cold

Despite the weather, my flight into Chicago arrived 20 minutes early. The snow hadn't been as bad as expected, there were perhaps two or three inches on the ground… there was still light snow falling as I picked up my rental car. The wind had picked up, but again it wasn't as severe as forecast. The temperature was just below freezing, and beginning to fall.

I stopped for dinner, then went into the city. I was seeking a modern counterpoint for my punk photos taken in 1981-82, something to broaden the timeline and include modern countercultures, or better yet, find a way to bridge the two. So I stopped at a small club on Clark Street just north of Belmont, where Scary Lady Sarah was scheduled to DJ. She's the bridge, the person who knows some of my old friends from the punk years, and also moves within the current goth scene. Although she has left Chicago and now lives in Berlin, she returns several times a year to spin music… and coincidentally, I was able to catch the last night of the current visit.

The light was impossible, we had to shoot in faint streetlight filtering through the tinted front windows of the club. Even at ISO 1250, I had to shoot at 1/3 second at f/1.4. I tried to include the colored lights playing on the wall behind her, although the light moved quickly and unpredictably. This part worked well enough, I'd originally intended to convert the images to black and white, but after downloading them decided to use the color renderings instead. The images are a little soft from camera movement, there's a little flare, there's some high-ISO noise, and I like them anyway.

Leaving the club around 1:00 am, the temperature had fallen to 18 degrees; but that was near the lakefront, moderated by the still relatively warm (40 degree) water. Returning to the place I'm staying in the north suburbs, perhaps 10 miles in from the lakefront, it was only 8 degrees.

That pretty much held all of yesterday, in mid-afternoon it was sunny but still 8 degrees. I went outside only once, to a nearby wi-fi place to deal with some attachment-intensive work e-mails. Other than that, I wrote, edited, responded to e-mails on my phone. It was a busy work day, busier than expected.

Today is better, in the 20s, the edge is off the cold, and the weekend looks almost mild in comparison.