You know I have almost no interest at all in the cameras people use. It seems pointless to ask the question,’what camera do you use?’ but it is one I hear often. Commenting on cameras is the dullest thing when looking at images. So I was less than thrilled reading the opening paragraph of this article recommended to me by my Danish friend Alisdair. Anyway I did look, I read nothing at all about the cameras but I liked the pictures and I hope you will too.
Last year I did a – one year – 2012: 12 months, 12 images, 12 cameras / lenses in total guest report for Steve. It was tough to make, it’s really hard to narrow down a big production to just one image per month, but very rewarding as well.
So I decided to do the same this time around. Those familiar with my work, either here at Steve’s site or my own http://www.oneofmany.dk will notice that I’ve been drifting slightly towards film and large format recently. The slow process has been healthy for me mentally and photographically speaking. I shoot less images, but work harder for each one, and it’s a thrill to learn new skills — especially ones that aren’t linked to Photoshop.
2013 was a good year for me in many ways, and also challenging. Sometimes I feel I’m balancing between being creative and obsessed, both when it comes to shooting portraits as well as using new cameras and lenses, hehehe. I still treasure my Leica M9-P more than anything else, but the artistic freedom (and limits) the large format view cameras give are very inspiring. Nowadays, whenever I grab a digital camera, I miss the selective focus / shallow depth of field while shooting large format extremely open, but also the tonality and amount of detail that I get from even 100-year-old non-coated lenses. An 8×10″ is approximately 60 times digital full frame, and a Swiss built large format Sinar camera, be it 60 years or 6 years old, is at east 60 times more fun to operate than a modern Canon/Nikon.
Well, here are 12 images, one for each month, all shot on different cameras, formats and lenses by Bjarke Ahlstrand, see the full article here
Oxford School of Photography 