Picture of the Month: June 2010

So I was getting a little bored of the first picture I had at the top of my main page:

If you read my "Antelope Island" post (May 2010) you would recognize it from there as well. Anyway, it's a nice photo and all, but I thought it would be fun to change it up now and then...how about once a month?

For June I chose this picture of the "Cloud Gate" that I took while visiting my sister Shannon (ok, ok, I know it's Shaun) while she lived in Chicago. I got this shot standing almost underneath the arch of the "bean" and if you look closely, you can see Shaun in the middle at the bottom with me right behind her holding a camera up to my face...though we also appear in several other spots of the oddly reflecting surface at the same time...who knew geometry could be so spooky!

Shaun was dancing in the Lyric Opera's production of Strauss' "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" (the woman without a shadow), and I came out to watch her performance (which was excellent of course) and see the sights of the city. This was long before I had even considered going back to school and if you would have asked me at the time if I'd ever consider living in Chicago, I would have laughed and asked in response, "why would I ever choose to live in a city that's so freaking cold for half the year?!"

We saw a Chicago Symphony concert together, on which Chris Martin performed the Haydn Trumpet Concerto, and bummed around the city for a couple of days checking out museums, the library, and, what turned out to be the sight-seeing highlight, Millenium Park.

The park is located near downtown right on the shore of Lake Michigan. It's loaded with art and features an outdoor concert stage and adjoining footbridge designed by...can you guess? Yup, the impossible-to-mistake Frank Ghery. In the picture below I made my sister pose on the side of the foot bridge.

The cloud gate is one of the most entertaining pieces of art I've ever had the pleasure of interacting with. It looks a little goofy from a distance--I remember thinking, "A giant kidney bean? Hmmmm...". But then I walked up to it, around it, under it, through it...I started playing with its chrome surface, I began to see how many ways my image could be morphed, stretched, squished, bent, and split into several different versions of itself...and before I knew it, I was hooked.