Julie Persons has at most four days to shoot 3,000 to 5,000 photos, enough to last her a year. It’s an incredibly tight timeline that’s entirely at the mercy of a chicken’s willingness to wear a hat.
Among the tricks she’s picked up over five years: Shoot them right after they hatch.
“They’re most amenable the first two or three days. They don’t know what a hat is yet,” Persons said. “When they get to about a week old, they start running around more, shaking their heads more, and the hats go flying.”
Persons, from Norridgewock, is the photographer behind “Chicks in Hats,” a line of cards, magnets, prints, jewelry and calendars featuring her fluffy yellow chicks dressed in crowns, derby hats, wedding attire and even a tall papal mitre.
This year, her chicks went nationwide, picked up by publisher Quarto in a deal that landed 2016 “Chicks in Hats” calendars in retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.
“People just always want to know if the hats are real, if I really did this versus Photoshop, and just what the process is,” Persons said.
Oh, it’s real. Chick poo on her kitchen table and all.
It all started five years ago when Persons’ daughter, Ruby, then 7, made paper hats for her gerbils.
“So we took photographs, it was awfully fun,” Persons said. “Then we got baby chicks a few months later and she said, ‘How about we try the hats on the baby chicks? They’re so cute.’ I started sharing them with friends. People were enjoying it so much, and then people were asking to buy prints.”
The family has a backyard coop with egg-laying hens and gets an order of four to six chicks every spring, between April and June.
“We planned for it the second year, we had lots of hats and kind of went full-on from there,” she said. “They’re only fluffy those first few days. They have a super short little career, two or three days of hats and that’s it, then they’re retired to the grassy meadow.”
Some hats she and Ruby make. Some come from a crafter in the United Kingdom who makes dollhouse clothes. Some are vintage Barbie hats.
“A Barbie head is about the same size as a baby chick’s head, believe it or not,” Persons said.
In advance of the short shooting window, she and Ruby gather a year’s worth of hats, wait for good natural light in the kitchen, and then, it’s go-time.
“It all happens in about two seconds,” Persons said. “She puts the hats on. I’m snapping in rapid-fire sports mode, because the hats are constantly just toppling off. The first few seconds they’re on the table they’re usually quite still because they’re not sure what their surroundings are yet; that’s a great time to shoot.”
After about 5 minutes, that chick goes back with its friends (they’re all named after First Ladies: Bess, Mary, Michelle) and a new chick takes the stage.
“I’m just looking at what this chick has to offer for personality and how I can work around that,” Persons said. “I am most proud of the images I’ve taken where there are two chicks cooperating, because that’s just the hardest thing there is to do is to get two chicks behaving. They want to eat each other’s hats, they’re always running off into the distance or they’re messing with each other, pecking at each other and peeping.”
This year for the first time, she pulled together two calendars, one for Quarto and a second 2016 calendar of entirely new shots to wholesale to New England gift shops and sell to her Etsy customers.
New this year are chicks in an aviator’s cap, birthday party hat and red bandana wrapped like a kerchief.
She’s at work on her 2017 Quarto calendar now. That company came to Persons after discovering her pictures online.
Chick magnets are her most popular seller and the most popular pictures are shots of a chick wearing a top hat and a chick wearing a crown.
Her line is available in Maine gift stores like Lisa-Marie’s Made in Maine in Bath and Yo Mamma’s in Belfast.
Ruby, whom Persons home-schools, gets a cut of the calendar sales for all her hard work and hat-wrangling.
“I wanted to kind of show her that you can take an idea like this and make a living out of it and make it work for you,” Persons said.
Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, unexplained and intriguing in Maine. Send photos, ideas and chicks in aviator glasses to kskelton@sunjournal.com
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