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Last year was a big year for more premium modern 35mm cameras; you have the Pentax 17, the Lomography MC-A, and this one. The RETO Kodak Snapic A1 marked a major shift for RETO in their camera lineup. I’ve reviewed two of their previous offerings (Ultra-Wide & Slim and Kodak Ektar H35N), which are basic and cheap feeling; the Snapic A1 is a lightyear leap forward. The A1 offers a few things previous cameras did not: first, automatic film advance and rewind, second, two focus points for the three-element glass lens, and third, a proper OLED screen for information. And while it is advanced inRead More →

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I have visited plenty of small blink-and-you-miss-it communities across Canada and the United States. Some have a draw, while others make you think: is it even worth stopping? The funny thing is that I didn’t even consider going to the historic hamlet of Norval; it’s one of those places that I have heard of, driven through, but never fully considered stopping to get out and take photos. But here I am, willingly going to Norval, parking the car, getting out, cameras in hand, fully committed to capturing this historic hamlet and writing about it, which is saying something. For this trip, I took along myRead More →

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In: Between Darkness & Light
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The VCXPEX events were a great way to check out locations I usually would not see. Old industries in Ontario were few and far between and often had been restored with some adaptive reuse or so run down that it was unsafe to enter. Enter the former Hooven & Allison Rope Factory or Cordage company, depending on where you looked and who you asked. This massive 19th-century rope work factory in Xenia, Ohio, was a local attraction even though it had been burned three times. Tracking a complete and chronologically accurate history of the Hooven & Allison Cordage Company proved difficult. Mainly because the peopleRead More →

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I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete this trinity of the original Efke films. Still, a fellow film photographer came through and sent me not one, not four, but a brick of ten rolls of Efke 25, and not just in 35mm, but in 120, that’s right, we’re doing the final review in the Efke trilogy with Efke R25. Efke 25 is the slowest and hardest to handle of all the Efke films, rated nominally at ASA-25. It is based on the original line of films first released by Adox in the 1950s. This is a single-pass emulsion with highRead More →

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The 1990s and 2000s were a weird time for film photography and film cameras. Digital was starting to arrive as a medium, and often the first digital cameras were adapted from film cameras. But there was also a push to chase nostalgia, and several companies put out what can only be described as premium options. Sure, you have the standard names like Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and Minolta. However, the biggest player in this push for premium is Kyocera. Kyocera had come in, purchased a couple of historic brands, Yashica and Contax, and began producing cameras and slapping these names on them. Kyocera produced cameras fromRead More →

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It’s been a bit of time since I had the chance to do a solo photo walk through Toronto. I had a week off from work and decided to make the most of it. I had to come into the city to do a run at Downtown Camera to get film and chemistry for later in the summer, and decided to make the most of it by doing a bit of a walk through some of my favourite parts of the old town. But it wasn’t my usual route, so I decided to do something a little different in getting around. Despite the heat thisRead More →

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Secrets run naturally among the urban exploration community. In Hamilton, Ontario, secret locations were common, and hiding the actual name of the location was common practice. But the Chicago community took things to a whole new level with good reason. By the time I started to explore the area briefly, there was already a great deal of tension between different groups. In the long run, I got into a better group. It netted me a chance to visit one of the prime locations in the local catalogue, and even now, more than ten years later, I still feel weird exposing the name and history ofRead More →

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Here I am back in the half-frame saddle. I have a couple of people to thank for this. First, there is a student at the college where I work who has a Pentax 17. It was the first time I had seen one of those cameras in the wild, and I was more than happy to let me hold it and fiddle with it. It felt good, far heavier and well-built than I was expecting. Then there was an article by fellow blogger and all-around awesome guy, Johnny Martyr, about his experience with the Canon Demi EE28. Now, in all fairness, I had been lookingRead More →

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When I started working on this series, I knew I needed to include a TLR on the list. But the biggest question is which TLR to include, as I’ve had three in my toolkit, all of which have had some impact on my photography. But after some thought, I settled on the Rolleiflex. The reason is that it’s been the longest-serving medium-format camera in my toolkit, and one I’ve been using before it was cool in this film photography resurgence. Does that make me a hipster? Yes, it probably does. At least I don’t wear a beanie. The Rolleiflex is not my first TLR; itRead More →

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A few weeks ago, an event that I first attended in 2012 had its final form. Back on the 20th and 21st of June, a group gathered to celebrate the life of Bill Schwab, who had passed away in 2025 while doing what he did best: leading a group of keen photographers to explore the world. Bill was the brains behind an event called Photostock. It started as a small gathering in the woods on his property in Michigan, far from the dirty industrial south, but in the far more beautiful northern parts of the state. And while I’m a fan of an event becomingRead More →