Here are a few more photos from an ancient folder I found of my Chicago commutes.
Early in the morning in early spring there can still be ice crystals in the air. This particular building gets hit by the sunrise and reflects like a mirror. This creates an amazing sort of god ray effect that pierces through all the buildings surrounding it.
These rays tend to happen only a couple times of year fortunately I've been able to see this a few times and this time I had my camera ready.
This was the shot I got before noticing the rays. The light seemed quite golden from the fog in the air and the light rays bouncing down under the bridge of the riverwalk.
By contrast here's a shot of the same riverwalk at night. Though this technically isn't really night time as it gets dark in Chicago at 5pm during the winter. This was some kind of retail display on a barge for advertising purposes, they figured out how to really use the dark winter night for their display.
Here's what the city looks like a level up from the riverwalk. Lots of little light windows in the condos and office building break up the dark skies above. There is still plenty of fog around too to kind of blur the lighting.
To ensure the darkness of winter doesn't make people too depressed the city usually has a color theme on the main buildings to brighten things up.
I used to work in the Wrigley building and they like to uplight the white building with lights to make it seem like its glowing at night.
Here is another panorama test of a typical gloomy foggy fall morning on the way to work. The buildings really fade away into the fog and people on the top floors can often see of the blanket of fog with just a few of the other taller buildings poking above. One day I hope to be high up in one of these buildings to see that effect.
Here's another patched together panorama from about 5 photos in photoshop. I really had to warp them in photomerge to get them to be seamless. Towards the edges the pixels really warped so I had to blur them out a bit to hide the stretches.
That's all for now, more ancient photos soon... Thanks for looking :-)
