Author name: Ibraar Hussain

Casual snapper from London My Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibraar

Durst Automatica – Overcoming Scale Focus Fears with an Italian Beauty

By / / Scale Focus / 10 Comments

My photographic journey took a new route recently. I had been scared of scale focus and viewfinder cameras for years – I mean how would one shoot people and portraits with a shallow depth of field without being able to critically adjust the focus on their eyes? Guessing exact distance isn’t something I’ve ever been confident with. And zone focusing isn’t anything I had ever tried before in anger though I knew how to set distance on a lens it seemed far easier to use something like a manual rangefinder or SLR for what I like to photograph – especially as my main interest is travel and with travel there’s people.

Olympus Pen F – The Walk to Paradise Garden and W. Eugene Smith.

By / / SLRs / 24 Comments

William Eugene Smith, better known as W Eugene Smith is one of The Greats.

One of the greatest photographers of all time, a Magnum photographer famous mostly for his reportage work during and after the second world war. (If you’re unfamiliar, I’ve added some links below). Now this isn’t an essay on W Eugene Smith, I’m not an expert nor am I an art historian of any sort – I just know a few things about him and have been admiring his work for years. His work is very moving and very dark – Don McCullin in many ways reminds me of him – it seems as if the darkness in their soul was made manifest in much of the photographic work that they made – as if the darkroom was where their soul, as a disembodied entity, under the red glow of the safe light, was absorbed into and made it’s way into the photographic enlarger and immortalised onto the gelatine and silver print.

Fujifilm Professional TX-2 – Seeing Panoramic

By / / Photos & Projects, Rangefinders (Changeable Lens) / 20 Comments

The Fujifilm Professional TX-2 (its sister Hasselblad XPan I/II or the older Fuji TX)  is one of those cameras which you lust after, and when you get it, open the packaging and have it in your hands at last, you marvel at the build quality, the heft and solidity, the beauty of the workmanship and the lens as you handle the jewel like thing and attach it to the body. You then oooh and aaaah as you lift it and put it to your eye and are blown away by the clear bright finder which is very wide and large indeed! You then want to go out and shoot with it so you insert the batteries and then the film – which is as easy to load as a point and shoot

Fujifilm Professional GA645i and Velvia 50 in The Hindu Kush

By / / Medium & Large Format / 16 Comments

Now, amongst the multitudes of cameras I bought, sold then regretted was a very special camera – being the Fujifilm Professional GA645i. You’ve all probably read about this and have seen Youtube videos, or you own one and love it! But I’ll relay my experience with it nonetheless. I bought this camera as I had been a very long time Contax G2 user and from what I read, this seemed to be the closest MF format (6×4.5) camera to that.

Rolleiflex 3.5F and Agfa Ultra 50 – Taveling in Turkey and Pakistan

By / / Photos & Projects / 14 Comments

The Rolleiflex 3.5F wasn’t my first TLR – that honour goes to the MPP Microcord. But the Rolleiflex is a name up there with Leica and Carl Zeiss.

When one thinks of a TLR, images from TV and Film from ages past come to mind – of Movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe and used by greats to make some of the most iconic photographs in history: such as David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Robert Doisneu, Fritz hence, Eduard Boubat, Lee Miller and Robert Capa amongst many others.

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