Our Photokina 2010 impressions
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s to book online the photokina ticket, it saved some money there.
There were offers for two or more days, we regretted not to spent there more time. (we only went the last half day of exhibition). There were many seminaries, talks and mini-workshops and it would have been great to visit more along the days..(although, you need also to understand German, or be lucky to find some of them in English)..
Another interesting reason to be more days, were the shows (musicians, skaters, bikers) or the models, in great light, posing for the visitors, it can give you fair possibility to shoot there. Impressive model shooting was especially at Hasselblad, but there were nice actions at other stands like Sony with African drummers and skaters.
We were eager to try some cameras, and in fact we did, but maybe not that attractive was the fact that you would hold them, seize them and shoot, but seeing result only at the LCD screen of the camera... at one of the last stands, Leica, we saw a guy with his own Cfcard shooting.
That was smart, but i doubt if it was allowed at others brands. Didn't see anybody doing that. (Maybe in Leica was a good try to sell the new S2 medium format camera, for the price of 18.000 euros the body) =)... not that i wanted, as it didn't really hold good at my hand ( i mean it) =) You need big hands for this camera… in spite of its DSLR like shapes. We saw huge prints hanging there, made with this camera with stunning sharpness.
we also try the new Pentax 645, which we found veeery handy.. in spite of its medium format look! it would have been great to see personal results of any of those cameras.
At Canon and Nikon stands, the crowd was terrible! It killed nearly our interest to have a look there… Even though Nikon was better shown in space and impressiveness, both had lot of persons and both weren't able to satisfy the wish to handle at least, the cameras we wanted to try.
You could try big lenses at special places, at all brands. As said before, for all shown there, cameras and lenses, it gave us bit of empty feeling, having handled them and not having any results to review at home or at location.
At Olympus we saw prints hanging that just didn’t look sharp, quite uninspiring…. Sony had our interest but we didn’t manage to get through the crowd there.
We also saw tripods, but short. Our general impression was that the cheaper brands are catching up in quality and stability, though we couldn’t test well.
An item that was really interesting to see for us were the brands offering photo-books. We saw Fuji, Kodak, Cewe.. the first, in best quality option, was the most convincing for us, although photo quality Cewe had a nice design for landscapers photo-books. (and in fair good quality, as well). Kodak looked good for the ‘normal’ quality.
An impressive stuff were the printers!
Canon had a definitely good quality and you see the results, saying: this is very convincing photo alike print! But Epson, in our opinion, you see results as pieces of art..It was impressive to see great photos coming alive in beautiful artwork prints. It was a subtle difference and huge at same time... wonderful papers and breathtaking details at each work. Of course, it is our humble opinion, no business interest or whatever..
Very amazing were also the expositions of images, with different subjects and from different countries at contests.. all well shown and really of high impact!
Summarizing, if you can for next photokina in 2012, , try to be there with more time than one day... bring your camera, lenses and your cards, to may try results and also make some studio images or action ones ... visit seminars that you want to see and take it easy, as it is huge... sooo huge! |
