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.
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