I have long wanted to do some urban photography. A good place to start is with Chicago’s famous skyline as seen from the area around Adler planetarium. My grandson, Ivan, and I spent a few hours there on a beautiful late September evening. I had three goals in mind:
1. Hone my panorama skills with the skyline as the subject.
2. Capture the full Harvest moon as it rose over Lake Michigan to the east.
3. Capture traffic after dark via long exposures.

The Skyline

We arrived around 17:30 at the park area around Adler Planetarium. As the sun set in the west, my first goal was to capture shots of the sun illuminating the skyline. Each panorama is a composite of 7 to 11 separate images that I knit together in Photoshop. This technique requires a tripod and calculating just how many degrees to rotate the camera to ensure the software can merge the individual shots.

The Harvest Moon

Our timing was perfect for the rising Harvest moon, which occurred at 18:30. I didn’t even need to move the tripod; I just turned around and looked east.

Around Chicago

These are images I made while waiting for the sun to go down and the moon to rise. After it was dark, Ivan took us to Roosevelt Road, where I could do time exposures to capture vehicle light trails.