Regarding locations, the former Indiana Army Ammunition Plant is by far the largest location I ever explored and only a tiny percentage of the total area. This massive factory is terribly repeatable, as it was designed to be an enormous plant for the production of smokeless powder during the Second World War. Based on what I’ve read and seen, I spent almost all the time at the Indiana Ordnance Works No. 1 and a bit of the Hoiser Ordnance Works. Either way, this was a single location I spent five hours at, but I still feel that I only saw a little but at theRead More →

Established in 2013 by MainStreetHost and taken on by Alex Luyckx Photography in 2015, #photochat is a community of photography professionals and enthusiasts who congregate to talk shop and discuss anything and everything photography. After a brief pause through 2023 Photochat is back with a monthly chat model. To participate in our monthly chat (every Second Thursday at 1:00 pm), search the #photochat hashtag on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky Social to see the conversation, or find me at @AlexLuyckxPhoto on Twitter, Mastodon & BlueSky. Include the hashtag in your tweets to answer the questions and talk with the other participants. If there’s a topic you’dRead More →

Infrared photography is one of the more unique niches of the hobby and can produce some amazing and wild images using light beyond our visible spectrum. In this episode, Alex digs into black-and-white infrared photography specifically. Infrared light is part of the overall electromagnetic spectrum, which includes our human visible light spectrum, which ranges from 380nm to 700nm or violet to red. Most infrared photography uses specialised film and filters to capture light between 700nm and 900nm. Today, we don’t have dedicated IR films being newly produced like Kodak HIE, Efke IR820 or Konica Infrared 750, but we do have extended red sensitive films thatRead More →

This is technically my third attempt at getting Guelph into the Frugal Film Project. I attempted once last year but was driven out by rain, and then earlier this year. But it looks like it has finally struck. While I have visited Guelph many times because my Opa lived here until his death, it was the short stint I lived in the city while house-sitting and just starting to explore photography that I took to wandering the downtown. I don’t know if I still have the digital files from those days when the downtown was a rough spot with lots of urban decay and theRead More →

Have you ever wanted to see outside of our visual spectrum? Well then maybe infrared photography is for you! While true Infrared films are long gone, these days we have a tonne of films that can, when properly filtered expose the infrared light. Among these films sits FPP Infrared B&W, the original film stock is unknown, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin, it is a film that can be shot both filtered and unfiltered and produces images that can only be described as magic! For this review, I went with a mixed approach to filtration, shooting the first roll withoutRead More →

June ended up being a pretty big month, with the 80th anniversary of D-Day, some good content across my Blog and YouTube feeds, but the biggest news is that Ricoh/Pentax which has been talking about bringing about a new film camera did so on the 17th. You can find three articles from fellow film bloggers in this post. And a note to my readers, this will be the final entry in the series. I’ve been finding them incredibly difficult to put together, so I’ve made the choice to end this particular monthly feature. 35mmc – Pentax 645 – A Review of a Budget Medium FormatRead More →

We see a little silhouetto of a roll film, and for this episode, we’re a little high, a little low because Ilford matters! Yes, this episode is a rhapsody of Ilford films, and we’re going from Pan F+ to Delta 3200 and everything in between to discuss what we love about Ilford films, how we use them, development, and shooting them! But why are we focusing on Ilford? Well, that’s simple! Ilford has made a constant effort to support the photography community in being able to produce film at scale for the modern market and is often less likely to increase costs. They have optionsRead More →

It’s been a minute since I ran a Toronto Film Shooters Meetup, let alone getting one outside the city. My good friends Bill and John have been killing it with the meetups, especially those inside Toronto. I love getting the group out beyond the GTA. While Hamilton is close, the TFS group has representation across North America. I also love exploring Hamilton with its stunning heritage architecture, so I organised a walk through Jamesville and into the historic downtown core at the start of June. For the walk, I went with a couple of cameras; first up is my beautiful Minolta Dynax 600si with theRead More →

Urban explorers always have a grail location or a favourite type of location. For many in the northeast of the United States, these locations are related to the treatment of mental illness. Now, I use the term ‘treatment’ loosely because of the long and rather cruel methods used in the past. While many were seen as humane compared to earlier treatments, in our modern context, they are rather terrible. Here in Ontario, we don’t have many abandoned mental hospitals. Most have been torn down and replaced with modern facilities or reverted back to their historical form. I had never explored many mental hospitals, and allRead More →

Established in 2013 by MainStreetHost and taken on by Alex Luyckx Photography in 2015, #photochat is a community of photography professionals and enthusiasts who congregate to talk shop and discuss anything and everything photography. After a brief pause through 2023 Photochat is back with a monthly chat model. To participate in our monthly chat (every Second Thursday at 1:00 pm), search the #photochat hashtag on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky Social to see the conversation, or find me at @AlexLuyckxPhoto on Twitter, Mastodon & BlueSky. Include the hashtag in your tweets to answer the questions and talk with the other participants. If there’s a topic you’dRead More →