Thursday 24 March 2011

Holga and the New York Times...


Came across this nice article in the New York Times 'Lens' section about the Holga, a 120 film, medium format plastic toy camera made in China.

The camera has a cult following due to its ability to give you results that you weren't quite expecting, say goodbye to digital perfection and hello to light leaks, soft edges and a complete lack of control..... all very liberating don't you think ?

Randy Smith of Holgamods fame gets a mention for his inventiveness when it comes down to modifying these cheap plastic cameras. I bought mine with a waist level finder from him a number of years back. Real nice guy to deal with, honest and open, does it because he loves it not because he is on some sort of get rich scheme.

There are mentions of a number of photographers who actively use this camera and I have to admit I liked a lot the work of Richard Sintchak whose image you see above.

The Holga world is a big one and there is a lot to explore, if you are tempted to buy one, get it from Randy who will make sure you get something just to your liking.

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Invited Speaker - Carlos Borrego Iglesias


The club is very pleased and honoured to announce that Carlos Borrego Iglesias, will be visiting us on the 13th May to give us a talk on his photography and creative vision.

Carlos from Barcelona, already has a number of exhibitions under is belt and is a passionate and creative artist and advocate of analogue photography.

A very big thank you to Miguel for organising everything and I think that this is an amazing opportunity for all of us to experience close up, the work of a fellow photographer.

You can see more of Carlos' fantastically creative work on his web site and Flickr page.

Mark Tucker and his latest project...

We've seen Mark's work in the past and I recently dropped by his web pages, just to take a look at what he's been getting up to.

He images still continues to amaze and inspire me and its great to see he still maintains his passion for homemade camera's. In this case, not made by himself but by John Minnicks, whom I'm trying to find out more about, but if like me, you don't have a Facebook account your going to be out of luck.

You can see the camera in action above and its a custom design using as its base, the Graflex RB Camera from the early 1950's. You may also notice that the lens attached is the famous Kodak Aero Ektar often used by David Burnett.

I have to admit that I really want one of these camera's as the thought of having a 4x5 reflex camera (meaning that you don't lose the viewfinder image of your subject when you load the film into the back) is really appealing, and it looks like a quite compact package as well.

Anyway Mark has set up a new blog to show the results of his new project to photograph special people in the Nashville area.

If you don't remember Mark from our past blog entry his web page is here and his 'normal' blog here.

Winners of Sony World Photography Open Contest announced...


The Open contest specifically devised for amateur photographers has ten categories in total; Action, After Dark, Architecture, Arts & Culture, Fashion, Nature & Wildlife, Panoramic, People, Smile and Travel.

.. and its James Chong's image from the Travel category you can see above.

More than 51,000 submissions from 148 countries were made with the Asian entrants scooping up almost half of the available prizes.

You can see more of the entries over on the World Photography Organisation's web page.



Friday 11 March 2011

Madrid Foto announces dates...

MADRIDFOTO starting on the 5th May will be in Pavilion Number 1 at IFEMA.

With more than 5,000 sqm exhibitors from as many as seventy international galleries, publishing houses and journals will participating.

MADRIDFOTO is the only international fair in Spain specialized in contemporary photography, and is designed to encourage new private, corporate and institutional collecting.

THIAPS produces book...


THIAPS, the International Analogue Film Society who are strong advocates of Analogue Photography, have recently released a book which is comprised of many images that have been shown on the Society's web page "Film is not dead it just smells funny" over the past three years.

It took them 6 months to create a short list of photographers who they wanted to participate in the UNLIMITED GRAIN project. They also had so many images that they decided that one book would probably not be enough, so hence a series of books will be released of which Portrait Photography is the topic covered by the first one. Following books may cover landscape, urban, street and nocturnal photography.

Based on the 'preview' you can see above, this looks to be a worthwhile series of books to collect and will be a motivation to any analogue photographer and maybe even encourage the digital users out there to give film a go as well.

Thursday 3 March 2011

Blurb's Storytelling Video Series...


Storytelling Series: Daniel Milnor from Blurb Books on Vimeo.

Blurb have been running these short video stories for a while now on authors that they consider to have an inspirational story to tell.

They really are quite a nice insight in to the motivation and thought process behind the creation of a book. The series covers authors of many different styles of books, but the video you see above, of course, is about a photographer (in this case its Daniel Minor who also has a very interesting blog you might want to take a look at as well).

You can check out the whole series so far over at Vimeo.

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Angelo Musco...


Angelo Musco and his team spent an amazing 2 years of 8-15 hour days putting together this image called 'Tehom'. Using tens of thousands nude bodies the image you see above is just a small part of the final artwork which you can see below.


'Tehom' refers to the 'great deep' of the primordial waters of creation, mentioned in the Bible, and biblical/mythical references appear to be the inspiration of a lot of his work which you can see on his website (Although I consider these images to be Contemporary Art, other work colleagues may not agree, so I give prior warning that these may not be work safe).

Angelo recently had his first solo exhibition in the States and it took one week just to mount all the individual images that make up the final huge art works, see the video below.



(credit 500 Photographers for bringing this to my attention)