2024 09 05

'tis the season, to get married! Chicago, Illinois. May, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I woke up early and went straight to write my morning pages, then headed to the laptop to get up a post on the ole blog. I was feeling good! I had it all planned out in my brain, then got distracted and… eighteen hours later here we are, scrambling to get one up so I can go to sleep. My wedding is in nine days and there’s a lot to do and not enough hours to do it all. Luckily we have help!

-Clayton

2024 08 13

A photo of pretty flowers to provide me a moment of calm. Chicago, Illinois. May, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

A day (today) in the life of a working photographer:

7am wake up and get ready to tackle the day!
8am arrive at studio to load up the car with equipment
8:30am breakfast sandwich to go
9:30am arrive at location for editorial portrait shoot, unload, set up
10am photograph subject for editorial portrait shoot
11am break down, load car, drive to grocery store to edit photos and grab lunch
12pm check emails and make phone calls
2pm arrive at second location for second editorial portrait shoot, unload, set up
2:30pm photograph subject for editorial portrait shoot
3:30pm jump into rush-hour traffic and drive home to grab studio key
4:30pm arrive back at studio to open up for a wardrobe fitting, unload car
5pm download and back-up photos, help production load in, etc
5:30pm warm up slice of leftover pizza to eat
6pm post to self-imposed daily blog before the day ends (late again!)
6:30pm write my morning pages which I neglected to do in the morning
7pm emails, dms, work on confirming details of an event happening in a few weeks
7:30pm work on treatment which is due the following day
9pm help production load out and lock up studio
9:30pm stop into bar for a cold one and maybe another bite
10:30pm get back home, remove pants, clean up mess, discuss wedding stuff with partner
11:30pm more work on treatment
12am set alarm for 7am and repeat

-Clayton

2024 06 11

Spring blossoms. Chicago, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Here’s a silly little memory that popped into my head:

One day a number of years ago, I was working on a project for a nonprofit which I was really excited about. The client had asked me, in addition to a half dozen other Chicago photographers, all of which I respected, to capture the city over the course of a summer. Each of us was assigned a few neighborhoods which we could document more or less as we pleased. It was a self assignment which I turned into a competition. I was motivated to make the best work I could to stand out among a distinguished crowd.

The silly moment was this: having been assigned Humboldt Park, my own neighborhood, I made a weekend out of the annual Puerto Rican pride celebrations which were happening all around my house. Setting out to document the parade one day, I stopped off at a recently-opened park along The 606 trail to photograph it. Hunting for some unique angle among the large kid’s netting, I was focused on my compositions when an angry mom snapped at me for taking photos of her children innocently playing on the play set.

“Oh no, ma’am, I’m an important documentary photographer capturing Chicago’s neighborhoods for a big important project.” I said to myself, while mustering up something hopefully less self-important to her. In an effort to assure her I was, indeed, on the up and up, I offered to show her the images on the back of my camera, to give her a sense of what I was out documenting. Luckily for me, she took my word for it, because when I myself glanced down at the screen, the image staring up at me was of small children on the little roller coaster ride which was set up in the park at the carnival, which I had just made at the end of the previous day on my walk home. Had she seen this image, which seemed impossible to explain away, there’s no telling what might’ve happened.

As is often the case in any photographer’s career-path-to-cynic, this project largely stalled and never became the big and important work I had imagined it was going to become the day I photographed children playing in the park. At least I had a nice laugh to myself about how absurd that entire situation was, which likely only a weirdo photographer like myself can fully appreciate.

-Clayton