Just a few photos taken as I was leaving work tonight. All are taken from the same angle and position, looking up and across both street and parking lot from the sidewalk in front of the Campus Center on Broadway. The last two were duds, but I kind of like the abstract appearance, so I’m including them.
So sad, I missed a breathtaking photo this morning, heading east on Kilbourn. It was a foggy morning across southeastern Wisconsin. As I crossed the Milwaukee River, the sun was shining on a couple of buildings, burning through the fog, and it was eerie and beautiful to watch the glowing glass and metal emerge from the mist. But I had to get to class, and there was no place to pull over, and the light was green, so I didn’t even get a break that way and had to drive on through the intersection.
So at least I had time after work to get these photos😀
The view looking west down State Street in Milwaukee’s East Town neighborhood as I walked out the front door of the Grohmann Museum on MSOE’s campus after work tonight.. I was struck by this gorgeous combination of colors—the warm yellow, red, and orange balanced by the cool green, purple, and blue, including the bluish-purple, grayish-yellow of the twilight sky.
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.
My office is in the Grohmann Museum on the campus of Milwaukee School of Engineering, and many of the photos featured in my blog posts are of places in this building. When your daily routine puts you into proximity with the same locations continually over time, you begin to notice the little differences that vantage point (distance, angles, etc.) and light (time of day and angle of the sun, overcast sky and diffused light, etc.) can make in their appearance.
On a sunny day a week ago, for example, I noticed these shadows at the base of the staircase on the second floor. Took this picture at 5:34 PM on September 9, 2026.
I was instantly reminded of this photo taken years ago, similar yet quite different in terms of aesthetics. I found it in my camera roll; the photo below was taken at 4:19 PM on October 5, 2016.
The time of year and time of day are fairly similar, but I like the older photo so much better. More contrast in the shadows, a more intense quality of light, and the angle of the sun is slightly lower. Even though I’m taking the picture from farther away, you can line up the darker, thicker lines of the columns (as opposed to the thin lines of the railing) to realize that the sun is lower in the sky.
Anyway, I enjoy figuring out why one photo “works” better for me than another one, especially when they are so similar.
I’ve written a few other blog posts about this, and since this is at least the fifth time I’ve felt compelled to do it and share my thoughts here, apparently that is a thing I do. There are more posts than the ones I list below, but this gives you an idea.
The real point of today’s post was supposed to be sharing some of the photo backlog that I’ve built up on my camera roll of “atrium staircase” pictures. But now I’ve run out of the time I had allotted today for updating my blog, so I’ll have to do that tomorrow.
Meanwhile, hopefully you can at least enjoy today’s two pictures and my photo-editing “diaries” of other images I’ve featured on my blog.
Which I realize might not be interesting unless you also enjoy either capturing and “making” images or thinking about creativity and why one photo “works” and another doesn’t. So apologies in advance if not 🙂
Make Something Wonderful is a compilation of Steve Jobs’ own words, taken from a variety of formal and informal texts, and published in “book” form on the “Steve Jobs Archive” website, which describes itself as “the authoritative home for Steve’s story and a resource for new generations eager to make their own mark.”
DavidCWG, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Although the Steve Jobs Archive website has existed for a few years now (link HERE), I only just stumbled across it today as I was prepping for the new semester that starts next week.
You can link to Wikipedia’s article on Make Something WonderfulHERE and link to the book itself HERE.
Once you click over to the book, the first thing you see is a blank rectangle that slides up onto your screen and slowly reveals itself as a 1970s-era image of Jobs as a tuxedoed young man in the form of a self-developing Polaroid-type snapshot. (Metaphor, anyone?)
Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, says in her “Introduction” to the book that the best way to get to know someone is through their own words, directly, unmediated by another’s framing (my paraphrase there) and that therefore, “the best way to understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life,” via speeches, inteviews, and emails.
“In these pages, Steve drafts and refines. He stumbles, grows, and changes,” Powell Jobs says.
I’ve only skimmed through the book so far, but she’s right. This is not a refined, coherent text. But that’s okay; it’s something better.
