When it comes to 160-Speed film, to mee it seems like a bit of an odd duck, 100, 125, are pretty standard, but 160 I’ve only seen colour films rated that way. But enter Silberra Pan160, a touch faster than it’s 100-Speed Cousin, but not as fast as the 200-Speed. It must be a Russian thing moving from the GOST scale. Either way, I like Pan160, probably a little more than Pan100. It’s sharp, but grainy, fantastic contrast, and responds well to contrast filters, especially a pale yellow. And while there’s still plenty of supply issues to us here in North American, and the 120Read More →

Out of all the Doors Open Events run across Ontario my favourite and longest attended is Doors Open Hamilton. The city knows how to do the event right with lots of buildings both public and private buying into the event and specifically allowing and even welcoming photography. My first taste of doors open had been back in 2007 and I pretty much have attended almost all of the Hamilton events missing only a few in the past decade and a bit. Plus being on the weekend closest to my birthday it has also become somewhat of a Birthday Tradition. This year I had an awesomeRead More →

The air certainly had a chill to it and if you didn’t know the date you might have laughed if I said it was the end of April. But it certainly didn’t feel like the end of April, it felt like the fall. I should have gone back up to the condo and gotten a sweater but I decided to soldier on. Despite the fact, the official Spring Toronto Film Shooters meetup was the next day I decided to scrap my initial plan for the day which was shooting solo in Elora and headed into the city for an informal TFS meetup in the beachRead More →

If there is a single figure in the lead up to the Upper Canada Rebellion, the opposite of William Lyon MacKenzie, a Tory among Tories, that figure is Sir John Beverly Robinson. There is no better example of a loyalist and the perfect man to head up the Family Compact and pull the strings of the Provincial Government for many years. While having no love of power, he was a man of strict ideals, and for that, he took the role seriously and refused to allow anyone to deviate from his moral compass. John’s family’s legacy traced back to the Robinsons who were among theRead More →

Certainly an odd-ball in the 600-Series line up from Polaroid. The Impulse is actually my favourite format for the 600-Series cameras from Polaroid, with the grey plastic and rubberized grips. It’s almost as if Polaroid wanted to try out the style that would eventually go into the Polaroid Spectra line of cameras before actually building it. Gone is the typical clam-shell design that is iconic of the 600-Series cameras. The Impulse is a fixed focus, point-and-shoot with a pop-up flash. They also released two sub-variants of the Impulse, the Portrait (which has a selectable focus via an auxiliary lens) and the AF which features Polaroid’sRead More →

The 28th of April marked two major events, the first being the official Spring Meetup for the Toronto Film Shooters Meetup which this year was hosted by our good friends at Burlington Camera, under the direction of James McFarlane and the first event being hosted by Burlington Camera which is celebrating their 60th Anniversary this year, for Worldwide Pinhole Day! The event saw only three pinhole cameras in use, two being actual pinholes and three folks (Alex included) used a pinhole adapter. We’d like to thank Burlington Camera for not only planning and hosting the event but allowing us to record, even though the audioRead More →

If there is a singular group that I had a clue about going deep into this project, that group would be the Family Compact. And how you view them relies on your view of Canadian History. To some they are the antagonist of this particular branch of Canadian history, to others, they represent Canadian loyalty to the British Crown in the rebellions. But for me, they now stand as the opposite side of the same coin during the Upper Canada Rebellion. The Compact represented the colonial elite, the new ruling class. They controlled every aspect, every part of the government, the law, and the church.Read More →

Back at the end of 2017, the film photography groups across Social Media began to talk about a photographic media producer in St. Petersburg in Russia called Silberra. While Silberra is not a new company they launched their Crowd Funding Campaign to expand their film manufacturing, introduce new film stocks, and expand their markets outside Russia and Eastern Europe. And while they encountered a pile of setbacks, but after waiting for nearly a year, we finally started to see some of the film starting to hit the market. Silberra Pan100 is the one film that I liked right off the mark, having done a first-lookRead More →

It’s fun to change things up every so often. And what better way to do it than adjust when the Spring meetup for the Toronto Film Shooters! This year our spring meetup saw several changes from the normal flow of the event. First off it happened on a Sunday; secondly, we had a company host the event, Burlington Camera and the reason behind these two things was so that it fell on World Pinhole Photography Day! And while the weather had been looking terrible even as late as Thursday, when I arrived at the Burlington Camera parking lot, the sun was shining, and while chillyRead More →

There’s a certain axiom when dealing with history, it comes from the reimaging Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. The rise of the reform movement and the radicalisation of elements of the reform movement merely in response to extremism on the opposite end of the political spectrum. And yes this is where we get messy and political. While Upper Canada saw a great deal of expansion and improvement under the governorship of Sir Peregrine Maitland and Sir John Colborne, not all were happy with how the Colonial Parliament operated. These complaints were brought to light when RobertRead More →