to invent an elaborate project for myself in order to justify all that bicycling in the first place; and this was right at the same time (spring 2007) that Google first allowed people to sign up for an account and start creating customized mashup maps through their official API, which convinced me to start doing such a thing too. But alas, because of the complexity of these maps (but more on that in a bit), I ended up doing a lot more trips than I had time to sit down and put together into a mashup; and I promised myself that over the winter I'd finally sit down and finish them, before it was time for bicycling season 2008 and yet more riding/photographing/mapping.

Anyway, it just occurred to me this weekend that I don't have much time left, so I better get started; and the first step, of course, was to sit down and look through all the photos and notes I took last year when actually on the bike trips, and determine exactly how much work I have ahead of me. The good news? It turns out that I actually biked a lot more and a lot farther than I had been remembering in my head, boding well for my chances of even longer and more regular trips this spring and summer. The bad news? I have 11 maps that need to be created, and so far only three of them "done" (and by "done" I of course mean "eh, like 80 percent done").

So, I just sat down on my other Mac (the one with Photoshop) and made a master map of all the mini-projects I'm shooting to finish by the beginning of May; this image, then, will also serve as a master map to interior pages over at the section of my personal website where you can always find the latest grand total of finished mashups. Anyway, so here we go with the descriptions...hold yr breath...

1 through 5: Chicago Lakeshore Path. An uninterrupted 18-mile bike and runner path stretching nearly from the north edge to the south edge of the city, surrounded nearly at all times by public parkland, a holdover from Edwardian times when the "City Beautiful" movement managed to get the entire Chicago lakefront declared a "public resource."

1) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park North. Upper half of the seven-mile Lincoln Park, one of the largest city parks in the entire United States. Riding the length of Lincoln Park is a lesson in American history and architecture, in that the park was designed in regular stages from 1860 to 1960; here in the north half are the sections created between 1910 and the '60s.

2) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park South. The lower half of the park just described, the sections designed from 1860 to 1900, containing the vast majority of the historical destinations the park is most known for.

3) Lakeshore path: North Avenue to the Loop. Want a smart alternative the next time you come into the inner city for a holiday like the 4th of July? Why not park your car on the northside and bike the rest of the way in? Although not regularly used by a lot of people, there is a perfectly safe and in fact delightful section of the lakefront path that stretches from the end of Lincoln Park to the Loop, including easy stops at Navy Pier, River North, the Chicago River and Millennium Park. It's only six miles from Montrose to the Loop by bicycle; why not try it the next time you're down there on holiday, avoiding the snarl of vehicular traffic that always forms during such events?

4) Lakeshore path: Loop to 57th Street. For many years the Hyde Park area of the city's southside was built up along the lakefront, but nothing else between there and the Loop; that finally changed throughout the mid-20th century, especially once a series of corporations and civic groups came in and sponsored the landscaping of vast tracts of the land. Although not as historic as the northside's better-known path, this slice of Chicago's lakefront is a beautiful and uncluttered space, perfect for lazy weekend rides as well as weekday wind sprints for more serious riders.

5) Lakeshore path: South Campus. The extreme south tip of the city-sponsored 18-mile lakeshore bike/running path, encompassing several historic areas: Hyde Park, the University of Chicago campus, the Museum of Science and Industry, Jackson Park, and the South Shore Cultural Center, spanning roughly 57th to 79th Streets.

6) Northside to the Loop, via Southport/Lincoln Avenues. Hey, city-dweller creative-class fucks! You know how the mayor and your hippie neighbor keep crowing about how easy it actually is to bicycle from your place to your office in the Loop each day? Keep wondering if it's actually true? Here's one of what will hopefully be an always expanding series of maps, looking at various inner-city routes from residential neighborhoods to the Loop, all of them lying along streets with dedicated, legally-protected bike lanes. Featuring not only the routes themselves, but various practical tips about city bicycling embedded in my photos and videos.

7) Northside to the Loop, via Halsted/Milwaukee Avenues. Exactly the same as map 6, but this time using the city bike lane on Halsted, passing through such neighborhoods as Boys Town, Old Town, Goose Island, Fulton Market, River West and more.

8) Burnham's Boulevards and the West Side Parks (north half). As part of the "City Beautiful" movement's 1909 overhaul of the city, architect Daniel Burnham recommended building a "green ring" through the most congested neighborhoods at the time, allowing not only for rapid middle-class development but also a small slice of healthiness in the middle of the most packed places in the city. At the same time, then, a group of Gilded Age entrepreneurs started a series of grand, giant public parks on the west side of the city as well (where the vast majority of the city's immigrants lived at the time); these were linked to Burnham's green boulevard system, to form a legitimate grand green circle all the way around the city's downtown, a few miles out in distance from the Loop's center. My map, then, is just of the north half of this circle; it includes Diversey Boulevard at Lincoln Park (including the Goethe statue, Hamilton garden, Elks headquarters and more), Logan Square, Garfield Park and more.

9) Northside Neighborhood Parks. It's the giant civic parks of the Victorian Age that get all the press in Chicago; but did you know that the park district here actually maintains over 550 public spaces? The vast majority of them, in fact, were created and first maintained by private neighborhood organizations, before the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal consolidated all the groups into one unified government administration. In this map, a winding and detailed route that will take a bicyclist to over 65 small neighborhood parks on the northside, ranging from a mile or two in size to sometimes the length of someone's backyard; the total route lasts 25 miles, with of course many opportunities to stop for food, shopping, coffee and more.

10) Northside to the Westside, via the "Industrial District." Here, a supplemental add-on to either map 6 (inner-city path on Lincoln) or 7 (inner-city path on Halsted) for getting over to such hipster westside neighborhoods as Wicker Park and Bucktown, specifically by riding through the last area of the northside left with working factories, smokestacks and more. A fascinating route to take at least once, especially for those who enjoy photographing urban industrial areas.

11) Near South Historic Neighborhoods. Did you know that there are half a dozen nationally important historic neighborhoods all butting against each other in Chicago's Near South Side? There are! Here, a map detailing them all, including the IIT campus, Bronzeville, Prairie Avenue, the Museum Campus, Chinatown, Printers Row and the South Loop.

Whew, okay, that's it! And three of these are now "done," like I said (i.e. 80 percent done), which you can find over here for now; and hopefully by May, like I said, I'm going to have all 11 of these maps finished and online, and with downloadable KMLs as well for Google Earth (for those who like their maps in 3D and spinnable and all that shit), and with a brand-new interface as well over at the section of my personal site where people will be able to find all these. And that's it! See you later, fuckers!

I keep forgetting to make mention of it here at my moblog, but over the last month I've ended up posting a grand total of 133 new photos at my Flickr account, most of them taken in the Chicago area on my mobile device, a Palm Treo. Anyway, you can click below for any of the five new sets I've recently posted:

Random photos for November (9 images)
Random photos for October (49 images)
Random photos for September (55 images)
Shots from a rehearsal for the Ken Kase Group (8 images)
Shots of my mom's handmade jewelry (12 images, shot in the St Louis area over Thanksgiving)