Love for a Summer Land Seen Through a Pinhole

Posted by sean
Me in the Forest

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.

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Building an Instant Pinhole Camera Mod

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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.

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Sunglasses ND Filter Hack

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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.

My First 16mm Film in 4K

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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.

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BLACK CAT HALLOWMAS – My Sophomore Effort Finally Finished

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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.

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Blackmagic Pocket Home Movies

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Because my magical little Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera emulates the look of 16mm film so well, adding a lo-fi lens to the front makes for a perfect home movie camera setup. Here are a couple home movies I’ve shot with my Pocket and various lo-fi plastic and vintage glass lenses over the past couple of years.

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Shooting RGB+W Fashion Portraits and Video

Posted by sean

Woman in 3D

I recently had the opportunity to work on a cool fashion photo shoot with my friend and brilliant model Cole. The shoot was for a product launch I created for Fotodiox, launching their new FACTOR Prizmo RGB+W lights. Here are some of my favorite images I captured.

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My Trippy Holga Cult Film

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I shot five short films the summer before last for a miniseries I’m making called Summer Stories. It’s hard to comprehend how I did this, considering that this past summer I only managed to shoot one short, but basically I just didn’t sleep much and spent every weekend on day-long shoots. Editing these films has taken much longer than shooting them did and I still have two shorts to finish up, but here’s my most recent completion, The Square of Grass.

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Capturing Spring with the Lensbaby Sol 45

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Lensbaby Sol 45 - Bahai Temple II

This Spring Lensbaby reached out to me to demo their new lens, the Lensbaby Sol 45, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience! The lens is a 45mm fixed f/3.5 lens with built in tilt controls. All you have to do is twist the lens to unlock it and tilt it to adjust the focal plane for subtle to extreme tilt focus effects.

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Hequet: Horror in a Silent Film Style

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Hequet is the fourth episode in my web miniseries Summer Stories, and my latest attempt at telling a story with images and sounds only. With this silent style of filmmaking, strong composition, music cues and actor’s movement and facial expressions are key to telling the story. This style of film storytelling has always appealed to me because it places so much emphasis on the cinematography and forces the viewer to engage with the story in a creative way–they have to piece the story together themselves rather than it being handed to them on an exposition platter. I’ve always enjoyed mystery in stories, leaving some of the big questions unanswered, and Hequet is no exception. What happened to the man’s wife? Is the statue really a supernatural entity or just in the man’s head? Who is the mysterious masked woman? Well, that question at least can be answered by watching Summer Stories Episode 3.

I hope you enjoy Hequet, and maybe even get a little spooked in the process! It was certainly a joy to create.

July Flame: Capturing Summer in Northern Illinois

Posted by sean

My whole life I’ve longed to capture the essence of the world and seasons around me. All of my short film projects incorporate this desire to some extent, and when I can watch one of my projects in the dead of winter and get a faint whiff of the heat of summer baking blacktop, I feel I’ve at least partially succeeded.

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Capturing Dreamy Photos with a Vintage Hit Camera Lens

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This winter I found this vintage Hit Camera at an antique store, a miniature camera you could buy out of the back of a comic book in the 1950’s!

The camera is designed to use miniature roll film which is no longer manufactured anywhere, so while I attempt to figure out how to make my own, I removed the camera’s lens and mounted it on my Sony A7S II via a hodgepodge of adapters and tape.

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Capturing Photos and Videos with an 11 mm Pinhole Lens

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Last year I picked up a Wanderlust Cameras 11mm Pinwide Pinhole lens. Wanderlust no longer makes this “lens” so it’s a bit hard to find, but I managed to snag one on Ebay for a decent price. Unlike a homemade pinhole lens, which I’ve made and used in the past, the Pinwide is precision milled and 3D printed and creates a much cleaner and sharper image. It has a Micro Four Thirds mount, but I’ve mostly used it on my Sony A7S II with an adapter.

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Style/Portrait Shoot with a Light Leak Adapter

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Two In The Alley

Earlier this month the company I work for released a lens adapter called the ArtFx ColorFlare. This new adapter allows light to enter through the rear of an adapted lens, creating in-camera colored flare and light leak effects. My job was to demo the adapter and create product launch videos with the material I captured.

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Sword and Suburb: My Newest Loner Narrative

Posted by sean

Loners have always fascinated me. Being a part-time loner myself, I’m compelled by the narrative force of a character who is alone by choice or necessity, striving to accomplish a goal by their single strength or choosing to do nothing and fade into obscurity. There is both a flaw and a strength to the loner. On one hand their absence from others shows their selfishness and fear, but on the other it shows their discipline and focus. Loners are more likely to become delusional and do foolish things because they have no one to correct them, but they’re also able to take risks that others wouldn’t take.

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Exakta in Chicago: Retro Lens + Canon Rebel T2i

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Last winter I found a beautiful Isco-Göttingen Westar 100mm f/4.5 Exakta mount lens at my local thrift store for only seven dollars! I did some research and found out that it’s a fairly high quality vintage lens, and a lucky find for such a low price! I took it to Chicago for a photo walk, mounted on my trusty old Canon Rebel T2i, and here are some of my favorite photos I captured.

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