Venue Description:

The locals have the inside scoop on the Wicker Park Historic District, 4 acres, as a place for hipsters, culture bugs, and artists. Not surprisingly, there is an abundance of charming shops, galleries, and restaurants. The park was established, thanks to Alderman Charles Wicker and his brother Joel, in 1868 and has undergone a series of significant transformations, including the restoration of bordering structures that provide excellent photo ops of old-world architecture. Forbes voted Wicker Park as the 4th hippest hipster neighborhood in the U.S., so all of this makes for compelling street photography of building interiors, exteriors, neighborhood residents, and visitors from Chicago, other U.S. cities, and international travelers. Your instructor will demonstrate easy-to-learn techniques for selecting backdrops that enhance environmental portraits, such as the many colorful wall murals in the area, dynamic signs and storefronts, remnants of 19th-century street construction, and more.

For this photo workshop, there is the extra benefit of the Wicker Park Bucktown Farmer’s Market, offering additional environmental portrait opportunities with vendors manning their colorful displays of fruits, vegetables, and an unending variety of produce, flowers, trinkets, antiques, and various flea market items. Your instructor will help you develop strategies to engage people on the streets and capture them in natural poses or guide them in presenting angles that are most flattering. This might involve close-up shots, wider perspectives, selecting the right colors in the backdrop, whether through aperture-controlled blurring of the background or making colors complement or contrast with the main subject in a compelling manner. You will learn techniques that you can use not only when photographing friends and family but also when you yourself are being photographed.