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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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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 →

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Like the Canal, the industries that formed along the corridor needed to adapt and change as technology, power, and market demand changed throughout history. During the early day of the Canal, industries could get by working in a relatively small area. Local grain, timber, and materials were brought to the mills, and then the products were used within the local market. The Canadian Industry during the first part of the 19th Century remained local, colonial, provincial. They were dedicated mainly to the extraction and processing of raw materials. But the 1850s brought two significant changes, the first being an effective railway network that provided furtherRead More →

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If there is one lens in my entire lineup that I know and have used the least, the Rokkor 135/2.8 is that lens. I’ve had the lens for some time and decided to keep it after I got out of Minolta cameras as my primary camera kit but dug it out when I got the XG-M and XE-7 in close succession to each other. And I have used the lens a total of twice. Once on the XG-M and once on my a6000 at Disney. As you probably have seen when it comes to short telephoto lenses my focal length of choice is the 100Read More →

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Comrades! It’s the return of the Communist Camera Revival and we have a bit of different episode today, Alex sits down with three fellow photographers to talk about all aspects of Photographic industry that grew in the USSR and the Soviet Bloc from the 1920s to the final collapse in 1991. And more importantly what you can still get and find today from Cameras to Film. And the surprising fact that there is a lot of stuff out there that is still new in box and is not as bad as a lot of people think. Don’t believe the propaganda folks, the revolution will beRead More →

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The Welland Canal attracted a wide range of industry. But most of the industry used the Canal as a way to bring in power to drive the machines, transport in raw materials, and ship out finished products. But if there is a single industry that not only depended on the presence of the Canal but also provided goods and service to the Canal, it is the shipbuilding industry. Shipbuilding in Canada was nothing new; ships were the cars of the day as water was the highway. And with most the communities that existed in Canada were on the water. While Mills drove inland communities onRead More →

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After last month’s debacle with FilmWashi D and the ultra-thin base, I made a point to check Z before even loading it up into the camera, thankfully, the base while thin, is a little closer to what I’m used to working with JCH Streetpan and Rollei RPX films. Like D, Z is designed for aerial surveillance specifically for the mapping of vegetation. To aid in this, the film has a near-infrared capability. While this might not have been used in spy satellites but you never know, it could have been used in spy planes? Knowing that the film has infrared capabilities, I decided to shootRead More →