Tall Ships Festival - 8.28.10 - Post 6 (Shipboard Life)

Okay, last post about the ships.

Boom Today, Boom Tomorrow

This is a 32-pound cannon.  Which means that it can fire a 32-pound cannonball.  The cannon itself weighs, literally, tons more.  While I was on the next ship over they fired a 'blank' from this cannon.  The charge they set off was 2 pounds of gunpowder.  I was a whole ship (roughly 100 yards) away from this and the sound was deafening.  I cannot imagine how anyone who actually served during wartime on a vessel like this had *any* useful hearing left after a couple of battles.

Guiding the Ship

This is the figurehead of the Bounty. There was a sign out in front of the ship that explained that the figureheads looked good and brought good luck and all that, but they had another more important purpose.  Illiterate sailors would identify their ships by the figurehead since they couldn't actually read the names on the sides of the hull.  It gave me flashbacks to when I was a kid and our school buses had Disney figures on the side of the bus.  That way little kids who didn't know their numbers yet would get on the right bus.  Most of my life I was on bus 54 - Cinderella.  But occasionally I was on 36 - Dumbo.  I'm going to be 38 years old at the end of this month, so I guess the fact that I can remember that more than 25 years later is proof that it works. :)

Lighting the Way

Three lanterns.  I was always a little freaked out by the idea of lighting a fire on a wooden ship.  These are in glass cases, but still...

Mind the Gap

A shot down the very deep stairs.  Some ships had the below decks open, others didn't.

Very, Very Low Clearance

This one did, obviously.  This is the crew's sleeping quarters.  Those bags are their personal belongings.  That's all they get to bring for the duration of the trip.  This is a rare self-portrait (done with a tripod and timer), as I'd much rather be behind the camera than in front of it.  But I did it this time to illustrate a point.  I'm 4 foot 10 and I couldn't stand up straight.  I'm guessing the headroom was about 4 feet.  It wasn't too bad for me, but can you imagine being, say, a six-foot tall guy?  If you look to the right of my head, there are two little white marks on the rail at the ceiling.  One is the place for one crew member to hang the foot end of his cot (hammock) and the other is where the next person over puts the head end of his.  Sometimes people could be so crammed in they only had fifteen inches across to sleep.  I'm 4 foot 10 and my shoulders are about 15 or 16 inches across when I lay on my back.  Talk about living in a sardine can.

That's a LONG Way Up

One last shot of the ropes, sails and rigging.  That's a LONG way up.  These days people climbing up to fix things wear a harness, but back in the day they didn't.  Think about climbing up to fix that top sail while that boat is out at sea.  I'm not usually someone who's afraid of heights, but I'm not sure I'd be so quick to volunteer for that duty!

Growing Up Pierside

And for something totally random... a juvenile male red-winged blackbird who's starting to go from brown to black and get his red shoulder patches in.  He was eating popcorn tossed to him by a couple of kids and he's got crumbs on his beak.  :)







Okay!  That's it for the ships.  Next?  Fireworks. :)

Saganashkee Slough - 8.25.10 - Post 1

So it was another "Google Roulette" shoot. I Google my area and see if I can't find a place that looking interesting. This time I put in "Cook County" and got the website for the Cook County Forest Preserve. So I plunked around for a while and decided on Saganashkee Slough. Now, I'm not sure what the difference is between a slough and a pond, but basically, it was a big pond, maybe a small lake.

There isn't much online about this place. Including an address I can actually feed into my GPS. If you fish, there's some data, but otherwise not much.

The one site I did find was all "OMG ducks! 17 different kinds of ducks in one day!" Me? I didn't see one duck. Canadian Geese, sure (but I am so over them) and a couple of herons, and some gulls I need to Google, but not one duck.

Now, like I said, the directions to this place are a bit sketchy.  I basically went to 107th and Willow Brook Road in Palos Park and drove until I found it.  The FPDCC owns a lot of land out that way.  For reasons I don't understand, about every six square feet of forest preserve gets it's own name.  If you drive up the street, the parking lot on the left leads to one named woods, the the parking lot on the left will take you to some meadow.  Drive another half a mile and now you're at Some Other Woods on the right and A Different Woods on the left.  Very odd.  But it makes finding the places that aren't so well mapped a little harder.

When I finally found a sign that said Saganashkee Slough, I stopped at that parking lot, where people were basically fishing from their tailgates and trunks. There was a path into the woods off to the left, but there was a rope across it and it said "Closed".   I couldn't see a good reason for it to be closed so I hiked up about a quarter of a mile and turned back. I couldn't see a good reason to keep going through woods where the only wildlife was massive swarms of huge mosquitoes. And after The Obnoxious, Unending Tick Incident that still isn't over, I don't want to tempt West Nile disease. Because these suckers? Very unimpressed with the repellent I bought on my way out today.

