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My high school doesn’t exist anymore. Sure the building still stands, it serves a different purpose now, but the school I attended is no longer there. Everything got shifted to a new building and a new name. To be honest, I don’t miss it, or high school at all. High School was just a means to an end, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have any high points to my time there. First, I was able to seriously build up my computer skills, both in function and support. Second, my love of history, both in exploring and how I write about it was because ofRead More →

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When it comes to Olympus cameras, especially the OM-System, I sadly lack in my experience. Thankfully I’ve had the chance to run with both the original OM-1 and the advanced OM-4. Meaning there are only a couple of these amazing cameras that I have yet to have any experience with. In a reoccurrence of GAS, I happened upon a trade where I swapped a Pentax for a beautiful OM-2n. And after hearing all the good things about these cameras from two friends, Bill and Leslie, I knew I had a winning SLR. And while the OM-2n isn’t a primary camera in my daily use, IRead More →

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A school mate and I trudged along the small muddy path along the Mill Pond in downtown Milton, the pond that was created by Jasper Martin to help drive his grist and saw mills. But what I did not expect to find was an abandoned rail bridge. What made things all the more interesting is that the bridge did not match in with Milton’s two main rail corridors, this one was different older almost. But let’s go back, back to the middle of the 19th Century. The first major railroads to form in Canada West (Ontario Today) were Great Western, Grand Trunk, and Ontario, Simcoe,Read More →

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Do you know that Kodak D-76 has a cousin? Although in the grand timeline of things, I can’t place exactly when the stuff was first released. But if I had to hazard a guess it was sometime in the 1920s. It proved to be a favourite of Ansel Adams along with HC-110. Today Kodak no longer produces D-23 in favourite of the far more shelf-stable D-76, but you can still mix it up from raw chemistry if you know the formula (I’ll be sharing that later) or you can purchase pre-made kits. Personally, I enjoy working with D-23 when I need some compensating capabilities andRead More →

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The idea of a small light meter is nothing new, ever since the concept of an exposure meter that clip onto the camera through an accessory shoe (or hot shoe). When I was shooting a Barnack Leica, I used one such meter, the Voigtlander VCII. A fantastic meter, easy to use, a little restrictive at times, but never missed a beat. I don’t recall what happened to mine. It either stopped working or got lost on an adventure on in my one move. When my good friend and regular of the Toronto Film Shooters Meetup, Matt Bechberger, let me know he aimed to release hisRead More →

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Way make in the early days of my film photography journey and having a lot of influence from the Film Photography Podcast I dove deep into the wonderful world of Polaroid photography. Now it wasn’t that I didn’t know about Polaroid, I had shot the format before but only the Type-600 integral stock. But through the FPP I learned about pack film, which if you know the song is where the phrase ‘shake it like a polaroid picture’ has its origins. After making a donation to the FPP I ended up receiving a Polaroid ColorPack II camera right from Michael Raso’s personal collection. The ColorPackRead More →

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I honestly can’t remember when I got this sealed box of 4×5 film. I remember getting it from my good friend and partner in photographic crime Bill Smith. Now, this was all before the great interest in Ultra-Low films and it took a lot of digging to find out anything about the film. Then I realised I was looking for the wrong number. I should have been checking out Eastman 5302. After expanding my search I found some developing formula on Flickr and decided it would be finally time to get out and check this mystery box out. It took a while to figure outRead More →

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If you’re of a certain age, you might recognise the title as being part of the school song for EW Foster. Foster is the school that I have some of the fondest memories from, and that’s even including High School. As a school, Foster isn’t that special, being built in the 1980s; it is a brown one-floor brick building with no details at all. Typical 80s, but I mean Milton has only one historic school that still stands. But the real magic of Foster happened inside the walls for me, from planting a maple key in a styrofoam cup in Kindergarten that grew to higherRead More →

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If there is one lens that lives on my XE-7 so much so that I feel it’s fixed to the camera, it is the Rokkor-X 45/2. This lens is a beautiful piece of glass that honestly, I wouldn’t want to replace with a 35mm focal length for my Minolta kit. It’s the lens that went through all of a trip to Disney World and Universal without being taken off the camera despite bringing a 135mm lens with which did more on the digital a6000 then on the XE-7. And while it looks a little silly strapped onto the beast that is the XE-7, as aRead More →

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I can probably trace my curiosity to peer behind the board up windows to Waldie’s Blacksmith shop. For much of my life, the building sat empty and abandoned. Sitting next to St. Paul’s United Church. But I also didn’t know the rich history behind the building that had captured that curiosity. James A. Waldie came to Canada taking over a business in Acton first before establishing his shop in Milton in 1865. The shop’s operations peaked in the 1890s when it operated around the clock employing five blacksmiths, two woodworkers, a painter, and a trimmer. After the death of James Senior in 1900, his sonRead More →