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Hasselblad and Leica t shirts

About a year ago Yukio Miyamoto's drawing in Adobe illustrator of a '53 Leica FIII won Printwear & Promotion's t shirt print competition. The FIII was the last Leica produced under the supervision of Oskar Barnack, the perfectionist innovator of compact 35mm photography. Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Minolta, Olympus, Panasonic, Fuji and all the other film and digital camera manufacturers followed his lead.

We now print Yukio's work at 1400 dpi, the results on a shirt are startling and always a pleasure to print, you just do not get tired of looking at the image. The Leica is our best selling t shirt of 2010. An interesting aspect of this is that although the shirt is consistently our best seller it hardly sells from our website or over the internet. It is clear customers do not believe that what they see simulated on our website is what they are going to receive from the postman. In actual fact what they receive is better.

For the 2011 Printwear & Promotion competition we have entered Yukio's illustration of a Hasselblad 500C. There are parallels between Victor Hasselblad and Oskar Barnack of Leica. They were both perfectionist mechanics with a compelling interest in precision instruments. Hasselblad's designs had their roots in horology and, care of Sixten Sason of Saab, car design. As well as German photography courtesy of a camera recovered from a German reconnaissance plane downed in 1940.

Having captured a German reconnaissance camera the Swedish Government gave Victor Hasselblad's camera manufacturing business a kick start by asking him to produce a camera suitable for use by the Swedish Airforce. Hasselblad did not rest on his aeronautical laurels, he went all the way. NASA asked Hasselblad to produce cameras suitable for Apollo missions to the moon and just about every image of the earth taken from space you have marvelled at was taken with a Hasselblad.

I think the perfection and attention to detail of Leica, Oskar Barnack, Victor Hasselblad and Hasselblad find their equivalent in the accomplished work of Yukio Miyamoto. Celebrate them all with our Leica t shirt and our Hasselblad t shirt.