If you are approaching Chicago from the south or east, I-65 or I-80, 90 or 94, take I 90, the Chicago Skyway, into the city. If it is rush hour, you may find this the best route AROUND Chicago, too. Get off before the end of the skyway and cross town on US 12/20 to get to I-294. Traffic can be at a dead standstill on the last twelve miles of I-94 in Indiana.

If you are headed east into the New York City or Connecticut area, avoid route 17, especially near Madison. The fascisti are out in force, to give you a ticket for over 70 even if you are doing the legal 55. They set an unmarked police car at the bottom of a long hill. Naturally your car speeds up on the downhill, even if you are at 55 at the top. The police won't show you the radar readout. The radar may not have even been turned on! There is no day/date, hour and minute readout with the speed readout, either, nor a printout that would prove your violation one way or the other. And the judge in Madison accepts the policeman's word. He has no doubt whatever that the policeman is right; you cannot create reasonable doubt with him. A friend in Cincinnati, who was raised in the area, told me the practice has been going on for a long time. Local cars, identifyable by their license plates, are not stopped. A complaint with the state's attorney general will get you nowhere; he's as good as a fascist, for he finds nothing wrong in this practice.

If you are only travelling in America, and only photographing FLlW architecture, you can get along with little more than a wide-angle lens. This is not true if you expect to photograph all of Wright including his non-residential work. For that, like for most non-Wright architecture, you need a PC lens. "PC" for "perspective correction." You don't want to have your collection look amateurish, with parallel verticals converging because you have to tilt your camera up to fill the frame with a tall building.

This should go without saying, but I've met architectural historians, academics, who have yet to figure out this simple matter. The trouble is, PC lenses don't come cheap. The wider the better. In so-called automatic systems, the best, almost the only, is the Canon EOS 24mm Tilt-Shift lens, which will run you upwards of $1100. You blanch. Well, them's the beans! Canon produces the widest PC on the automatic market (and it doesn't autofocus, but does auto meter), and it will take a front polarizing filter (which is the most important filter that you can own). This is actually quite unique, for it not only shifts up-down or left-right (30° increments in any rotation), which provides perspective correction, but also tilts, which gives you the kind of corrections you otherwise get only on view cameras. If you go to my exhibition "Medano and Raukawa" (click here) you will see many shots of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument in Colorado which could be taken ONLY with a tilt lens. You don't need an expensive Canon body, but you do need that lens.

The Price Tower, S.355, perspective corrected with EOS 24mm T-S lens

There is no alternative other than, say, the Nikon PC 28, a manual lens that will work on most Nikon bodies; it will take a front polarizer, too. An alternative is to use a single-focal length ultra-wide angle lens (a zoom will have too much linear distortion) such as a 20mm or 17mm unit, and use it vertically. Aim the lens so the center of your focusing screen is at your eye height on the building, then crop out the bottom third of the resultant photo. This won't work, of course, for slides. It works nicely with digital camreas.

By the way, I do not "take" pictures; that is theft! I make photographs.

Once you've gotten the TS or PC lens situation satisfied, you'll probably want a standard wide angle lens or zoom. Again, the best is from Canon, their 16-35 mm f 2.8 L-series EOS unit, at $13700 (the "old" 17-35, if you can find one, should be quite a bit cheaper, and is a true 17 mm). It is a true 16 mm, while competing lenses marked 18-35 or 19-35 are 19 or 20 mm lenses (this much "cheating" is allowed under Japanese regulations!), and the Canon is more linear (namely, has less barrel distortion at the wide-angle end). It is also fast, at f 2.8 throughout its range. Before this lens came on the market, I'd used Canon's 20-35 mm f2.8 FD (non-autofocus) lens. If you can find a store with a 17-35 Sigma on the shelf (about $470), buy it, or the slower Canon 20-35 mm f3.5-4.5 (about $370) if you need to save the money. Tokina, from which I've never had a bad lense, makes a new professional f2.8 20-35 mm for $6000, so if you want speed, or constant f-stop over the zoom range, consider this one. If you really want wiiiide, Sigma makes an f3.5-4.5 15-30 mm lens (about $580) and an even wider 12-24 ($$670, for digital only).

One warning about linear distortion at ultra-wide angle focal lengths. The wider you get, the more a sphere distorts from round to oblong, looking almost like a football at 17 mm. Which is why I never recommend the 14mm "linear" lenses for architecture, and use anything in the 16-18 mm ragne carefully for interior shots almost exclusively. For this reason, you might wish to limit your wide-angle choice to a 20/21-35 mm zoom.

For details, such as the gargoyles on a French cathedral, you need telephoto power. Since there are few details high up on tall Wright buildings (what few there are), and most are also the same detail as at lower levels, long telephoto may be redundant for Wright, but here's some information for those who want a complete camera bag. The 28-200 and 35-300 and such lenses loose so much speed at their long ends (as well as quite a bit of resolution) that you may not be happy with your photographs. If you are shooting only negative film, Kodak Gold Max or the Fuji equivalent are excellent, but my most recent test show Konica's 800 and 400 speed films to be outgrageously sharp. At 800 ASA, even slow lenses can work satisfactorily. If you are shooting only slides, nothing over ASA 400 is any good unless you are willing to spend quite a bit both for the film and for push processing. In this instance, get the new professional ED 200 Kodak Ektachrome, shoot it at ASA 640 but have it processed at 2 full f-stops push. That will give you outrageously saturated color and high resolution you won't believe at such speed.