Speaking of the Unending Tick Incident... I've apparently hit some kind of critical mass in the antibiotics they gave me.  I was told they might make me "a little photosensitive", but when I was out today, direct, unfiltered sunlight actually HURT.  I mean, this has to be what being a vampire feels like!  In the shadows, fine; step into the sun and my hands started to burn.  I'm going to be ridiculously glad to get off these stupid meds.

So I got in the car and drove up to the next parking lot. More people fishing, and talking and generally being annoying, no paths and no easy access to the water.

So I got back in the car and drove to yet another parking lot. If you decide to head out to this place, this is where you want to go. It's on 107th Street and is listed as the Boat Launch. Which, you know, is because it has a boat launch.  There were no boaters today, just some people fishing off the pier.

At first I was pretty disappointed. I could get to the water periodically, but I wasn't seeing much. I did get one frog and a few butterflies. I went into the Savannah area for a bit and got some butterflies and grasshoppers, but there was nothing there that I couldn't get at the Chicago Ponds.

But the path (which is to the right of the parking lot, when you're facing the water) was open, so I started walking around the pond. This path is clearly maintained, but it's done badly.  They cut down the trees that have started growing between the rocks, but they leave about six inches of wood sticking up out of the ground.  And they don't get to these trees until they stumps are about three inches across, so they aren't little avoidable things.  I don't know about everyone else, but when I'm shooting, I'm not concentrating on where I'm putting my feet.  So a number of these things caused me near-collisions with either the ground or lake below me.

What I saw, but couldn't shoot:
• A pair of male and female green hummingbirds. I'm so disappointed that I didn't even get a *bad* picture of these things. But if you know hummingbirds, you know how fast they are.
• A falcon or eagle. Some large bird of prey. I could hear it at all three stops, and I saw it at the first stop, but it always stayed too far away to get it "on film".
• A water snake. As I was walking around the edge of the pond I heard a splash and saw a snake slither along the 'coast', duck under and slither across some more. I didn't even know Illinois HAD snakes that could swim!

These are the things that make me think that going back to this place wouldn't be a total waste of time, but overall, I'd give the place a C+ for now.  Maybe during migratory season it'll be more interesting.

I did manage to get some good shots.

For me the big thing that makes a trip a success is finding something new.  A new species or variant or something.

Today I found...

Green Bee, Purple Flower

A Green Bee.  Kind of like the Green Frog, it's just called "Green Bee" - it's the species, not just being descriptive.  From what I've found online, basically they're a species of sweatbee.

Green Bee, Purple Flower II

Here she is a little closer.  This is likely a female since her abdomen is darker than her head and thorax.

Little Red... I dunno What.

Here's a creepy little dude.  A grasshopper with a stinger?  Not really.  It's a species of long-horned grasshopper with an ovipositor.

All the Google in the world couldn't find me a species name.  Anyone have an idea?  She was pretty small and her wings are pretty underdeveloped, so it's possible that she's a juvenile.

Not So Common As They'd Have You Think

This is apparently a Common Whitetail Dragonfly.  Though, he's the second one I've seen and the tails always look more blue to me.  Just as I was about to write the whole trip off as a loss, this guy landed on the path right in front of me. :)

Text Book Perfect Pearl Crescent

Like Midewin, the Pearl Crescents were out in force.  I love this shot, you can actually see the stripes on his antennae.  And he was showing off his wings so very nicely for me.

Lone Bird

There weren't many birds sitting where I could catch them.  There were herons on the banks *way* far away from me and the hawk overhead, but here a female Red Winged Black Bird sat and posed for a minute.

Big Bee on Row of Little

I love this shot.  This is probably the closest, clearest, largest shot I've gotten of a bee.  I love how you can see his legs between the flowers and how he seems to be holding on with his antennae.

Stamens Throw Shadows

The chicory flowers are starting to wither.  But This one still had very prominent stamens that were giving some great shadows today.

Thistle Starts to Seed

Bull Thistles are starting to go to seed.  Oddly this plant's higher blossoms had dried already and the little fuzzy seeds were starting to blow away, while this lower flower was still in bloom.

Two Prickly Characters

And while they're blooming, the bees are still visiting.










