Sean’s Top Nine for 2023

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Here are my top nine most liked photos on Instagram for 2023. They’re fairly representative of my year, from shooting lots of photos with my various Holga cameras to experimenting with Polaroid film and some new point and shoots to collecting rare cameras and celebrating our first wedding anniversary! It’s interesting that some of my most low-contrast, funky color film photos got the most love. I get it guys, you like that retro film look :) Thanks for all the support this year! – Sean

Check out my Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/seanandersonmedia/

Creative Macro Photography with Star Wars Miniatures

Posted by sean

As a kid I loved collecting Star Wars toys, and my favorite toys to collect were always the miniature vehicles and ships. Though I ended up breaking or losing most of these toys before I was old enough to realize I wanted to keep them, I still have a couple that survived, and I’m always on the lookout at thrift stores and antique malls to find a few more.

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Winter Polaroids

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Walking in a cold city

As an avid film shooter I must admit: Polaroid film has the easiest turn-around time for getting from photo to screen than anything else in the medium. I shoot plenty of 35mm and 120 film, but then I either have to process it myself or send it to a lab, then scan all of it, edit all of it and pick my favorite frames to share. But with Polaroid all I have to do is point, shoot, and print, then decide if the photo is worth adding to my portfolio, and if it is, I just scan it, do a bit of exposure tweaking and dust clean up in photoshop, and it’s ready to share. So easy and laid back and relaxing!

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Love for a Summer Land Seen Through a Pinhole

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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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Shooting RGB+W Fashion Portraits and Video

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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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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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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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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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Making a Magnifying Glass Lens

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I’ve always wondered what using a magnifying glass as a lens would look like, and this summer I decided to give it a try. I’ve seen people online hold a magnifying glass up to an exposed camera sensor or lens for trippy freelensing experiments, but I really wanted to see how close I could get to building an actual lens. The build was super simple: all I did was tape a magnifying glass to a macro tube and attach it to my camera. Here’s a tutorial video I made for my company, showing my process.

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Grayslake Pinhole: Shooting Pinhole Video with a Homemade Body Cap Lens

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Pinhole imagery has always fascinated me. I own a Zero Image medium format film pinhole camera that I shoot with occasionally, but other than my weird pumpkin camera obscura, I’ve never tried shooting pinhole photography with a digital camera. I find the precision made digital pinhole lenses that you can buy online just a little too expensive for the results you get, so the other day I finally did the homework and made my own pinhole lens from scratch.

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iPhone Fisheye In The Garden

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Japanese Bridge

One of the most peaceful places I know is the Chicago Botanic Garden. I spent an entire day there last summer, walking slowly through the palatial grounds trying to take in all the wonderful designs, colors and smells around me. I had a Sony A7R II and some nice vintage glass with me, but I found myself having way more fun shooting with my iPhone 6s and a little snap-on fisheye lens my friend had recently given me.

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Fisheye In The Bog

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Bog Boardwalk

I grew up going on hikes with my family at Volo Bog State Natural Area, and it’s still one of my favorite places to visit in Illinois. A bog, especially in the vanilla Midwest, is a magical place, and when you get out in the middle of it, after crossing acres of quaking ground and floating dwarf trees on a narrow boardwalk, you feel like you’re in another world. This January we had an unseasonably warm stretch that felt just like Spring, and one Saturday I couldn’t help but grab a camera and head out to Volo to check up on an old friend.

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Creating a Pumpkin Pinhole Camera Obscura

Posted by sean

I wanted to do something special for Halloween last October to help promote my company, and I hit upon the bonkers idea of turning a pumpkin into a pinhole camera obscura. I hollowed out a pumpkin, put a cardboard frame with wax paper attached to it inside, and put a pinhole lens on one side and a hole for shooting through on the other. It turns out that pumpkins aren’t light tight, so I also had to cover the whole thing in black duct tape. The pinhole lens i made wasn’t able to produce the most detailed images, so I focused on creating silhouette images by back lighting the subjects I shot. All of this could have just as easily been done with a cardboard box, but where would the fun be in that? Here are some of the images I created with this bizarre device.

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