2024 05 14

Super grainy image of a green-lit tree at night with some stars and planets and sensor artifacts. March, 2024.Wheeling, Illinois. © Clayton Hauck

Kyla has a book coming out which is very exciting news! She has become one of my favorite thinkers on economics and our modern media-saturated life. I share this video because this piece arrived in my inbox a few days ago via her substack and I really enjoyed reading it. Then, today, the video version of it appeared in my youtube feed and it reminded me about how I love that she makes her content available on all the major platforms. It’s a ton of work, but these days this is what you basically have to do if you want to be noticed. Posting to your daily weblog isn’t going to move the needle! … perhaps I should turn my daily weblog post into a daily vlog post, as well … maybe.

I love what Noah Kalina has been doing on his channel lately. But yeah, yet another fulltime job on top of the ones I already have probably isn’t in the cards. Maybe we start small.

-Clayton

2024 05 02

People are inside doing things as day turns to night. Chicago, Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Me, walking into a hotel room for the first time: Oh, nice room, glad I upgraded! The view is decent but I wish the windows were bigger. Why is the sink not draining fast? Why does the sink’s faucet handle come like a millimeter from hitting the mirror? Do people not plan ahead before installing these things? Why do hotels give you giant bar soaps that you end up mostly wasting and without any sort of tray… where are you supposed to put this bar without it getting messy? Nice, one of those Martin Schoeller mirrors… I wonder what he’s up to now. There’s definitely a stain of something on the floor by the toilet. Free water… but it’s Dasani, of course. Oh great the phone is blinking so now I need to figure this out so it doesn’t blink for four days straight and keep me up at night… why are these new phones so impossible to figure out? Clearly whoever designed this thing didn’t expect anyone to use it. Gotta move this weird pillow out of the way. Why are the reading lights on? The air conditioning is kinda loud. Oh great, a text from the hotel, now, too.

Text from hotel: Welcome! Thanks for being a valued member. How is everything with the room?

Me: good, thanks.

-Clayton

2024 04 28

Spring flower pops up in an unexpected place. Chicago, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

If you read yesterday’s post, this is the scene we came across while walking home from bar dinner.

If you read Thursday’s post, this is me embracing using new photographic tools. I’ve written about it here before, but I’ve been loving the Lapse app in my iPhone. While I’ve been trying to use my phone less for image making (thus, carrying around a Ricoh everywhere I go), I do love the snapshot aesthetic this app provides, along with the date and time, which is a fun throwback to point and shoot film cameras. The only downside is the files you get from it are not very big. I imagine the app creators don’t want to host full-sized images on their servers to save money, but if you could pay for a “pro” version which allowed maximum resolution, I would totally give them my money.

For the first time in my pro photography career, I’m finding myself wanting more, new, different cameras! I just need to make sure I don’t revert back into the gear-head person who cared more about what equipment he had than the images being made from that equipment.

-Clayton

2024 04 26

Car parked at night. Chicago, Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Sometimes when The Office is on, you get sucked into an Office Hole and forget to finish all the work and blog posts and life stuff that you needed to do. But also sometimes it’s nice to just check out and let your brain decompress for a few hours.

-Clayton

2024 04 15

Illuminated window on a winter night. Chicago, Illinois. December, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

Well, well. Happy tax day. Having jammed my weekend full of plans (hosted multiple events at the studio while vastly misjudging the time involved), I find myself scrambling to get my tax payment in the mail so it can be postmarked on time, while scrambling to get a blog post up without having one ready to go in the morning for the first time, while scrambling to clean up the studio and do laundry and get the house in order and kick on the air conditioning for the first time, all before departing town tomorrow afternoon for a quick work trip. Yes, spring has sprung and things are moving.

Let’s see if I can’t get some more blog posts in the pipeline and keep this streak going for a while longer. Would hate to end it on such an uneventful note.

-Clayton

2024 04 07

Palmer Square Park on a foggy winter night. Chicago, Illinois. December, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

This blog is at a serious risk of becoming a place that only reposts Noah Kalina videos, however, per the rules of the blog, if I watch a video I enjoy I need to write about it here. Since Noah is posting videos like every damn day, this space is going to get all cluttered up with hashtag Kalina Content, which honestly might not be a bad thing.

Anyway, enjoy your Sunday, while taking in a few recent videos from Noah’s youtube channel, posted below.

-Clayton

2024 04 02

Life finds a way. Chicago, Illinois. October, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

I got an email with a job offer the other day. It’s weird because I haven’t applied for a job in at least a few decades, nor do I have a university degree or a CV, while my LinkedIn profile is a mess. Thinking it spam, I went to hit delete, however, was intrigued by the writing in the email. It had a tone I’m not at all familiar with and got me curious to hear further details. After giving the entire short-but-direct message a read, my bullshit detector was activated but not enough to make me go away just yet.

