Meat Your Maker part 1

Apologizes all around to you viewer, as I have been side tracked with a book I am writing for later this year, along with a camera upgrade (more information to come).  We're back, and it's now time to unveil Meat Your Maker individually.  Each one of these has a story to their creation and since we already know about the drummie, the item that started it all, it's only fair to start it off by seeing where that drummie went.  I call this "YKFDRUMMIE", short for Yellow/KFC/Drummie.  The chicken itself is actually from a local farm, the source of a separate blog later, Hillbunker Farms.  This farm offers wool balls for dryers, local honey, soaps, pigs, lambs, eggs, and chicken to name a few.  They do pretty good for themselves, and it was a pleasure to work with them on this project.  As you can tell by the previous blogs the art style and design that I was going for was executed perfectly and right down to the chicken colored and edited to look like a monochromatic dollar bill face.  I'm really happy with the results!  As your eyes go down the piece you can see a vibrance and liveliness to it slowly wash away into want it becomes.  Now I didn't want it to be too depressing towards the bottom but a more solemn monotoned and monochromatic theme needed to be implemented, so it was a departure from color topside to black/white/grey at the bottom.  Each one of the "products" at the bottom also fit a street art style, as mentioned before in a previous blog I believe.  For this piece of the triptych I went for a Banksy-like  black and white vector, colorized it, and still tried to give it the vector paper urban poster feel.  To re-iterate, this is one part of a three part triptych, and you'll see the other pieces in the next few days separately.  So please do check back as I'll give each one their time to shine.  This leads up to a great Summer store update coming in July where Meat Your Maker will be one of the many things that gets added!  Check back in a few days, and thanks for stopping by!

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