I love the way this building looks from the river (or in this case, across the river). And I love shooting B&W film.

Let’s see how long this lasts.

I’m missing the beach. The high tomorrow is -1° with a wind chill of -25°.

Blizzard’s a’comin. Wish the weather in Chicago looked more like this right now.

We saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tonight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that beautiful. I mean aesthetically, of course. But the film itself was really quite good as well. I felt fully immersed in it the whole way through. That is, until Stacy forced me to go get the Coke refilled (she did it at the last movie). I missed what I’m sure was a very crucial 45 seconds. (She contends it wasn’t.)

The movie is split in two, much like Titanic, where the old woman is essentially retelling this story. Well, kind of. Anyway, most of it takes place in New Orleans, and the present-day portion is happening as Hurricane Katrina is about to make landfall. The final scene (if I remember correctly) shows the flood waters entering a building. I just thought about this image… and even though it isn’t necessarily strongly tied to the movie’s theme, I’ve been thinking it would make a nice book cover. I really don’t have a body of work in mind or anything, but I mocked this up anyway:

My brother, Ryan, during a search for old wooden oil derricks in Orangefield, TX. Unfortunately, we discovered on this trip that either Hurricane Rita or Ike had destroyed all of these amazing structures.

We left Chicago for Texas a mere hour before the snow began to fall, at 2pm. The drive took 16 hours, and we arrived at Stacy’s parents’ house South of Dallas just after sunrise. Although the weather wasn’t great (freezing rain, copious amounts of fog) I can’t say it was an altogether awful drive; just uninteresting.

A few days in Dallas, a few in Houston, a few more in Orange. Then we decided to add another week to the trip and head to Austin. I’m so glad we did. The weather in Texas was fantastic pretty much the whole time we were there. We’re talking dry and in the 70s on most days. Awesome. And now I feel like I could live in Austin again and really appreciate it. I know that’s not likely to happen, but who knows.

We got back from Texas just in time for it to snow, and now it’s snowing again tonight. I thought I’d hate getting back to that, but it really hasn’t been that bad. Maybe it’s growing on me.

I shot around 8 or 9 rolls of 120 film on the trip, both color and B&W. I’ll be posting images from those soon.