Pickles For Christmas
The Mammoth in My Community
Dreaming of Summer
A Note
Hequet
Sword and Suburb
Chicago and Ice
Spring Twist
March Forest
Fisheye Lo-Fi
I’ve always been a big fan of shooting with fisheye lenses. I like how they give my camera a unique view of the world, shrinking almost every element in a scene into a vast landscape even if it’s right next to the lens, and giving an exaggerated largeness to anything close to the lens in the center. With the virus still in full swing this summer, I’ve spent a lot of time alone on bike trails walking through the forest preserves of my county, and this has given me the opportunity to focus on shooting quiet, meditative videos focused on the natural elements around me. I’ve been using my Lomography Experimental Fisheye lens, a lo-fi plastic lens that gives me a warm, soft image that screams cheap plastic home movies camera from the 70’s, and I love the lo-fi looks I’ve been able to get out of it.
Continue readingLove for a Summer Land Seen Through a Pinhole
Summers in Lake County, Illinois are like heaven on earth. The light filters through the leave and dapples the ground with an animated display of green and white and yellow. The heat fills the yellow and green spaces between the trees, sits quietly on the blue and green water, with cicadas nobly droning over it all. I love capturing these summers on long walks through the forest preserves of Lake County, especially with non-traditional lenses that add an extra texture, softness and distortion to the final image. These lenses help me to visually express the magic I see in this northern Illinois summer world, by making the landscapes and close-up details of a normal summer day into something more.
Continue readingShooting a Portrait with Dracula Film
I recently had the opportunity to demo some Dracula 35 film for Fotodiox. Here’s the video I made:
And here’s one of the photos I captured with model Abby.
Continue readingBuilding an Instant Pinhole Camera Mod
A couple years ago I made a wide-angle pinhole instant film camera with a Diana Instax Mini back and some cardboard and tape. The film drive stopped working shortly after, and Lomography stopped selling the back, so I was stuck. That is, until I discovered the Jollyllok, a fully manual, very affordable cardboard Instax Mini camera. This Halloween I made a video where I modded the camera to a wide angle pinhole and shot some ghostly black and white instant portraits with it. Here’s the video showing how I did it.
Sunglasses ND Filter Hack
A couple summers ago I took my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera to Door County, Wisconsin on vacation. To keep my setup super compact the only lens I brought along was my Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens, which was great until I realized that it was too bright out to shoot at f/8 and all my footage was overexposed. I didn’t have an ND filter with me but I soon realized there was another option: cheap sunglasses and tape! Check out this little tutorial video I made for Fotodiox showing how I used this hack to save my vacation video.
And here’s the video I shot.
Shooting with a Retro Fisheye Lens
My First 16mm Film in 4K
2007, March: my best friend Mike and I trudge up a North Carolina mountain to a long narrow bridge over a rushing mountain stream. I’m carrying my newly purchased 1960’s Bell and Howell Filmo 70 loaded with 16mm black and white reversal film. It’s really heavy and I’m panting. We find a stone in the dangerously fast flowing stream for Mike to stand on, I wedge the heavy tank of a camera and flimsy tripod into a bolder on the shore, meter the shot with a Super 8 camera–I don’t own a light meter–set the lens’s focus and aperture, crank the camera’s spring motor drive and shout action! Almost 12 years later I’m finally releasing the short film we shot that day in the quality it was meant to be seen in.
Continue readingBLACK CAT HALLOWMAS – My Sophomore Effort Finally Finished
After graduating film school in 2010 I spent a couple years trying to figure out what was next. In that time I worked in retail and spent long hours on walks and in libraries, mulling over and writing out ideas for short films. BLACK CAT HALLOWMAS was the first really strong idea I landed on, and in the Fall of 2012 my friend Jeremy drove up from Ohio for a long weekend of shooting.
Continue reading