Art of the Blizzard

From mid-afternoon yesterday until noon today, the Chicago suburbs were in the midst of the biggest blizzard we have seen in a while. The breadth and intensity of the snow, deep enough to be the third largest snowfall in Chicago history, were heightened by the chill and the gusty wind to send most folks home. Fire in the fireplace, we outlasted four or five brief power outages and woke up this morning to more than 20" of snow. Here are three artistic scenes, two of snowbanks and one of the snow trapped between a window and a screen in our living room.

Riding the Rails

Still escaping from the blizzard with one more view from the Union Pacific, focusing on the wheel truck. The other image is from a Milwaukee Road company car.

Union Pacific

The classic Electromotive diesel engine in the powerful UP markings. This is a greatly preserved unit.

On the Railroad

In honor of the fact that I am a bit tired of looking out the window and seeing winter, I looked up some railroad photos to look at this week. Maybe it will take the imagination on a trip away from winter snow of Chicago.

SUNDAY POSTER

A friend of mine, Ernie Klapmeier, invited me to a Revolutionary War encampment. It was a wonderful sunny day in September 2009, and I had the chance to shoot several battle scenes. Here he is, red coat and all, surrounded by the smoke and noise of war, with of all things a Chinese proverb.

Coldstream Guards

All the television talk about the upcoming British royal marriage sent me back into the archives for a look at these guards, during a changing ceremony at Windsor Castle, 2009.

Cartoon Effect

In the previous post I included two sunset photos that had been processed with a posterize filter into well-developed color effects. Later, I applied the same process to several portraits, but the posterization did not work so well. The layering of the colors took apart the definition of the face and the body into more of an abstract. Further experimentation took me to the Comics filter, and I like this effect. A recent photo of me on a cruise shows the Comic effect, and the shot of Marilyn, my wife, visiting one of the Bridges of Madison County, turned out even better. That one, as you can see, is more landscape than portrait.