Archive for January 2008

1

Apocalyptic Winter

Post-apocalyptic nuclear winter? Nope. Eight in the morning in Minneapolis. Like water in a Mad Max movie, sunlight is a precious resource in the northern latitudes this time of year. Someone once said that if God wanted us to see the sunrise, he would have made it later in the day. God wants us to see the sunrise here and now. Yes, I'm on the roof. One of the perks of being a caretaker for my building is keys to the roof. Best place to see the sunrise. It's easy to track the movement of the sun from the south to the north throughout the year. The buildings are on a regular grid, the white building in the foreground points east, so you can see how far south the sun is. And yes, I processed this image. I had what I call an Edward Hopper image, high dynamic range (HDR). I shoot these in camera raw so that I have lots of information to work with. I lower the highlights and raise the midtones to keep the proper exposure throughout the image. So yes, the sky is not that moody, but this isn't far off. This is Uptown, the Famous Dave's Ribs sign is the orange glow on the left. I love the light at the time I was shooting, lots of red in the sky and the light falling on the foreground is very blue. It really looks like that, the snow was blue. Normally you don't notice that because your eyes white balance themselves so well. With the sky firing the red light right at me, my eyes kept their 5000K balance and saw the snow as blue. A cool demonstration of this was when I was coming back from the Northern Air Resort with Jeff at twilight, I turned on my laptop to convert the pictures, the gray mac startup screen looked red. I pointed this out to Jeff and he was mystified. The blue light of a winter twilight makes your eyes shift to see blue as white, so the actually gray screen looked very red. More optic fun for you guys, so take time to look at how the light changes, but don't, seriously don't look directly at the sun. P.S. My hometown of Kenosha took a real beating Tuesday, tornadoes in January! Take a look

10

Graffiti on Ice

Graffiti in hidden places intrigues me, art that is hidden because the artist had to hide when he did it. I'm not talking about those &*#* that write swear words on buildings, but things like this. Not far from this location some twerps were writing "Compton" on everything up and down the bike trail. I wanted to wring their necks when they tagged the stone monument under the trail bridge that explained the regional geology. This is the stuff I like. Especially since you have to work to find it. This is located under the Cedar Lake Commuter Corridor just off Theodore Wirth Parkway. At the North end of Cedar Lake, there is a channel over to Brownie Lake. Under The Road, under the Rail and the bike trail is another path, for canoes. I cross over this all the time, but haven't been down here for years. I have a penchant for wandering on the ice, but I am very leery of passing under bridges. There are usually cracks and bare ice under them, but two people had just come out of the tunnel and it looked safe. Sometimes you just have to trust the ice. Are there other City Photos of good graffiti? Let me know in a comment! Also, if you like Mitchster.com, please help spread the word by clicking on some of the 'social bookmark' links below the post!

6

Minneapolis Midday Sun

Yes, this is 1:00 in the afternoon. It's fun living in the biggest most northern city. I was out between the islands on Lake of the Isles, wandering on the ice when the clouds shifted. Overcast high cirrus clouds changed over to lower cumulus clouds with a brief moment of open sky.This was at thee beginning of the transition.

4

Minneapolis Lakes

Out wandering on the ice again. It was up in the 30s yesterday, it was what we Minneapolitains call a tropical heat wave. So off I went trudging through the wet snow. I took a lot of shots; this one was from the edge of Cedar Lake. I was drawn to this one because it isn't like my usual compositions. There is very little composition, I was just working with a shallow Depth of Field and shooting into the sun. It was fun to take this because even though my lens has vibration reduction, I still needed to hold it still enough for the auto focus to grab onto one of the cattails. I was sitting on a bench and balled up using my knee to steady the lens. Even though it was warm, not much snow melted. Let's hope we get some more snow for the St. Paul Winter Carnival and the City of Lakes Loppet — both of which I will be shooting and sharing on mitchster.com.

2

Paintable Landscape and True Art

This morning I drove through some amazing fog to get to Caribou and it got me thinking about this picture that I took in the fall. If you look closely, you will see that the three shore lines drop in value and the shadows become bluer as they step back. This is an atmospheric effect caused by the scattering of light by the air and humidity. You can also see the effects of the reflecting light on the water. If I was out with my oil painting kit, this is a place I would set up camp to work. I studied Plein Air oil painting with Joe Paquet for a couple of years. The main thing I learned from Joe was how to see what was going on. Once you have studied landscape oil painting, photography becomes a lot easier. I've hung up the easel for a while, but I still spend time talking with Joe and also photograph his paintings for him. Below is one of his paintings I shot earlier this week. I've been meaning to show some of his work and this seemed to be a good time to do so. When I photograph a scene, the viewer doesn't question the odd uneven appearance of surfaces, but with a painting, if something seems slightly out of place, they think the artist made a mistake. So Joe has to make every surface tell you what it's doing as well as work with the painting as a whole. I've tried doing this, it's really hard to keep it all in mind. But then, that's why he paints and I photograph. I learn a lot working with him and I think he's learning a little from me.