Admittedly, the job sounded easy. It was almost tailor-made for me, which also had me wondering how this person even found me. I went to Google and started digging but no information about the email sender, or his company, was found anywhere online. Again, thinking it spam but still somewhat curious about a potential easy-money gig that would also allow me to maintain the personal freedom of my existing freelancer lifestyle, I crafted a reply to get a bit more information: who is this person, what is this company, how did you find me, why me?

The salary being offered was generous. The task was essentially to be a photographer, as I already am. I would be supplied an ongoing, never-ending, list of things, people, and places, that I would be tasked with photographing and video recording. Quality is somewhat important but not the highest priority. Most importantly, the copyright of all the work I produce would remain with me — no work for hire clause at a full-time position seemed too good to be true, and in hindsight was the tell.

Sidetracked with visions of how this new assignment could completely change my lifestyle for the best, I bypassed consulting with any friends or loved ones experienced with having normal-people jobs unlike myself and instead told the mysterious emailer to send me the contract with a verbal commitment to take the job, while thinking I could quit at any time if it did turn out to be a scam or something weird I hadn’t considered. It was a fully-remote position with paid travel and no office to report to. They have no physical location and he told me he himself was based overseas and I would likely never even meet him in person.

After receiving the contract mere seconds after emailing him the request, I sat on it for a day, then two. Feeling a need to come clean to someone, I called my agent and told her the situation. That I would be mostly unavailable for new commercial assignments for a while and I hope she’d understand but this opportunity was too good to pass up. She is great with legal contracts so offered to read it over for me and agreed with my take that it almost sounded too good to be true; not at all what we’ve been familiar seeing from clients lately who ask for the world on most assignments. Sad to see me go, she did ask one request of me before accepting the position. Even though I woundn’t be working directly with my new boss, she said I should at the very least meet him over a zoom call to catch his vibe and a feel for who I’d be further enriching through beautiful imagery. I agreed, as this sounded very reasonable and smart, so requested the meeting as my last stipulation before signing on to my new job.

The reply came in a bit more delayed than his usual promptness and the tone was a bit concerning. Still, I had visions of Japanese travel and strolls through our national parks in my mind so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Now look, even with my new-found blindness to reality while dreaming the big dream, I’m still a professional photographer, trained on visuals, pouring over them endlessly day and night. Because of this, when the mysterious emailer joined our zoom call, precisely at the time scheduled, my heart sank, pools of sweat developed in my armpits and my face turned red. I’d been had.

AI technology has become very good, very fast, but it’s still not perfect. My future boss who I was now meeting on a video call was not-in-fact human but an artificial intelligence personality. Upon learning I was no longer buying his routine, he calmly (and weirdly) asked me if I was still open to working with him on the assignment while ensuring me the money was real and that he could prove it by send some to my bank account iNsTAntLy! He said he was already working with dozens of great photographers who would become my co-workers, while listing their names in hopes of convincing me. He just needed more content! Get mE the cONteNt! When he mentioned both Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz were on staff, I started laughing, which had the terrifying effect of enraging him. Immediately, the previously humanlike face began shifting and deforming into a vile creature while he hurled insults and threats at me. He firmly let me know he’d be directing all of his dark web resources into hacking my computers to gain access to my digital photos and simply take them for freeeee.

…

A few days later, the news reports started to come out. Tech bros had been funding fully autonomous corporations and letting them loose into the economy. Many failed, sure, but some started doing very well, growing their bank accounts into the millions and a few even into the billions. One artificial corporation got so drunk on success it tried to file for an IPO on the NYSE. I was never able to dig up any info on my specific almost-boss, however, there were a bunch of similar companies who had been making lots of money by growing social media accounts and selling merch on various ecommerce sites. The machines apparently figured out that all the imagery they were sourcing from the web was fairly easy to trace or a noticeable tell to prospective buyers, so in order to gain a competitive advantage over the other AI competition, a few of the artificial corporations tried to hire humans to make the imagery for them to give it a more human touch.

This is a true story, written by a human, March 28, 2025.

-Clayton

2024 03 25

Reflection of sunlight off the moon, through the trees, on a cold winter night in Chicago, Illinois. October, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

Until fusion power is figured out and solves all of humanity’s problems, we’re stuck with nuclear fission power plants, which have their own drawbacks (Homer Simpson vibes) despite being far more green and efficient than all other methods of power generation currently known. More importantly, humans hate nuclear energy, so we do all we can to make sure it doesn’t exist anywhere close to where anyone lives. Germany just closed all of their nuclear plants, as did Japan after the Fukushima disaster (understandably… though have recently reopened some). The United States has only opened two new nuclear power plants in the previous three decades, while demand for energy only continues to go up.

