Weekly Shooting Excursion XV: Little Village…North Lawndale…Bohemian California?

My fifteenth summer ‘keep me sane’ outing was a really interesting and enjoyable photo shoot. I decided to shoot along Cermak Rd. (22nd St) west of Western Avenue, in what I assumed was Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. I had really enjoyed shooting along 26th St. in Little Village earlier in the summer, and was expecting something similar shooting a few blocks to the northeast. While there were some similarities, there were also some big differences. The first difference was the actual neighborhood where I was  shooting. I thought I was in the northeast corner of Little Village, just west of Pilsen. Looking on Google maps, it showed the area as being part of Little Village. Looking in Wikipedia, however, I read that Cermak west of Western was actually in North Lawndale, the neighborhood directly north of Little Village. North Lawndale is more a struggling neighborhood than Little Village, and doesn’t have the buzzy street vibe that Little Village has. To further complicate things, when uploading photos from this shoot to my Flickr account, it labeled most of them as being in ‘Bohemian California’. Flickr comes up with a lot of odd neighborhood names (so does Google Maps),  but I Googled ‘Bohemian California’ and found that the area was informally called that in the past, as it was once an area with many Czech immigrants (that also explains why nearby Pilsen, now a largely Mexican neighborhood, also has a Czech name).

The other big difference was in the feel of the area. While 26th St. just a few blocks south and west of where I was shooting is a busy street full of small businesses and shops mainly catering to the large Mexican population in the neighborhood, Cermak Rd. in this area is much quieter. There were quite a few businesses, but also a lot of closed storefronts, and there was considerably less pedestrian and vehicle traffic. It’s more run down than 26th St., and the farther west I walked, the grubbier the neighborhood felt. The street eventually became a couple block stretch of auto repair shops and weed filled lots before ducking under railroad tracks and continuing as a residential area.

Regardless of the name and the feel of the neighborhood, I found the area very photogenic, and shot a lot of photos. Urban areas always attract me when shooting, and the somewhat gritty feel of the area was easy and fun to shoot. 

This shoot was also the last time I used my Nishika camera, a cheap plastic 4-lens camera made in the late ’80's to produce lenticular photos. I had my Nishika loaded with old, expired film, and was shooting photos, when it jammed while trying to advance the film. I tried again, and the entire film advance mechanism broke. I was a little disappointed. While it’s a cheap crappy camera I bought at a garage sale, I had rediscovered it this summer after not using it much for ten years or so, and was particularly enjoying shooting panoramic or mosaic scenes with it and joining those images in Photoshop. I may try taking the camera apart to see if I can get it to work again, but as it’s a cheap plastic camera, I’m doubtful that will be successful. Replacing it isn’t going to happen either, as crappy camera enthusiasts have discovered the Nishika. The camera I paid $2.00 for now sells for over $100 on Ebay, and it definitely isn’t worth nearly that much! Along with my favorites shot with my real camera, I’ve added a couple of the final photos made with the Nishika to the end of this post.

 

Made with my now broken Nishika camera.

The last photo shot with my crappy old 4-lens Nishika camera. The double exposure is from the camera jamming and exposing twice on the same piece of film.

Weekly Shooting Excursion XIV: Oak Forest

I’m quite a ways behind in writing about my weekly summer shooting excursions. The photos in this post were actually shot in mid-August. These things happen when you work full time. I’m just grateful that I have a job right now. These photos were shot in Oak Forest, a suburb south of Chicago. This was one of those ‘combine a photo shoot with an errand’ outings that also comprised a couple of earlier shoots. My car was due for a biennial emissions check, and the closest facility to where I live is out in the middle of nowhere. I took a look on Google Maps, looking for anything that might be a little photogenic, and found that Oak Forest, a suburb just a few minute’s drive from the emissions testing facility, has a small, kind of downtownish looking area. So, I headed there.

As is often the case when I find myself shooting in the suburbs, I didn’t seem to engage as fully with the landscape as I do when shooting in the city. There was a bit of an interesting twist to this shoot, however. A few days before I shot these photos, a derecho, which is a very severe and long-lasting storm, blew through the Chicago area. It was very severe-about half a block from my house, a huge tree blew over in a neighbor’s yard, and came to rest on electrical wires. Cleanup crews were so overworked that it was several days before it was removed-I’m surprised we never lost power. Oak Forest was in the middle of cleanup when I was there. Electrical and tree removal crews were working in several locations, and I saw a few storefronts that had sustained damage. I was actually asked three times if I was “the guy from the insurance company” when I was shooting photos of buildings. With all the cleanup, there were people out, but not enough to worry about social distancing.

My car passed the emissions test, by the way.

Here are my favorites from this shoot.

 

Favorite Photo 2020

Miss You More

Digital Photo, 2020

Every New Year's Day, Lenscratch, one of the best photo blogs I've seen, publishes reader submissions of their favorite photos taken over the previous year. This year's post is huge, eleven pages full of reader submissions of all types of photos from all types of photographers. They are loosely arranged thematically across the eleven pages.

The photo I submitted is the one above. It's one of those photos that I knew was probably a winner when I posted it. It was shot on Memorial Day weekend, on the first of the weekly shooting excursions I made this summer. You'll find it on page 7 on the Lenscratch favorite photos post.

 

Weekly Shooting Excursion XIII: Uptown/Argyle St.

This is the latest in a series of posts documenting a series of weekly photo shoots I made this past summer, to keep me sane while living under a pandemic. This was my thirteenth summer shooting outing, and I chose Uptown, a neighborhood on the far north side of Chicago. I spent a few hours on a humid Sunday afternoon shooting and shopping in the numerous southeast Asian groceries in the neighborhood, narrowly avoiding the strong rainstorms that blew through when I was on my way back home.

Uptown is one of those neighborhoods that has gone through many changes. Historically, it was a big nightlife area, with numerous ornate theaters and jazz clubs. Many live music clubs still exist there; the area is still known as one of the big entertainment districts in Chicago. It has also seen some not so great times. Before I moved to Chicago, back in the 90’s, I had a guidebook to the city, and I remember it referring to Uptown as a 'classic skid row' neighborhood. Like much of Chicago, however, there has been gentrification in recent years. There are still some gritty areas, and the area as a whole hasn’t gentrified nearly as much as other Chicago neighborhoods, but it’s no longer a ‘classic skid row’ either. 

Uptown is also home to a small southeast Asian commercial area that most locals just refer to as Argyle St., although it is sometimes called Little Saigon. About four blocks of Argyle St., along with a couple blocks of Broadway St. either side of Argyle is home to many Vietnamese restaurants, southeast Asian groceries, bakeries, etc. I always enjoy shopping in these groceries, while I know nothing about cooking any southeast Asian cuisine, there is produce and other items I find in these stores that I can’t find anywhere else.

I shot along Argyle St., wandered along Broadway a few blocks as well, and explored a few side streets. There were more people around than I encountered on most of my other summer photo shoots, probably because I was shooting on a weekend. Some restaurants in the Argyle St. area were doing outdoor seating, and it looked like social distancing was a little iffy, so I avoided the busier spots for the most part. Still, more people appear in the photos I shot this day than in most of the photos from my other summer shoots.

Here are my favorites:

 

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: