Project CMYK: YELLOW CITY
The third installment for the "behind the scenes": Project CMYK brings us to a challenging piece, Yellow CIty. Utilizing Lomography's Redscale film the idea was simple: summer time, yellow sunset with Chicago bathed in oranges and reds. Where this fell short was time. Photography being a hobby of mine and secondary source of income sometimes has to be put on the back burner. This brings us to one year ago almost to the day where I'm instead of shooting a summer themed shot, driving into Chicago in autumn during an unusual cold front and windy flurry weather (hey I had my camera and put it off long enough). While scouting around I remembered a location near our Adler Planetarium that I shot Windy City, using that I knew to repeat greatness I would have to get away from the city and out on the lake. Pictured are crashing waves on the lake, but like most things, the picture doesn't do it enough justice. To guesstimate, the waves crashing twenty feet away from me got as high as 5-7 feet which coupled upon the cold gusts that cut me to the bone; needless to say I was miserable. I did find comfort in just getting back to not only shooting photos but to be apart of something greater than my own personal photos I shot here and there; I was doing this to show how appreciative I was to be able to shoot with this wonderful camera. Weather aside, I was quickly losing light and while I had an inkling they wouldn't come out as I wanted, I wasn't ready for how far off they mark they would turn out.
Needless to say I was able to work with it, but to color shift orange highlights to yellow, I needed to shift blues and oranges of the shadows to something complimentary. Purple seemed like the best route as a compliment to yellow, and with a fix the Sears Tower's antenna, it was fixed in post, and off the the printer. Looking back I would have made time to shoot this under "brighter" conditions, I also would have blown through all three rolls over a week of trial and error shooting. I treat this project as birthing four babies, and I can't choose a favorite because each one bring something to the table, but this one; this was a watershed moment. Coming out in this crappy weather with one roll of film on a whim, and getting this shot, of my favorite city, with all these memories in the capture of this piece really made me appreciate the project as a whole. In the next and final installment, "BlacK Sky" I'll go over a long fruitless winter, and a compromise that yielded the results I wanted to a t...or K.
Yellow City
Hasselblad 500C
f/8 @ 1/60
Lomography Redscale 100
