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.
Lately I’ve been really enjoying shooting with my Sony full frame camera and a homemade pinhole lens I made a couple years ago. The hole of the pinhole is a bit too large, causing everything it captures to be soft and out of focus, but I’ve found this helps me to simplify my subjects, breaking them down to their most basic parts. I also get a pleasing bokeh effect on distant light sources. Here are some photos I’ve captured with this pinhole lens.
And here’s a video I created with it.