My Favourite Lens

5 stories

My Favourite LensReviewsA Few From Ratcliffe-on-Soar With the Sprocket Rocket [Kentmere Pan 100] Images shot on Kentmere Pan 100 in the Lomography Sprocket Rocket A few posts ago in my film photography essays archive is an account of shooting some Lomochrome Turquoise with the Rollei 35 ...

10.03

My Favourite LensReviewsLomography Sprocket Rocket 35mm Film Camera Review Lomography’s Sprocket Rocket is unlike any camera I’ve shot before, or since. All things considered, it’s quite unlike any camera anyone else has ever made before or since. The build ...

09.06

My Favourite LensReviewsBetter to Light a Candle Than to Curse the Darkness [AgfaPhotoAPX 400] Images shot on AgfaPhoto APX 400 in the Rollei 35 Once again I have walked around Mansfield and shot a roll of monochrome film. And once again I was left not knowing ...

09.01

My Favourite LensReviewsColouring Mansfield Town With a Touch of Turquoise [Lomochrome Turquoise] Images shot on Lomochrome Turquoise in the Rollei 35 Most of the time I shoot a roll of film somewhere, at least one deliberate choice has been made that shapes ...

08.23

My Favourite LensReviewsCooling Towers and a Boat Graveyard at Redhill Marina [Lomochrome Turquoise] Images shot on Lomochrome Turquoise in the Rollei 35 A short drive outside of Nottingham, down towards East Midlands Airport, sits the now-decommissioned Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station.

08.17

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo