2012 Year in Review: March

This isn't the best photo I made in March, but it is certainly the most special!

Me and Tom Tran at The Bean

Tom Tran is a photographer I met on Google+, just one of many with whom I have become online friends. But Tom is different in that he is the only one of all the photographers I've met online that I have now also met IRL (in real life)!

For the past couple of years, I have been going to Chicago a couple of times per year to get my "city fix." These trips are schedule around performances by Lyric Opera of Chicago and include at least one meal at a nice restaurant, perhaps a visit to an art museum, and photography.

In March 2012, having been on Google+ a few months and met Tom, he and I planned to meet and "photowalk" The Loop together on a Saturday afternoon. What a great time we had! From the beginning, it was as if we had known each other much longer.

We met at The Bean in Millenium Park, a famous Chicago landmark. You can see a bit of it over Tom's right shoulder. The real name of this highly-polished steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor is "Cloud Gate," but everyone calls it "The Bean" because of its shape.

We walked north to the Chicago River, where I took a photo that won a 3rd Place ribbon at Art With a View in Monroe in November of this year. We wandered around The Loop and photographed some of Chicago's interesting architecture. We stopped and talked over lunch.

Tom's story is amazing. He and his family escaped from Vietnam a few years after the war had ended. They were among the many who left at great personal risk via an over-crowded, too-small boat to head out across the South China Sea! But they made it, spent two years in a refugee camp in the Phillippines, and eventually came to the U.S.

And if Tom looks a bit familiar, it is because he played a prominent role in the movie, Good Morning, Vietnam!

I'm looking forward to photowalking with Tom and other Chicago photographers when I go back in March of this year.