Little objects in big spaces ... and more from 2014 shoot at Indiana Dunes

While looking through photos on my iPhone's camera roll doing research for a personal project Friday, I stopped when I came upon the shots you see in today's post.

I took these along Lake Michigan at Indiana Dunes State Park in Long Beach, Ind., on Aug. 29, 2014, the night before the wedding of Lee Ann's daughter Mindy. I did a post at his blog on the wedding shoot -- still the only wedding I've shot as the hired photographer -- and incorporated three photos from the Friday night shoot into the assemblage of pictures in that post.

But there were others from Friday night that I didn't post, and those are the ones I stopped on while going through my phone camera roll ... and prompted me to pull together this post.

A couple of the shots made me think immediately of Jason M. Peterson, a Chicago photographer I recently started to follow on Instagram. Fortunately, I just found his website on the Internet and included the link to it in the previous sentence.

Jason specializes in black and white imagery, and the compositions of his that stick out in my mind -- because I've seen them on Instagram, not on his website -- juxtapose tiny silhouettes of people or objects in big spaces. An example is one of my shots leading off the post; I used a color version of this in the 2014 post, and the individual is Lee Ann's grandson, Justin.

But another example that I haven't presented before appears below, and in this case, I'll give you both the original color and a monochrome conversion. I like both, but I kind of lean toward the monochrome ... possibly because it's not something you'd be able to view live ... unless it were almost dark out. These were taken near dusk, but obviously, the sun was still high enough in the sky to provide the sundown amber hues you'd expect at the time of the day.

I did play a little bit with the above images in Photoshop Elements. Mostly I tried to minimize the burning highlight of the sunspot at the top. I succeeded a little, but the iPhone does not give you a lot of options to address things like at at the point of shot. But I was otherwise very impressed with the quality of images the iPhone gave me otherwise that night, and I'll get into that more a little lower in this post.

Next up below are two compositions of the sun hiding behind clouds. Again, I used Photoshop Elements to address the sun highlights, but otherwise, I did very little else to these.

Next up below are two shots I was very happy in getting with the iPhone to show the raindrops that began to fall as we started to make our way back to the house.

I finish with two pictures of the main reason we were on the beach that night. Mindy and her then-fiancee were hoping to integrate the elevation of flame-powered lanterns into the air as part of their ceremony the next day. The trip to the beach Friday night was to test the idea to see if it would work. Each of us was given a lantern to try and launch, and Justin's was the only one that made it into the air. Of course, the rainfall didn't help (if you see spots on the black lantern below, those are raindrops).

I used the first shot below in my 2014 post on the wedding, but Justin's successfully launched lantern in the second photo below is new to Photo Potpourri.

Revisiting 2008 shoot in Columbus, Ind.

 

Today's post is another in my periodic project to revisit photo shoots I did before launching this blog in December 2008.

Last November, I introduced Photo Potpourri readers to photos I took during a 2007 visit to Columbus, Wis., a town where I worked for a year editing a weekly newspaper not long after graduating college. That shoot occurred 14 months before I had launched this blog, so ... the photos were never presented in a post until I revisited them in November 2017 to do a fresh edit -- mostly to address the serious loss of detail in the darkened portions of scenes with serious light contrast.

As it turns out, less than a year after that trip to Wisconsin, I visited another Columbus -- in Indiana -- this time just four months before Photo Potpourri's launch, so those, too, never were presented in a blog post here. Today, I address that omission.

I'd heard about Columbus, Indiana's reputation for architecture long before I made it there in Aug. 30, 2008. Unfortunately, for various reasons, I didn't get there until late in the afternoon, but after grabbing a bite to eat at a place in the downtown area, there was a little daylight remaining to stroll around the downtown area and take in some of the architecture I'd heard about.

But the attraction that left the most lasting impression on me wasn't a building at all. It was the 25 forty-foot-tall limestone pillars positioned in a 5'x5' grid to comprise the Bartholomew County Veterans Memorial. The memorial, designed by Maryann Thompson Architects in 1997, sits on the Bartholomew County Courthouse lawn bounded by Jackson, Washington, 2nd and 3rd streets. Etched into each of the pillars are excerpts of diaries or last letters home to families of Bartholomew County soldiers.

A couple images of the memorial are featured in the photo leading off the post and first three below. The lead-off and first below were taken in a backlight situation, the sundown lighting casting amber hues on the pillars. I was catching the full sunlight off the pillars in the second image below. The third below was an attempt to amplify the height of the pillars, focusing directly skyward from the bottom of one of them. Below those images are two examples of the etchings in the pillars.

As always, to view a larger and (hopefully) sharper version of an image, simply click on the image. To view a full gallery of the shoot from my visit to Columbus, Ind., click on the link in this sentence.

Photo geek stuff: I shot everything in this post with my Canon 30D equipped with a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 lens.

Above and below: Different sections of the upper portion of the Bartholomew County Courthouse.

The volume of installation art in the area of the courthouse was striking. The installations above were near the courthouse lawn.  

Above: Most people seem to be familiar with the A-frame architecture on the Ind. 46 bridge entering Columbus from I-65. I would like to have spent more time exploring different photographic perspectives of the bridge, but I was losing light fast, and the bridge was several blocks from my car, so ... I grabbed what I could from afar.

There appeared to be a wedding and/or wedding reception on the eastern fringe of Mill Race Park the night I was there. That appears to be what was going on in the photo above, but I didn't want to get closer and intrude.

Above: Another piece of installation art in a media not far from the courthouse lawn and Mill Race Park. 

