More photography here.
Partly cloudy in the Windy City:
Feeling reflective at our park:
Fishing class with the five year old:
First time downtown with the lads:
Enjoying the hotel room balcony at Timber Ridge Lodge:
Burgundy boy blending in with the fallen leaves:
More photography here.
Scenes from some time in Michigan with extended family…
Gas station architecture:
Boatin’:
Cousins dancing to the sunset (also a perfect album cover for their future band):
Happened to catch the sunset reflected near the five year old:
Early morning dune summit:
In between teaching the five year old how to play and then letting him beat me, I absolutely smoked him in a game I’ve played since elementary school:
Some pre-dinner heckling of the granddads on the grill (notice the thumbs-down in the middle lol):
We’ve encountered more interesting bugs while out and about since doing this last September, so I figured I’d turn this into yet another of my recurring features with its own tag.
Here’s a midge:
And a (much smaller in real life) ground crab spider:
And a yellow woolly bear moth:
And an alder spittlebug:
And a juniper (or jade) stink bug:
And a white plume moth:
And a painted lichen moth:
More photography here.
Shadow play:
The tunnel into Brookfield Zoo:
Garbage Day is appointment viewing:
Barking up the front yard tree:
Puddle hunting:
More photography here.
Lots of red admiral butterflies in our backyard:
A goose family at our local park:
A toad tromping through our backyard:
The Great Cicadapocalypse has begun here in Illinois, and here’s one of many molting cicadas on our maple tree:
Our lilac bush is so vibrant for such a short time:
A marigold in our backyard garden area:
More photography here.
Back before winter melted into an unseasonably warm February, we got to enjoy some idyllic snowfall:
A boy beholding his world:
A foggy commute:
Shadows and hallways:
Laying down in the backyard with the 5 year old let us spot this view of a fading contrail:
Back in early 2011 I produced a photo documentary of the student-directed stage musical production of The Wedding Singer at North Central College, where I’d graduated the year before.
I set up shop on Tumblr and documented the behind-the-scenes process over the 10-week period. It was fun to watch the show come together from the first rehearsal to the final bow, and I ended up with a nice audiovisual project for my portfolio.
But when I saw the news that Tumblr was being left out to pasture, I wanted to find a new home for this project. So I created a fresh WordPress blog, transferred the posts and photos from Tumblr, cleaned them up a bit, and voilà:
nccweddingsinger.wordpress.com
It was fun to relive this journey as I set up its new digital home. I’m really proud of the shots I was able to get and the journalistic storytelling as a whole, which included cast/crew interviews alongside the day-to-day dispatches.
Read it for yourself. I set up the posts chronologically, so you can start at the homepage and go from there.
More photography here and on my Instagram.
When you go into an elevator and look up to see this face of doom:
The skyward view outside my workplace:
Caught this partially melted ice cube on a countertop:
Why save your Halloween costume for a few hours on one day when you can wear it all the time around town and look like a superhero:
View from a bridge at a mini golf outing:
Autumn is upon us:
This summer I managed to snap pics of a few cool and colorful critters spotted around our yard and house. And thanks to my phone’s aforementioned Visual Look Up, I actually know what they are.
Here’s an ailanthus webworm moth:
And a two-striped grasshopper:
And a grapevine beetle:
And some kind of mantis (species unknown):
And a southern sickle bush-cricket or katydid:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
Spotted these two lights reflecting off the Whole Foods cafe counter, the rainbow from outside and the fluorescent light from above:
Investigating a hail storm from our porch:
Tunnel vision at the children’s museum:
It’s a shame our neighbors live in a bubble:
Baseball diamond? Nah—giant sandbox:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
My wife and son heart-bombed my car for Valentine’s Day while I was at work:
I’ve never tasted or seen Romanesco broccoli but it looks super cool:
He’s been using his new training-wheels bike a lot:
Some colorful stairs in Woodstock, Illinois:
Our friends built a mini sledding hill in their front yard and brought out the lights once it started getting dark to keep the party going:
Sun shade at a local park:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
A sunbeamed leaf as seen through our car windshield:
The yin and yang of a backyard bonfire remnant:
At work in his corner office:
Cloudy with a chance of a refill:
The bubbles are back, and they’re multiplying:
Mr. 3 Year Old is eager to shovel at the slightest dusting so we’re out there even while it’s still snowing. This results in what I call snombré (snow + ombré), where the freshly shoveled blends smoothly into the re-covered areas:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
The view of the capitol building in Madison from the Madison Children’s Museum rooftop:
Mr. 3 Year Old and his cousin on the slide at the Madison zoo:
Stumbled upon this view atop a slide at a nearby suburban park:
Ascending a magically wooded tunnel of stairs adjacent to a sledding hill at another nearby park:
More stairs, this time at the DuPage Children’s Museum:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
Watching and waiting:
Really proud of capturing this absolutely perfect arc between the moon, basketball, hoop, and sun:
The 3 year old and his cousin tearing it up in Michigan:
Sandy sunset shadows:
Sure, sunset photos are cliché, but damned if I care:
Like I said:
More photography here and on my Instagram.
Into the tundra:
A ghostly window creature:
3 year old was “helping” me clean out the car on a warmer day by “fixing” a headrest with a wrench, but all you can really see is the reflection of the sun and clouds in the rear window:
Among the pines:
Stumbled upon this view (while walking on a bike path under a bridge), in which the sunlight hitting the dirty creek water formed an X-ceptional angle:
More shapely, shadowy scenes on aforementioned walk:
We celebrated Little Man’s third birthday this week (well, fourth if you count his actual day of birth). While looking through my photos of him I noticed a motif of capturing him from behind as he ventures forth at varying speeds.
I like this vantage point for a few reasons. Since we don’t post his name or face on the internet it’s a convenient angle for sharing. But it’s also an accurate representation of me watching him discover his world over and over again.
Most of the above shots are from very familiar places: our backyard, our local park, our regular family getaway spot. For me as a jaded adult visiting them can get monotonous, but there’s really no such thing to a toddler. Everything can be new and adventurous no matter how many times he’s encountered it.
That’s why I consider it a privilege to follow him into his great daily unknown. All I can do is hope to continue capturing these views, fleeting as they are.
While going through my library’s bevy of old staff and event photos, I encountered lots of what used to be commonplace but are now practically ancient artifacts: photo envelopes. Most of them were from the 1990s and early 2000s, which you can probably guess from the designs.
(See also: groovy ’70s library brochures.)
