2024 01 18

Car in front of house just outside Chicago, Illinois. November, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

Important Announcement: For the second annual year, our Personal Anthem is…

Stay Positive by The Hold Steady

In anticipation of *gestures broadly,* we feel the need to maintain our continual reminder that we, indeed, gotta stay positive. We’re getting older but have some things to be proud of. The kids are doing things differently but let’s be real, deep down they appreciate our contributions in years past and we can learn from how they are doing things differently. We acknowledge that sometimes we run short on options and go with the quick fix — we’re only human, after all.

To be candid: 2023 was the most challenging year of my professional career. Early on, I assigned myself this song to help see me through; a constant reminder that things ebb & flow and sustained success isn’t always a realistic outcome in life and esp. not in the world of commercial photography. In years past, I kept my overhead low and weathered the downtime by simply not paying any attention to it! Reading, travel, movies, etc all became my go-to time fillers and distractions. What changed is that last year my overhead ballooned dramatically as I had studio rent to pay each & every month no matter how few assignments were coming in. This directly led to me associating things like casual magazine reading, a healthy and important aspect of my life in years prior, as a harmful & lazy distraction in a never-ending quest to shovel more coal into the furnace to keep the train moving (make money, honey). I’m dramatizing a bit for effect, sure, but the sentiment is accurate and understanding is the first step toward recovery. Don’t forget to be kind to yourself!

You gotta stay positive — not by force but in your core perspective on living. Prisoners of war survive when they keep their mental state in balance and don’t slack on the little things, that, in context have no real value, such as shaving and keeping up appearances for themselves.

Stay positive,

-Clayton

2024 01 17

Rural Illinois farmland west of Chicago. November, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

How do you break through and gain an audience in a world where, for example, 3,700,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day? Do you post one photo (of farmland!) to an obscure photo blog each day? Well, no. I’m not really doing this to go viral or get a fan base (tho that would be a motivating development!). Some modest goals for this website are:

• Get and stay in the habit of creating images and exploring thoughts just for the sake of creating

• Get better at writing

• Get better at curating and editing my images (I share way too many images typically and mostly ignore sculpting meaning through juxtaposition)

• Have fun and explore new things

If you have any thoughts on things that help you create for the sake of creating, in a world where the proliferation of #content on #socialmedia is such a turnoff, I’d love to hear them!

-Clayton

2024 01 16

Night street scene in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. November, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

I came across this scene while walking home and snapped a few images with my Ricoh. It’s just a simple little scene but I love the odd tree, ambient night lighting and gritty noise from the high ISO.

THEN, a few months later, I again came across this scene and immediately thought back to this image I had made. Instead of making yet another image with my Ricoh, I pulled out the iPhone, opened a new app I’ve been using called Lapse, and snapped a few new images.

I must say: I’m a bit obsessed with this app. After getting over the initial data grab app-trickery bullshit that makes me want to throw my phone into a river, Lapse surprised me! The way they implemented the camera is fun and impressive; the concept being that your phone is a “disposable film camera” so you get the expected filter look, which is nice, but you also get a really well-blended strobe look from the camera flash (which is something I’d always fully avoided using on my phone camera even in the darkest environments). It reminds me of my old Yashica T3 film camera and the many years I spent shooting nightlife strobe photography. Of course, it’s still digital and still a highly compromised phone image, but the convenience and social factors are hard to compete with.

I bought my Ricoh, which I keep in my pocket at all times, as a way to get away from solely using my phone camera out of sheer convenience and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve recently made, however, this app might have me once again using my phone camera more than I’d like to.

-Clayton (@claytonhauck on Lapse)

Lapse app version of the above scene made a few weeks later than the original above. © Clayton Hauck

2024 01 15

Bread is among my favorite things of all-time.

When I was a kid, I was a picky eater. My mom would send me to sleepovers at my best friend’s house with a full loaf of french bread. As werid as this sounds, I loved it and would snack on the loaf as I got hungry. I’m guessing she did this in case the dinner being served was something picky boys didn’t like. In reality, they’d usually just order a nice big pizza (also my favorite food) and, as I vividly remember because I thought it was so odd, cut it up with a pair or scissors.

Anyway, it’s strange how some memories just become seered into your brain. I also vividly remember picking up a toy gun at this friend’s house and nonchalantly aiming it at his bedroom tv (like in Duck Hunt!) and pulling the trigger, for fun! The fun quickly changed to terror as the toy gun was in fact a high powered pellet gun and the pellet shot out, hit the glass tv screen and cracked it, ricocheted back to the other side of the room and nailed my best friend in the leg causing him to scream out in pain. WTF! I managed to hit the two most sensitive objects in the room, in one shot, without even trying. Talk about good aim!

