My Favorite Photo I've Ever Taken

This is it. It hangs in my house how, beautifully framed. I'll explain the why below. To me, this photo is pure magic.

​This post is more "Tom" than it is "Baylor." We'll just forget the title of my blog for a moment and think of this as "Tom At Chicago." I've been thinking a lot about this shot lately. I am in the process of compiling a new section of this website all about iPhone Photography, and this shot keeps coming into my mind. It's my favorite photo I've ever taken. I'd like to tell you the story of this photo. Before we start, scroll back up and stare at it for a second. To me, it's mesmerizing. I just get lost in it. Maybe it's just me. 

In the Summer of 2012, I found myself in Chicago. I was working for a university that sent me there to a Noel Levitz conference about university admissions marketing. I traveled there with some friends from work and thoroughly enjoyed myself and the conference. 

Chicago was ungodly hot that particular week in late July. My buddies and I had galavanted around the University of Chicago campus for a day and almost died of heat exhaustion at least a dozen times. We got very little rest on this trip as we packed a ton of sightseeing in between conference sessions. So the time that we did get to crash in our hotel rooms was spent entirely zonked. 

I think it was midway through the week that I had gone to sleep one night only to wake up a couple hours later to an immense thunderstorm that almost shook me out of my bed. Since I was wide awake, I went to the window of the 7th floor of the Warwick Allerton Hotel and looked up Michigan Avenue only to see the most magical thing I'd ever seen out a hotel window. The storm was moving literally in waves off of Lake Michigan down the avenue. Even at about 4:30 in the morning, the city was beginning to wake up as shift workers moved to and fro their responsibilities. It was intoxicating to watch the traffic move through the aerosolized lake as lightning lit up the entire hotel room every few seconds. 

That was a moment that I wanted to record. I wanted to save it and savor it. So I grabbed my iPhone and held it in front of the window and snapped the photo you see above. I immediately looked at the tiny screen on my iPhone 5 and said "Well, that's not good. All the lights are getting obscured by the water on the window." So I did what you could only do in a 100+ year old hotel...I opened the window. And I got this:

So similar yet so lacking. The photo without the window just isn't the same.

I shot several dozen photos like this. I quickly closed the window, addressed the fact that I was then drenched. I changed my shirt and crawled back into bed. Here is the critical part of this story. I sat there and scrolled through what I'd just shot and considered for a moment deleting the "bad" shots. Bear in mind, that iPhones at the time didn't come with a ton of storage space, so deleting excess photos was standard practice. But I was tired. It was still before 5 in the morning. The storm had kept me up. And I figured I could just delete them later. 

I forgot to delete them. Fast forward a few days, and I was sitting at my computer at home digging through my photos of the trip...going photo by photo and remembering the fun of the trip when I arrived at the point of the storm. I lingered for a few seconds on the "bad" photo before moving onto the "good" ones. And my heart sunk. "The good ones are not good." They were gray and boring and they didn't give me any sense of that experience at all. As fate would have it, the last photo that I left on my computer screen was the "bad" shot with all the light blur. And I kept walking past it that night. And eventually when I did, I thought, "well, that's not THAT bad." That feeling moved to "I kind of like what's happening in this photo." to "I remember this moment so vividly." to "I love the play of light...the combination of blues and yellows...the motion of the photo....the life of the city." 

Wait a minute? I had just fallen in love with a mistake. It wasn't previsualized. In fact, I'm sure it breaks all kinds of rules of not shooting through a pane of glass obscured by a rainstorm. I learned a handful of things through this experience.

1. The first was to chuck the "rules" (or at least the ones I assumed existed) out the window.

2. The second thing I learned was that I should never delete photos from my phone until I'm home looking at them on a large screen.

3. The third thing I learned was that it's wholly possible to create your favorite image EVER completely by accident.

4. The last thing I learned was the value of an image encapsulating an emotion of a moment.

This image, to me, is personal. And it may not be to anyone else who views it, but even to those who weren't there (all of you) I believe that it far more successfully captures the motion and emotion of a moment of life in the city during the storm when compared to the second shot above. 

In my little book on iPhone photography, I am spending a large amount of time talking about being intentional when shooting. It's a bit ironic and possibly hypocritical that my favorite shot I've ever taken was a complete (almost deleted) accident. Or maybe it's just a reminder that sometimes magic only happens in life when we slow down enough, breathe, and just let the universe dictate what happens in front of our lens.