Chicago, IL

Chicago is a city of hard contrasts for a photographer, and its venues divide along lines that matter more than style. There are the sealed grand ballrooms, where the light is identical at two in the afternoon and one in the morning and nothing is ever rushed. There are the window venues — lake-facing, river-facing, skyline-facing — where the single best frame of the day lasts about twenty minutes and is dictated by sunset rather than by the running order. There are the museums, some of them so vast that ordinary wedding lighting simply disappears into the volume.
And there is the lakefront itself, which supplies the skyline-across-water frame that no inland city can offer and a wind that never quite stops.
These guides are written venue by venue rather than as a general survey, because the useful information is specific: which hour the carved limestone on a Michigan Avenue facade actually reads, why a bright aquarium is harder than a dark one, how long a lift journey really costs in a hotel stacked over forty floors, and which West Side streets run east-west so that low sun reaches the brick. We have not photographed weddings at all of these venues and we say so in each guide.
What transfers is the craft — how glass, stone, timber, water and altitude behave — and that is the same whoever is holding the camera.