Hasselblad needs no introduction. Ever since the launch of its 500C, the boxy, modular medium-format waist-level SLR has defined the output of genres ranging from street to fashion photography throughout the mid-20th century and beyond.
Sometimes, having an original idea isn’t everything. Innovation can strike at the wrong moment, fizzing out before it has a chance to materialize.
Throughout the history of photography, few names have endured for as long and few have left as significant of an impact on the medium as Olympus.
Today, most of the consumer-grade camera landscape is dominated by less than half a dozen brands. Canon, Sony, and Nikon take the lion’s share in terms of sales and public recognition, while almost all the gaps are filled by smaller companies like Fujifilm and Pentax.
If you were an aspiring photojournalist during most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, then your dream machine was likely not a Hasselblad, a Rolleiflex, a Leica, or any of the other vintage film cameras commonly cited as the most desirable collectibles nowadays.
Lens filters are one of the most affordable yet also most versatile accessories you can stow in your lens bag. Some of them, like polarizers and UV filters, are practically ubiquitous in modern-day photography, used both to lend images a unique look as well as to protect your costly gear.
One of the greatest things about film photography is its friendliness toward do-it-yourself approaches. Want to hack together a working camera out of discount hardware store supplies? All the power to you! Want to shoot on art paper coated in a home-concocted emulsion, contact-printed using authentic techniques from the 1800s? Why not?
Much has been written about the concept of the "decisive moment", a notion popularized (posthumously, for the most part) by legendary candid photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.