Category: travel

Taliesin, Spring Green

A few weeks ago we took a trip up to Spring Green to see both the American Players Theatre and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, his home in Wisconsin and on 800 acres he used as a place to teach his architecture students. It is currently 400 acres in the Taliesin Preservation Trust. The home is the third one Wright built as the two previous ones burned down. You can only visit the grounds and structures, of which there are many, in a tour group, so photography is limited in time as you stroll through and hear the history of the place. The photo’s are all shot during a tour using my iPhone.

Being someone who thought about becoming an architect and then starting my career in photography as an architectural photographer I have an admiration for many of Wright’s designs. Although he was clearly not good on the structural side of design. I love his prairie style with it’s overhangs and lots of windows. One interesting thing he did being only 5’ 5” tall was make short ceilings, especially when entering a room though a hallway or changing spaces within a room. His thought was it makes you want to move into the bigger space, often with vaulted ceilings.

On the house tour you also see what used to be a barn and is now used as apartments for those who studied under Wright and still live on the property as well as staff.

It is a trip worth doing if you like architecture! Enjoy the images.

Cheers,

Richard


Grosse Point Lighthouse Documentary

While we are still filming and editing the documentary The Sweetwater Seas – North America’s Great Lakes, we were asked by the Lighthouse Park District in Evanston to produce a short introductory film about the Grosse Point Lighthouse.

Because we live in Evanston and grew up on Lighthouse Beach, we were delighted to take on this project and help people know this amazing National Landmark. In these times of Covid-19, the Grosse Point Lighthouse has been closed to visitors, as is the case with all lighthouses on the Great Lakes. This film will inform people about the history of the lighthouse, show you portions of its interior and aerial views that not even the visitors get to enjoy.

Don Terras, the Director of Lighthouse Park District, gives us a great history of why it was built at Grosse Point, what the lighthouse keepers did and more.

Because we are just one mile from the landmark, Grosse Point Lighthouse and its adjacent beach has been one of the locations we have used extensively for filming, from shooting the weather in every season, sunsets, moonrises and more, to testing equipment.

We hope you enjoy this short film about the Grosse Point Lighthouse.

Cheers,

Richard


Chicago Skyline Time-lapse

I did my first real test of the of the “holy grail” of time-lapse where you go from daylight to night-time (or the reverse). I used the Timelapse+ VIEW intervalometer and software plugin for Lightroom CC to handle the exposure changes. I did this from the Montrose Harbor area looking down to Chicago, an iconic view of this beautiful city. We started the exposures at 6:40pm and finished 2 hours and 44 minutes later at 9:24pm. This gave us just under a minute of video from the 1,408 images shot. For those interested it was shot with the Canon Mark 5d IV with the 24-105 lens set at F/11. The ISO started at 100 and ended at ISO 8000. The shutter speed started at 1/80 of a second and ended with an exposure of 4.0 seconds. A total of 14.5 stops! Timelapse+ VIEW was setup to change the shutter speed first and then the ISO. Timelapse+ VIEW Intervalometer will automate night to day time-lapse using a light sensor and advanced algorithms. This system worked really well and once you take it into Lightroom in post processing the plugin finds the keyframes which you can use to do the initial processing in Lightroom Development window to make any exposure / color corrections you require. The software then makes these corrections for the entire selection in subtle increments so you have a finished piece with smooth transitions for a beautiful time-lapse.

Now one thing I know I will try next time is starting with at least a 1 second exposure to make the water smoother throughout the time-lapse. I would also go longer into the nighttime view to give a little more room in editing to be able to use a longer nighttime scene.

This Timelapse+ VIEW intervalometer and what we will be able to do with it will be a great addition to The Sweetwater Seas – North America’s Great Lakes documentary! It will be in the equipment bags for every shoot from now on! Can’t wait to get outside along  the Great Lakes and do some day to night with the Milky Way winding its way across the screen, and maybe even back to daylight.

Enjoy,

Richard

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Happy 100th Birthday Grand Canyon National Park!

Today marks the 100th Birthday of Grand Canyon National Park! It has been 19 years since I was last at the Grand Canyon. As anyone knows who has seen this magical place it is awe inspiring when you see it for the very first time. Breathtaking, spectacular, unbelievable, remarkable, enormous, spiritual are just some of the words used to describe this place. I have only been to the South Rim nineteen years ago for New Year’s Day 2000 with the family. We enjoyed the momentous passing of the millennium sitting on the hood of the car (to stay a bit warmer) watching a starlit sky filled with more stars than the kids had ever seen before. It was a magical night knowing the passage of time was marked on the calendar, used by most of us today, by a millennium.

It is the second most visited national park (behind Great Smoky Mountains National Park – which yes I have a book on…) and because of these massive numbers of people at the park, it faces challenges of over use, management of the Colorado River system that fails to adequately adopt strategies for the protection and restoration of native animals, as well as cultural resources and wildlife habitat, sound and air pollution, mining just outside the park, and yes the effects of climate change are already apparent in the park.

I have not been to the north rim or even down below the rim more than a few hundred yards. It is on my list of things to do, along with visiting some of the Native American sites along the canyon. Here are four images from my last trip there for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s sunrise back on Jan 1, 2000. Yes, before digital.

Enjoy,

Richard