Canon's "Barcelona zoom" lens now has serious competion from Sigma with its f4-6.3 80-400mm range or its 50-500mm f4.5-6.3mm range. You may need the Canon EOS-3 if you want autofocus at the long lens (where it is f6.3; most autofocus cameras autofocus only to f5.6). Canon's "Barcelona zoom", designed especially for use by professional sports photographers under the bright sunshine of northeast Spain at the Barcelona Olympic games, is a 35-350mm zoom, f3.5 at 35 mm, holding that out to around 100 mm, then dropping to f5.6 for most of its longer range. You may find a used one on the market, because Canon has replaced it with a 28-300mm for the digital age where digital cameras push the focal length out by a factor of 1.6. You can use Canon's 1.4 extender to help either lens reach out to almost 500 mm (manual focus). Of course, these spectacular lenses are not cheap; but good news, the price, once $1900 for the 35-350 dropped to $1500. The newer lens, however, is $2200. The 2 xextender, once $450, is now $280.

BUT WAIT. COMES THE REVOLUTION. IMAGE-STABILIZATION it is called. The Image Stabilization technology invented by Canon will stun you with its abililty to produce sharp images in only moderatly steady hands. Now they have several such lenses. Nikon has followed, slowly and at equally high prices. Hallelujah, Sigma has joined the fray with an f4-5.6 80-400mm. It will work, we are assured, with 1.4 and 2.0 tele-extenders. Sigma calls their system OS, for Optical Stabilizer. Any of the three systems adds two to three f-stops in terms of relative shutter speed for hand-held photography. So, if you are not experienced in hand-holding long lenses, you might find the Canon 75-300mm f4-5.6 USM IS at only $420 to be your best choice. You will then need a 35-70mm or wider mid-range zoom to cover the normal focal lengths to fill in the mid-range, but there are many choices in this highly competitive range.

To simplify what you carry and reduce weight, I offer the following, which I often use when I don't need to go beyond 300mm. Get the Canon f3.5-5.6 28-135 IS mm lens and the Canon 2X APO extender ($410 + $280 = $670 ). Slow, surely, and you will manual focus on those gargoyles, but very lightweight. This is all you need if you are shooting mostly people and scenics, and few or no buildings.

Canon EOS-3	$ 875	Canon EOS-Rebel K2	$ 150
Canon 28-300mm f3.5-5.6 IS zoom	$2200	Sigma 80-400mm f4-6.3 OS zoom	$1000
Canon 16-35mm f2.8 L-series zoom	$1370	Sigma f3.5-4.5 15-30 mm zoom	$ 580
Canon 24mm f2.8 Tilt-Shift lens	$1100	Canon 24mm f2.8 Tilt-Shift lens	$1100
Canon circular polarizer	$ 90	Tiffen circular polarizer	$ 75
TOTAL pro	$5635	TOTAL alternate	$2905

There are many other zooms in the 75/80-200/300/400mm range at very cheap prices, and many more that span 28-300mm, such as the Tamron 28-200mm f3.8-5.6, the Tokina 24-200mm f3.5-4.5, the Sigma 28-300mm f3.5-5.6 and Vivitar 28-300mm f4-6.3 at prices well under $300! None of these has optical stabilization, so require a tripod or very careful hand holding.

8 meg digital cameras are no longer priced out of amateur photographer range. If you wish to go digital, different choices are necessary due to the pushing of focal lengths in digital imaging. It takes a lens with a focal length of 10 mm to equal the 16 mm of a 35 mm film camera. Accordingly, Canon and others have produced lenses specifically for their digital bodies . The only problem is that they have not yet provided a Tilt-Shift lens of 15 mm focal length to equal 24 mm in 35 mm format. The 24 mm becomes a 38 mm lens. You will have to choose if this is acceptable. With digital, an ultra-wide angle lens can be cropped at the bottom and be used much like a PC lens.

Canon 10-22mm f3.5-4.5 $800 Sigma 12-24mm f4.5-5.6 $670 Canon 28-300mm f3.5-5.6 IS zoom $2200 Sigma 28-300mm f3.5-5.6 zoom $250 TOTAL pro exclusive of camera body $3000 TOTAL alternate exclusive of camera body $920

You now need to choose a digital camera body. For 20x30" exhibition prints, the new Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II providing 16.7 megapixels because of full-frame imaging (no multiplication factor for lenses; thus, get the 16-35mm zoom) is the only choice at close to $8000 street price. But the new 8.2 megapixel EOS-20D will be suitable for large prints (up to 14x20") for about $1300 street price. For inexpensive digital photography, the EOS Digital Rebel at, about $830street price, offers 8.0 megapixel resolution.