Chicago

Last week my wife and I visited Chicago. It was the first leg of a mini tour around the Midwest whose main purpose was to see family.

We were hoping for better springtime weather. But while clear skies offered folks back home on the West Coast a spectacular opportunity to see what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime northern lights show, we had off-and-on rain showers and lots of light pollution throughout our visit. No aurora borealis for us.

My wife and I intended to branch out and explore attractions we’ve never been to in Chicago. But the weather combined with other circumstances one afternoon led us back to what has always been a favorite place for us: the Art Institute of Chicago.

During our visit, I found myself people watching more than anything else. It was fascinating to see how others interacted with the art on display.

Other than the Art Institute, and when it wasn’t raining, we found ourselves just wandering around Chicago and taking in the sights.

I have to confess that I was a little disappointed with what I accomplished photographically. I had the opportunity to do some truly big-city street photography, and I feel like I blew it. I was in more of a vacation snapshot frame of mind, and I ended up taking lots of photographs using familiar compositional devices. Perhaps I’m still caught in the same old rut I’ve been in lately.

At the time, I felt driven to cover as much area as I could in the rather limited amount of time I had in Chicago. I might have been better off picking one spot and exploring it a bit closer.

I also found myself a little overwhelmed with taking in the energy of unfamiliar surroundings. Do you have to be well accustomed with a place in order to do street photography effectively?

Before leaving home, I put a fair amount of mental effort into deciding what camera to take. I kicked around the idea of shooting the trip on film. But I didn’t want to deal with taking undeveloped film through TSA screening. We also packed as lean and mean as we could, so the Canon EOS M50 with 15-45mm zoom lens seemed like a logical choice.

In hindsight, I regret the decision. For digital photography, my new Canon EOS R8 simply does a better job all around. The M50 may be smaller and more convenient, but not by enough to warrant going with a camera that doesn’t perform as well. I think I may have finally outgrown it.

And as far as digital vs. film is concerned, I found myself not thinking through what I was doing. I had a camera that did all the thinking for me and an autofocus zoom lens that enabled me simply to stand there and frame a shot, and I failed to move around and work a subject with my feet. I had a seemingly limitless SD card, and I ended up with hundreds of images most of which were garbage.

On the other hand, as my recent experience in Seattle taught me, holding a film camera with a prime lens puts me in a far more careful and artistic mindset. I ended up with fewer photographs, but my keeper-to-trash ratio was much better from that trip than from this one. Do you really need ten zillion pictures of a place anyway?

But in spite of my choice of gear, I still feel like I succeeded with capturing a sense of what it was like to experience Chicago.

Overall, I got the impression that everyone in Chicago is kind of tired of each other. I saw lots of people driving their cars aggressively and blaring their horns at each other. I saw lots of impatience and lots of standoffishness. People are packed in close together, but no one interacts.

I did find that, once the ice is broken, people often opened up. It’s almost as if they want to interact but don’t know how to take that first step.

One night when my wife and I were having dinner in Wicker Park, I asked our server what her experience living in Chicago was like. The way she summarized it is cemented in my mind: drinking and sports.

Yeah, that’s kind of what I remember from growing up in the Midwest. And I don’t miss it.