Weekly Shooting Excursion XII: Tinley Park

 My 12th summer shooting excursion was out in the suburbs. I had a couple errands to run in the southwest suburbs, and decided to combine that with a shooting trip. I chose Tinley Park, a suburb in the southwest corner of the Chicago metro area. Tinley Park has a small downtown-like area, and while I’ve driven through and shopped in the more typical strip mall parts of the town many times, had never set foot in the downtown area. I don’t shoot in the suburbs often, and the differences between the suburbs and the city made for a nice change of pace, even if I find it a bit more challenging to creatively engage with the landscape.

It was an enjoyable shoot, overall. While a downtown area, there weren’t a lot of people around. Most of the people I saw were congregated close to a couple of restaurants, and easy to avoid to maintain social distancing. This was late July, and it was hot, but not so hot as to be overly uncomfortable. Large, fluffy clouds in the sky made for nice backgrounds in the photos I shot. I wandered around for a little over an hour shooting various things. Here are my favorites from this shoot:

 

Weekly Shooting Excursion XI: Archer Avenue, Bridgeport

For my 11th summer shooting excursion, I shot on and around Archer Ave. in the south side Chicago Bridgeport neighborhood. Bridgeport is an interesting neighborhood with an interesting (although not always nice) history. I’ll save that for a later post; I returned to the central area of Bridgeport for a shoot in early September (the one I’m posting today was in late July), and will touch on history when I get around to posting about that shoot. The Archer Ave. area feels different from the rest of the neighborhood anyway, so I’ll focus on the Archer area now.

Bridgeport these days is one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the city. Nearly 40% of the population in Bridgeport is Asian, and Chinatown sits immediately to the northeast of where I was shooting. Archer Ave. is one of the infamous diagonal streets in Chicago, and for much of it’s length, is paralleled by the I-55 expressway as it runs out to the southwest suburbs from the city center. It’s an arterial street, and I’d bet that most Chicagoans’ only experience with Archer comes from using it as an alternate route when I-55 is a gridlocked nightmare.

Where it runs through Bridgeport, Archer is pretty grubby and run down looking in places, but the area doesn’t feel grubby. Bridgeport for years has had a kind of simmering under the surface, almost gentrifying, almost hipsterish feeling, but not quite. The people who were out in the streets when I was shooting were mainly a mixture of young adults and middle aged Asians, and the area felt, if not quite vibrant, stable and calm (traffic aside). I walked along Archer for maybe a mile and a half, popping down side streets when things looked interesting. The cloud cover was steadily increasing while I was shooting, and on my way back home, some strong storms blew through. Here are my favorite shots.

Mosaic made from three separate shots with a 4-lens Nishika camera.