Babymoon 2012
- January 16, 2012 - posted by chicago wedding photographer nate mathai

categories: Personal
tags: baby, babymoon, bongo room, chicago, chicago wedding photographers, couples, downtown, grand lux, illinois, maternity, portraits, second city, wyndham

interested in booking? Head over to the the contact page or shoot me an email to info@natemathai.com

Babymoon? Yeah, I had no idea what that was either. But my wife sure let me know early on that we were taking one. :)
Seriously, though, the wife and my schedules have been very busy that its been a bit difficult for us to actually have some extended time just to relax. And since the wife is unable to relax while being at our house (she will always find something to clean, fix, organize, work on, etc.), it was necessary for us to physically get out of our place and get disconnected from everything.
We spent the weekend in downtown Chicago and stayed at the Wyndham. A week ago, Chicago was boasting an unseasonable warm winter with 50 degree weather…sadly this time around we were in the teens. Coupled with me being a little under the weather, the plans didn’t go exactly as we expected, but we still had a great weekend away. We spent a good deal of time just laying around and watching movies, before catching a showing of Second City- I feel like at every improv show I go to, there’s about 2 people who are extremely funny and make the show worth it, and then the remaining cast is just OK. Definitely had a good laugh though! Afterward, we had dinner at the Grand Lux…the wife was initially wanting to go someplace we’ve never gone before, but I was in the camp of getting something that we knew we’d like. I won this one. :)
We ended off our weekend stay at the Bongo Room, which is small and busy, but had a great brunch (according to the wife who got a chocolate tower french toast…I’m not much of a foodie so I stuck with an egg sandwich). All in all, it was definitely a great escape for us to just spend time with each other and plan and look ahead to 2012, as we get ready to raise our first child in this world.

We also planned to do a faux-maternity shoot (“faux” in the sense that I’m not really a maternity photographer), so I brought a handful of gear along. But the cold weather and my sickness didn’t allow us to do as much as we/I envisioned. But one thing that I always wanted to try was “freelensing”, and I finally used this opportunity to mess around with it! I took a handful of images of people passing by our hotel room on the streets below (all the freelensing images were shot with the 135 f/2)-

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chicago wedding photographers. free-lensing in downtown chicago, illinois
[all images copyright nate mathai]

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chicago wedding photographers. free-lensing in downtown chicago, illinois
[all images copyright nate mathai]

1 PERSON LIKES THIS

chicago wedding photographers. free-lensing in downtown chicago, illinois
[all images copyright nate mathai]

1 PERSON LIKES THIS

chicago wedding photographers. free-lensing in downtown chicago, illinois
[all images copyright nate mathai]

The wife wanted to make sure that both of us were in some of the images together, so we set a few up with us two, but then I got to have a bit of fun just photographing my model (and doing a little freelensing on her as well) :)

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