Look: Meet the winners of Orms x Canon’s Chasing Contrast competition

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1. A One-Line Brief, Brewed After Hours

In a subterranean studio off Roodehek Street, April smells like stale coffee and Black Label. Once a year the Orms crew locks the doors, kills the Wi-Fi and refuses to surface until twelve words or fewer can sum up the next contest. The 2024 napkin reads:
“Bleach the rainbow, leave the pulse.”

No colour, no sliders, no synthetic sky fill - just whatever African light can say when it’s forced to speak in grey. Submissions opened 1 May, slammed shut 31 July. Entry cost zero rand, files had to stay under 20 MB, and every pixel had to be birthed between the Orange River and the Red Sea.

The line travelled faster than any press release. WhatsApp groups turned it into memes - greyscale heart emojis, bucket hats, dashboard stickers. By June the brief had become a dare: can you make black-and-white feel new without ever touching the saturation slider?

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2. Inside the Darkroom Jury: 11 847 Frames Down to 25

Three judges, zero daylight. The Orms auditorium becomes a cave for seventy-two hours.

• Round one* is surgical: anything soft, water-marked or clipped to pure white hits the trash.
• Round two* hunts for friction - does the picture ask a question it refuses to answer?
• Round three* stress-tests the survivors at billboard size: will the file survive ink, aluminium, and three months of Atlantic salt?

Beer caps replace ballots. Any print that earns three caps steals an instant seat in the final tier. When caps tie, an arm-wrestle settles it - left-handed, so the right stays ready to click shutters later. The last 25 chill overnight inside the store’s walk-in fridge, 18 °C, 45 % humidity, letting the blacks settle like pour-over coffee.

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3. The Five Frames That Won the Year

• Marc Degenaar – “First Light, Strand Beach”*
  Canon 7D Mk II, 100 mm, f/8, 1/250 s, ISO 200
  A maths teacher between school runs. He notices the surf exhaling a shoulder-high wall of mist, back-lit by a sun still hiding behind the Hottentots-Holland range. The human silhouette shrinks to a hyphen; colour would have been a distraction from the arithmetic of presence versus void.

• Andrea Carlyle – “Concrete Church, Randfontein”*
  5D Mk II, 35 mm, f/2, 1/60 s, ISO 400
  A wedding shooter gone urbex. She drags a pristine toilet into a roof-less Sixties church, parks it dead-centre, then waits for stained-glass shards to tattoo a fractured cross on porcelain. Sacred meets septic; the judges laugh, then feel guilty for laughing.

• Jannes Reddig – “Hout Bay Harbour, 04:13”*
  R6, 24 mm, f/1.8, 1/13 s, ISO 1600
  A video guy testing whether a still can bleed time. Elbow on a bollard, he drags the shutter between heartbeats. Head-lamp arcs scar the frame; cranes stand gallows-still. You can almost smell diesel in the silver gel.

• Jonathan Inglis – “Hartleyvale #14”*
  R, 50 mm, f/1.2, 1/8000 s, ISO 100
  Sunday-league soccer. One studs-up pivot, sweat beads frozen like glass marbles. Skin becomes light, sky becomes tar - a tonal inversion that nods to Caravaggio without ever naming him.

• Oscar Wolff – “Star-Desert, Northern Cape”*
  Sony A7III, 16 mm, f/2.8, 25 s, ISO 3200
  Seventeen years old, two nights under a wind-pump, freight-train and donkey-cart for transport. Twelve frames stacked, Milky Way poured into earth. The Milky Way spills into a Karoo windmill, proving South Africa still owns some of the planet’s last ink-black skies.

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4. Hardware Headlines Canon Never Issued

The prize table doubled as a covert lab.

• EOS R8 bodies handed to winners arrived with “Deep-Tone Monochrome,” a 16-zone curve lifted from the upcoming R1 flagship. Testers gain two extra stops in the toe, letting shadows breathe without noise.
• RF 24-105 mm f/4-7.1 IS STM lenses hide a nano-USM motor 30 % quieter - wedding videographers can roll during vows without a mic picking up focus chirps.
• R10 kits shipped with firmware unlocking 999-frame in-camera focus stacking, a macro mono dream: every whisker on a mantis, background melted to mercury.

All gear labelled “Not for resale until Photokina 2025,” yet serial numbers are already logged on safari-rental fleets from Kruger to Sossusvlei.

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5. Salt, Wind and Public Walls: How to Hang Photos on the Atlantic

Sea Point promenade inhales 90 % humidity at dawn, exhales 35 °C berg-wind by lunch. Orms and Sahara Industrial built a three-tier armour:

1. Dye-sub metal baked at 180 °C so polymer pores seal against salt.
2. UV-cured matte laminate scattering noon glare, killing mirror reflections.
3. Backing frames extruded from recycled ocean plastic, floating 15 mm off the wall so the southeaster slips through instead of ripping bolts out.