Considering all the talk of AI taking over the world, a less-discussed aspect in making our automated futures become a reality is that the amount of energy required to do so is extreme and will require many new sources. Wind and solar help, yes, but are both inconsistent, have relatively lower outputs, and introduce new challenges. Look for nuclear power to suddenly become fashionable again as corporations realize their power needs are about to skyrocket. In order for the New Industrial Revolution to take place, (I’m just guessing here) we’ll probably need to double our energy capacity. Convenient timing considering climate change and the race to pivot to renewable energy.

Unrelatedly, one fun fact about Illinois is that we produce more nuclear energy than any other state. It’s a small fact that helped motivate me to purchase an electric vehicle, as burning coal to power your car isn’t any better than filling up the tank with gasoline.

Anyway, I bring all this up because it came to mind after watching a Noah Kalina video I liked, so as the website rules go, was required to write about here. I had no idea there used to be a nuclear plant on Long Island (home to many rich and powerful people!) and (therefore) it only operated for a few years even after they spent $6 billion to construct it (insanity!).

-Clayton

2024 03 11

The former alderman is now retired and his suburban-style home, built thanks to being an insider able to bend the system to his own wishes, has seemingly moved on to places unknown. Time keeps on slipping.
Humboldt Park, Chicago, Illinois. February, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

May all your problems be boring

One of my favorite writers dropped a new substack (lol) that hit close to home. Tim Kreider is one of those writers who makes writing look fun and easy, like maybe something I could do if I put my mind to it. This is not to say I think writing is easy, but an appreciation of his skill for making it appear to be so. Like a person living a simple-yet-interesting life while occasionally heading to the computer to jot down some words along the way in exchange for money to keep the whole operation going. Are we allowed to start a sentance with the word like? I don’t know, I’m only a pretend writer.

Getting old is on my mind basically all the time now. Having just celebrated yet another birthday in what seems to be an increasingly-faster routine of numbers going up. Forty snuck up on me, as the end of my thirties was spent locked down in our house waiting out a global pandemic. This seems unfair to me but my problems are probably not so interesting to you. Instead, take a moment to read Tim’s birthday wish contemplating life and getting older below.

➡️ On Boring Problems

2024 03 03

Night street scene. Chicago, Illinois. January, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Now that we’re a few months into this blog, I’m thinking I don’t love the way things look on a desktop. The images are often too big, esp when vertical, to display fully and the text still has the issue of paragraph breaks displaying as line breaks without the extra bit of spacing to let them breath. I have no idea why (I think it’s a Squarespace bug) but these two issues have me thinking I should do a little visual reworking.

If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them below … in the comments … which you can only see when you view the specific blog entry page, not on the homepage index.

Yeah, design changes.

-Clayton

2024 02 17

Night scenes viewed through the windshield at the corner of Kimball and North Ave. Chicago, Illinois. January, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Oh, shit. I signed myself up for another unpaid job. What the fuck was I thinking starting a daily photo blog?! In the year 2024. What kind of bullshit is this? I was high on the “fresh start to a new year” nonsense and got a bit too ambitious and now it’s a fucking Saturday in mid February and I’m sitting here in my underwear at 6am, cold, tired and annoyed, while trying to think up another meaningless thing to peck down on my computer and spam out into the world wide web for my mom to read and post on her facebook page. What. The. Fuck.

Have a great weekend! 🤗

-Clayton

2024 01 10

House with police lights. December, 2023. Chicago. ©Clayton Hauck

Clayton, what’s your secret to Photography Success?

You have to go to where the people are… BLOGS!

While I may be Old & Irrelevant now, photographing my neighbor’s house while police cart away someone across the street, I used to be Young & Relevant. Back then, I would also go out at night to photograph other Young & Relevant people and post those pictures on a photo blog called everyoneisfamous.com.

Am I, here, attempting to relive & duplicate my past successes by doing the same thing all over again in a slightly different approach?

Yup!

Will it work the same way?

Nope!

Have a nice day.

-Clayton

2024 01 08

Water on car. December, 2023. Chicago. © Clayton Hauck

Part of what I’ve been photographing a lot lately has been more abstract, textured images to use as backdrops for my “Keep it 100” portrait sessions[1], where the background changes every second, cycling through various images I’ve made recently. Before doing these sessions on a regular basis, this is a moment I would've passed over. Is it a stunning image? No, but it does have a lil something going for it… and it’s fun to incorporate as one detail in a more detail-dense portrait.

It’s easy to make a good image, the hard part is figuring out what to do with it. I’m still figuring that bit out myself and likely always will be.

-Clayton

[1] inspired by artist Jeremy Cowart