And frankly, I think the messiness is more in keeping with Jobs’ intuitive approach to life anyway. From these fragmentary textual “snapshots,” you start getting a “feel” for the context of who Jobs was and the meaning found outside the boundaries of what he actually said—kind of a gestalt understanding that transcends the facts.
Not sure I’m saying that well, but in some ways this collection of raw material is like poetry. You don’t read it for information; you read it to see things “fresh” and to feel something “true” in your bones.
Which in some ways is the point of a “self-help” text read for inspiration. Affirmations and the like help people envision a future for themselves that may not currently even be on the horizon. If you’ve never seen something before, you can’t imagine it easily. And it’s hard to keep going if you don’t believe there’s a destination waiting for you or that you have what it takes to get there.
I often think of that quote attributed to Henry Ford:
Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.
The Internet says (and ChatGPT confirms 🙂 ) that Ford’s words can’t be traced to an original source, except for a 1947 unsourced ascription published in Readers Digest following Ford’s death. And apparently similarly worded statements were already in circulation long before that. For our purposes, though, the actual source doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that this sentiment is so widely held. It seems self-evident because it feels so true.
Which is why I love this last sentence of Laurene Powell Jobs’ introduction:
I hope these selections ignite in you the understanding that drove him: that everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter, no more capable, than we are; that our world is not fixed—and so we can change it for the better.
I can’t think of a better argument for the value of reading this collection of her husband’s words.
This was a question/prompt for a writing exercise done for a meeting of my writing group in December 2022. I came across it today going through folders to organize ephemera related to some larger writing projects. Seeing it again now, I thought it had some fun associations and wordplay, just a nice little metaphor/allegory for life that might give someone a smile or a bit of inspiration, so I decided to share 🙂
Roger Cornfoot / The long and winding road, CC BY-SA 2.0
Question: If life is a journey, not a destination, how do you pack?
Answer: Well, are you traveling fast or slow? Are you staying at the Palmer House or at a Motel 6? Do you pack sandwiches to eat in the car? Stop at roadside rest and cook hamburgers and hotdogs on one of those old grills for a picnic? Drive through McDonald’s at an exit off the interstate? Or do you travel along a “Blue Highway“ and stop at a little mom-and-pop diner?
What is your mode of transportation? Are you hiking? Biking? Motorcycling? Driving? Are you taking a Greyhound bus? Are you flying? Taking the train, And if so, are you traveling coach, sleeper car, or private bedroom? Are you making a transatlantic voyage on an ocean liner?
Do you prefer traveling solo or as part of a group quest?
All of these things will influence what you need to pack. I recently saw a photo of an old steamer trunk that folded open to create a chest of drawers. Another opened out to reveal a closet full of dresses. If you were traveling first class on the Titanic, this is probably how you would pack. Except you wouldn’t have done the packing, your maid would have. That’s a very different type of journey than the one involving a backpack and a good pair of shoes along a dirt road.
Finally, even though life is a journey, not a destination, it is helpful to know where you’re going. The road to heaven looks quite different from the road to hell, for example, and you’ll need to pack accordingly.
Hell is easy. You can pack light if you’re going to hell. According to my grandmother, you won’t even need a suitcase; a handbasket will do. The road to hell is easy to traverse, as it has a “slippery slope” and is paved with “good intentions.” And it is also easy to find. Just fall in with the wrong crowd; they will take you with them.
Getting to heaven, on the other hand, can be confusing. As a popular song once told us, paradoxically, “If you wanna get to heaven, you gotta raise a little hell.”
If you want to go to Heaven, you may find a good guidebook absolutely essential. Several good ones exist—for example, the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran—but they require close reading and ongoing consultation.
One last perspective regarding the “journey” comes from this passage of literary advice from a favorite author, J. R. R. Tolkien, in which hobbit Bilbo Baggins shares his thoughts on travel with his nephew:
It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.
A scenario that pretty much upends anyone’s ability to plan or pack!
