A Chicago couple on Bryn Mawr & Sheridan

I moved to Chicago 9 years ago. My first week here felt like I had moved to another planet. I couldn’t believe that I could walk out of my apartment and find a bar and a grocery store right around the corner. I kept a journal and wrote about everything I saw because everything was new. Everything was different.

A homeless woman outside Little India restaurant

When you’re on vacation, it’s easy to approach every day as a opportunity to explore. Your time is limited–you’ve got 3/7/14 days to soak it all up and experience everything. When you live somewhere, it can be remarkably easy forget to see. When you wake up, commute to work, commute to the gym, go home, eat dinner, go to bed and do it all over again the next day, things become routine. You bury your face in a book or put in your earbuds to have a “reason” to avoid the person begging for $.25 on the train. You close your eyes to catch a 20 minute nap on your way to the office. You hide your face in your scarf and shuffle as quickly as you can to meet Missy for coffee and a gab. It’s 15 degrees, after all.

Winter in Chicago is rough. Granted, this year it hasn’t been so bad. When the holidays are over, New Years is done and it’s just cold and grey and dark until April… it can really wear a person down. This past weekend, we were lucky enough to have two gorgeous, sunny days in a row. I grabbed my camera and decided to re-explore. I wanted to open my eyes. I wanted to fall in love.

I moved from Dayton in 2012 and was managing a photography studio for Kevin Weinstein in the West Loop. We primarily did high-end/luxury weddings and life events (Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, birthdays, etc.). I’d perform simple edits on the photos and assist him on his shoots. Eventually, Kevin started handing me a camera and let me photograph during the receptions. It’s crazy how beautiful your photos can be–regardless of your talent–when you’re photographing a $500k event.

A buttefly mosaic near Kathy Osterman Beach

I always loved taking detail shots–flowers, invitations, place settings and decorations. I got better at photographing people, but I never fully got over the fear of sticking a camera directly in someone’s face. It’s fairly intrusive, if you think about it and–more often than not–people don’t love having their photo taken. It’s a weird experience when your mental justification is, “I’m getting paid to do this… whether Aunt Jan likes it or not.”

Street photography is an interesting thing. You can stand in one place all day long, waiting for the right person to pass by–the woman pushing her cat in a stroller or the man wearing the wooden top hat with a long, grey, braided beard. Or you can travel and find something interesting about a scalped barbie doll, a sticker, a Little Library you–somehow–walked by 100 times but never looked up from Instagram long enough to notice.

I’m not a professional, but I love my camera because it acts as a new eye. It encourages me to observe the world, people and my home. It helps me value light and color and shape and find something interesting in pattern and reflection. Photography helps me truly see what I haven’t seen in a long time…

There’s something beautiful about every day.