On the rocks

Yesterday’s post got a cool pingback from a blog telling the sad tale of a happy visitor to our fair city who, on a magical trip into the windy city for a show, stopped by the river of ice chunks (which she gave the sublime sobriquet “Shard Mosiac”) and … forgot her memory card. She was kind enough to use the photograph I shared on tWp yesterday and a few others from around Flickr to blog about the experience – check out yesterday’s comments section to see the post.

Speaking of blogs, I wanted to take a second to recommend my brother’s cooking blog called Garrett’s Table. Those of you who follow me on twitter @thewindypixel, will have seen that I’ve sent out a tweet now and then about the food photography Mike and I do for him (check his website to see these images as well as the recipes for VERY unusual and interesting dishes). If you are a twitter fan and you are into the food/chef/blog/deliciousness thing – check out Garrett’s twitter feed @garretts_table and subscribe to his free newsletter via his blog. He uses new technology and unusual techniques to deconstruct and reconstitute old flavors into new textures and new experiences – and anybody who can get Mike Boehmer to eat pancreas and thymus must be doing something right. I’m hoping to plug a few of my favorite blogs (and not all of them will be family members’ blogs ) now and then on these pages, I look long and hard for interesting things on photography and science to read and I’ve slowly amassed a list of quality blogs. I hope you’ll all like them too!

I had spent a few moments down along the river bank myself in the hour proceeding my trip to the top of the Trib Tower. I was partially inspired by the aforementioned blog post to go ahead and process a photograph from that trip and share it here today. It is to my great chagrin that the lake does not freeze as readily as the Chicago River. Turbulent shoreline waters and temps at or around freezing have meant a big thaw for the Lake as of late. Perhaps its continual cooling over the end of January and a fortuitous cold snap will mean I’ll have another chance at some frozen lake magic in the future. Lucky we are for the rapid and striking freezing of the Chicago River. Mike posted an awesome photograph of this river cocktail back in March on one of the first tWp posts. Mike’s photograph was taken in the hours after sunrise beneath the Columbus Street Bridge, this one was taken in the hours before sunset underneath the Michigan Avenue Bridge. I love the contrast in the apparent size and texture of the river between yesterday and today’s post. (I’ve begun to post more and more of the vertical photographs really, really large – I like the experience of scrolling through the image even though I can’t see the whole thing on one screen – what do you guys think?)

Prints available.

Photo by Justin Kern – Feel free to use images with links and credit – no commercial use without permission.