Hipster... moi? | Scott Ogden and his camera kit

January 15, 2021

The revelation came to me a couple of years ago when we were in the midst of a photoshoot for our 2018 collection with our erstwhile photographer and friend Jim Marsden.

As I pulled it out from a cupboard, a thin layer of 14 years' worth of grease and dust stuck to it. "That's highly sought after," Jim said in his Lancastrian accent. We carried on with the shoot and saved the chat for another time.

The camera in question was my old faithful Ricoh GR-1, a camera that gained legendary status with street photographer Daido Moriyama. A camera which documented my heady days of getting pissed and "all back to mine" from 2000 to 2002. I worked in a camera shop back then and purchased it for £50 trade price. I processed and printed (cross processing transparency film in neg chemicals) nearly every day as it was free, accumulating hundreds of blurry, badly lit party images.

It was also around this time that I had to value my camera kit that I'd completed my degree on. I had purchased a Hasselblad kit in 1997 off a bloke named Derek who proudly regaled the story of the time he shot Charles and Diana's wedding with it. I paid the princely sum of £1000 – a steal. 

 

By 2001, the "pros" were dumping their medium format equipment for the all-new digital cameras – Cannon's 6 megapixel offering was going to change their lives. This was a time when photography was uncool and strictly the domain of "Derek" – a man who wore BHS slacks, drove a 12 year-old Vauxhall Cavalier and was chairman of the local camera club. It was a science and a bit of topless smut for a friend on the side.

So, on with the market valuation. My 18 year-old Hasselblad 501cm, 4 lenses, 6 backs (1 polaroid), TTL metre, Metz flash and Gitzo tripod all came to the grand total of... not very much. It wasn't digital.

 

When 2004 came around, my days of assisting on shoots for Dazed and Confused and The Face magazine were so last century. I was a relic of an analogue age and film was getting expensive. Fast forward to 2018 and a quick eBay browse showed that my small collection of cameras (Olympus Trip 35 anyone?) was white hot with the cool kids. Just with the passing of time I had become an inadvertent hipster...

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