More pictures tomorrow.  And less rambling narrative. :)

Chicago Botanic Garden - 7.25.10 (2/2)

Okay, I thought it was odd that I'd only found ten shots from my last CBG trip that were good enough to post. So I went through the folder again. I had *edited* ten, but there were more. So here they are. :)

What made me think of it was these two shots. I knew I had some good rainbow shots and yet, I didn't have a 'rainbow' tag in my 'labels'. So I knew I'd forgotten to post something.

The color saturation here isn't so great, but I've never seen an almost perfectly horizontal rainbow before.

[Horizontal Rainbow]

This one was taken with a *just* slightly faster shutter (1/1000 here, 1/800 above), and a bit longer of a focal length and the color saturation was much better. Obviously I also changed position (the fountain was in the middle of a pond I was walking around), and the different angle helped as well.
[Fountain Rainbow]

So after about two months of searching the internet, I've discovered that this is a female red-winged blackbird. She was being highly cooperative from her perch on a purple coneflower.

[Not So Black Blackbird]

She even shifted to give me a very nice profile.

But there is some seriously weird stuff going on on that Y chromosome to make this bird (female)...
[Female Red Winged Blackbird on Coneflower]

... look like this bird (male of the same species.) (This shot from the North Pond)

I so adore this shot of a GIGANTIC green dragonfly. Not because he's so huge or so still, but because if you look at it closely, the light is coming in just right that you can see the *shadows* of his wing veins on the lilypad.

[Veins in Shadow]

Business end of a yellow-jacket. I spent about forty minutes chasing yellow-jackets around a pond trying to get just the right shot for the book I was working on for my nephew. (More on this later, in its own post, but the short version is, I made my nephew an alphabet animal book using only pictures I took myself. And I needed a good shot for Y. :) [Business end of a Yellow-Jacket]

This ended up being the shot I used. Clear shot of his wings, you can see how his thorax and abdomen are a.) not fuzzy and b.) very disjointed - which is how you know he's a wasp, not a bee. And check out those huge eyes.

[Yellow-Jacket Species Model]

I love these, but I somehow managed to forget to shoot the sign. I think they're a form of violet. Anyone have a clue?

[Perky Purples]

Another one I forgot to get the sign for. Looks like a pink fried egg. :)

[Pink Fried Egg Flower]








Okay, NOW I think that trip is done. :) What do you think?

Chicago Done Naturally (Post 2 of 10) - The Magic Hedge

Okay, this is my favorite secret Chicago shooting spot. I lived in my apartment at Montrose and the lake for seven years before I discovered this place – and I could walk to it if I wanted to.





To get there, you drive down Montrose heading east (or take the Montrose bus to the Montrose Beach - it only goes that far east during the summer, though). Cross Lake Shore Drive and keep going all the way to the harbor. When you get to a curve in the road with a road on the right, take the right. (Montrose is one side of the top of a Y, it becomes Simmons which is the other side of the top of the Y, you want the street that becomes the bottom of the Y, which really doesn’t have a name.)

Drive around the curve until you see a whole lot of trees and a couple of signs announcing “The Montrose Harbor Bird Sanctuary”. Otherwise known as “The Magic Hedge.”

Quick history: The army built a barracks here back in the day. They put in honeysuckle bushes to give a little privacy to the bottom floor of the barracks. Eventually they left, the buildings came down, but the honeysuckle hedge remained.

Now over 300 different bird species are spotted here each year. Obviously not all at once or anything, but there are more birds than you can point a camera at. I’ve seen robins, cardinals, thrushes, some little yellow thing I still can’t identify, grackles, gulls and others. There’s also a load of squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits. I haven’t seen them yet – I’m guessing it’ll be June before they arrive – but they’ve also got up signs indicating the hedge is a butterfly spotting point.

Oh, it’s also famous for something else – a place to pick up a prostitute. The websites will tell you that since they put up fences around most of the stands of trees, that that’s been curtailed, but I’ve seen evidence that it’s not terribly true. ;) So, yeah, it's gorgeous during the day, but I'd head home around nightfall.

You’ll see other photographers out there no matter when you go. There aren’t a lot of kids and the bird watchers and high school couples you do see are pretty quiet, so it’s a nice quiet place to shoot. These are very wild birds though and will take off at the slightest noise. A good telephoto is your friend.


To hit:
Go as far east as you can through the trees and you’ll eventually reach the lake. You get a pretty awesome view of downtown from there. (This was clearly taken on a very hazy day.)



To miss:
Watch the ground. If it’s not the aforementioned prostitutes, someone’s still having a good time out there. This is probably the tamest evidence of that activity that I've found...