2024 11 04

Remember that eclipse? Vincennes, Indiana. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

It turns out I got a couple decent shots of the eclipse afterall! Yeah, that thing that happened way back in April, which feels like a lifetime ago. I wrote about feeling frustrated after the experience (see: 2024 04 11) in that I hedged and neither fully enjoyed the moment nor committed to making a nice image of it. That said, it was an incredible experience nonetheless and I’m so grateful that we made the effort to be there in person for it.

A nice little bonus was that months later, when I finally got my film developed, there were a few nice exposures on it that I had completely written off as not likely to be worthwhile. This frame above I’m quite sure I made through the highly filtered solar glasses, which helps give it a darker appearance, while the on-camera flash illuminates the tree. It was all happening so fast that instincts took over and most of what I remember is the feeling of frantic and chaotic awe.

Fittingly, my plan today was to post a quote. When researching the below quote (so many famous quotes are inaccurately attributed), I was pleased to learn this was indeed said by Einstein in an interview about his theory of relativity, which was proven correct through measurements taken during a total solar eclipse.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

— Einstein

-Clayton

2024 09 18

Springtime in Humboldt Park. Chicago, Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

This is what my laptop desktop has looked like for about a year now. Instead of locating the folder I need on the desktop, I’ll open any random folder and use the search bar to type for it instead. My schedule, and my thoughts and focus, have been all over the place. I’ve been telling myself for months now that I will get around to organizing the desktop, and the studio, and the house, and my time. Yet, here we are, still scrambling.

I think this is a nice analogy for my life and a sign that I really ought to get my priorities a bit more straight. This is not to say I need a complete change in lifestyle, but better balance would be beneficial. It’s impossible to shine when you have a million tasks in front of you, blocking your view.

We watched Civil War last night. The movie is just okay but it got me feeling nostalgic for a different era of photography and photojournalism. Shooting film and developing film yourself while on the move. The movie got me wanting to get out and make more photos. The movie also got me wanting to make a movie myself. This post reminded me that I wanted to write some thoughts about the seasons and why I prefer living in a place like Chicago, where they are clearly defined (although increasingly less so these days).

Last week, I hosted a favorite musician in my space, David Dondero, for an incredible night, which was lightly attended. On Friday of this week, I am hosting a favorite Illinois photographer Nathan Pearce, which my negative-thinking brain assumes will also be lightly attended as it’s an afternoon affair. As I’m getting older, I’m learning that dwelling on the negative things doesn’t serve much good, and while I don’t yet believe in manifesting your reality, I see the point of people who do. More importantly, however, the takeaway is that I need to improve in communicating. It’s no easy task. I’ve always been wary of anything that feels like selling, but if I want people to participate in these things I am choosing to invest my time and energy in, it’s a non-negotiable!

This post has been as scattered as my brain has been felling, so I’m glad I could give you a taste of what I live with. Hope you can make it out on Friday!

-Clayton

2024 05 05

Allison Ziemba basking in the sun. Chicago, Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Happy sunday, y’all. I’ll be back next week with some new posts and hopefully dig a little deeper on some stuff if I can find more time that I had this previous week.

-Clayton

2024 04 11

Totality is approaching, but will he capture it? Vincennes, Indiana on the state line with Illinois over the Wabash River. April 8, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

When living in the moment and anything to get the shot conflict, things can get complicated.

Having just returned from experiencing the first and possibly only total solar eclipse of my lifetime, I’m sitting on my couch consuming everyone’s eclipse content and finding myself regretting the whole living in the moment mantra I was doing my best to practice during my time spent directly in the path of totality down in Vincennes, Indiana. I am a photographer, afterall, so getting the shot is kind of my thing. Yes, I did still make dozens of photos and thoroughly enjoyed every moment during what is maybe nature’s most amazing show. However, suppressing my urge to strictly focus on capturing the moment in favor of being present in the moment and experiencing it through my own eyes (I even had a 200mm lens and tripod with me but left it in the car!) is something that is harder to justify the next day when you’re looking at everyone’s amazing eclipse captures and comparing them to the lackluster results you made only after the natural impulse to document took over midway through (because it was so amazing I felt like I just had to make some photos!). Instead of doing one or the other, I ended up attempting to do both, which doesn’t really work when you only have four minutes. Sure, I’ll always have the memories seared into my brain, but perhaps this is why people like myself are driven to create beautiful images in the first place — it’s a sort of visual evidence that these moments did in fact happen and you’re not simply fabricating them in your mind.

