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In the automotive world, especially in the world of hotrods, there’s a term ‘sleeper’. A sleeper is a car that doesn’t look like a performance automobile, but under the hood is. For many years my dad babied a 1983 Caprice Classic, installed a new engine, new exhaust, fuel injector, all to complement the Impala SS suspension and close-ratio police steer box that came with the car. The Caprice spent many years as a sleeper until he started working on some exterior detailing. Why do I mention a car on a lens review? Well, it’s because the lens I’m covering today is a sleeper, it doesn’tRead More →

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People, Places, and Things they all intersect with our lives in various ways and at multiple times, all according to a plan. I’m one who believes that everything happens for a reason; you may not always realise it at that time or won’t until much later. Take, for example, Southside Community Church; my family attended the church briefly when it first opened, but I became attached even attending Sunday School there before going to Knox later that Sunday morning. In High School thanks to a coworker of my mom, I went to the youth group there also, met many friends, or older siblings of thoseRead More →

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Back last year I made a single roll review of the Eastman 2238 film, but now that I have a lot more resources available to me and having found three rolls sitting in my storage, I decided to do a proper review of this beautiful film stock. As I mentioned in the one-roll review, 2238 is what is called a Panchromatic Separation Film and is used to create archival film prints from colour film prints. Unlike past speciality motion-picture stocks this is a Panchromatic film, meaning it is sensitive across all the colour spectrums. Now, 2238, like all films, is not designed for regular pictorialRead More →

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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 →