claytonhauck.com | blog

green bean daycare

clayton — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:07:33 +0000

Last summer, The Green Bean day school & nursery had me over to take some photos of the kids. I love kids and had a blast documenting some of their activities for a morning. Word on the street is that they have a brand new space opening up soon so I’m hoping to get back and do some more photographing! It brought me back to my days of working at Ebel Productions on spots such as this one. And this one.

the ogden food

clayton — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:19:40 +0000

As promised in the previous post, here are some food images I shot at The Ogden, the new sports bar down the street from the United Center. They have great food and an above-average beer list to go with countless giant televisions; a perfect place to watch almost any game. As for shooting the food, it can always be a challenging process, especially when you have to light the entire thing yourself with no assistants or food stylists on set. Constant tiny tweaks are required while the food rapidly loses its lusted and the grease soaks thru the garnishes. On top of that, I seemingly spent a lifetime in Photoshop since we shot so many dishes.

Overall, I was happy with the results and liked the high key and energetic look I was going for, giving the bar food a bit of an edge with a touch of class (whoa, do I get a publicist credit there?) If you’re curious, I lit all the dishes with a large umbrella bounce as the key light, white board bounce on the other side for fill and another strobe more or less directly overhead, depending on the image. I really have no fancy training shooting food so it always tends to be a huge learning experience.

the ogden kitchen

clayton — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:16:54 +0000

I recently stopped by my pal Rodney Staton’s (formerly at Bite Cafe) brand new restaurant, Chicago’s “first chef-driven sports bar” called The Ogden. It’s a few doors down from the UC and a great place to grab a bite and a beer before, after or during a game. I’ll post some of the food images I shot shortly. Trying to limit the number of images per post as I tend to get carried away. More soon!

barrelhouse flat

clayton — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:43:50 +0000

Scenes from Barrelhouse Flat, November 18, 2011. Chicago. I was assigned to shoot some interiors of the newly opened Barrelhouse Flat bar & restaurant up on the northside for Time Out Chicago. Upon arrival, they had some food & drink dishes waiting for me as well. No problem, we’ll improvise here. Shooting food in a dark and busy (an open restaurant) environment can be pretty challenging. Thankfully, my pal Dave was along with me to get a few beers after the shoot and was able to help me light the scenes a bit. We did something I love to do yet don’t do often enough. Lock down the camera on a tripod, set up for a longer exposure (I think I was doing 4 second or so here), and use a single flash multiple times to mimic a fancy multi-light setup. Try it sometime, it’s fun!

You can check out Julia Kramer’s review of the bar here; although if you decide to go yourself sometime, be sure to stop into Rose’s bar a few doors north on Lincoln Ave. It’s my favorite place to enjoy a cold Old Style in Chicago.

2011 year in photos

clayton — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:12:08 +0000

(vimeo link)

I decided to once again (as I did last year) throw together all of my favorite images from the year into one place. It’s a bit of a mess, with roughly 400 images in the bunch, so I put it in video form (above) for easier viewing. Overall, it was a fantastic year and I had a ton of fun shooting. It’s always a bit strange spending so much time reviewing my own images, as I begin to hate everything after seeing it so much. Looking forward to a new year and a whole new set of images!

What you see is mostly from personal or editorial assignments, as I haven’t yet gotten clearance to use any of the images I shot for commercial jobs in 2011. Hopefully I’ll get around to blogging about that stuff early next year. Until then, enjoy!

happy holidays

clayton — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:55:40 +0000

Happy Holidays from Clayton Hauck Photography! 2011 was a great year filled with many awesome regular clients, new clients, new reps and plenty of adventures. May 2012 be an even better year to you & yours!

chicago reader people issue

clayton — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:29:09 +0000

Images from the Chicago Reader People Issue 2011. December, Chicago. I was asked to photograph three of the Chicagoans featured in the first annual People Issue and honored to discover one of them made the cover. It’s super appreciative to be included among some of my favorite Chicago photographers on a single project. Other participants included: Saverio Truglia, Jim Newberry, Jeffrey Marini, Andrea Bauer, Lisa Predko & more. A bit about each shoot below, in order of appearance…

I met Adolfo Mondragon down at the University of Chicago, where he got a law degree and took three classes with some dude named Barack Obama. Adolfo ran for State Senate and plans to run again after garnering more votes than anticipated his first time around. The weather was terrible that day, so we set up and did a few shots in the law library followed by a second location in a hallway with nice big windows. The trick was avoiding reflections between his glasses and the floor-to-ceiling glass.

