Clean up your room

My mother-in-law would flip if she saw this room.

We shot this artist's loft in Chicago a couple of months ago. I found the absence of color (in the loft and in the 100s of papers) very interesting. It wasn't immediately evident what the artist's specialty was but he was a very calm, very polite man in his 40s.

The third-floor room used to be a garment sweatshop around the beginning of the 20th century. Old papers found on the site include what seemed to be a handwritten work schedule of seamstresses with Italian names.

While the mess in my office doesn't approach the level of this one, I will argue (mostly with my wife) that right brains need a bit of chaos in order to function properly.

FOR PHOTO GEEKS ONLY:

I shot this with a PhaseOne P20 digital back with side-to-side stitching, creating a 30 megapixel image showing every detail in the room. The lens was a 24mm Schneider Digitar (a little soft but highly recommended) mounted on a Silvestri Bicam (highly not recommended). The only light sources were the windows in the shot so it did require some masking in Photoshop.