For me, yesterday was a vivid reminder that everyone experiences things from their own perspective and it’s best practice to live life in a way that best compliments your own viewpoints and impulses.

All that said, the moments that will stay with me forever are ones that can’t be captured on any camera because they require your internal vision and past experiences to fully appreciate: the friends and loved ones around you and their emotions being displayed; the roar of the crowd gathered in the park as totality took over and again as the sun emerged from behind the moon; the visible lights miles off in the distance that your brain knows you are only seeing because it’s now nighttime over there but isn’t, yet, where you are; the quality of light and the vibe that is surrounding you in 360-degrees as day turns to night and then back to day again, which one static image will just translate as a mostly ordinary sunset; the feeling of the scale of things, how you are both incomprehensibly small yet a part of something so grand and impossible to understand; when the skies turn dark and another planet is immediately and unexpectedly visible in the same sky you’d just been staring at for the past two hours, and then somebody mentions there is a comet that is also visible with the right optics in your same field of view—how layers upon layers of things exist and are only visible at the right time, with the right equipment, and the right tuning. Even in the void of space things are seemingly plentiful.

Almost as spectacular as the eclipse was the surreal feeling after it ended. Within an hour, even before the moon had finished transiting the sun, which by now was ordinary by comparison to totality, everyone had packed up a left town. The balloons were deflated, the band gone, the food carts moved off, the swarms of people and overflowing collection of cars nowhere to be seen. We stopped into a pizza spot to grab a bite to eat on the main street of this now mostly re-abandoned town and immediately encountered a woman angry about her reservation getting lost and having to wait for a table — the look on her face is one I will never forget when juxtaposed alongside the amazing life event I had just experienced. Was she not also there?! Did she not see what I’d just seen? How could you be so upset in this moment?

In our modern world of endless distractions and forms of entertainment, my thoughts turned to how this day might’ve be different a century ago when nobody had things to get back to so quickly. Maybe we’d hang out and talk to each other about what we’d just travelled to witness, instead of racing home to edit our content and put it out into the internet for a million strangers to hopefully notice. These physical places, town centers across the mostly forgotten Midwest, once the social medias of another time, are now mostly empty collections of run-down-yet-beautiful houses and more stray cats than human beings.

Driving home among a mass caravan heading back towards the big city, we talked about an acquaintance who avoids eclipses as part of her culture. Maybe it’s a long-forged human self-defense mechanism used to avoid the regret of not taking away from these magical moments any sort of wisdoms it deserves or great photographs to post on your social media for likes and follows. The pressure put upon a moment in time which you have absolutely no control over is quite dramatic. Sorry it rained on the day you had your only chance at experiencing God. Guess it wasn’t in the cards this lifetime. [update: last night I repeatedly dreamed that sunlight was now different that it was before the eclipse. It’s hard for the brain not to interpret such a colossal event as a sign that something far bigger and perhaps more dangerous has just taken place!]

In the end, I didn’t get the shot but I did get quite alright two-for-one buffalo wings, an experience I will never forget, and a nice reminder about how seeing the world from your perspective is all that we know, and making sure your perspective is a good one is the only thing we can kinda sorta control, if you put the effort into it.

One day we all look up at the same thing and everyone experiences it differently. 

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” - Anaïs Nin

-Clayton

PS - anyone want to go to Iceland or Egypt for the next few total solar eclipse viewings? I’ll bring the good lens this time!

2024 04 08

Sun behind trees. Grand Detour, Illinois. February, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

I’m out today, heading home from my cookbook shoot in Nashville and chasing this total solar eclipse. I’ve never experienced one before so will be sure to report back tomorrow and let y’all know if my life is now forever changed and I have a new perspective on everything. Or maybe I’ll simply never return? We’ll see!

-Clayton

2024 01 19

The sun beyond a silhouetted tree on a property in Lee Center, Illinois. November, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

They Might Be Giants “Why Does the Sun Shine?”

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

Yo ho, it's hot
The sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives

We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun
Without a doubt
There'd be no you and me

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

The sun is hot

It is so hot that everything on it is a gas
Iron, copper, aluminum, and many others

The sun is large

If the sun were hollow, a million Earths could fit inside
And yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star

The sun is far away

About ninety-three million miles away! And that's why it looks so small

And even when it's out of sight, the sun shines night and day

The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's atomic energy

Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine
The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of 
hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees