Yesterday I had the opportunity to shoot from a friends condo in the Streeterville neighborhood. If you’re not familiar with this area, its boundaries are the river on the south, Michigan Ave on the west and Lake Michigan on the east and north ends. If you’ve ever visited the city and walked from Michigan Ave to Navy Pier, odds are you’ve walked through this neighborhood. It’s mostly condos and apartments, some hotels, Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH) and of course restaurants and bars.
So many of the buildings in this area are new since I moved here in 2000, I worked at NMH in their microbiology lab for a short time in 2001 and 2002 and SO much has changed since I was in that neighborhood daily.
It’s always great to photograph the city from a higher vantage point, I was able to shoot from the 31st and 13th floors. I was hoping to get some images for my Urban Quilt series but only managed one so-so shot for this. But it was so fun photographing some cityscapes again, it’s been a long time! And I loved seeing Navy Pier’s Ferris Wheel peeking between some of the buildings closer to the lake.
These first two images are more typical of how I shoot and process most of my images.

But then I was shooting a little wider and trying to take advantage of the city view in a more general way. Clearly I’ve shot cityscapes before and these would certainly fall more into that category, even though I rarely keep things in color, these just worked best this way.

These last two images are probably my favorites from the day. I seem to waver between two extremes in what I like regarding post processing or mood in imagery. Most of what I do is fairly straightforward, clean lines with a sharpness to it. But I so love the moodier imagery where there’s a softness and less-than-perfect focus or cleanliness to the image. The pinhole preset in Nik Silver Efex Pro offers a fun take on my typical sharp processing. Not that there isn’t mood in both methods of processing but each conveys different emotions…don’t you think?