Above and below: Shots taken several blocks from the courthouse. As best I can remember, the photo below is a slice of the facade of Bartholomew County Public Library, but I'm not sure. By the time I reached this point, it was starting to get dark, and I was forced to using shutter speeds slower than I would have liked. I'm sure, using my Canon 30D, I was pushing my ISO to 800, which was not far from its maximum.

Above and below: Two shots from the commercial district near the courthouse.

Above: The top portion of yet another piece of installation art, near Mill Race Park, as best as I can remember.

A varied collection, er, potpourri of photos

Today's post is another that helps explain why I picked the name of this blog. I'm pleased to present a montage, er, a cornucopia, er, a collection ... er, ah ... a potpourri of photographs, this one encompassing a grasshopper, some crepe myrtle trees, tomatoes and a cucumber and crepe myrtle foliage.

My lawnmower is on the fritz (hopefully temporarily; I'm waiting for some replacement parts to arrive that hopefully will get it back to working order soon), so I hired a high school youth to do the mowing yesterday.

While the young man worked, Lee Ann and I were lingering on the backyard deck, and she noticed a grasshopper anchored on one of the ledges of the deck in the back of the house. Of course, I didn't have my camera with me. In fact, I had the camera up in the office -- out of the bag and ready to shoot -- because I've been hoping to see a couple of colorful birds -- cardinals and an oriole -- return to the sun room roof.

I dashed into the house, ran up the stairs to the office and grabbed my camera (Canon 6D fixed with my Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L lens and 1.4x adapter) then ran back to the deck. To my surprise, the grasshopper was still there. So ... I began shooting away.

My first several shots were taken using f/4, the widest available on the lens with the 1.4x adapter attached. Hence, I was noticing I wasn't getting much clarity or sharpness beyond the insect's head. The photo leading off the post is one of those pictures. I then moved to a different angle and stopped down to f/7.1, getting deeper sharpness and detail as you can tell in the photo immediately below.

I hadn't shot with the 70-200mm lens for a while, and I didn't want to stop just yet. So after photographing the grasshopper, I strolled over to the raised garden beds and took some shots of the tomatoes and a cucumber (the tomatoes are still thriving; the cucumbers seem to be ebbing). Those photos appear immediately below.

Yeah, nothing really super spectacular there, but ... I hadn't presented any garden shots in the blog lately, so now I have that base covered.

After a few minutes taking those pictures, I noticed the bright red blooms on a red crepe myrtle tree -- not the pink-petaled one that I see from my my office window -- and captured some frames of it as well as the lilac-colored blooms on another bush nearby. I don't know the species of the bush, but I will note that 15 or so years ago, one of the original owners of this property made a point to landscape his yard with a very diverse amount and number of plants, bushes and trees ... to the point that there's almost something in bloom every season of the year. The pictures of the crepe myrtle and lilac-colored bloom appear immediately below.

I conclude this post below with a solitary shot I took three days ago from my office window, looking at the foliage on the aforementioned pink-petaled crepe myrtle tree. I wasn't focusing on the petals here, although you can see some of the dropped ones sprinkled amid the dappled sunlight on the rooftop. I simply was admiring the foliage.

A bookstore's children's section can be a photographer's delight

Have you ever studied the layout of a children's section in a retail shop? Many of us no doubt dawdled for as long as we could in toy sections of department stores when we were kids ourselves, but we were too young to stop and consider why things were positioned the way they were. We were so much in awe and in fantasyland, it really didn't matter.

But how about as an adult? Have you studied the toy section layouts to appreciate why everything was placed and displayed the way it was? Have you stopped to take in the bright colors? Or the arrangements of "like" objects (i.e., stuffed dolls, games, books, trucks and cars, etc.)? The location of decorations (up high, down low, eye level) and considered what age child those placements were aimed at?

I was in the child's area of a bookstore on Saturday, when Lee Ann and I went to meet her son and their family, including Lee Ann's 3-year-old granddaughter Elizabeth. We spent a good amount of time in that child's area on a day that was devoted to a Harry Potter book party. I've never read a Harry Potter book or seen any of the movies, but Elizabeth's mother is a huge fan, and back in Indianapolis, my oldest son and his son and my oldest daughter and her children are Potter fanatics.

The questions I posed above didn't occur to me until we had been hanging out in the child's area for at least 15 minutes. At that point, an adult's attention begins to stray, which happened to me. And I started noticing the toy arrangements, the extraordinary bright colors, the displays dangling from above -- well beyond even a tall adult's reach.

I couldn't help but wonder whether the store was trying to immerse children in a visual kalaidescope ... and, of course, use it to keep them wanting to stay longer and, thus, increase the odds of parents purchasing something for their child -- even if only as a means to get them out of the store more quickly!

Considering that this was a Harry Potter book event, I might have expected an inundation of Potter-related merchandise. But by the time we got there (which was well after any of the scheduled special events), the children's area seemed pretty tame ... and not Potter-heavy.

Still, I did find lots of things to photograph. Considering I did not go there planning to take pictures, all of the images in this post were taken with the camera on my iPhone X. As always, to view a larger, sharper version of a photo, simply click on that image. To view a full gallery of images from the shoot, follow the link in this sentence.

I eyeballed the above and below as possible pickups on a future visit to get for one my grandchildren for Christmas. 

My 4-year-old grandson Maddox, who lives in the Chicago area, enjoys playing with Legos, so I checked out the above and below for more ideas on future Christmas or birthday presents.

Above and next seven below: Examples of the elevated displays, many of them featuring characters from Dr. Seuss and Winnie the Pooh stories.

Above: A perspective shot of one slice of the bookstore's children's section.

Above and next three below: Examples of stuffed animals. 

Above: My 4-year-old grandson also is crazy about trains and railroad tracks. I was imagining how he would immersed himself in this easy-access display.