Venus Optics has always been the maker of some very good manual focus lenses that have character, and the Venus Optics Laowa 7.5mm f2 for Micro Four Thirds seems to be offering just the same quality. The company is touting that this is the widest f2 rectilinear lens for the mirrorless camera system. With 13 lens elements in 9 groups and a 46mm filter thread, this lens is so far seeming to be really ideal for a whole lot of landscape photographers. Granted, it doesn’t boast weather sealing. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to use the absurd image stabilization abilities of the Olympus OMD EM1 Mk II with this lens.
Photographer Michael Scott Phillips is one that uses film and who genuinely considers himself an artist. You see, he’s an oil painter. Painting plays a role in his photography and vice versa. His influences are many: Mary Ellen Mark, Bruce Davidson, W Eugene Smith, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Stanley Kubrick, Joel Meyerowitz, John Vachon, and Sebastião Salgado are cited in this post. And while going through submissions for our analog zine, I found Michael’
This month: we’re exploring Fujifilm Acros.
As photographers, not only are we always needing more storage to hold our digital images, but we are needing better ways to backup that data within our various workflows. One of the best ways to do this is with a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device that allows you to backup the data on your computer to a separate location within your home (or in some cases offsite). One such solution is the Synology DS416play, which happens to be a killer deal right now at only $399.
Photographer Kaamna Patel is based in Mumbai–where she returned after working for five years in Paris. “I am interested in themes of identity & globalisation, putting the world and myself under scrutiny, an objectivity facilitated by a lifestyle of constant travel.” she says. “I usually shoot with a Beautyflex 6×6 camera.” Yup, that’s right, she’s an analog photographer. Like many others, Kaamna has fantastic work surely worth being featured here on the website. So here’s her submission.
Learn how to get the most from the Acros simulation in your Fujifilm Digital Camera.
Fujifilm Acros 100 is the company’s last black and white film emulsion, and for many photographers it was an absolute favorite. Acros 100 is a very fine grain film considering how it’s also a fairly slow film. In fact, it’s so fine grain that when my scans came in, readers thought that the image was digital and not film. For this reason, it was always used for a variety of applications though mostly with portraits and landscapes. Depending on how you developed it and if you pushed it or not though, it isn’t very tough to get great results even when pushed to ISO 1600, though it is surely time consuming when it comes to the processing.
Many photographers, myself included, often tout the ability of mirrorless cameras to utilize old film era lenses to save money and try new focal lengths without breaking the bank. But at what point does doing this actually, make sense, and when does it start to be a bad decision.
“While Europe has thousands of years worth of ancient cities and temples, America has its great canyons, mountains, forests, and deserts; these are our great wonders. “says northern California based Photographer Troyce Hoffman. “They are the great equalizer in our country; they belong to both rich and poor serving as a vast communal backyard.” Troyce’s images are mostly shot in the public lands of the American West and has worked to capture images of the American West using Kodak Tri-x for a while now.
Photographer Tomasz Kędzierski has been a pretty fantastic and creative analog film photographer for a while. We’ve featured his work a number of times on this website. Besides the Square Lips project, his homemade pinholes and his solarigraphy, he’s done some higher end work too. Most recently, he was working on a shoot where he was shooting with Provia 100, and to ensure that he got the shot right, he used a Leica Sofort first before switching back to his Hasselblad 501C.