With aim like that, this moment is when I knew I was destined to become a photographer.

-Clayton

2024 01 14

Restaurant scene at Lardon. December, 2023. Chicago. © Clayton Hauck

Found moments are always my favorite. On my fancy expensive commercial jobs, the trick is often to make the neat & clean setup look organic & found. In this regard: a big part of styling is simply knowing what works and having good taste.

Bonus Tip: The Italiano Sandwich at Lardon. (photos by yours truly)

-Clayton

2024 01 13

Wilson & Allison on our 114 year old stairs. December, 2023. Chicago. © Clayton Hauck

Creating vs. Consuming.

This is the big one, for any artist, in my opinion. For who is an artist that does not have a product to share?

It was around the time of the Covid lockdowns when I realized I’d been living the life of a Consumer in recent years. Addicted to the ease of hitting play on the next YouTube video.

This website is part of my carefully-crafted-consultant-directed-investor-funded Plan to get my ass making more photos of dogs to post on the internet for all the masses to consume.

Enjoy!

-Clayton

2024 01 12

Three neighbor dogs peeking out the window (aka Mr. Peepers). December, 2023. Chicago. © Clayton Hauck

Every once-in-a-while some art comes along into your life that makes you wonder: why isn’t everyone in the world obsessed with this? Oh yeah, it’s because you’re a genius and these mere mortals just don’t get it.

This Bug Club album is one of those things.

Again, discovered via the great Ezra Furman, thanks Ezra.

Enjoy!

-Clayton

2024 01 11

Humboldt Park Lagoon. December, 2023. Chicago. © Clayton Hauck

Make an image, edit an image, select an image, post an image, write a lil thing, schedule the post, repeat.

Hard hat, lunch pail. Hard hat, lunch pail.

This is the life of a working photographer, toiling away in the digital mines of The Internet.

I use the word “toil” lovingly, of course.

-Clayton

2024 01 10

House with police lights. December, 2023. Chicago. ©Clayton Hauck

Clayton, what’s your secret to Photography Success?

You have to go to where the people are… BLOGS!

While I may be Old & Irrelevant now, photographing my neighbor’s house while police cart away someone across the street, I used to be Young & Relevant. Back then, I would also go out at night to photograph other Young & Relevant people and post those pictures on a photo blog called everyoneisfamous.com.

Am I, here, attempting to relive & duplicate my past successes by doing the same thing all over again in a slightly different approach?

Yup!

Will it work the same way?

Nope!

Have a nice day.

-Clayton

2024 01 09

Composited image of house on street in Chicago. December, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

Enter: Artificial Intelligence

Surely, I’m going to talk about AI quite a lot here in the weeks ahead. It’s a subject that takes up a lot of my brain space yet still don’t quite know what to think of it all. One real world result has already been an attempt to diversify my income away from strictly photogrpahy, as I do feel relatively pessimistic my job will still be around in a few years time.

Imagineers!

I moved to rebrand “photographers” to “imagineers,” largely because I wanted to be an Imagineer when I was a kid. Seriously, though, humanities’ relationship to The Image has been evolving drastically over the last few decades and there’s no telling where it will be in two decades more. My hunch, is that we’re fucked.

So how does AI relate to this image?

I like this photo! It does lack a little bit of detail, some humanity perhaps, to really make it sparkle, but it’s nice. Part of why I like it is a bit behind-the-scenes.

Firstly, the image was made with a ~20mp digitial RicohGR3x, however, it is stitched together from 4-5 captures (pano-style), thus giving it resolution and perspective that isn’t typical (and kind of looks a bit more like a wider lensed-medium format camera, partly because of the square crop).

Secondly, I used the Adobe “generative fill” aka AI to extend the top and bottom portions of the frame, as there was no information there. While this is a boring example of what’s possible with AI, the texture on the street doesn’t exist in real life and was a choice made mostly by the computers based on thousands or millions of other images and then partially by me, in choosing one of three I most liked.

Soon, 100% of images will be fully generated by AI and humanity will live in peace.

Enjoy!

-Clayton

2024 01 08

Water on car. December, 2023. Chicago. © Clayton Hauck

Part of what I’ve been photographing a lot lately has been more abstract, textured images to use as backdrops for my “Keep it 100” portrait sessions[1], where the background changes every second, cycling through various images I’ve made recently. Before doing these sessions on a regular basis, this is a moment I would've passed over. Is it a stunning image? No, but it does have a lil something going for it… and it’s fun to incorporate as one detail in a more detail-dense portrait.

