Chris Bradley got to show off his sweet home, Chicago, for his latest shoot with Arkansas Life Magazine. For their monthly edition of The Weekender, the magazine was featuring cool places around The Windy City to eat, stay, and do fun things, and they knew they wanted Chris’s style on the photographs.
When Chris got the email from Arkansas Life, he was pumped. A native Chicagoan himself, he was eager to help the magazine show off just how cool the city was. And with his main focus being architecture and interiors, shooting venues is exactly they type of assignment Chris likes to get. The catch? The magazine gave Chris just over a week’s turnaround to get the four-location shoot and send them the photos.
Chris says 80% of the work was in the planning. He wasted no time sending out emails to the restaurants, hotels, and theaters he would be photographing. The magazine had a detailed list of the places they wanted shot, so he really needed to do his homework to schedule everything in, and do it within a time crunch.
I had to coordinate all of the moving pieces of a four location shoot, and I had to coordinate them from start to finish in a three-day window so that I could edit, retouch, and send off the images on deadline. The challenge was exhilarating.
Aside from the scheduling mayhem and tight deadlines, the shoot went smoothly. Given that each place was a busy venue, they could only allow for so much shooting time, so the faster Chris could be in and out, the better. Chris says he had to be extremely decisive about which shots he was taking and how, but that he found it refreshing to quickly formulate his concept, get the shot, and get out.
Chris’s favorite shot from the series is the shot (shown above) of the hotel room bed with the lettering above it that spells, “The End.” The lighting is soft and glowing how he wanted it, the style is a little funky, and the overall look is inviting and clean. Chris says it looks like a space he’d want to spend time in, which is a goal for all of his interior photos.
I like an interior that feels awash with crisp, glowing light, and I knew that I could bring that look to the various indoor shots.
He says that this whole series, from the architecture to the food photos, is really emblematic of his style. The architecture and the interiors were right in his wheelhouse; the food was outside of his usual scope which offered him a challenge he loved; and throughout all of it, he was given the freedom to photograph in a way that appealed to his eye and style. Chris’s photos were used across six pages of The Weekender’s feature, and the “The End” photograph was requested for use as a framed picture in somebody’s home.
To view more of Chris’s work, visit bradleyfoto.com.