The Big Challenge

I have spent so much time recently sorting out the technicalities of setting up a business and building a website that when I was shown this picture it kind of pulled me up short.

This is what I am hoping will result from my efforts. This picture, along with a few others was taken by a good friend of mine, Chris Windsor www.chriswindsor.com He has been playing with a Holga 120 camera and has demonstrated that it is not necessary to use expensive materials and equipment to take interesting and exciting pictures.

Chris is a professional photographer and is equipped with various cameras including Hasselblad. However what happens when you start to use a camera like a Holga is that the equipment imposes limitations in that it has a voice of its own - well, at the very least a strange foreign accent! In the past this was very much a part of photography, it was a challenge to master the medium, if you like, to speak louder than the materials and equipment so that the result was what you had visualised. Digital photography is rather different because the process is so versatile that it will give you virtually any result that you can imagine (or often that a software engineer can imagine).

So here is the challenge: do you remember when photography was more art than technology? When capturing your vision was more about personality than pixels? Photography doesn't have to be about sensors and computers. your equipment and materials can still add their own voice and tone to your creative work.

If you let them

Progress...

There seems to be quite a bit of weather around at the moment! As usual, the snow has brought the country to it's knees - but really there is way more snow than I have seen for the last 30 years so to my mind there is nothing to be done other than to make the most of it. This is the view from my front door, it really is very picturesque.

I should have been having a meeting with the bank today but they were unable to open because they didn't have any staff, if they had any sense of fun they will have been out tobogganing with their children who will have been off school. My son, Jim, is supposed to be making his way back to university in Falmouth with a friend but will have to wait until the weather improves.

Still, not being able to go to the bank today has given me an opportunity to sit in front of a blazing fire and catch up on some of the other things that needed doing in preparation for a launch of the website very soon. At the start there will be the Polaroid films and also Holga cameras and accessories and film for them too. Holgas are great fun, proper photography, low tech and unashamed of it, Available in various models both for 35mm and 120. I think they fit in really well with the instant film products.