First of all, may you both please introduce yourself to our readers?

Irene: I’m Irene Steger from the Dolomites, Italy. I’m a creative person in many ways and like to try out new things. So I tought myself to sew and photograph. I’m proud to make leather bags and accessoires in my little workshop. Therefor I print my photos on leather and sew them together to bags and wallets and sell them quite successfully.

Christian: I’m Christian Heidebur from Munich, Germany. As a kid I used to be very creative and painted a lot. After school, however, I was done with creative leisure and concentrated on my job. Luckily I found my way back to painting a few years ago and I paint watercolors. Obviously we both have a passion for analogue photography.

How and when did you get into photography?

Irene: All started with a Holga 120 I’ve found in the museum shop of the Deutsches Museum in Munich about 8 years ago. I was fascinated by the unique look of the photos on the wrapping, like all these photos on social media with that digitally filters. But I wanted to create real photos with that nostalgic look. In the shop they gave me a 35mm film for it though. Little that I knew I tried to make that work. Was a big fail like all my first films, but I didn’t give and started to read about photography. Later I discovered Lomography and bought a Diana and some more Holgas.

Christian: I got into photography when I met Irene in 2019. She gave me her Pentax ME and Holga 120 and some Lomography films for our first hiking tour and encouraged me to just shoot. It didn’t take long for me to get into it because I had a great teacher who motivated me to find my own way. Luckily Irene has a lot of cameras and a huge treasure of films in her fridge. Although I like photo manipulation and digital art I was stunned what you can do with good old analogue technology.

We both weren’t really into photography as a child or teen and weren’t later into digital photography. Somehow that didn’t appeal to both of us.

Your Instagram Accounts shows a lot of successful experiments with double exposure. What do you love the most at these technics and what is your wish and goal result using this technique?

The great thing about double exposures is the incredible number of ways to get something that a single exposure cannot. The photo can be surreal, or it can bring together two things that do not belong together and thus show a contrast. And most importantly, it’s fun and a big surprise when the photos come back from the photo lab.

Bringing nature and urbanity together in a single image can reveal problems in our way of life, or industry and clouds can express the desire to change something about our economy. But it is not our primary goal to improve the world with our photos, it is really first and foremost the joy of photography and experimentation. The strong effect of our double exposures are a nice side effect.

What cameras do you use preferably?

Christian: I personally don’t like point and shoot cameras, but besides that I don’t have any preferences. But I prefer 35mm cameras because there are way more different films available. More important to me are the lenses, like my 200mm telephoto lenses for my Nikon F3.

Irene: There are three: Nikon FE2, Pentax 67 and Polaroid 195. I also wound’t mind a Hasselblad 501 ;)

What do you wish, where the development in photography goes?

We are both happy that analogue photography continues to exist and hope that it remains a strong niche. That makes analogue photography something special. However, we want to have more choice in films and we very much regret that these great films like Lomochrome Turquoise or Kodak Aerochrome infrared have become extinct or unaffordable. They would fit especially well with our surreal double exposures. We also wish the FP100C back. Beyond our personal wishes, we want to see further development and people continue to enjoy photography. At the moment these are probably rather sweet ears put on by filters, but as long as this encourages interest in photography, we think this development is ok too.

We are very happy that you chose KONO! films for a lot of your work, can you go in detail why you use the films and what kind of KONO! film would you like to see in the future?

We like the KONO! Sunstroke, Mirage, Monsoon and especially Moonstruck! The KONO! Monolit is super, because we develop and scan black and white at home. But as we said: the choice might not be big enough, especially for medium format. Would be a dream to shoot KONO! Moonstruck 120. A new slide film, which can also be cross-developed well with strong color shifts, could well expand the KONO! portfolio. And sadly there doesn’t seem to be any color IR film at all available right now.

What would be your photography dream, is there a special landscape, a city or a person you’d love to take pictures of?

We dream of an extensive road trip through Europe or a trip to Iceland, neither of which was possible in 2020, but with the Dolomites on our doorstep we live in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Where can we see more of your work?

We mostly share our work on Instagram

Irene Steger Photography

Christian Heidebur

Irenes selfmade bags - SelberGMOCHT Südtirol Sheye bags