Wanderlust

In an effort to get better at my portraits, I have been breaking out my Speedlites and having some fun. I’ve gotten so used to shooting everything with natural light that I thought it might be a nice experiment. The first is a self portrait I did with a bare 580 EXII on the right.

Luckily I convinced a friend to step in for a couple of photos as well. The first is my mock “Corona ad” which I also did with my 580 EXII bare and the second is shot with a beauty dish over the strobe.

Thanks for looking!

I recently took a little vacation to Toronto for the New Year. It was great to get out of Chicago and be a tourist for awhile. Spent most of my time downtown wandering but did get a chance to make it to Niagra Falls and see the insanely great Honest Ed’s, a local discount shop that has everything you could want and more. Here are some of my favorites from the trip!

I was recently asked to photograph 11-day-old Tuesday for a local family in Chicago. I was so honored to document this young family and spend some time making photographs. I decided to shoot with all natural light and luckily they had a great window where spent most of our time. I was really excited about how the images turned out and congratulations to Heidi and Joe on their beautiful new daughter!

Looking for a feature the other day and I decided to stop at the Leaning Tower of Niles and make a few pictures. I love these quirky, American landmarks and I’m inspired to make a map of them and have a little road trip fun.

Back in August I had the pleasure of photographing a local pregnant mother for a feature the paper was doing called Oak Park: Our home, our lives, our stories. Each of us found a few people to interview and photograph and everything was put together as a separate paper full of the stories. I met Lisa and her son Jackson who were both really wonderful.

I just got back in touch with her to catch up and meet the new baby Sam. I spent an hour or two hanging out with Jackson and the rest of the family and made some portraits at their house. It was such a wonderful surprise to see one of the photographs I had taken earlier framed in their house. How great!

I was recently asked by my friend Rob Clearfield to shoot the photos for his upcoming album release. I was really excited to be part of the project and we headed over to LaSalle St. Church in Chicago. I really love the classic, high contrast jazz portraits from the 30’s and 40’s but I wanted to add a bit of a modern twist. These are some of my favorites.

The album, A Thousand Words, will be coming out later this month. Rob just sent me the layout for the cd and it looks great! It’s always interesting to see which photos of yours other people choose. Here it is…

I recently went back to Detroit to scout some more ideas for a project idea I have there. This trip was mostly spent exploring the downtown area which included many trips on the People Mover, Detroit’s elevated transit system. It’s so strange to go back to a place where you once spent so much time and feel like a complete outsider.

Also, sorry about the lack of posting. I was doing a redesign that consumed way too much time. But I’m back!

This was the first thing I encountered at my assignment today…