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Haje Jan Kamps

Don’t trust a photographer with dirty glasses

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I’ve made this joke many times, but nobody laughed.

Every day, I grieve for Instagram

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Nineteen Eighty-Three. That is probably the first time I picked up a camera. I say ‘probably’ because I was born not long before that, and I can only assume that it took me a couple of years before I was able to crawl into my father’s brown and tan camera bag to explore the Canon A1 he purchased the week before I was born. He bought the camera to take photos of me, his first child. For someone who neither makes a living as a photographer nor takes all that many photos these days, I sure did write a lot of books about photography.

In photography, “Master and Slave” flashes is lazy language. We can do better.

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If you’re an avid photographer shooting with remote-controlled strobes, you’ll have come across this issue: One set of flashes is connected to your camera, and it controls all the other flashes in the photo studio.

Almost all of these systems use the same terminology: “Master” for the trigger that is doing the controlling, and “Slave” for the receiving strobe. It seems convenient because the language is so clear — until you pause for half a moment, and think about what that use of language does to normalize and casualize literal slavery.

I built a fully manual Polaroid studio camera

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It turns out that shooting Polaroids in the studio isn’t impossible — it just takes a little bit of engineering and ingenuity. Here’s how I turned a $200 toy into a studio camera.

I’ve done a lot of portraiture in my time (ahem), and I’ve never shied away from building my own photography equipment. I’m also intrigued by the tactile nature of instant photography. There’s something about the ability to immediately destroy a negative that makes portraiture a lot more fun. And with Polaroids, you can give your models the photos before they’ve even developed. Nobody has to see the photo except them — and then they can share it from there… If they wish.

How Peak Design Became Kickstarter Ninjas

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Peak Design have created five incredibly successful Kickstarter campaigns. Their most recent – for the Everyday Messenger bag – raised nearly $5m from more than 17,000 backers.

In this article, I talk with Peak Design’s Adam Saraceno, to find out how they keep knocking their projects out of the proverbial ballpark. And, perhaps, to find out exactly what the magic sauce is to delivering a successful project.

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