28 by Robin Schimko - Zine review
What’s up photography fans! Welcome back to the All About Street Photography channel. In today’s “book” review I am going to review a Zine called 28 by Robin Schimko a.k.a The_real_sir_robin. I am going be giving away a copy of this zine. All you need to do is leave a comment below the video on youtube. You can for example let me know what is your favourite picture from the Zine. I am going to show you the zine and talk about the process of making it, in case you might be interested in making your own.
Robin Schimko is a photographer and YouTuber based in Germany. On his channel the_real_sir_robin he uploads a lot of videos about street photography, which is a great passion of his. He mainly uses Leica cameras, and besides his M6, he also shoots a lot with his Leica Q, since he loves the 28mm focal length. Another camera that he features a lot is the Hasselblad X-Pan, which is a panoramic film camera. The wide aspect ratio is unique and gives the photos a very cinematic look. Besides the technical aspects of doing street photography, he tries to encourage people to get out of their comfort zone by shooting candid photos of people, and also getting really close. You should definitely check out his YouTube channel.
So this is the zine. It is actually Robin’s second zine and the overall theme of the zine is street photography from Cairo, Egypt. The name is 28 because it was shot with Leica M6 with a 28mm lens and 28 rolls of Silbersalz Vision 3 200t film. The size of the zine is 280x210mm, which is a nice standard size that can fit in your Ikea cabinet just fine. It has 80 pages and 51 colour photographs. Those were selected from 28 rolls. So, 1008 photographs in total were made for this zine. Robin actually shoots mostly in colour, but he is also working a project that will be completely in black and white.
In case you are wondering what was the reason to produce this zine, the answer is simple. Robin wanted to challenge himself. It was an assignment that he gave himself. Before he went to Cairo, he already thought about putting the results into a zine.
The cover actually features one of the shots from the book which is actually Robin’s favourite photograph from the book. My favourite photograph is this one with the pyramid, maybe because of how it looks in the book. But I find the opening both good and bad. In one way it connects the photograph, but for the bigger ones being printed on both pages, I wish the zine would be in a format that would allow proper flat openning. But overall I like design and consistent look.
Robin actually said that one camera, one lens and one film stock helped to achieve a consistent look and tell the story. It took him 9 days to shoot the photos and two weeks to edit. For the sequencing, Robin printed all the photographs he thought he might use for the zine and started to put them into an order. The images are nicely connected and if you are interested more in that, I would recommend you to check out his video called “How to make a photography zine.”
If you think that is actually not challenging enough, Robin’s Leica actually broke during the trip, and he was unable to change shutter speed for the rest of the time.
As Robin says at the beginning of the book, there are many cities in this world that have a great reputation among street photographers, but Cairo certainly isn’t one of them, probably mostly because of the safety issue. That is why I find the story of this photograph Robin told me about interesting:
“As you can see there are two guys that are cuffed together. What you can’t see in the photo is the military police that were on my right hand side. It isn’t a wise idea to take photos of police and military in Egypt and you can get into serious trouble but in that moment I couldn’t resist and took a very quick shot. I pre-focused and with the framing in mind I brought the camera up to my eye and took the shot. “
What I like about this book is that it presents street photographs from a place you do not often see them. It catches the life on the street of city that is not being photographed too much. I also like his choice of paper and the printing quality overall.
If you would like to order this zine I will the link in the description below. Check out Robin’s Instagram and his YouTube channel. Also do not forget about the giveaway, so leave me your comment below the video. Thank you for watching and I will see you next time.
Follow Robin Schimko:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_real_sir_robin
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/