1

Duck, Turtles & Trash - Saturday Moment of Zen

Obviously this was taken in the summer, but I was thinking about turtles earlier; what do turtles do under the ice in the winter for fun? Do they sleep all day? Raccoons & Possums are still in my trash every night and the Mallards, Wood Ducks, Nuthatches & Shovelers left a while ago — so what are the turtles & bees up to? I could check with Wikipedia, but I'm feelin' lazy and sort of like the image of the turtles playing cards and telling fish stories.

16

Washburn Water Tower - Infrared

This is the little-known ever-terrifying Washburn Water Tower, hard to find, it is located in south Minneapolis in a confusing little area known as Tangletown — so named for the street layout. Perched on a hill surrounded by trees, this beast was built in 1932 with massive eagles atop and scary Templar Knights at the base. The knights are "guardians of health" designed to protect Minneapolitans from typhoid — tainted water had reciently been linked to the disease. The first time I went there was at night, so I'm even more afraid of the place. I went through a fit of infrared photography at the time and decided that the spooky effects of infrared would suit this location. Infrared is the light above human vision. the human eye can detect light that has a wave length of 380 to 750 nanometers. Infrared is from 700 - 1400nm. I shot this with a 1000nm filter that cuts out all light below that. I was using a Sony F828 camera that has a night mode. The best thing about infrared — trees. They glow like crazy. Second best is the sky, it goes black and the clouds go white. Here's a perk for all of you with point-and-shoot cameras: Big DSLRs have filters that prevent them from taking IR photos. A lot of P&S cameras have a 'night mode', if yours does, put it in night mode and then point your TV remote at the lens and push a button. If you see the light on the screen, your camera picks up IR. Do a little research: type in your camera model name and 'IR' or 'infrared' and see if anyone has talked about your camera. All you need is a filter and a tripod (you are cutting out a lot of light with the filter, so shutter speeds will be slow). I would recommend a 72 or 75 filter, they are a lot cheaper than the 1000nm I bought (I'm a bit of an extremest). I've since discovered that I can convert my Sony F828 to be Infrared in regular mode. It costs $350 at maxmax.com. Have you done this? Let me know. I'm interested in doing so.

10

A New Day Begins

It's a new day at Mitchster.com. I woke up this morning to find an email from Wayne (Thanks Wayne!) informing me that my site had been down since 11:50pm central yesterday. I called godaddy.com a couple times and they said that they knew about it and were working on it. Apparently all the WordPress blogs on GoDaddy were down. At 11:45 am today, it came back up — almost 12 hours later. I haven't backed up the database since I created mitchster.com and that was all I was thinking about today. As soon as the site came back up, I downloaded it. So the lesson for all you bloggers... Find the database export function on your blog and get the file. It's just nice to have a current copy. This picture was taken a few years ago at Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. It seemed appropriate to how I am feeling right now. I was going to post about infrared photography today, but I'm going to wait until tomorrow. Now I am going to take a nap, or at least breath normally for a while. Thanks again to all of you that emailed me about it and commiserated. It's very nice when you are in crisis to know others are thinking of you. P.S. Mom called, no post, something must be wrong. Now I know why she hasn't called lately to see if I'm still kicking. Years ago she gave me a little sign that I put in my kitchen that says, "Mom worries." Now I know my blog as another purpose I didn't know about.

4

Ice Houses on Mille Lacs

This is the Minnesota equivalent of project housing. Yes, the movie Grumpy Old Men was not making it up. They actually go live in shacks on the ice and fish. These are owned by Eddy's Resort on Lake Mille Lacs in central Minnesota. Anyhow, I took this on the infamous trip up to Grandma's house on the Saturday before Christmas. I have several pics of the houses out further on the lake, I might post them later on. These are big luxury ice houses, they are almost trailer-sized and if you look, you can see propane tanks on them. Yesterday's Theme day was a lot of fun, thanks for all the comments! I went through all 118 participating sites yesterday and it was quite impressive! It's fun to be apart of this amazing group. Let's get out there and record the new year!

38

Best Photo of the Year 2007

Happy New Year! Another year in the can (old school photography term). Thank you all for visiting and thank you to all the city photographers for such wonderful work! The picture above originally ran on October 21, it was taken at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. I was out with Carol Anne and her daughters. Carol Anne and I took Chris Marquart's four-day photography workshop together. After going through all my photos from this year I discovered that there aren't many people in my pictures. So one of the New Year's resolutions that I can actually keep is to try to include more fellow humans in my posts. If you aren't familiar with the Daily City Photo Blog, it's a portal for city photos from all around the world. They have themes every month and this month's theme is "the best photo of the year." Here are the top ten photos that I chose from. The theme for February is "When People Think of My City They Think of..." So if you have any ideas for Minneapolis, let me know. MOA, IDS, the Spoon, a mountain of snow, a broken & bottomed-out thermometer?