Now that I no longer live within Chicago proper, when I visit friends, I most certainly view the city, metaphorically, through a new lens.  As close as I presently live to Chicago, it is just far enough that I do not get the chance to visit as often as I would like.  And when I do visit, I feel a desire to be more proactive and take the opportunity to photograph various aspects of the city, however it’s just not quite the same now as to when I actually lived within the city.

I planned a weekend excursion to Chicago and while I was primarily there to visit friends, I planned to use the opportunity to photograph the skyline using my new super telephoto zoom lens and to test a new tripod I recently purchased.  Waking up early and feeling energetic, I had all morning to try and go to three different locations with ideal views of the city skyline.  The first location I went to was Montrose Beach, the second was by Adler Planetarium, and the third was on Navy Pier.  I feel fortunate that traffic, parking and other circumstances were in my favour as I was actually able to get to all three locations.  And with time to spare, my friend and I met & we spent the afternoon doing the touristy thing on Navy Pier.  Alas, I do miss living in the city; but then again, there are many aspects I certainly do not miss.

Prominent in the top photograph is North Ave. Beach & Oak Street Beach, at centre is a view of Michigan Ave., at centre right with the pyramidal peak is Two Prudential Plaza building and to the left of centre are the landmark buildings, John Hancock building, the former Playboy building and The Drake hotel.

About This Photograph

The above two photographs show a panoramic view (bottom) of the Chicago skyline and an original image size (top) view of North Avenue Beach and Michigan Ave. as viewed from Montrose Beach with a lens focal length of 500mm.

To produce the panoramic skyline photograph, I took twenty-two photographs with each image overlapping the adjacent image by approximately a quarter to a third; then I manually overlaid and merged each image to the adjacent image.  When fully assembled, this created one single ultra large panoramic photograph.  The process of manually aligning and merging each image together, and doing colour correction and other edits took many hours over several weeks.  The final panoramic photograph above is 1.8% of actual image size, which is 5061ppi (42.85cm) x 43071ppi (364.67cm) with a final TIFF document file size of 654mb.  The red outline in the panoramic skyline photograph shows the position of the image above, which is 100% actual image size.