It’s easy to make a good image, the hard part is figuring out what to do with it. I’m still figuring that bit out myself and likely always will be.

-Clayton

[1] inspired by artist Jeremy Cowart

2024 01 07

Dinah. December, 2023. ©Clayton Hauck

This is Dinah. She owns Spinning J and is awesome. I had a wild idea a few months back that would require me to find new partners and/or investor money (have a loose $100k you’re looking to do something with? Hit me up!) so I reached out to her and some other people to see if they may want to get involved. The idea is really cool and I hope it happens, however, it’s a bit of a long shot at this point because I don’t think the space is still available. If it does happen, surely you’ll be hearing a lot more about it soon.

-Clayton

2024 01 06

Vertical or horizontal? I can’t decide. Also, do I love these images? I can’t decide. December, 2023. Chicago. ©Clayton Hauck

Because Nobody In The World knows about this website, it would be nice if a Top Tier Clandestine Spy Network started using it to communicate in the comments sections so I could get a little inside peek at how the world operates while I think up what to say the next day.

cc: @whitehouse (not the porn site), @joebiden, @cia, @fbi, @mossad, @isi, etc

-Clayton

2024 01 05

Lonesome Rose neon. December, 2023. Chicago. ©Clayton Hauck

Are you really going to post every day for a year? I don’t know, ask me again in 359 days.

-Clayton

Image made at Lonesome Rose in Chicago’s most underrated neighborhood: Andersonville

2024 01 04

Sloppy Bob. November, 2023. Chicago. ©Clayton Hauck

A fun album I recently came upon via Ezra Furman’s favorite albums of 2023 list:

This album got me thinking about art and how music is, rightfully, among the most celebrated of art forms (and how photography is not even really considered art). Within a song, let alone an entire album, you have countless opportunities to connect with an audience. A catchy lyric, fun melody, weird sound, etc. Even the world’s most iconic photographs are like the equivalent of a single note, or perhaps on a good day a little jingle (photography books or bodies of work is another story!). Sometimes a photographer will hit a home run and merge a striking image with a relevant global conversation and it can connect and have a deeper impact, like the memorable photojournalistic images through the years, but even my strongest images will be mostly forgotten by next Tuesday.

Anyway, this album is better than 99.86% of the world’s photographs.

Enjoy!

-Clayton

2024 01 03

Downtown Steubenville, Ohio. November, 2023. ©Clayton Hauck

Steubenville, Ohio topped out around 38,000 people in the 1940s. Today, roughly 18,000 people live here — a loss of over half the population from its peak almost a century ago.

I have no magic takeaway from these stats but a desire to see America’s Rust Belt re-filled with people. Trends, however, are tough to fight against. To succeed in business you have to go to where the people are. To run a city you have to maintain your infrastructure. With a shrinking tax base, this math becomes impossible to manage very quickly. Its hard to blame people for moving to new southern cities, where budgets are flush and the crafty and connected are able to more easily fill their coffers.

Cheap home prices help, but there needs to be an additional catalyst to get enough people motivated to move back to these rusty towns and refill their full potential.

If elected mayor, I pledge to Make Refurbishments Exciting Again. A ribbon cutting for every alley repaved. A fish fry for every sewer line replaced.

Enjoy.

-Clayton

2024 01 02

Cat in window (Mr. Peepers). November, 2023. Chicago. ©Clayton Hauck

Still here! Keeping things brief is the key to longevity. Let’s not get too ambitious too soon, that’s how burnout happens.

I’ve always preferred horizontal images. Vertical images have a place, though. Like here on a mobile phone where you are definitely seeing this! Meow.

-Clayton

2024 01 01

Moon through trees. November, 2023. Wilmette. ©Clayton Hauck

Even years are better.

I was born on an odd year, on an odd day, in an odd month. You may say I’m odd, and that’s exactly why I’ve decided to — after years of wanting but failing to — start a daily photo blog™️ at the ripe old (odd) age of 41!

Surely this will be my ticket to Photography Fame & (fortune, sadly, is no longer possible in the photography industry) Busy Work. You may even be blessed by musings and insights as good as this!

So buckle up and enjoy the ride. We’ll see how far we can get before the car runs out of juice.

Happy New Year.

-Clayton

PS- Thanks to Richard Avedon for naming this website. More on that later.