Saw these sparkling water droplets strung along the wires as I opened the back door to let our dog outside around 5:45 PM.
Not that she accepted my invitation. It had been drizzling for the past hour. Things were wet out there. She just sat in the kitchen looking back at me.
On the plus side, though, I saw this and grabbed my phone for a quick photo. And then I wrote this little poem to go with it. So all in all, a good day! 🙂 (Although not for our dog, who HATES the rain. And baths. And water anywhere, in fact, except in her bowl.)
Remember the picture that got away yesterday? Well, it came back!
As I was driving home from work tonight, heading west on State Street out of downtown Milwaukee and being blinded by the intense sunlight of the setting sun, I found myself sitting in relative shade at a stoplight at 20th Street. Idly curious to know whether that building could be seen now that I was about seven blocks west (the building that “dropped” below the skywalk bridge as I got closer because my iPhone camera couldn’t give me a long enough focal length from a distance where the building loomed above the skywalk), I glanced at my side-view mirror . . . and realized: WAIT. THERE IT IS!
I could see that building exactly as it looked yesterday when I was driving east, toward downtown!
To recap: Below is the picture I was able to take yesterday, with the arrow showing nothing more than the tippy-top of the roof of the building that had loomed so large in the what I initially saw and wanted to capture.
Here was that same building sliding lower, beneath the skywalk, as I moved closer still.
But check out the photo I was able to get tonight. When I saw the brightly illuminated building in my side-view mirror, I grabbed my phone and tried for a close-up of that reflection. Which I was able to grab before the stoplight changed! Yay 🙂
I asked my buddy ChatGPT to explain how it could be. Why would my side-vew mirror be able to reflect a close-up view of those downtown buildings when actually “objects are closer than they appear,” as the text printed on those mirrors warns us? In my case, the downtown buildings appeared closer in the mirror and seemed larger than they were. How could that be?
ChatGPT gave me a physics/optics explanation involving formulas (formulae?) and diagrams. The gist of it all, I think, was that the convex lens of that side-view mirror captured a wide swath of the world and compressed that view into a relatively small area of its surface.
Then I put my phone right up near the mirror and also zoomed in. My phone wasn’t photographing the downtown buildings directly. It was photographing the mirror’s image of downtown—an image that was large in terms of the space it occupied on the mirror. And I was able to photograph that image from just a few inches away, so once I added the zoom to that closer proximity, I was able to get the shot.
My two-step process of side-view mirror reflection plus my iPhone was able to capture what otherwise would have needed a more powerful lens. In other words, although I didn’t create a telephoto lens, I had accidentally found a way to reframe a distant scene through an intermediate optical image.
Isn’t that cool?
I still didn’t get exactly the shot I wanted, but if you can combine today’s image of the taller buildings in the center behind the skywalk bridge with yesterday’s landscaped photo showing the brilliant, golden glow of sunset reflected on the Aurora Sinai skywalk and buildings, you can sort of get the picture. (“Get the picture?” Pun not originally intended, but I kind of like it, so it stays 😀)
Absolutely gorgeous sunsets the past few nights here in Milwaukee.
At this time of year, the setting sun aligns perfectly with the east–west streets of downtown Milwaukee such that the tall buildings frame it like Stonehenge. Which, of course, has led to this equinox event being called “Milwaukeehenge.”
NYC has “Manhattanhenge,” but because Manhattan isn’t aligned with true north, theirs doesn’t match up with the September and March equinoxes. (Or would that be “equinoctes,” if we were staying true to Latin grammar?)
If only, if only . . . I’d had a camera with a longer lens.
The actual sight of sun-gilded downtown Milwaukee last night, as I headed east on State Street with the setting sun behind me, was SO AMAZING! But I would have needed to be a few blocks farther away to capture that image, and my phone just wasn’t up to the job. I couldn’t zoom in enough with my iPhone’s telephoto lens to get what I saw. And when I moved close enough to get the buildings with my phone’s camera, I lost the tall downtown buildings beyond the Aurora Sinai Medical Center skywalk/bridge.
In the photo that got away, there would have been tall buildings in the distance looming up high beyond the bridge. As I moved closer, those buildings “dropped” away because of the change in perspective.
See the top of one of those buildings below (with the arrow pointing to it)? Imagine that building raised up quite a bit higher, gleaming in the sunlight like the other buildings and the bridge in the foreground.
To get a sense of the proportionate drop, see the photo below. I merely moved a block closer. See the nearest green light in the photo above? That’s the same traffic signal as the red light in the photo below.
But just LOOK at how much that same building (the one with the arrow) has “dropped” with the change in my position relative to the bridge. Now imagine those same buildings the same distance higher than the bridge, which is where they were when I was farther away. Plus, from that more distant angle, they were brilliant with reflected sunlight.
I actually first caught sight of this dramatic reflection two nights ago, September 22. Far closer to the actual “equinox” of “Milwaukeehenge.” Last night (9/23) the sun was already a little farther off “center” from where it had been the night before. Even if I managed to get my hands on a longer lens and tried again tonight, the angle of the sun would be even farther off, meaning more shadows from the righthand side of the street and less full-on reflection.
Sigh.
That’s the thing about photography. You win some, you lose some—often simply by being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time with the right/wrong gear and the right/wrong awareness that the moment is now or never.
Still, despite the fact that it’s not the ideal image that got away, I like my picture from last night well enough and thought I’d share. Hope you like it, too ❤
No time today for uploading my Grohmann Museum atrium staircase pictures, but I did see these two photos of my sunglasses in my camera roll. Taken Monday night as I was getting stuff out of my back seat upon arriving home from work.
One landscaped . . .
One portrait . . .
I can’t decide which one I like best. No matter. It was fun to notice this reflection and grab the pictures at the end of a long day.