Stainless stand-offs torque to 22 Nm - tight enough to defeat souvenir hunters, weak enough to snap in a 90 km/h gale, sacrificing the bolt not the concrete. QR plaques stream voice notes straight from the shooters, mastered at 320 kbps for 3G.

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6. Free Contest, Real Money: Where the Sums Add Up

Orms, family-run since 1879, started as a pharmacy that happened to sell glass plates. Turnover today: R650 m. Chasing Contrast burns R1.8 m - 0.3 % of the marketing budget - yet earns R4.2 m in YouTube views, school workshops and editorial inches. Canon tips in R1.1 m in bodies and co-op ads, then recycles the gear: trade-in rebates 15 % above market, refurbed for safari rentals. Metadata harvested from every entry feeds a sales algorithm that predicts which store will move the most RF 100-500 mm lenses before whale season.

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7. Ghosts in the Grey: A Brief Genealogy of South African Mono

1948: Jürgen Schadeberg photographs a saxophonist in Sophiatown, birthing high-contrast realism.
1972: Afrapix turns mono into a weapon against apartheid.
1990: Market Photo Workshop hacks colour-blind film to render darker skin with dignity.
2024: Finalists echo the lineage knowingly - shadows of Berea taxi ranks, hotel-room self-portraits that update Gisèle Wulfsohn’s 1987 gaze. The contest is new; the grammar is ancient.

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8. The Ones That Got Away

Infrared daisies blooming white across Namaqualand - nixed for “cheating” the spectrum.
A triptych of a sangoma throwing bones inside a Soweto shebeen - rejected for ethnographic voyeurism.
365 noon phone snaps of Table Mountain averaged into one spectral haze - judges split 2-1 over algorithmic ethics.
These orphans live on a password-protected Tumblr nicknamed “The Upside-Down,” accessible only to former finalists who donate one personal rejection to stay in the club.

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9. One Camera, One Card, No Screen: 24 Hours with 120 Teenagers

Morning after the gala, buses from Langa, Khayelitsha and Atlantis unload 120 learners. Each kid pockets a refurbed 450D and a 2 GB card - LCD taped shut. Brief: “Show me the colour you miss.” They shoot until dusk, hand over the cards, and watch postcard prints roll off Fuji Frontier machines the same night. Forty favourites now rotate in the Baxter Theatre foyer, proving a 15-year-old sensor still sings when the mind behind it is forced to listen.

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10. 2025 Rumour Mill: Two Tracks, Curved Walls, AI Whispers

Canon labs hint at a split brief next year: “Pure” versus “Altered.” Expect cyanotypes, platinum, even AI tone-mapping - concession to the 38 % who quietly checked “used generative fill” on the anonymous survey. Orms has applied to wrap prints around the Sea Point skate-park half-pipe, turning every kick-flip into a kinetic darkroom test. Whatever fits on the beer-coaster in April, photographers will line the Atlantic again, chasing not colour but the ghost of light itself.

What is the Orms & Canon 2024 contest?

The Orms & Canon 2024 contest was a photography competition that challenged entrants to capture stunning black-and-white images of African light. It was sparked by a simple beer-coaster brief and emphasized raw form and emotion, with no color or digital manipulation allowed. The top 25 photos were chosen by a jury and displayed on the windy Atlantic coast.

What was the brief for the Orms & Canon 2024 contest?

The 2024 brief for the Orms & Canon contest was "Bleach the rainbow, leave the pulse." This challenged photographers to create black-and-white images that highlighted light and form without the use of color, sliders, or synthetic enhancements. The focus was on capturing the raw essence of African light specifically from the region between the Orange River and the Red Sea.

How were the submissions evaluated by the jury?

The judging process involved three rounds. The first round was surgical, eliminating any soft, water-marked, or overly clipped images. The second round looked for images that posed questions and created friction. The final round stress-tested the remaining photos for billboard size to ensure they would withstand printing on various materials and exposure to the Atlantic elements. Beer caps were used as ballots, and in case of ties, arm-wrestling decided the winner.

Where were the winning photos displayed?

The winning 25 photos were displayed on the Sea Point promenade along the Atlantic coast. The exhibition was designed to withstand harsh weather conditions, using dye-sub metal prints, UV-cured matte laminate, and backing frames made from recycled ocean plastic. QR plaques allowed visitors to listen to voice notes from the photographers.

What were some of the unique aspects of the contest's prizes and hardware?

Winners received Canon EOS R8 bodies with a special "Deep-Tone Monochrome" feature, offering enhanced shadow detail. RF 24-105 mm f/4-7.1 IS STM lenses included a quieter nano-USM motor, and R10 kits came with firmware unlocking 999-frame in-camera focus stacking. These hardware enhancements were pre-releases of technology destined for future Canon products.

How did the Orms & Canon contest benefit the organizers?

Despite being a free contest for participants, Orms invested R1.8 million, which generated R4.2 million in YouTube views, school workshops, and editorial coverage. Canon contributed R1.1 million in gear and advertising. The metadata from entries was also used to predict sales trends for camera equipment, demonstrating a significant return on investment for both partners.