There are a fair amount of guidelines that photographers mostly try to adhere to when shooting.  One of those recommendations is not to shoot directly into the sun.  And generally speaking, it’s probably not a good idea to do so; my pilot mentioned as such about a minute before I took this picture.  However, there are times when shooting directly into the sun isn’t the most awful thing to do.  This picture marks a good example of that.

When I first went up in a helicopter to photograph the Chicago skyline, I purposely chose to go up at sunset.  I wanted to see how the light from the setting sun would impact the colors of the buildings.  Sometimes they were pink, sometimes they were blue and, as this photo shows, sometimes they were a reddish yellow.

The unusual coloring of this image is a product of, essentially, one large lens flare.  You can actually see the striations of the sun’s beams on the lower parts of the Sears (Willis) Tower.  I ended up taking some photos of the Sears Tower that weren’t shot directly into the sun and, interestingly, they came off as incredibly boring compared to this one.  If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that all rules are meant to be broken if the end result is something cool looking.