Illinois
Chicago has something no other American city has: a downtown of real architectural ambition sitting directly on an inland sea, photographed from a public beach two minutes from it. North Avenue Beach at sunrise gives you the full skyline across water with nobody in it, and it is a fifteen-minute drive from the Loop. The permitting splits cleanly and it is worth knowing which half you are in. Streets and sidewalks are the Chicago Film Office. Anything inside a park — which includes the lakefront, Millennium Park, the conservatories and most of the good locations — is the Chicago Park District, a separate authority with a separate application and its own fees. Millennium Park adds a third layer: Cloud Gate is a copyrighted sculpture, and commercial use of its image is a permission question rather than a permit question. The seasonal split here is sharper than anywhere else in this catalogue. Outdoor work runs May to October and is genuinely excellent; November to March is studio, interior and architectural work, and pretending otherwise produces cold, unhappy photographs.
Late September and October are the best weeks of the year — warm light, clear air off the lake, and the crowds gone. May and June are green and reliable. July and August are hot, humid and hazy, with the lakefront crowded from early morning. From late November to March the lake effect brings grey skies and wind chills that make an outdoor session genuinely hard; this is when the studio and interior work happens, and when the architectural photography is at its best.
The entire downtown skyline across the water, from a beach. The single best skyline frame in the city and almost nobody is on it before seven.
The Bean is empty for roughly an hour after the park opens and solid with people for the rest of the day. The underside — the "omphalos" — is the frame worth getting, and it needs the space to yourself.
Walk east from Lake Street and the bridges stack up behind you. At blue hour the building lights come up and reflect the full length of the river — the most reliably beautiful fifteen minutes in the city.
Two acres under glass, and the answer to a Chicago January. Warm, green and softly lit when everything outdoors is grey and twelve degrees.
Limestone revetments, old oaks and the skyline at a distance to the north. Quieter than the lakefront downtown and the better location for family and senior work.
These come under the Chicago rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Chicago itself.
It depends on which authority owns the ground. Streets and sidewalks fall to the Chicago Film Office, which generally does not require a permit for handheld shooting without equipment. Anything inside a park — the entire lakefront, Millennium Park, the beaches, the conservatories — is Chicago Park District property and requires a separate photography permit for professional work, including portrait sessions.
Not without permission. Cloud Gate is a copyrighted sculpture by Anish Kapoor, and while photographing it for personal use is unrestricted, commercial use of an image in which the sculpture is the subject requires the artist’s permission — a separate question from the Chicago Park District permit needed to work in Millennium Park at all. For personal portrait galleries this is not an issue.
Outdoors, only briefly and with planning. From late November to March, wind chills off the lake regularly make sessions longer than twenty minutes genuinely unpleasant, which shows in the photographs. The realistic winter options here are excellent: the Garfield Park Conservatory, the city’s interior architecture, and short outdoor bursts built around a warm place to return to.
North Avenue Beach at sunrise, looking south across the water at the full downtown skyline. Because the sun rises over the lake behind you, the buildings are lit directly for about twenty minutes and the beach is nearly empty before 7am. Adler Planetarium gives a tighter, more classic version of the same view and draws a bigger crowd.