Weekly Shooting Excursion VII: Oak Lawn

My seventh weekly photo shoot was kind of a mini shoot, for a couple of reasons. First, I was pretty busy getting things ready for my Fall semester classes, which are being taught entirely online. There is a staggering amount of prep work involved in designing an online class, I’d even say that the prep work is more difficult and time consuming than actually teaching online. Second, the beautiful weather I had for last week’s shoot had been replaced with sweltering heat and high humidity, which we seem to have had more than our fair share of in Chicago this summer. I hate hot, humid weather, and I tend to get dehydrated pretty easily, so while I really wanted to go shooting someplace, I was procrastinating it.

My solution to this mini-dilemma was leaving an hour early for my annual eye exam. My eye doctor is in Oak Lawn, a southwest Chicago suburb. I don’t often shoot in the suburbs, and generally find the urban environment closer to my personal aesthetic, but I also love mid-century architecture, and knew there was a bit of that a few blocks from the eye doctor’s office. So, I combined shooting with the appointment, and spent an hour shooting along busy, 6-lane Cicero Avenue. 

It worked out nicely. While I didn’t shoot as much as I have been on these weekly excursions, I did enjoy the dated, 60’s vibe to the buildings. Shooting also distracted me from the bit of nagging worry in the back of my head. A quick haircut aside, this was my first real one on one interaction I’d had with someone outside of immediate family since the pandemic lockdown over three months earlier. It was fine, by the way. The eye doctor’s office handled things very professionally and had a distancing plan in effect.

One additional difference, in addition to my digital camera, I also shot with a junk camera. I was doing quite a bit of shooting with cheap, vintage and modified film cameras about ten years ago, but hadn’t used any of them for a few years. I had recently uncovered a box of expired 35mm film buried in my studio closet, and decided to start using them again. For this shoot, I brought a Nishika N8000, a really crappy camera with four lenses designed to shoot lenticular photos. 

Here’s the best of this mini shoot.

Shot with a Nishika N8000 4-lens camera.

Shot with a Nishika N8000 4-lens camera.

Shot with a Nishika N8000 4-lens camera.

 Gif of the above image, showing the 3D effect the 4 lenses give.

Weekly Shooting Excursion VI: West Lawn

This was my sixth week of finding a day to go out shooting, and so far it’s been my favorite of these staycation shooting excursions. I went to West Lawn, which is the neighborhood that sits immediately to the east of Midway Airport. Specifically, I walked along both sides of 63rd Street, the main commercial district in the area, on the mile long stretch between Pulaski and Cicero (which are both multi-lane, very busy streets). I walked a couple blocks along Pulaski on either side of 63rd as well.

While I had driven down this stretch of 63rd Street a few times (it’s an alternate route to Midway when Cicero is a traffic nightmare, which is often), I had never spent any time there, and didn’t even know the name of the neighborhood (I had to look it up). It was on my list of places to shoot, I’d seen from driving along 63rd Street that it looked like it could be photogenic (at least my kind of photogenic). 

As I wrote above, this has been my favorite of these weekly shooting excursions, and I’ve done several (I’m writing this several weeks after June 24, the day I actually shot these photos). It’s probably due to a couple of reasons. First, the weather was perfect. Temperature in the low 70’s (low 20’s Celsius), low humidity, mostly sunny, but with huge, fluffy clouds that look great in the photos I was shooting. I really dislike hot, sticky weather, and it was pleasurable to walk around on a day where it felt nice to be out. Second, it’s always fun to explore a new area, even if that area is a typical non-destination neighborhood on the edge of the city. Third, the neighborhood was quite pleasant. It was mostly a mix of smaller retail spaces and mid-century apartment buildings. I love mid-century architecture, and while they often don’t seem to get a lot of love, the apartments along this stretch were mostly well maintained. A couple of empty buildings aside, everything on this street was tidy and well cared for.

Here are my favorite photos from this shoot.

 

Weekly Shooting Excursion V: Rainy Chinatown Night

Another weekly shooting excursion, this time, more rainy night shooting.

I love shooting in the city on rainy nights, and it’s pretty easy to figure out why. It’s a great way to get gorgeous shots full of color and reflected lights. Of course, it’s also easy to get wet and cold, and to get blurry photos from raindrops on the camera lens and shooting with long shutter speeds, but it’s worth the inconvenience. I’ve been fortunate to shoot on rainy nights in a few places-Boston (that was a fun one, it was my first time in the city, and wandering alone on an overly chilly mid-summer night in the rain in an unfamiliar place with no rainwear was oddly enjoyable), Madison, WI on a stormy night last Thanksgiving weekend, dodging hailstones while shooting, twice in Blue Island, a Chicago suburb close to where I live. I don’t get to do it often-it’s not always raining at night, of course, and when it does, I don’t have my camera with me, or am ready for bed, or just don’t feel like doing it. 

I was happy, then, to check the weather report and find that storms were forecast to move into the Chicago area right as night was falling. I chose Chinatown to shoot. I’ve shot so many times in that neighborhood over the years that I’ve kind of used it up photographically speaking, but a lot of the businesses have bright LED lights, and I knew it would be a good, easy shoot. I arrived in Chinatown right before sunset, and my first shots have a twilight-gray feel I quite like. It was really pouring for much of the time I was shooting-the waterproof jacket I was wearing turned out to be not as waterproof as advertised, and I was soaked to the skin by the time I was finished. I didn’t mind, I’ve always enjoyed walking in the rain, and it was a warm night, so it actually felt really good.

Here’s the best of what I shot.