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Well, I don’t know about you but 2020 turned into a little bit of a dumpster fire and while the wild ride there is now hope at the end of the tunnel. We just have to stay the course for a little while longer. But there are only a handful of things that we can actually control. Despite the rocky year that was, I did get a lot of photography done and plenty of projects completed and wrapped up which means I have a clean slate for 2021! And what is now becoming a yearly post this is what I have planned for the newRead More →

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In: The Canal
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When it comes to all the posts I’ve written about the Welland Canals, this one is probably the most important. The reason is that if it hadn’t been for the efforts to save the historic Welland Canals, this whole project would not have been worth creating. The reason is that there would be nothing left of the first Canals at least in original forms. Sure there might have been plaques installed eventually, and some sections of the earlier Canals may have survived, but I don’t think in any meaningful sense. The preservation of the historical Welland Canals was the last thing on the minds ofRead More →

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I’ll have to admit, ever since I went to Europe in 2015, I’ve wanted to add some sort of folding medium format camera to my collection. Something compact, shooting at least 6×4.5 or 6×6. And for a little while earlier this year, I had my eye on a Mamiya Six (the original one, not the modern rangefinder). After reading and searching, I realised that there were too many questions about the Mamiya Six and stopped looking. And then this beauty fell into my lap, and I’m glad it did. The Ikonta 521 might not be the best folding camera out there, but it is exactlyRead More →

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If you’re a member of any film camera group on Facebook, you’ll know our guest for today’s show. The man who has a thousand camera and is rumoured to smash them all after writing a review. His reviews are the stuff of legend, today Bill and Alex sit down with the one, the only, Mr Mike Eckman! Mike Eckman, if you’re looking for a history or a review of some sort of obscure camera then there’s a good chance you have stumbled across his site. That is certainly true for both Bill and especially Alex in their own research for reviews and feeding their personalRead More →

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In: The Canal
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I have this memory that recently floated up to the surface of a camping trip I took many years ago with my dad and brother. We were camping at Sherkston Shores a camping resort half-way between Fort Erie and Port Colborne. While I have excellent memories of swimming in the old quarry and the three waterslides, but less clear is a visit we made one trip to the Welland Canal. We’re all unclear as to what lock we visited. My brother remembers stores. And there was also the stranger who gave us chocolate bars (through our dad) on that same trip. I’m sure buried inRead More →

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Matt’s back! Yes, local camera builder, inventor and overall mad scientist, Matt Bechberger joins John and James to discuss his process on building home brew cameras and what bits and pieces that make the best parts from broken and non-functioning cameras that help in his methods and spare parts bin. Check out Matt’s amazing light meter at www.reveni-labs.com and on instagram as @revenilabs. If you are interested in home brew cameras, Matt suggests checking out theHomemade Camera Podcast at http://homemadecamera.com/ Here are some images both of Matt’s homebrew creations and some images he made using them. Want a subscription to SilverGrain Classics and are aRead More →

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Back in the Summer of 2013 when APUG was the place to get your online fix of the analogue photography community, I noticed a post in the Toronto local board that there weren’t enough meetups for the film photography community. Which was at the time partly true, sure there had been a couple of FPP/APUG meetups in the area in the past, I had even helped coordinate one in 2011. But there had not been anything since. So I took it upon myself to plan these events, at least four, in a year. The first one dropped in July 2013, had a decent turnout andRead More →

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In: The Canal
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Out of all communities formed along the Welland Canal, both large and small, the ones that are most important to the Canal are the ports. It’s easy to tell which communities along the Canal remain or are former terminuses or access points onto the Welland Canals as most of them carry the title Port in their name. Welland for example offered through the first two Canals access onto the feeder canal that exited at Port Maitland (which I will not be covering today, sorry). While once-thriving communities with some level of municipal independence all save Port Colborne are a part of a larger city today,Read More →

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These days I will rarely work with Ilfosol 3, but it remains a developer that I always keep in the back of my mind. After learning how to develop my own black & white film from my good friend Julie using Kodak D-76, it would be a few more years before I started taking on the process full time. When I went into Burlington Camera to get all the equipment I needed to take on the daunting task some eight years ago, Joan pointed me towards Ilfosol 3 as a good starting point when you didn’t want to keep a large quantity of developer mixedRead More →

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When it comes to TLRs, there are plenty of choices out there and in many cases will cost you a fair amount of money. I’m talking Yashica, Minolta, Mamiya, and Rolleiflex plus several other upper-crust cameras. But for me, these were a second step (Yashica-12) and third step (Rolleiflex 2.8F) in my journey of Twin-Lens cameras. My first TLR is a true Soviet-era classic and a gateway drug into the wonders of both 120 film but also TLRs in general, and that is the Lubitel 2. Built by ЛOMO (LOMO) or Ленинградское Oптико-Mеханическое Oбъединение translated Leningrad Optical Mechanical Association one of the pillars of theRead More →