I’ll admit, I have a soft spot for manual focus Minolta cameras. And the Minolta lineup is a unique cross-section of camera technology through the post-war 20th Century. All my early experience with photography came in various Minolta cameras, from my family’s Riva Zoom to my first personal camera, the Hi-Matic 7s and the first SLRs in the SR-T 102 X-7a. More recently, the XE-7 has been my Minolta SR-Mount of choice. But the XE-7 lead me down the rabbit hole of the 1970s of Minolta’s technology-sharing agreement with Ernst Leitz because, of course, there was something better. And that something better is the MinoltaRead More →

My first introduction to Brantford came in the form of the film Silent Hill where the city’s depressed centre featured as the downtown of the titular Silent Hill, a fictional mining town that ended up in a supernatural cataclysm after a coal fire broke out. Brantford, in reality, has a far more complex history where the dark colonial past and rich indigenous heritage are seen like never before in Ontario. I’ll admit, this week was hard, made harder by recent dark elements of Canada that were brought to light for us on the colonial side of history. The earliest known human settlement in the GrandRead More →