Early Sunday Morning – Photography Practice

I have to admit that I have been a slacker with my photography, which sometimes isn’t the best thing when it comes to maintaining a blog! I like to keep things simple you know?

So this morning I decided to get up early with Jamba and drive into the city to see what would inspire me. My goal this holiday season is to get a picture of Jamba in a photo with one of our city’s landmarks.

I have a few spots in mind, one being this one below, which is out along the Museum Campus drive looking back towards the city. Unfortunately for me, I ran right into Bears game security and parking authority! Slap to the head! Doh!

I asked if I could just pull over and take a picture and they said sure, after all it was still only 6:30am. Otherwise I’d have to wait until 9:00am and pay $45.00 to park. No thanks.

So really quickly I set up the camera and took this photo. I’m still trying to figure out why my camera defaults to a “soft” focus so this one is a little soft but I think it is promising for a future location…

Then I decided to drive over to Millennium Park and just check if I could park in the parking garage there. They were prepping for the Bears game as well so I decided to just say forget it when just two blocks North I noticed there were several cars parked along the street. What? I can park here? SCORE!!!!

So I parked along Michigan Avenue and walked back towards Millennium Park and our world famous ‘BEAN’ or ‘Cloudgate‘ as it is called. Jamba is still young, and I probably would not have been asked to leave, but I decided to just ask the Security if Jamba could get up close to the Bean with me but they were hemming and hawing and ‘yawn’ I don’t knowing until the security guard finally agreed that because he didn’t know the rules on ‘dogs in training’ he’d let me just go up to the platform but stay behind the benches.

Well, as you can see…it wasn’t working out for me. I had set up my camera timer and just couldn’t figure out how I was going to get a good shot. I am just bummed that I can’t put Jamba in front of the Bean and take a cool reflective photo of him.

Then I decided to enlist the help of some fellow photographers. We set up this next shot…

But it didn’t work out as I’d hoped, plus there’s a photographer in my scene!

So Jamba and I walked around the park looking for more inspiration. What about here, looking back towards the Bean?

Enh. I’m still not fulfilling my vision. And what’s up with Jamba’s vest? It’s hanging on him really weird…

Let’s keep walking…

This one is just okay…still not satisfied. Let’s keep going…

Whoa! Jamba! Let’s look at this through the viewfinder. Jamba, wake up buddy…Now we are talking! This was the last photo I took this morning. Jamba was getting very restless and had pretty much quit his role as model and was ready to go home. These little young ones don’t have long attention spans so I’m going to have to come back for anything further.