Jay Travis was next. She runs a community organization on the south side and stays busy. We had about five minutes to fire off as many photos as we could while a priest waiting to speak with her. I threw a shoot-thru umbrella on a mono pod and had my assistant hold it just out of frame. It would’ve been nice to add a second fill light into the mix to kill some of the shadows, but you can’t always get what you want (the white paper on the desk helped a little bit). Gels would’ve been great, too! The color temperatures were all over the map, making for some fun post-production.

Kimberly Nieto was shot in front of the coal power plant in the Little Village neighborhood where she spends time protesting the pollution residents live with. Again, a second fill would’ve helped on a few of the shots. We had the sun directly behind the subject, making everything hard. Overall, I loved the gritty locations and was happy with the results.

You can pick up a copy of this week’s Reader or find the articles online here. Thanks to Stefan Klapko for assisting on the Kimberly & Jay shoots.

nancy for marie claire

clayton — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:15:32 +0000

Scenes from Melody School, August 10, 2011. Chicago. I was alerted to the fact that these photos had finally run while browsing Melissa Golden’s great blog. I had the pleasure of shooting in a wide variety of Chicago’s public schools this past year, an assignment that always provides an interesting and challenging day. Poor light and contrasting color temperatures, tough access and lack of any real way to remain out of sight, and fast-moving subjects make it a great way to boost your photo skillz. This assignment called for following around Principal Nancy and documenting what she does over the course of a day at school. Hectic, is all I can say. You can read a bit about her day and see what her yearly salary is over on the MC website.

carryaround camera

clayton — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:51:55 +0000

Miscellaneous images from 2011, Chicago. I purchased Panasonic’s first (I think) micro 4/3 camera a few years back, the GF1, with plans to carry it around at all times. That plan never quite materialized as I found it to be a bit too large for casual concealment and a bit too noisey at high ISO. I’m still way behind on blogging about jobs from the past 2-3 months, however, I downloaded these images which had been digitally aging on the camera’s memory card and figured I’d get them up on the blog as a change of pace. That final image is of a couple prints I made as a gift to the man kissing his wife, who passed away recently. I ran into him at that same bar not long ago, found the images online via my iphone and showed them to him, which made him teary-eyed and reminded me just how powerful a photograph can be in the right context.

hood internet taco album

clayton — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:41:41 +0000

Behind the scenes on the Hood Internet taco album cover shoot. November 7, 2011. Chicago. I’d been looking forward to shooting this project for a while. When Steve from The Hood Internet initially told me his grand vision for the taco album, I couldn’t wait for the shoot day to come. After settling on a date, my pal Brian Sorg was kind enough to let us fill his space with 370 Taco Bell tacos (totaling $461.23), which surprisingly did not forever stain his place with a deliciously-gross odor. The biggest we faced trick was rigging up an overhead camera that we would not have access to for the duration of the shoot (more on that below). The Canon 5Dm2 with the 24mm f1.4 at ISO100 provided just enough resolution to do the job, although ideally more ones and zeros would’ve been nice. Thankfully, Chuck Anderson of No Pattern fame was on board to work his graphical magic on the final image. After a busy day of taco placement, everyone was happy with the end results. Be sure to check out the BTS video above! And thanks to Stefan Klapko for assisting.

It’s been said that half of photography is moving furniture. I’ve always thought half of photography is problem solving and the other half is standing in awkward positions. This job included both.

Things learned: Setting up a ceiling camera rig is tricky. Brian Sorg ended up coming up with the winning rig idea, which consisted of two floor-to-ceiling poles on either end with a speed rail in between, as close to the ceiling as we could get it. Eight super clamps later, we had a Canon 5dm2 with the 24mm (barely enough to fill the frame) along with 2 Profoto heads with beauty dishes on either side of the camera, all attached to the speed rail. It was a surprisingly sturdy setup, however, it did not allow for access as long as the “taco art” was on the floor. In hindsight, I probably should’ve used a level to get the camera even with the floor. Of course, I did not have one available so I eyed it and got as close to perpendicular as possible.

Learning things the hard way, I failed to set the camera’s auto timer to OFF, so we had to move everything a few minutes in to get the camera to fire back up, which I assumed you could do in Capture One (I was shooting tethered, of course, which I don’t do very often). Everything was synced via Pocket Wizards, which was fun because so was the shoot in the studio across the hall. Phantom flashes, anyone?! A medium format or higher end Canon would’ve been ideal resolution-wise to get more nice taco detail, but in the end we got what we needed and everything went smoothly. Just another day at the office!

Additional reading: The Hood Internet’s Album Taco Tumblr.