This is only the second time I’ve reached a significant milestone in my ongoing reviews, the magic number of one hundred. And to be clear, I’ve done one hundred film reviews, not reviewed one hundred separate film stocks. And that’s because I’ve reviewed some rebadged films; sometimes, I knew it was a rebadge and then made a point not to go after that film stock again, notability ORWO films. I reviewed the four motion picture-specific films from ORWO as their Lomography rebadge. But in the case of Fomapan 100, I reviewed that first as KosmoFoto Mono 100 and then again as Fomapan 100. Agfa AviFotoRead More →

It seems that Fuji enjoyed cutting off film stocks that had become rather popular among photographers, and most are legendary and much-loved colour-negative film stocks. Recently we saw the end of the Fujifilm Pro 400H along with Superia 200 and Superia C200. But one of the earliest discontinuations I remember that caused ripples through the community is Fujifilm Superia Reala 100, or Reala (the older version of this film). I’ve only tried this film in 120 formats after being gifted several rolls from my good friend Andrew Hiltz and picked up a few more along the way. I always thought it was a 120 onlyRead More →

The year was 2013, a new voice had recently joined the Film Photography Podcast, one Mat Marrash. Mat had dived headfirst into the world of film photography and had not looked back and begun speaking about a type of developer I had never heard of before, Pyro developers. Well, I was instantly interested, having myself dived headfirst into the wonderful world of home B&W development. I was also looking for something outside the normal D-76, HC-110, and Rodinal developers. Well, this Pyrocat-HD stuff seemed interesting, but getting it shipped to Canada proved difficult at the time, so with a trip to New York City inRead More →

When I was starting to shoot film seriously, I stuck mainly to negative colour stock but started experimenting with black & white, but slide film was something that I avoided. Slide film was for professional photographers or travel photographers who wanted to share their trips on a slide projector. My first experience with slide film was Fuji Sensia and I was hooked. So I decided to jump right into the iconic Fuji slide film, Velvia. The original Kodachrome killer, and yet I only started shooting the stock after it got discontinued, the first roll running through my camera in 2009. Film Specs Type: Colour ReversalRead More →

When it comes to the name Velvia, most photographers will often latch onto the cult classic Fuji Velvia or its modern form, Velvia 50. But Fuji also released a one-stop faster version, Velvia 100 or 100F, which offers everything you like about Velvia 50 but in a slightly faster form. While I’ve shot plenty of slide films, Velvia 100 is one that I have far less experience with; again, I’m more likely to shoot Provia, Ektachrome, or Astia (RIP) when shooting a 100-Speed slide film. But Velvia 100 is an interesting animal and one that I’m not likely to shoot again. So I wasn’t tooRead More →

While Fuji Velvia was not my first experience with slide film, it is certainly is the one that made me like slide film. First released in 1990, the film became an immediate threat to Kodachrome, especially Kodachrome 25. And unlike Kodachrome, Velvia used the standard E-6 process that could be done in any lab that covered the process. No need to send it to speciality labs, and you could have your slides back the same day from the right lab. The name itself comes from combining Velvet and Media to describe the smooth images produced by the stock. While the original version was discontinued inRead More →

Honestly, you can thank Facebook for reminding me of this amazing trip that I took nearly eight years ago when I am first starting to see posts reminding me that this started to occur. It was 2012, several months after my first major Urban Exploration Meetup, since a rather off-putting event in Buffalo, New York. MAMU or the Mid-Atlantic Meetup had been resurrected by DJCraig, who I had met in December 2011 outside an abandoned hotel north of Dayton, Ohio, at a separate UE event VCXPEX. Early in April, I found myself on a twelve-hour drive south, the first time I had ever done suchRead More →

It was May 2009; I was on a road trip with three friends to explore the wealth of abandoned buildings up in Northern Ontario. Our previous night’s plans of camping out at a mine further north skunked by cold weather and the inability to hide our car safely. But that didn’t matter; we found a small motel on Highway 11 north of our next location, the town of Cobalt. Despite the name, the city once thrived with silver mines and started the northern Ontario silver rush that eventually butted into the gold rush further north. Silver from Ontario caused riots in New York City inRead More →

When it comes to fine-grain developing, the developer that most people reach for today is Kodak Xtol. But Xtol is one of the newest developers to come out of Kodak, before Xtol if you wanted to tame that grain, you reached for Microdol-X. While I’m unsure as to when Microdol-X was first released by Kodak, I’ve found images online of the powder coming in cans rather than pouches. The logo style is that of 1935, so I’m guessing it was released at some point in the mid-1930s at the earliest. I stumbled across Microdol-X while visiting Pittsburg back in 2015, while my main goal wasRead More →

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 →