This Camera Company Will Pay You to Live in Hong Kong and Shoot for Up to Six Months

A camera company is offering to pay one person to move to Hong Kong and photograph the city for up to six months. The gig comes with a stipend and covers the cost of living there while you shoot.

The opening comes from Flashback, the Australian company behind the ONE35 retro-style digital camera. The company is framing it as a "dream job," and the pitch is simple: you live in Hong Kong, you carry its camera, and you build a body of work in one of the most photogenic cities on the planet. 

If the name sounds familiar, it should. Flashback was founded by two university students from Brisbane, Kelric Mullen and Mackenzie Salisbury, whose paths crossed during their time as residents at Cromwell College. The company started in a garage in 2022, and its 2023 Kickstarter cleared $80,000 in 13 minutes before crossing $800,000. The ONE35 is a digital camera dressed up like a disposable film cam, complete with a winder, a viewfinder, and a bright flash. The original version made you wait 24 hours to "develop" your shots, mimicking the old ritual of dropping off a roll and coming back the next day.

The founders later appeared on Shark Tank Australia. Mullen and Salisbury secured a handshake deal with investor Maxine Horne that valued the business at $5 million, though reporting since suggests the pair reconsidered the arrangement as sales climbed. The company has since sold well past 100,000 cameras and released a second-generation ONE35 V2 with a 13-megapixel sensor and a new mode that lets you see your photos right away. So the Hong Kong job is not coming from a scrappy unknown. It is a marketing play from a brand that has spent three years turning nostalgia into revenue, and this is another swing at attention.

That framing is worth keeping in mind if you are tempted to apply. A residency-style gig like this is really a content deal. You would almost certainly be shooting on the company's hardware and feeding a pipeline of images the brand can use, which is a very different job from a documentary fellowship or a grant with no strings attached. None of this means it is a poor opportunity, though. Paid time to shoot a great city is rare, and for the right person, it could be a genuine springboard. 

There is also the practical side of relocating to work in Hong Kong. Foreign nationals generally need the right visa to be employed there, and equipment and location rules matter once you are on the ground. Hong Kong's film office notes that no permit is required for filming in public areas on a non-exclusive basis, which is good news if your plan is street work. If you are the kind of shooter who has always wanted an excuse to spend a season wandering an amazing place, this is a real one. Apply here.