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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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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 →

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The main reason behind this epic road trip was to fill in a bunch of gaps in my War of 1812 project. I was on the tail end of the project and wanted to fill in a bunch of gaps before I got married in 2017. And there were two areas that I had not yet explored and wanted to because they offered up parts of the conflict that are often forgotten or not even presented here in Ontario. While the majority of the war took place here in Ontario, there were also a series of battles along the East Coast. So I plotted theRead More →

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A few years ago, I reviewed a rather interesting developer, Diafine. Diafine is a universal black-and-white film developer. Universal in that it will develop all films using a fixed set of development times, which also requires that the film be exposed at a specific exposure index. But what if you could make this even simpler? Well, that’s where the fine folks at Flic Film come into play with their Elementary Developer. Like Diafine, Elementary is a two-bath developer with parts A and B, which you use as separate steps, but you only have one exposure time for all films and no need to expose theRead More →

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We’re picking up where we left off last month with the second of two locations we hit up on a quick Labour Day trip to Buffalo in 2012. If you aren’t part of the classic hot rod hobby, the name Houdaille might be lost on you, but even today, these styles of shocks are highly valued in the hobby, especially when restoring or rebuilding cars from the 1930s and 1940s. The location itself didn’t spark anything interesting because it was empty. Its real value is in the history. In March 1909, French inventor Maurice Houdialle filed a patent for a new style of shock absorberRead More →

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Within the Canadian Mythos of our nation, there are several events, call them fixed points in the timeline, that have been arbitrarily assigned to build the Canada we live in today. These points are, of course, all post-contact with the Europeans, but that’s a discussion for another time. You can look at the arrival of the French and the founding of Quebec City and Montreal. The French and Indian War that established British rule, the American Revolution, the two attempted invasions, and the arrival of the Loyalists. The War of 1812, which saw the American invasions repeatedly tossed back. The Canadian Confederation in 1867. WouldRead More →

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I had not been exploring in Buffalo proper since 2007, and honestly, if they had including some of these locations at that event I probably would have had a better time. So taking advantage of the invitation to join in a short Labour Day exploration in 2012 to check out a couple of locations on the other side of the border, I jumped on the chance. Both locations we checked out were right next to each other in a former industrial corridor on Northland Avenue. Of the two, the most interesting is this spot, the former Curtiss-Wright metal forming works, but its history is muchRead More →

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I love winter. Well, a specific type of winter, the winter we had this past winter. And while we’re all here now, looking forward to spring, I wanted to look back at the winter that was, because I had a lot of fun this year. So what made this winter better than, say, the past two that we had? Well, first off, we got snow early, back in November 2025, which was awesome. And sure, we did lose all of it over the rest of the month and into December. But we did get some back in December, only to lose it again. But weRead More →

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Like last year, I had a few extra days free to myself at the end of the year. So I rounded up the CCR team and headed into the city. The goal was to shoot some film and record an episode of the Classic Camera Revival for the start of our new season. I grabbed a train out from Oakville and into Union Station to meet up with the gang. I packed my Minolta Maxxum 7 and the 20mm lens, along with a roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 (rated at ASA-320 and developed in 510-Pyro). Since we were also doing the Mystery Camera Challenge, IRead More →