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The air certainly had a chill to it and if you didn’t know the date you might have laughed if I said it was the end of April. But it certainly didn’t feel like the end of April, it felt like the fall. I should have gone back up to the condo and gotten a sweater but I decided to soldier on. Despite the fact, the official Spring Toronto Film Shooters meetup was the next day I decided to scrap my initial plan for the day which was shooting solo in Elora and headed into the city for an informal TFS meetup in the beachRead More →

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It’s fun to change things up every so often. And what better way to do it than adjust when the Spring meetup for the Toronto Film Shooters! This year our spring meetup saw several changes from the normal flow of the event. First off it happened on a Sunday; secondly, we had a company host the event, Burlington Camera and the reason behind these two things was so that it fell on World Pinhole Photography Day! And while the weather had been looking terrible even as late as Thursday, when I arrived at the Burlington Camera parking lot, the sun was shining, and while chillyRead More →

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There’s a certain axiom when dealing with history, it comes from the reimaging Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. The rise of the reform movement and the radicalisation of elements of the reform movement merely in response to extremism on the opposite end of the political spectrum. And yes this is where we get messy and political. While Upper Canada saw a great deal of expansion and improvement under the governorship of Sir Peregrine Maitland and Sir John Colborne, not all were happy with how the Colonial Parliament operated. These complaints were brought to light when RobertRead More →

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There are many activities that Canadians love in the winter; there is none more Canadian than ice skating. To make it even more Canadian you ice skate on the Rideau Canal. But the world’s longest skate way was originally designed for a completely different use in mind than a key feature in Ottawa, Ontario’s Winterlude festival. Built during the same period as the First Welland Canal, the Rideau Canal addressed the concerns raised during the War of 1812, where the St. Lawerence River provided the only path for supplies to arrive in Upper Canada from Quebec City, Montreal, Halifax and England herself. Travel on theRead More →

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Upper Canada was a Province created by the influx of immigrants, from the first loyalists who arrived during and after the American Revolution. But they were not the only group who would make Upper Canada home. As the Province grew, many different groups such as Germans, English, Irish, Scottish, Americans, French, and those who came as slaves, arrived owing to the rich cultural mix that we in Ontario still enjoy today. And many of these cultures owe their presence in the country to these early pioneers who often faced harsh conditions to carve a living out of the wilderness that made up of most ofRead More →

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There are many figured in our history that changed the course of Canadian History, think Sir John A. MacDonald, William Lyon MacKenzie, Robert Baldwin, Louis LaFontaine. However, all these men owe their contributions to a single person, Robert Gourlay. Gourlay’s presence in Upper Canada would ignite the spark of reform here in Upper Canada. Upper Canada in the early 19th-Century was a vast rural backwater. Urban centres were few and far between cities that we know today were little more than muddy villages in the middle of the vast forest. The undeveloped nature of the Province gave those in control, the colonial elite, access toRead More →

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In Post-War British North America, the British authorities took a two-pronged approach to the defences of their North American holdings. The first through a series of upgrades to the defensive forts along the border and the bolstering of the British garrisons, the second would be to prevent another war through a series of negotiated agreements and treaties. The idea would be to shore up the start of better relationships and fill in the gaps left by the Treaty of Gent. If you have read the Treaty of Ghent and understand its context you’ll quickly realise Ghent could not be the final say for normal relationsRead More →

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Out of all the projects I have done in the past, this is the only one I can say has been a long time coming. But when I look back at how long it took me to prepare this project from conception to final project, it has not been that long. I mean I spent five years working on my War of 1812 project, but that was a logistical mess from the start. Acts of Confederation has been a slow burn, I started working on the framework in 2017, completed most of the writing in 2018 while collecting all but a single final roll ofRead More →

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When it comes to Soviet cameras you can never be too sure, I’ve had some winners in the way of the Fed and Zenit E, but also some failures with the Zenit 122K. However, when Boris, a member of the Toronto Film Shooters group offered up his Kiev-19 I jumped at the chance, and the day I tested it on, was the perfect way to see if these Soviet Cameras could take a Soviet Winter. But the Kiev-19 is no ordinary Soviet Camera. While most use a universal mounting system like the M39 or M42 Screw Mount, this camera uses a Nikon F mount. NotRead More →

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This year’s fall vacation certainly wasn’t only the Disney Parks. If we’re going to Florida, might as well do it right and take a day to visit Universal Studios in Orlando as well. Both Heather and I are big Harry Potter fans, both the books and the movies. And the main purpose of our visit to Universal was to visit the two areas dedicated to Harry Potter. Like Disney, the folks at Universal have designed two immersive worlds that bring both the books, but mainly the movies to life in two interactive and immersive environment that will have you shooting a lot of images asRead More →