It was a great (but freezing!) weekend in Chicago for the holidays. It was adventurous and relaxing. The first shot here is from the amazing tree in front of Bloomingdale’s off Michigan Avenue.

I also spent a lot of time in the Art Institute of Chicago, coming away from my favorite room with the great Impressionists — the room is filled with over $100 million in Renoirs, Monets, and Cézannes. After coming out of that forum, I always get a bit melancholy… a strange combination of inspiration while feeling like I have no talent at all.

The final shot is one of a wonderful little adventure journal that I thought you might enjoy. The other captures are little bits from here and there around my room… freezing some time, perhaps.

I was thinking about that nice black water from yesterday and remembered a cold night in Chicago a while ago with more nice black water… glassy and reflective…

This one was shot from the John Hancock building during sunset. I believe I was facing south with this one… Which reminds me… the other day Ethan asked why “south” is called “south”. I did not have a good answer.

This may be the dumbest name for a post I have ever made, but I hope to surpass it some day with something more stupider. This was shot in Chicago in the dead of winter, which seems to be most of the time in Chicago. You can still see the frost on the ground there in front of the castle.

I found this on the way to Hong Kong… so I stopped for a quick shot while security eyed me with suspicion… But they have those cool TSA badges that makes them look all official and everything, but I just ignored them.

Chicago! You can’t go wrong with photographing this city just before or after it gets dark. All the light from the city casts sort of a matrix-glow up into the sky. It’s always a neat effect and this area around Millennium Park is always a prime area for shooting.

It’s been a while since I posted any shots from Chicago, so I am also posting another one I took several months ago that you may enjoy if you have never seen it.

The below mobile-phone shot shows one of my Chicago photographs being used for commercial purposes (without my permission) at a Kodak print shop on Hanover street, Edinburgh. It was shot by Paddy Patterson, so I wanted to thank him for sending this. The shot was taken on March 22, 2007 at 1.26pm GMT.

Someone else put this on DIGG (thanks, btw) – you can digg it here: Kodak steals from one of Digg’s favorite photographers

Here is another picture of Chicago below that I took around the same time.

This is my favorite shot of Chicago. I was happy to capture a bit of the blue lake and be lucky enough to catch the particolored sunset. This shot is facing one direction and the one below it faces the other direction. The latter was taken about 30 minutes before the upper one.

I got on Digg today – that was a nice surprise to get over 150,000 views on a single photograph within just a few hours. Thank you everyone who stopped by or sent along emails! Here is the picture that was “Dugg”:

One of my good photography friends, Valerio, highly recommended that I get this new lens – the Sigma 10-20mm. We spent the weekend together in Napoli and took a bunch of pictures together…we put that set here on Flickr. Here is one of the first shots I have taken with the new lens from Chicago last night; I think this lens is amazing. I look forward to doing some landscapes with it as well. The second picture is one of my favorites with that lens from Valerio… who is one of the most popular photographers on Flickr… here are some of his top shots.