The plastic-fantastic, Holga!

One of the problems with photography today -- and it's been caused by increasingly sophisticated digital cameras -- is that all images, irrespective of the subject being photographed, somehowlook the same.
The truth is, today's digital cameras are so advanced that most pictures are perfectly focussed, well lit and have accurate colours recorded. They are perfect, in a sterile sort of way.
The situation is even worse when it comes to press photography. The pic-men (or women) are herded together and confined in a specific area. All are armed with similar cameras (the brands don't matter), have similar lenses, similar flash set ups and, as a result, they get similar pictures.
I am more than ever convinced the days of professional photographers are numbered, a fact yet again brought home to me when a friend (ironically at a recent photographic exhibition and in poor light) took a picture with her iPhone. The quality was astounding! Photography is becoming so easy that there are fewer and fewer reasons to hire a pro.
In the light of that I decided to mess around with a Holga, a cheap, Chinese, plastic, toy camera fitted with a plastic lens. With the Holga it's all about compostion and creativity. You never know what you are going to get and no two cameras are the same. The only control, I believe, comes in the darkroom.
I am well-please with my initial efforts!

You can view the full series at www.bighilt.smugmug.com
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Moment critique!

I am always amused when new digital photographers and photojournalists talk about the newest, latest, all-singing, all-dancing digital camera able to churn out six to 10 frames per second.
I find it even funnier when they tell me how it's impossible to shoot sport -- or much anything else -- without a camera that can fire off photographs faster than a machine gun.
They seem to forget many of the world's greatest news photographs were shot using thumb-wound cameras with just a standard, manually-focussed, lens. At the same time, many of the great sports photographs were taken with similarly wound-on cameras fitted with a single-focal-length telephoto lens that also had to be focussed by hand.

How did we do it back then?

So how did we do it in the old days before feaures like autofocus, matrix metering and wizz-bang motordrives were even thought of? And how did we do it when we couldn't check the rear LCD screen to be sure we'd got the picture?
It was, and still is really quite simple. We worked like snipers rather than machine gunners. We anticipated the action, prefocussed or zone focussed, understood exposure and only needed to take a single shot at the critical moment.
To illustrate the point, last Saturday, I took a trip to Mandela Square at Sandton City, armed with a simple Minolta X300s and a 50mm and 28mm lens. There is a large statre of Madiba there that naturally attracts the attention of locals and tourists alike.
I took up a position near by, took a meter-reading off the palm of my hand, gave one more stop of exposure, pre-focussed and waited for magical photographic moments to happen.
Over the course of three hours I got a number of really good shots that captured wonderful vignettes of life in the Square and though I was only about 10 feet away from the action, not one of my subjects even realised the were being photographed. At the moment critique I simply brought the camera to my eye, pressed the shutter and lowered it. No shutter-lag, no whirring autofocus, no grinding motordrive to attract attention -- just a single, clean shot and kill.

Look closely at this image!

Some more cyanotypes

Some more cyanotypes I recently completed in preparation for an upcoming exhibition.
All cyanotypes are available for sale as signed, limited-edition prints and can be shipped anywhere in the world. Each is printed on fine, archival-grade watercolour paper. For prices and details please visit my website www.bighilt.com