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