Tag Archives: downtown

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Downtown Chicago Buildings, Morning

October 26, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on dense downtown buildings, Chicago, Illinois

This is yet another photograph made from the architecture boat tour of downtown Chicago. At one point the boat head out toward the mouth of the river, where the water widens. Here the boat turns around and provides the most open and distant view of waterfront buildings. (During much of the rest of the tour the river passes very close to most buildings, so one is aiming almost straight up at them in many cases.)

The kind of view in this location and in this photograph is actually a bit rare when photographing big cities — a view from just enough distance and one that is not blocked by closer buildings. The greater distance reduces the issues of converging perspective lines and also allows more buildings to be included in the photograph, as here where more than half a dozen overlapping buildings fill the frame.

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Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Morning, Riverwalk

October 19, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Two men on the Chicago Riverwalk in the early morning

Let me begin by telling a story on myself. The last time I was in Chicago, which was some years back, I was there for a conference related to my work as a college faculty member. I flew in to town, went straight downtown, and spent three or four days engaged almost entirely in conference stuff at the hotel, mostly eating there with the exception of one dinner out in a place I’m sure I could not find my way back to. It was November, and at one point I thought I would go out for a walk. Silly California boy! I believe that I walked out one hotel doorway and made it as far as the next one before the cold and wind convinced me to think of a different activity. The point of all of this is that I really did not see the city and, in fact, I was so unaware that I managed to get my directions off by about 90 degrees.

This has happened to me elsewhere, most notably in Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. I normally have a very good sense of direction, but when I arrive at Tuolumne, to this day my world rotates (incorrectly) by 90 degrees. In the case of Chicago, the problem for me was that I got the idea that the Chicago River headed through town in a southerly direction — and, as any Chicagoan knows, that is absurd… it goes east. Perhaps if I had actually gone out and walked the Chicago Riverwalk, like these two guys, on that earlier visit I would not have spent the first day or so of this visit trying to rotate my mental map by 90 degrees!

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

East Madison Street

October 18, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon light on East Madison Street, Chicago

We had been in roughly the Millennium Park area for a good part of this day, wandering around and looking at stuff and visiting a museum, and we were (if I recall correctly) heading back toward our hotel in the late afternoon, planning to perhaps take a break before figuring out where to go for Chicago style pizza. (One goal on this trip was to have both Chicago and New York pizza. After all, pizza research is a solemn duty.)

I’ve noted elsewhere that Chicago’s tendency to combine tall downtown buildings with more open space allows a lot of beautiful light to reach down to ground level and it sometimes permits clearer views up and down streets. As we walked past this intersection, marking the end of East Madison, the late light was coming straight up the street from the west, though slightly hazy and soft atmosphere, striking the sides of buildings and silhouetting people and vehicles on the street. This was light to stop for!

Photographs: Chicago, Photographs: Urban/Street

Building Reflections

October 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Distorted reflections in windows of Chicago downtown towers

As I have mentioned in earlier Chicago posts, I like the way that Chicago’s more open urban design provides more opportunities to clearly see the many tall buildings, allow more light to get deeper down into the space, and makes the interactions between the buildings more visible. As with many of the others, I made this photograph from the Chicago River while on the architectural boat tour of the downtown area. This tour offers views of many, many of the downtown towers and other subjects, though it can be a bit tricky to photograph them — they do move past quickly and it is pretty much necessary to shoot handheld.

If I recall correctly (without taking the time to review the sequence of my raw files), I made this photograph somewhere along the south branch of the river, where there was a momentary juxtaposition of the lower building with its visible exterior framing and the much larger glass-encased building with its curving surface on the left side. If you look closely at the photograph you will notice that very little of what you see is the actual structure of buildings, aside from that external skeleton in the lower building and the narrow frames of the windows on the higher one. Virtually everything else in the photograph of the builds is arguably not the buildings but instead is some sort of distorted reflection of its surroundings.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: downtown

Downtown Chicago Buildings, Morning

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Morning, Riverwalk

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East Madison Street

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Building Reflections

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.