The HOOK UP King James Bull & his family.

Our man Jonny Wilson went above and beyond at The Hook Up 2023 shooting an array of shenanigans, motorcycles for the mag PLUS these incredible portraits of all the lovely people present.

Jonny - “I’ve been involved with and shooting The Hook Up Chopper Show since the very first one on top of a windy hill back in 2015 with only a handful of People. It has now grown to the best Chopper Shows in the Europe with people attending from all over.

I’ve taken hundreds of digital photos over the years of the event, bikes, bands and of course the ride out! This year I wanted to focus on the people that make this incredible show, so decided to bring my 4x5 large format sheet film camera and set up a Pop-Up Studio in the Art Show/Tattooing space and capture some of these faces.

The camera I use is an Intrepid Camera Company 3D printed modern rethink of the traditional large format field camera design that has barely changed since the mid 1800’s. Shooting large format sheet film on is a slow but rewarding process, allowing you to control both the depth of field and the focus plane of an image. When shooting portraits this allows you to tilt the lens pushing the bottom half of the image out of focus, thus giving the portrait that classic aged look. I’d like to thank everyone that got a portrait taken and sorry to those that couldn’t, I didn’t expect to get through all 45 shots (included a couple misfires). If this project goes well, I’ll do some more sessions next year for you all.

Posted above are a small selection of the outcomes that have been hand processed and scanned. The finished project will be a limited run of 50 A5 books containing a 4X5 hand printed darkroom print of each portrait, signed and numbered making each book personal and unique.

All images shot using the Interpid Black Edition 4x5 large format camera + Schneider Symmar 150mm lens + Ilford FP5 Plus 125 sheet film. “

@jonnywilsonstudio