This last month, a fantastic surprise happened. An old friend of mine from Madrid was going to be in detroit and let me know he’d be flying in to Chicago for a few days. Since leaving Madrid, Marcus Hurst started a fantastic blog called Yorokobu and started making the beautifully designed Ling inflight magazine for Vueling, a Spanish airline. He asked if there was anything in Chicago he should do a piece on and one of the first things that came to mind was Specimen in Humboldt Park. They make amazing hand made guitars, tube amplifiers and have been making grammaphone-esque cone speakers for Andrew Bird for the last ten years or so. They’re so interesting they recently put up a huge installation of their pieces in the MCA in Chicago. One of the “inventions” of the owner Ian Schneller is a massive amp with a set of 2 rotating cone speakers that make the most lush sounding stereo chorus effect when a guitar is run through it. It filled the whole space with this gorgeous tone and made me want to just sit and listen for days. It reminded me of why I love my job. I get to meet interesting people making gorgeous things with varied stories. I’ve always been curious and photography gives me this pass to access so many things I’d never get to see or maybe never put the energy in to see. Being a tourist in my own city is fantastic.

I shoot regularly for Gilt City here in Chicago. It’s a bit of a challenge as normally I get an email 24-48 hrs before I need to schedule and shoot the images, and occasionally have another day to get the edit to the photo editors off in NYC. The process is difficult but I like having the obstacle of almost zero planning, and telling a story about a place I may have never visited before. I like it because I go somewhere and imagine I’m a customer, walking in for the first time and shoot what strikes me as special about the location.

This week’s great shoot happened at Tesa Cigar shop in the west loop – BYOB and stocked to gills with classics like macanudo and their own brand of cigars made in Nicaragua, its a cigar smoker’s heaven. The humidor was massive and at one point I even saw what looked like an erupting volcano of humid air puffing out of the humidifier. It turns out the owners and their friends built the whole walk in humidifier themselves. I love when people take their spaces into their own hands. But enough talking, here’s the images.

I don’t really keep in touch with too many people from college, but this guy Jordan was always playing out in school and writing solid bits of pop and this new EP is a good representation of a classic american pop album (pop as in melodic, not as in Kesha). The arrangements are really well done, and the melodies an easy listen. It’s good not because it’s some challenging artistic endeavor as much as it’s just well crafted and quite a bit of fun. A bit of The Beatles, a bit of Elliot Smith, and a whole lot of personal touches make this album worth the listen. It’s free for download still, so feel free to check it out.

Download it here.

Lomo , the company that helped bring the Holga to its throne, pusher of all cameras russian and smelly (open up a fed 5 and tell me it doesn’t smell bad) has done it again, but this time its a movie camera that shoots 35mm film. Now I want to make movies with 35mm film reels. This looks like a fun way to blow tons of film. It would really be great to make a music video with this or shoot it at a friends wedding and make a nice creative short of the day. Now I just need to look and see how much developing and scanning this stuff costs, because even though its a $100 camera a roll of film is probably $40 and the developing probably the same, plus scan fees if you want to share it. So yeah, $120 for a family vid might not be worth it but for a gig or a special occasion I might be tempted…

Check out this sexy footage…I LOVE the wide aspect ratio.

The Lomography LomoKino from Lomography on Vimeo.

So I’ve been MIA for the week, and it’s mostly due to my new camera, the Fuji X-100. It’s amazing little beast that looks like an old school film camera, functions mostly like a point and shoot but has the quality of an SLR. I’ve been wanting something to carry around and take “snaps” with for ages, and I really don’t like the quality of most point and shoot digital cameras. Either the lenses are subpar or the sensors are crappy.

There are tons of people talking about what they like or don’t like about this camera, so I’m not going to do a massive tech review on the x-100 but I will say a few things about it in general. The manual focus is basically worthless, but the autofocus works most of the time like a charm so it’s not really an issue. The battery seems to last pretty long unless you leave the quick wake up setting on and leave the camera turned to ON, while you sleep at night (found that out the hard way when I woke up and wanted to shoot). The camera is a touch slow to respond at times, but it’s a fancy point and shoot in many ways, so you learn to deal with that, and its a bit of a compromise to get something small, light and inobtrusive. Also, since it has a great sensor and shoots raw I found myself being able to rescue underexposed shots in ways you’d normally not be able to do. And the dynamic range of fuji’s sensors is pretty impressive.

What I love is that the camera gets a great response when I carry it around and people don’t act like they do when I pull out my 5dmkii at a party. I feel like I got more honest interactions with the camera and had more fun shooting than I’d had in a long time, so really the camera is doing it’s job. You feel ok taking photos for the sake of photos with it, in a relaxed manner and it’s just so fun to touch that you almost forget you’re holding a new camera. I’d highly recommend also getting the thin leather strap that nikon sells to complete the classic package. The faux leather one that comes with the camera is pretty gross to the touch.

OK. So enough babble, here are some shots from the first week. Sorry, no lush landscapes but lots of wandering urban shots and snaps of neighbors…

john maus @ the empty bottle

The Fader mp3 streams pointed me to one of my favorite label’s, Tri Angle, soundcloud stream and specifically this track.

Balam Acab – Motion by TriAngleRecords

Lush.

I’m going to make one of these soon. The Burning House is awesome. It’s a stream of people making piles of things they would grab in case of a fire. It’s a cool concept about the things you’d not want to live without. It’s the classic, “If you were stranded on a desert island” question.

I hope this is it. It’s Stream Ford & Lopatin’s Channel Pressure album in entirety. Streaming. Now if I could just get it directly to my brain. Work on that please Grado, yeah?

Thanks RJ Dugan for pointing this one out and to Fact Mag for posting in in the first place.

And here’s a drawing I’ve been doing over and over recently. I snapped a webcam shot of it and added a bit of creamy color to the paper via photoshop. I love marker paper.

So I’ve been going through quite a bit lately and haven’t kept my NY resolution at all (suprise). I think sometimes we make them with great intentions of breaking them. So now I’m back and I have a new resolve to create blog-ish content.

Tomorrow I’m going to see Vivian Maier’s work at the Chicago Cultural Center. For those of you who don’t know who she is, her negatives were found by Jeffrey Goldstein and John Maloof. She was an au pair and shot photographs but never shared them on a large scale. It’s always kind of thrilling when new work like this surfaces because it reminds you how not everything has been found or documented and that there is still a lot to explore.

I think the show is mainly from John Maloof’s collection but I’m not sure. I’ll report back tomorrow with more solid info but everything that I’ve seen of the images in a few videos and blog postings seems to indicate I’m in for a treat.

This may be old news to some, but I just stumbled upon these recently.

They’re “muertitos” or little dead that embody personalities. Great stuff. I really love the texture that Christian uses for most of his illustrations as they are really flat but the way the ink appears to be scraped on/off makes them get 3 dimentionality from something other than shading.