This Summer I spent a lot of evenings exploring new places and honing my photography skills. Fort Sheridan is an old military fort about twenty minutes south of where I work, and I found it to be a beautiful and relaxing places to explore and shoot. Here are some photos I captured there with a Sony A7R II, a WonderPana 10-stop ND filter and a beautiful Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens I was able to borrow from work.
110 is my secret weapon film format. With it I can create a dreamy and grainy image that evokes what many people think all film photography should look like. I took these photos on a winter walk with my brother with my trusty little Vivitar 110 Point and Shoot Camera and Lomography Tiger 110 Film.
I love autumn! Its colors, sounds and smells have always appealed to me on such a basic level, and a lot of my art tends to be inspired and often centered around the season. This November for work I had the great pleasure of shooting some macro photos and video of autumn leaves, and here are some of my results.
In college I was required to shoot black and white 4×5 film as part of a photography class for my Cinema and Video Production degree. Back then I wanted nothing to do with photography–I was a movie maker gosh darn it!–and I did as little as I possibly could to scrape by. I was so uninterested in film photography that I threw away my negatives and prints after I graduated! Fast forward almost a decade and I’m now a film photography junkie. I collect and shoot with every retro camera I can get my hands on and I’ve shot almost every format, from 110, instant and medium format to Super8 and 16mm motion picture film. The one format I haven’t shot on since college though is large format 4×5 film. I could kick myself now, remembering the amazing large format cameras and darkroom gear I had access to back then. These days I don’t have space for a darkroom or the cash to buy an expensive large format camera, but I did finally find a way to shoot 4×5.
Sometimes retro lo-fi lenses are just too fun to leave on the antique store shelf. A couple years ago I picked up this amazing little C-mount Baush and Lomb 26mm f/1.9 lens (pictured above), and since then I’ve used it on multiple projects with my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, which has a super16 sized sensor that is very similar in size to the 16mm film the lens was originally meant to shoot on. You can read more about my experiences with the camera here, but this past summer I started experimenting with mounting the lens on a Sony A7R II, a camera that has a much larger full frame sensor. Shooting on a sensor size that this little lens was never meant for adds a lot of distortion and vignette, but I kind pf like the effect, especially after a couple of tweeks in post.
Probably due to the fact that I’m a child of the 90’s, I’m beginning to develop a deep nostalgia for lo-fi digital images and video. My first true digital camera was a keychain camera I bought at Walgreens for $20 when I was 16. It produced the tiniest and dreamiest pixelated images–almost painterly in quality–and It was pure magic.
I wrote about my obsession with these types of cameras years ago here but I’ve since almost entirely lost interest and focused on more professional quality gear; that is until a couple of months ago, when I finally bought a camera I’ve been eyeing online for years: the Digital Harinezumi.
Last weekend I borrowed a Sony a7RII, a Canon 11-24mm lens and a WonderPana XL 10 stop ND filter from work. I took this setup to Kenosha Pier in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Illinois Beach State Park and my grandparents farm near Rockford, Illinois. Cutting the light by ten stops with the filter enabled me to shoot 30 second exposures in broad daylight, blurring clouds and water and capturing some cool ghost effects. Check out the images I captured in the slideshow below.
All photographic undertakings require some artifice and trial and error. The photographer or filmmaker isn’t so much capturing the exact right image or moment as he is capturing many images and moments and looking for the best in the editing stage. This has always been the case. It reflects the fact that we’re not the creator so much as the created, trying to capture a piece of creation.
November is almost here, and with it comes bright cold days and bare trees reaching towards perfectly blue skies. Everything is brown and grey and purple and seems swept clean for a moment after the leaves have fallen and before the snows begin. It’s a season of Holidays and family get-togethers, full of football, feasts and long walks to burn them off. My family loves to wander over bone yellow prairies, through oak savannas and down rocky ravines, exploring twisty stony forests after they’ve lost their cover of green. We visit abandoned military forts, old bridges and river overlooks, admiring the way the sun reflects off old stone and trees curve over and reflect in the brown water below. This is photography season, the best time for carrying a camera, either film or digital, and capturing all the joyous romping and beautiful scenery. Here are some of my favorite images from this season.
The mornings are all of a sudden freezing, the trees are gilded and beginning to strip bare and I’m reminded of my trip to New York City in November 2008. It was my first time in that city and I was awed by it. It was so loud, dirty and obnoxious, yet it felt so elegant under it’s grey skies and cold rain, illuminated by yellow leaves and green mold.
For the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to go on two mission trips to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home of The Lakota people. My home church has a heart for the Lakota, who face many challenges including poverty, alcoholism, and a lack of good housing and jobs.
The smartphone photography revolution is over, and the smartphone has clearly won. Almost everyone owns one, and the majority of photos these days are being captured with them. Much has been written about smartphone photography, it’s art or lack thereof, and I admit that I don’t have much to add to the conversation. All I can really say is that I purchased an iPhone 5c over a year ago and have been shooting photos and videos with it ever since, and I really like it.
One of my responsibilities as a video producer at Fotodiox is to demo new gear. It’s a valuable exercise because, along with creating demo images to promote our products, it helps me sharpen my photo and video skills.
I went to school in Greenville, South Carolina, and one of my favorite pastimes was to wander the back roads of that town. Unlike the north, roads in the south meander wherever they will, backtracking and crisscrossing, delving down into ravines and climbing up sudden hills. A single turn off a main road would find me plunging into a vine-choked valley, creeping past a sun-baked cemetery, or wandering behind the walk-out basements of old YMCA gyms and tree-bound churches. Green streams trickled from old pipes through narrow crevices, Confederate soldier statues stared down from half-forgotten monuments, and red-brick ruins loomed in the thick brush.
One of my biggest hobbies is collecting and shooting with vintage cameras. Antique and camera shops are a fine place to start when I’m looking to add to my collection, but my favorite haunts are rummage sales and thrift stores where I never know what gems I’m going to find, or how ridiculously under-priced those gems might be.
Last winter I had the privilege of helping my friends Colin and Christiana Flanigan with a photo shoot to promote their band The Aches. They specifically wanted an analog film look, so I used my Canon AE1 35mm film camera, along with a Polaroid Colorpack II instant film camera to photograph them. We headed out to a lakefront park in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which gave us a starkly beautiful view of partially frozen Lake Michigan.
Here are some of the shots I captured.
As always, it was a joy to shoot with film. I love the aesthetic of 35mm and instant film, and I didn’t even have to do much work in post to get these images ready for publication. Chris and Colin really liked what we achieved and they’ve have already incorporated some of these images into their Facebook page. Check it out here.
Oh, and they’re also an awesome band! You can listen to some of their music here.
My job requires me to spend some time on photography blogs and forums every week, and I’m consistently surprised by how much snobbery I run into. It seems everyone has a premium brand or model they swear by, and the predominate claim is “costlier is better. While I won’t argue that expensive lenses and sensors can yield great results, I still want to grab the internet by it’s collective shoulders, give it a good shake and ask it a few simple questions: does your camera have ISO, shutter speed and aperture control? Do you understand the basics of composition and subject matter? If so, you have the tools to be a great photographer. So cut it out!