Chicago freewrite!

Hey, Hive! Coming at you just before midnight with a freewrite! These are good for me, especially during stressful times. They give me a chance to reflect on things and access my life from a more narrative perspective. I just got back from Chicago with @tarotbyfergus. Leading up to that trip, I’ve been working around the clock to get three proposals finished for the EVMxIdeathon/Hackathon on EOS. It was a contest for ideas that would benefit the blockchain and I submitted three proposals. I received 3rd place for one of my entries, so that was a nice windfall while the crypto-market burns down.

I just finished a new edit of my friend Cindy from my October trip to Los Angeles. I adore her. This will almost certainly before our last shoot together. We’ve collaborated for almost a decade with our first shoot being at NOIR in LA in 2014. We’ve shot together almost every year since. She had a baby in 2020 and since then, it’s been harder for us to coordinate for collaborations and I have less of a reason to go to LA with my career priorities changing like they are. We decided to go all out and this is just one new shot at the Gable’s estate mansion in La Cañada. I love how simple and beautiful the composition is.

While I was in Chicago, I went to a death match tournament; this is true. I also met up with an instagram friend that I’ve known for about a year. Her name is Vina and she’s Chi-town, born and raised. It seemed like a long shot that we’d actually meet because she didn’t clock out of her bartending job until midnight. I had some energy, though, and I decided to make the 25 minute drive in to the city and met her at a fancy place called Celeste. Not my usual haunt as it was more of an upscale nightclub but we shared some food and met for the first time.

The next morning, I drove back in to the city where I dropped @tarotbyfergus off at a little Serbian coffee shop called Café Beograd. From there, I met up with my longtime friend, Sar, at her hotel on the coast of Lake Michigan. The last time we shot together was 2016 while myself and @vermillionfox were visiting Chicago for C2E2. Years have passed and after the separation forced on all of us because of COVID, I enjoyed seeing an old friend. I had a chance to flex the muscles of the Nikon Z6II with some gorgeous natural light. Can’t wait to edit these new photos.