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Cactus has ceased trading – but apparently they didn’t tell anybody for three months

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This only seems to be coming out now, which isn’t much of a surprise as the popularity of Cactus triggers and lights has taken a bit of a beating the last few years – what with Godox bursting onto the scene covering everything from entry-level budget speedlights to honking big location strobes. So Cactus has kind of fallen by the wayside.

But Cactus, the company that failed to crowdfund the Cactus RQ250 strobe – a competitor to the Godox AD200 – a couple of years ago has now left the building. According to an email response sent out to one of their customers recently, Cactus actually ceased trading in December 2020, but they just didn’t tell anybody and nobody seemed to really notice.

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Thinking about closed and open form pictures; or how old art history terms can still be useful

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If you were to mention the term ‘formal analysis’ to an art historian today, you’d probably be told it’s passé. No one really tries to objectively compare one painting against another using formal concepts anymore. However, formal analysis—or the concepts that it identified—does still present some interesting ideas, especially for photographers.

Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin was a key figure in formal methodology. He devised a system that compared opposing artistic concepts so that they could be applied to paintings and used to analyse them. In particular, Wölfflin was interested in trying to characterise Renaissance and Baroque art.

One pair of comparators used by Wölflinn was closed form against open form. While I’m doubtful you’re set on recreating Renaissance or Baroque pictures, knowing what the terms mean, and how they can be applied to your photos and make your audience feel about them, is useful.

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