

"Dearborn and Lake; That's where the fake snow filming was going on. It may be over now, but worth checking out. It was slushing up the crosswalk earlier," our assignment editor Mark Hume said in an email asking me to go have a look on my way to another event.



Sure enough, as I rounded the corner near State and Lake, I could see the snow. It was a bit of an odd sight, and clearly the countless pedestrians passing by had no idea what to make of it. "What's going on?" one woman asked. Others stopped to take photos with their phones. Even more just stood and gawked.



I could tell right away that it wasn't a television commercial being filmed but rather a photo shoot for an Adidas shoe advertisement. I crossed the street to frame up a photograph, mostly interested in the juxtaposition of the snow with the pedestrians. However, moments after I started photographing, I was spotted by a member of the crew, who crossed the street to confront me.



He explained that these new Adidas running shoes weren't launched yet, and therefore I couldn't be taking photographs. I tried to explain that they were staging a photo shoot, complete with fake snow, in the middle of the sidewalk at 10 a.m. in downtown Chicago, and thus had no expectation of privacy. I told him I have a job to do, and I was no different than anyone who had stopped to take a photo with a phone.



As I tried to take another photograph, a woman from the crew grabbed my camera and tried to block me from photographing the model wearing the Adidas shoes. As I tried to move away from her, a man with a fake snow machine on his back told me if he wasn't working right now that he'd "take care" of me, whatever that means, before pointing his fake snow gun at my camera and spraying me. Then the person holding a studio flash at the end of a boom pole turned the light from the model to my camera lens, blasting the flash in my face. Others shouted obscenities at me and told me I was disgusting and a paparazzo.



All of this for trying to do what countless other folks around me were doing with their phones. Sometimes the hardest part of being a photographer is looking too much like one.