Today was a big day for astronomers. It marked the last transit of Venus until 2117. In Rockford, the Rockford Amateur Astronomers gathered at Lockwood Park to share their high powered telescopes with the public for a safe viewing of the event. One astronomer helped me get a better view by guiding my lens up to the eye piece of his four inch refracting telescope. I couldn’t hold still enough to view the whole sun through my lens but I […]
There was a lot of discussion online of the partial solar eclipse that was (maybe) going to appear over the Midwest this evening. Local meteorologists said that it would be visible at sunset approximately between 7:15 and 8:15 tonight. Naturally, I decided at about 6:50 to take a stab at photographing it. It was uncertain if the skies in Rockford would be clear enough to see the eclipse. A band of clouds was moving into the area. Also, since the […]
It wasn’t that long ago that we all laughed at the idea of cameras built into phones. They were low resolution and hideous quality. The picture of your grandmother in the backyard looked more like a blurry shot of Big Foot running through the brush. Even with that said, phones with cameras were treated and sold like luxury items. Pretty quickly, it seemed that it became difficult to buy a phone without a camera. I had one on mine for […]
With my pathetic jump shot, I never thought I’d have an “old basketball injury.” Little did I know that mine would come with a camera in my hands. It was March 10 and I was in Peoria at the Civic Center covering the third place game between Rockford Lutheran and Seaton Academy. Adrenaline was high. I, along with the players and fans, was excited to be there. State tournaments usually have more strict rules about where photographers can be. I imagine this […]
If you’ve spent any time around me while I’m looking at my work, you know I’m a self loathing photographer. It’s rare that I get excited about making an image. I usually see all the flaws in my work. Recently, I’ve made a few frames that I enjoyed. There was something that made them stand out to me. And for the most part, the flaws that I saw were tolerable. The first was a basketball portrait. The player, Hunter Hill of […]