We are moving the company’s downtown Chicago offices to a larger space closer to Union Station; both good things. We invited Eastlake Studio to help make the new location awesome and I recently visited their offices in the Chicago Tribune Tower. I’ve walked and driven past the 1920s landmark countless times before but never had the opportunity to go inside.
The above photo is the view from Eastlake's offices looking west-southwest. Not bad, right? How wonderful to have such inspiration just outside your window every day.
A couple of technical notes
1) This capture was taken very quickly with an iPhone 5S. A snapshot. Nonetheless, I am thoroughly impressed with the detail and resolution the 5S pulls off — from street-level sidewalks to the distant top floors of the Willis Tower to the weathered stonework of the Wrigley Building and the shadow detail of IBM Plaza (now AMA Plaza). Perhaps I’ve just grown accustomed to digital aesthetics, and a future print likely will be the true test, but I'm not sure I would have been able to produce anything like this with my 35mm gear, certainly not without preparation.
2) If you peek at the metadata, you will find that I used Adobe Lightroom 5 to post-process the image (monochrome conversion, lens correction, and perspective adjustment). As a long-time Apple Aperture user and evangelist, this marks my first tentative steps toward an all-Adobe workflow. It’s no small decision and part of me is holding out hope that the mere thought of ditching Aperture will have some cosmic effect resulting in the announcement and release of Aperture 4.0 at WWDC next month, delivering all the goodness of Lightroom and more. But I am doubtful. Despite my deep (some would say non-rational) reservations about Adobe generally, for anyone looking to get more serious about photography today, I would be hard-pressed to recommend Aperture. I wish things were different.
Since one cannot easily move one's work and time invested in one tool to the other, perhaps the best choice is to rely on them as little as possible. There are likely alternatives out there which I am not aware of, but it seems to me that photo file management and lightweight image post-processing is an area begging for innovation, including cross-platform support, long-term scalable network storage, and auto-curation beyond map views, face recognition, and “on this day” flashbacks (as provided by the now-defunct Everpix).