JOE WIGDAHL PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG

QBN.com is a sweet art + design showcase site and they just named my site and my picture of Chicago during the storm as their Editor’s Choice. Here’s the link.  Thanks guys!

I just found out that I won 3rd place in the Altpick Awards’ “Popular Vote” for Best Design: Ad Campaign/Packaging for the work I did with the Chicago White Sox in January of this year. Here’s the link to the award and you can see tearsheets from the campaign here.

It was a lot of fun to shoot but it was about -5 degrees fahrenheit inside the stadium. My assistant Jeremy is a huge Sox fan and after we were done shooting we took some pictures of Jeremy on home plate and in the dugout and then my crew and I all took turns running the bases and sliding into home and making snow angels in the outfield.

Last night I was watching The Office (the Customer Survey episode) and the characters Andy and Angela are discussing getting married in a tent. The picture on the website they’re looking at for “Shangri-la Tent” is a picture I took at my friend Neal’s wedding that I blogged about last year. (Best Friend Gets Married In Cornfield, Drinks, Bellows.) They must have gotten it from Getty Images where I have some of my stuff on sale for stock but I had no idea that it was going to be on a show. I almost choked on my beer when I saw it pop up. Here’s a shot from the show:

I hope this means I can be in a Judd Apatow movie now.

Hey Everybody- A campaign that I shot for Sears Kenmore this summer just came out- here are some of the spreads.

The job was fun and sort of crazy- we got to one of the locations where we were taking pictures and the homeowners had a little boy with a treasure trove of toys lying around. The kids who ended up in the photographs didn’t want to leave because they were having so much fun. The little boy who got to play with the spaghetti had a hard time believing that we would let him eat spaghetti without his bib. We kept asking him to eat and he was scared of getting messy. Once he saw that we wanted him to do his best to make a mess he went crazy and started throwing food all over the place. We had plastic everywhere so nothing got stained but I did get marinara on my lens a couple times and his mother was scared that we had turned on a messy switch that she wouldn’t know how to turn off. Everyone wanted to play with this little red megaphone that would change their voices to sound like robots or elves (or elven robots). I saw that they loved it so much that I got one for my nephew for his birthday although my brother wasn’t too crazy about having a megaphone in the house ( it took about ten minutes for my brother to put it in the highest, most unreachable-by-little-hands place in the house).

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for prints of this image of Chicago right before a thunderstorm since it appeared in Time Out magazine a few weeks back. I’m offering prints of this image for sale.

Prints of this image are digitally printed on archival paper with archival inks- prices and sizes are as follows:
8”x11.75” print is $50
12”x18” print is $100
16”x24” print is $175

Shipping and handling costs are based on where you live. Requests can be made to info@joewigdahl.com.

The other day I got a nice letter from the folks at Design Taxi to let me know that my site had been featured as the site of the day. Suddenly I’ve been featured on Netdiver.net, Mostinspired.com and Dailyslurp.com. I’ve also gotten some very nice letters from a few new friends in Germany, Finland and Norway who like my work. Thanks for the support everybody!

http://www.designtaxi.com/

About 2 weeks ago I was hired to shoot the cover story and for this week’s issue of Time Out Chicago. They needed me to go up in a helicopter and get some interesting shots of the city. We got up in the helicopter and by the time we reached the city we found ourselves in the middle of a lightning storm. Later that day the storm turned into a storm that brought havoc to the city with tornado sightings and (from what I’ve read) something like 900,000 lightning strikes that day. We had a lot of fun being in a helicopter in that storm but the pilot and I both got spooked and decided to head back when lightning struck not too far from us.

Definitely an interesting experience and we got some good pictures out of it.

It’s been forever since I updated my blog and even longer since I even changed the images on my portfolio site. I’ve been really busy the past few months and the last thing I want to do after working 14 hours a day on a bunch of ad jobs for a couple weeks is look at my pictures and change my portfolios. So here’s what’s up:

Since the last time I wrote I shot ad campaigns for Northwestern Mutual Insurance, Sears-Kenmore, the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau, and Central DuPage Hospital.

Everything has finally calmed down and I got a chance to buy a bunch of new albums and hunker down and completely re-do my website. I’ve found that listening to the album “Mt. Eerie” by The Microphones is probably my favorite album of all time for listening to while I’m working on my website, next to anything by Califone or Stina Nordenstam. I also really dig Lee Scratch Perry or Ali Farke Touré for when I want to listen to something but I don’t necessarily want to have any idea what the singer is saying. Anyhow, they’ve all been pretty good at getting me to re-do my site.

I’ve redone my site so it’s all html. Got rid of the flash. It always took way too long to update. I ended up hating it and having dreams about actionscript. Also, most of the pics in the portfolios are new. Or at least mostly new in the sense that you probably haven’t seen them before or if you have you’ve seen them on this blog or you’re that guy across the alley in the other building who’s always looking into our studio windows but you pretend to not look when we look at you.

Check out the site. http://www.joewigdahl.com

Mike Kinsella from Owen, American Football, Joan of Arc etc. dropped by the other day after he’d been on tour for a few weeks. He destroyed me in a couple games of Halo and afterwards I took some portraits of him with his little varmint friend.

Spin Magazine called me up in January and asked me to take pictures of Yeasayer and MGMT playing at Schubas’s here in Chicago. I had just started to get into both bands and I really love MGMT’s Time to Pretend video so I was glad to meet them both. They were interesting guys- Ira from Yeasayer has a hilarious story about how he now carries a knife with him because of an incident of being trapped in a bathroom by a guy who started screaming and speaking in tongues. The MGMT guys talked about magnetic bio-vibrations and spirits.