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.

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.

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...

produced and edited by Frans Peter Verheyen

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.

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.

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)

Red Bull Illume Quest 2010 Winners...

Red Bull has been running this great competition to celebrate and honour the best action and adventure sports photographs on the planet.

Below you will see a few of my favourites, if you would like to see all the finalists you can go here.

I know it doesn't have much to do with photography, but while we are on the subject of Red Bull activities, you might want to check out the video at the bottom which is just incredible !

Overall Winner and Illumination Category Winner - Chris Burkard

New Creativity Winner - Eric Berger

Energy Winner - Stuart Gibson

Tourist photo's, an artistic approach...

Saw this pop up on the Online Photographer the other day regarding the work of Corinne Vionnet a Swiss based photographer and her use of readily available tourist snaps on the web.

Corinne 'collects' hundreds of these images and then artistically blends them all together to produce the final art work.

Do you happen to have any online images of the Alhambra, maybe they form part of the one you see here.

Apart from the copyright discussions that ensued on the Online Photographer I find it fascinating that so many people take the same image of the same thing from the same place.

There are more examples over at My Modern Met of all the typical tourist spots.

Phase One IQ180 Back...

With an incredible 80Megapixels the Phase One IQ180 Medium format Back will be available in May this year and once again raises the bar for image resolution and quality.

I would really love to have one of these for the club, but its slightly out of our price range at more than 30,000 Euros.

However, if you do have the means for such an item, you may want to head over to the Luminous Landscape for a hands on report to tempt you even further and it will also give you the perfect excuse to upgrade you computer as well, handling 480Megabyte 16bit TIFF files is not something to be scoffed at.

Anyway, the video above which shows Jens Honoré on the Sitges Terramar Racing Circuit with an IQ180, is worth a look (check out what happens around 0:55 for a good example of photographer/subject trust !)

There are some more 'In Action' videos over on the Phase One site if you also want to see what Fashion and Architectural Photographers have to say.

Selection of Themes for 2011...

Poll will close 7th March.

Something to make you smile...

DIY Beauty Dish...

The Chinatown Special: The Best DIY Beauty Dish from The Browyoungs on Vimeo.

The Beauty Dish gets it name for a very obvious reason... the quality of light it produces is very flattering in portrait photography.

The above video, gives a quick overview of how to build one and here you will find one of the best and most detailed tutorials I ever seen.

This is one for that weekend when you can't find anything to do :-)

FujiFilm FinePix X100...

This little camera is causing quite a stir at the moment and looks like being one of the hottest sellers in 2011.

It's retro on the outside and cutting edge on the inside.

For more information go here and for a pre-release review check here.

Danny Santos, Weekend Warrior...

Danny Santos II is a self confessed weekend warrior who likes to shoot strangers in the streets of Singapore. 

He's been shooting street photography for about 2 years and is a graphic designer by trade.

In this article, Danny explains his motivation and exactly what he goes through when he spends his weekends wandering up and down Orchard Road asking strangers if he can take their pictures. Would anyone dare to do this on Gran Via in Madrid ?, maybe we should put it as a theme ?

If you want to know more about Danny, who is very articulate as well as an excellent photographer, you can check out the following sites:

His Flickr page
His Webpage

Pep Bonet...

Found out about this guy from the 500 Photographers website (by the way this is definitely one of the pages you should visit daily), and what really struck me was his approach to photography, travel and I suppose in a way, life in general.

Whilst War/Disaster photography is always difficult to view and digest, and almost always leads to questions regarding the morality of the photographers involved, I think its worth to see the video above and take a bit more of a look into the work and philosophy of Pep Bonet.

GIGAntic PANoramas

Panoramic photography is surely one of the areas having gained most from digital photography. Some people push it to the limit - or beyond, regarding the capacities of normal PCs. At the GigaPan website one can find images with hundreds of gigapixels, stitched together from thousands of individual images. Via the Web interface one can zoom into the images and find details invisible in the full image. See, for example, this nice panorama of Prague at dawn or this (relatively low resolution) sunset shot of Madrid.

These photographers are helped by the hardware sold by GigaPan which moves the camera around automatically. Should we consider a GigaPan EPIC Pro for the Club to create such special images ourselves? Since Neil is now with Gaia, he should soon know everything about dealing with enormous datasets :-)

Yearbook 2010 published...

yearbook 2010 by esacphotoclub | Make Your Own Book

Firstly, congratulations to Silvia whose photo graces the cover of our fourth edition of the Yearbook as the most popular image on our gallery pages in 2010.

This year we have reduced the number of pages to take advantage of the new premium lustre paper, which I think really adds a lot to the look and feel of the book.

Above you can take a quick look at the 'Book Preview' which hopefully gives you an idea of what to expect.

I may be biased, but I think this years edition is our best yet and if it wasn't for you all taking the time and effort to produce the images you do throughout the year, the club could not produce such a high quality product. Many thanks to all of you for your time and enthusiasm !

In the bag with David Burnett...

In The Bag with photographer David Burnett from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.

We've spoken about David Burnett in the past, recently I came across this series on Photoshelter which gets various photographers to open and explain what they have in their camera bags. Always interesting to have a nose around in the bag of a professional photographer.