Photokina (Part 2)

Kicking off where Photokina Part 1 left off, but with less criticism about the flamboyancy of the event, and more about the fun of it!

So as I briefly mentioned when I first got there I headed straight for the Lomography stand, I knew that Lomography were giving away free cameras to anyone who came to them with a good enough proposal for a new LomoLocation to put on their map and I had the perfect addition, The other London. When I found out about the giveaways while I was still in England I had a arts and crafts extravaganza and cut and paste my way to winning a new Colorsplash camera! After I finish my series of blogs on Photokina I'm going to do one on Lomo, coz it deserves one all to itself..

Fujifilm were also there with a both their consumer products and their professional products, I made a softcover book that they were trying to sell the new machinery to vendors and the products out of the machines to the consumers and so i took my chance to do it for free and basically how the new machinery differs to others is that you input 100 images, it uses 'smart technology' to then put the images in order and group them how it thinks they should go. I asked the woman doing it if it used the date of the photos at all but she said it didn't but I don't know how much I believe her to be honest but it did do a good job, however it did it and so I got a little booklet of Oktoberfest photos.

Next up the as I call 'Luxury' camera manufacturers were there, Leica with their giant lenses and Pro photographers doing shoots behind glass..

Hassleblad, another of the luxury camera manufacturers, had Pro Gunther Raupp using the just released at Photokina, Ferrari branded medium format camera doing a car interior workshop. On a Ferrari, of course!

Also at Photokina they had an Underwater imaging world, where you could get into a diving pool and try out the latest underwater cameras, to be honest I didn't really take too much notice of what was going on down there because, other than Fuji, I didn't recognize any of the other manufacturers names. When I think underwater, I think Olympus because I have had for the past four years one of their Shockproof, waterproof cameras which treated me very well being dropped deliberately into peoples beers at the club, smashed on the cement outside clubs and taken swimming in various chlorinated pools and salt water at the beach, and it wasn't until it got a light bump from a coffee table that it decided to stop working and I invested in a Canon D10- which I think had far superior image quality and is extremely quick compared to any of the Olympus cameras on the market that I've seen.

Panasonic were also there with new technologies including the 3d tv's and cameras. It was quite a sight seeing a bunch of people standing around with 3d glasses on. In my opinion, out of all the new technologies that I saw at Photokina that this is going to be the one which will develop and grow and eventually convert a great deal of the market into wanting to see everything in 3D.