Fast and Cheap 4×5 Film Photography

Posted by sean

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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.

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Shooting with a C-Mount Lens on a Full Frame Camera

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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.

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Joy and The Shadow

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In Autumn 2013 I was asked to teach a film acting class for the Lake County branch of Spotlight Youth Theater. I jumped at the opportunity and quickly realized what a great opportunity it was for me as a filmmaker–not only could I teach students how to act naturally in front of a camera, but I could also create a fully realized short film in the process.

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River Trail

Posted by sean

Sometimes when I’m testing a new camera or lens, I like to go somewhere and just shoot. This week I had a Sony a7R II and a Leica M lens to test, and I was drawn to one of my favorite spots in Lake County. I also wanted to experiment with adding film grain to video, as well as doing a post anamorphic conversion. Here’s the result–nothing special, but a very enjoyable and relaxing exercise.

Vigilante Hunter: Creating a Comic

Posted by sean

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In college I was tasked with coming up with a new film idea every week and writing it out on a note card. It was really just a creativity exercise, and most of my ideas were pretty poor. I still have the stack of cards, and it’s full of oddities like “a webcam comedy about an opera singing plant” and documentary ideas like “how to make swords.” One idea I had involved a character named the Vigilante Hunter who hunted down superheroes for the government.

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Prodigals Music Video

Posted by sean

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Christiana and Colin Flanigan approached me last Fall with the proposition of creating a music video for their
band, The Aches. I’m a personal friend of theirs–I made silly videos with Chris in high school–and I’ve
done photography and video work for their band before. We decided to make a video for Prodigals, a track
from their newly released EP, Your Broken Hand. Not only is it my favorite song of theirs, but it’s also the
most energetic and driving track on the EP, and when I listened to it I envisioned the duo relentlessly walking
towards the camera through an urban environment while singing.

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Lo-Fi Imagery and the Digital Harinezumi

Posted by sean

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.

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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.

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Wide and Long: Canon 11-24 + 10-Stop ND Filter

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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.

Canon 11-24 + WonderPana XL

Shooting with the Sony a7S II

Posted by sean

I recently rented a Sony a7SII to test it out, and I have to say that I’m officially in love with this camera! The full frame imagery it produces is beautiful, and the built-in image stabilization means you can shoot stable handheld video with just about any lens, old or new. Here’s a video I made for Fotodiox, taking a closer look at the gear I used for my shoot.

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Green Town: A Video Tribute to Ray Bradbury

Posted by sean

I grew up in Waukegan, Illinois–learned to ride my bike on it’s sidewalks, developed my first friendships and crushes on it’s playgrounds, began to love nature in it’s parks and preserves. I also learned to love reading in it’s downtown library, a sprawling and boxy 1960’s artifact filled to the brim with dusty old books and strange statues. It was here, around the age of 12, that Ray Bradbury stole my heart. I picked up one of his collections of short stories of the shelf–maybe it was October Country?–opened it and was hooked. His poetic prose and vibrant imagery were like a drug to my young mind, and I devoured most of his writings in the space of a couple months, immediately aping his style in my messy notebooks, desperately trying to write a story as exciting and melodic and moody as one of his.

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The Spiritual and the Mundane Side by Side

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As Christians we are told by our Savior that those who seek a sign are a wicked generation–but the spiritual gifts given at Pentecost have not gone away. Last summer my roommate prayed for a pain-stricken woman who was instantly healed, and one of the students I help lead encountered a demon that was beaten back by prayer and dependence on Christ’s power. Neither of these instances involved spiritual power being wielded by humans, but simply followers of Christ depending on His power for providence and protection.

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Mini Reviews: 2015 Awards Season Films – Part 2

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The Hateful Eight

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As a storyteller Quentin Tarantino is a cold-hearted chess player. He sets up his characters on the board and then pits them against each other in violent combat, gazing unflinchingly at the resulting carnage, uncaring and unmoved. This clinical approach seemed to be slipping slightly in Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained, in which he seemed to truly care for a couple of the characters he sent into the fray, but its back with a vengeance in The Hateful Eight, which is undoubtedly his most sadistic and amoral film to date. That’s not to say the film doesn’t have its redeeming features, but you have to dig through a couple of inches of gore to find them.

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Spy Vs Spy Vs Spy: Mission Impossible, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Spectre Go Head to Head to Head

Posted by sean

This summer brought us not one super spy film, but two, with Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and when the holiday movie months arrived, it was once again time for another entry in the James Bond franchise: Spectre. Instead of reviewing these three films separately I decided to pit them against each other in a no-holds barred fight to the death. Let’s see who’s left standing when the dust clears.

Characters

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Every film needs them, and Mission Impossible has a couple, but they’re all pretty bland. It feels like they all have interesting back stories and relationships that have happened off screen, I just wish they could have happened on screen instead. Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg play their parts amiably, and Tom Cruise’s Agent Ethan Hunt is steely eyed and daring as ever but not much else. Many of the characters in this film were introduced in 2011’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, but then as now they had little depth or development. For such a huge franchise, it feels like an opportunity to create enduring screen characters has been wasted.

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Winter Forest Gimbal Video

Posted by sean

I grew up next to Lyons Woods in Waukegan, Illinois, and to this day I’m still drawn back there. It’s a beautiful forest full of grand old oaks and strange rows of pine trees, and I know every inch of it. I recently had the opportunity to test a new brushless gimbal for GoPro cameras, and I knew where to test it.

I shot this video with a HERO4 Black set to 4K and Protune to give me extra grading flexibility in post. I reduced the focus in post to counteract the HERO’s sharpness, giving the footage a more cinematic feel. The poem in this video is one I wrote in high school, and is inspired by a winter walk I took in these same woods years ago.

Shooting HAUNT

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I recently wrote about my experience shooting my short film HAUNT, which you can read about here. One of the coolest things about my job working for Fotodiox Inc. is that they allow me to borrow any gear I need for my personal projects as long as I make videos discussing how I used the gear. Here’s a video I recently put together for Fotodiox’s YouTube channel discussing what gear I used to make HAUNT, plus some of the tricks I came up with to create certain shots.

Some Random Thoughts on Photography and Filmmaking

Posted by sean

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.

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Mini Reviews: 2015 Awards Season Films – Part 1

Posted by sean

Why do all the best films come out in the space of three months?! My wallet and I wish the studios would space them out equally over the course of a year, but there is something fitting about the quality of cinema climbing as we approach our holy days. Here are some mini reviews of the 2015 awards season films I’ve seen so far.

Sicario

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Every once in a while I see a film that already feels like a classic, and Sicario is one of those kinds of films. Emily Blunt plays FBI agent Kate Macer who is frustrated by the violent drug crimes she encounters daily in her hometown.

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