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If there’s one lens that I don’t use that much is the 135mm focal length. I shoot a tonne with my pair of Nikon 105mm lenses and the 100mm in my Maxxum system is becoming a fast favourite. But I have a pair of 135mm lens one in Nikon the other in Rokkor that just don’t get the same amount of love as the others do. And oddly enough there are plenty of other photographers out there that their lenses feel the same lack of love. Enter Dan Novack when he posted a challenge on the Negative Postive’s Podcast group on Facebook asking if anyoneRead More →

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I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a sucker for professional 35mm cameras, and there are two that I’ve always wanted, the Nikon F5 and the Minolta Maxxum 9. While I loved working with the Maxxum 7, the 9 still drew me in just that little bit more. And while the 7 and 9 share many similar features and design cues, the Maxxum 7 to the Maxxum 9 is what the Nikon F100 is to the Nikon F5. All solid cameras, just the 9 and F5, are aimed more at the professional than the advanced amateur. I was sold on the 9 as soon asRead More →

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Back at the end of 2017, the film photography groups across Social Media began to talk about a photographic media producer in St. Petersburg in Russia called Silberra. While Silberra is not a new company they launched their Crowd Funding Campaign to expand their film manufacturing, introduce new film stocks, and expand their markets outside Russia and Eastern Europe. And while they encountered a pile of setbacks, but after waiting for nearly a year, we finally started to see some of the film starting to hit the market. Silberra Pan100 is the one film that I liked right off the mark, having done a first-lookRead More →

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Found in a dusty warehouse, based on where the film came from, Sweeden, Lomography promoted their Berlin 400 as an iconic cinematic film. 400-Speed, Black & White, and from East Germany. Well, that certainly narrowed it down to only one film, thankfully it is one that I did have planned to review at a later date, so why not discuss it under the Lomography Brand! The film, if you haven’t already guessed is ORWO N74, which made collecting developing formulas easy. Shooting cinematic film in still cameras is nothing new, at least for me, I still love shooting Double-X for urban work, so getting intoRead More →

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If anyone has read any of my classic film reviews, you’ll know I have a taste for out-of-production films, especially Kodak Plus-X and Panatomic-X. For several years I’ve participated in an event called Expired Film Day. This is an online celebration of shooting film past its due date and it usually is a single day, the 15th of March, but this year the mind behind it decided to give three days to get out and shoot. In the past, I’ve only gotten out and shot a single roll of film on that day, but now that I had three days to play I could getRead More →

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Like Ultrafine Extreme 100, the 400-speed flavour is another mystery as of where the film stock comes from. But when it comes to a budget-friendly film, it might be best not to ask too many questions. Extreme 400 is a stock that I have little experience with before I started this review, I had shot a single roll several years back for a camera review. And while, like Kentmere 400 I expected Extreme 400 to be of similar style and class, with heavy grain and low contrast in general. However, the film stock quickly proved me wrong as being inexpensive but far from cheap. FilmRead More →

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As much as I would love to get my hands on enough APX 25 to run a classic film review of that legendary stock, sadly they are few and far between, and when they are sold, often it’s at a premium. In the meantime, how about its faster cousin, APX 100. But the two films are wildly different, APX 100 is a silver rich film that produces amazing sharpness, detail, and contrast. For this review, I got lucky and found 50-sheets of APX 100 in 4×5 which made shooting the film all the more enjoyable. Film Specs Type: Panchromatic B&W Film Base: Acetate Film Speed:Read More →

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If you’re a fan of the Polaroid Automatic Land Camera or old school pop-out folders, then the Lomography Belair X 6-12 will be a familiar camera. I’ll be referring to the camera as the Belair from now on. And while the Belair shares some design features of the Auto Land Camera, the two are very different cameras altogether. The Belair doesn’t try to be anything but a fun camera that sits nicely on the edge of being a toy camera. A fairly simplistic camera, but has one thing that drew me in, the giant 6×12 panoramic images and the interchangeable lens. Special thanks to AngelaRead More →

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I like to think I have an open mind when it comes to different film stocks, but it’s easier to write that than to practice it. Thankfully thanks to these reviews I’ve found that I have come to like several stocks that I once derided. It would be in that category I will place Kentmere 100. Kentmere, once an independent company saw purchase in 2007 by Harman, and today is manufactured by our friends at Ilford. My first couple experiences were fairly terrible, especially the first and second rolls, but in those cases, I’ll chalk it up to the camera and my own mistake inRead More →

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One thing that is always satisfying is being able to come up with new processing details for rare films. I did some extensive testing with Eastman 5363 back when the Film Photography Project began to release it for general photographic use. But now I have a new challenge from the group, Derev. Of course, there has already been some testing of the film by the Alpha team over at FPP HQ in New Jersey which gave me a baseline, so I went and checked over my extensive list of films looking for similar film speeds, film feel, and developing times to see if other developmentRead More →