Over Christmas of 2018, I had a cousin of mine, Maddie Stellick, ask me if I could take some photos of her. Excited at this request, I knew that I would be able to try out my newest lens acquisition, a Sigma Art 50mm f/1.4. lens. Unfortunately, just after Christmas, I headed back from my home in Geneva, Illinois to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for my winter-term class at college. Maddie and I were both rather bummed out that we could not manage to fit the trip in, but after talking to her about it, we decided, last minute, to go into Chicago on a weekend after the first week of my course’s start.
This trip went, very quickly, from a two-person outing to a five-person adventure. Because of the nature of Maddie and I’s relation to each other, the shoot was going to be light-hearted and relaxed, I invited two close friends who are also photographers to accompany us into the city. They had never been to the city and they chose to go to different part of the city to do their own thing while Maddie and I found some places to take photos. The fifth person who joined us is my younger sister, Faith. Maddie and Faith are very close, and my sister had wanted to go into Chicago for a while before this.
Friday night, we decided to take a train into the city at an ungodly hour of the morning. Saturday morning rolled around and the five of us barely made our train on time.
I would like to point out that we almost missed the train not because we were late but because we were on the wrong side of the tracks and a very slow freight train was blocking our ability to cross the tracks to the other side.
On the train took us into Chicago and whilst on the train, we decided that we were going to spend most of our time on Michigan Avenue. This was a combination of knowing that Michigan Avenue is incredibly scenic and also because there are lots of stores we could go into and pretend to be fancy.
The Bean, or Cloud Gate as it is apparently actually named, is where we started our shooting. In the first part of our shoot, Maddie had on a black sweater and a red outer jacket. We technically were in a little courtyard area off to the side of the Bean and it provided a very unique background. This background ended up not really mattering too much as I became obsessed with the fact that my lens could open to f/1.4 and that is what the entire day was shot in. I definitely should have changed it up, but hindsight is 20/20, I guess.
I have worked with a decent amount of people who are fairly uncomfortable in front of a camera, Maddie was not one of them, she knew exactly what to do without me even having to ask her to move or act in a certain way.
Around lunchtime, we went to Chick-fil-A, which is where Maddie switched into her second outfit, a more relaxed street look: a pair of jeans, an oversized Eddie Bauer jacket, and my favorite piece of the shoot, a Gucci hoodie. We ended up outside of a Nieman Marcus, where there was a lot of foot traffic, for this shoot. The foot traffic allowed for a variance in the background. The f-stop that I chose for this shoot was nice because whenever an out of focus snowflake came into view, it provided a really aesthetic piece in the foreground.
At this point, it was early afternoon and the wind had picked up in the Windy City and it was beginning to become unpleasant outside. We decided that 450 photos would be plenty to sift through and quickly called on an UberBlack XL (which was definitely overkill) to take us back to Ogilvie Station to make our train back to Geneva, Illinois.
Spending time with family is fun, taking photos is a blast, and being in Chicago is normally fun when it’s not negative one hundred thousand degrees outside, but when you put it all together, it makes for a very memorable outing that sticks out as one of my favorite sessions to date.
