Continuing the trip

As I said, we got up to Chicago late at night, did a hair of scouting, and found a place to sleep.

I made it up, and over to Montrose Point before sunrise the next morning. I was a little worried about getting into the park (they'd closed the gate when we drove by close to midnight), but it was ok, as the gate was open when I arrived. And no problem finding parking. But photographically, not much happened there. I got a decent skyline shot (well, pano, actually), but there wasn't any real sunrise (color-wise, that is; too much cloud cover).

After shooting for a bit, I went back to the hotel, and got some more sleep.

We eventually woke up, ate breakfast, packed everything in the car, and drove over to Calumet, where my dad had arranged a rental of a 600mm lens for the airshow. We picked up the lens, put the arca-swiss plate I'd gotten onto it, and took a few test shots (I was feeling good about spending so much for my tripod, as it handled the load without flinching).

Things looked good, so we headed back to Montrose Point to do some more practice. Parking was a bit more of an issue by this point, but manageable.

Shooting planes was fun, but easy. Shooting little birds (Montrose Point is also a bird sanctuary, so there were lots of them) was extremely challenging. In fact, we didn't manage a single good shot of them. But we got a lot of shots of sailboats, and a few more of the city (the Willis Tower barely fit within the frame at 600mm, from there). We also got a few of people (including ourselves), but nothing special.

It did help give us an idea what we could, and couldn't, do with the lens. Although shooting airliners on final approach to O'Hare was a lot different than shooting aerobatics at the airshow. Especially since the aerobatics planes were all prop-engines.

Eventually, though, we gave up and headed into town. We drove down the Magnificent Mile (no pictures, though), and found parking underneath Millenium Park. We wandered around for a bit, and got a few shots of The Bean. They were also setting up for a concert, next to the Bean, featuring Chaka Khan (who is, it seems, a Chicago native); quite a shock, there. I hadn't heard the name since High School, I don't think.

My dad had mentioned wanting pizza (and hey, we were in Chicago deep-dish land; why not?), and I saw a sign for Pizano's. I figured they had to have good pizza, so we meandered over for a long, but excellent (if late), lunch. Had a nice talk with a family from Kansas; the husband did sand-blasting of oil pipelines (and they had two cute kids, about the same age as my kids).

After eating, we wandered around the park for a while, then found a hotel nearby.

We were tired by this point, and not hungry (I'd finished my pizza, and my dad came close to finishing his), so we went to bed a little early, planning on going back to the Bean at sunrise.

We'd found the hotel via GPS, from the car, and when we got up, we found out we were much closer than we thought. We were waiting for the car to be brought around, when we realized a cab would suit us better. We got in the cab, told him where we wanted to go, and he said we were only two blocks away. Ok, then.

So we walked over, as fast as we could. We didn't get the best light (we talked to another photographer there, and it was much better earlier), but we got some decent shots. And we got to wander all around with no crowd. Plus, we got to see them setting up for a shoot for an upcoming show, Betrayal (I think one of the crew told us it was Betrayed).

After the sun was fully risen, we walked over to the garden area we'd seen yesterday, and I took a few shots (in particular, showing my dad how to do focus stacking with the camranger and ipad). We wandered back (passing the shooting of a scene of the show), stopping in a Starbucks so my dad could get some coffee (and I got juice and a croissant, since we were there). Continuing, we walked by a bus stop again, where they'd been doing something with PVC piping when we went by earlier. It turned out that they were setting up some Blue Man Group thing that was just getting started as we returned.

It seemed very random, but cool. We talked to one of the setup people for a few minutes, and found out that the founders of BMG don't do shows anymore. They just train the new performers. We stuck around to see things starting; the person we talked to lamented that mostly these things just got people to take pictures with their cell phones nowadays, not to start partying.

When we got back to the hotel, we packed up and headed north to Oshkosh. We skipped on Milwaukee (I'd wanted to stop there, to see the "new" waterfront. ie: I'm not sure how old it is, but it definitely wasn't there the last time we went to Milwaukee (1989, for GenCon)), and drove straight through. Fairly boring drive, actually. The only interesting things were the detours we took to avoid traffic, and the gas prices we saw around Chicago (up to $4.499 for regular, which compared with the ~$4 we were seeing around DC for super, at the time).

Oh, and we were mightily impressed at the number of billboards we saw for "adult novelties" in Wisconsin.

Getting to Oshkosh, we found where we were staying (a room of a dorm at University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh), and dropped some stuff off there.  Then we headed off to the airshow.

I think I'll stop there for now.