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I have far surpassed one hundred and fifty camera reviews and one hundred film reviews, my other two reviews being lenses and developers have only made it to the big fifty this year. If you read my previous post on lens reviews these are my least favourite. And while I rather enjoy creating film and camera reviews the most, developer reviews come in as the third favourite. The reason being is that I have the most amount of freedom connected to their creation. And while I’m working on a full post on how I write developer reviews, this post is about looking back at theRead More →

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This is only the second time I’ve reached a significant milestone in my ongoing reviews, the magic number of one hundred. And to be clear, I’ve done one hundred film reviews, not reviewed one hundred separate film stocks. And that’s because I’ve reviewed some rebadged films; sometimes, I knew it was a rebadge and then made a point not to go after that film stock again, notability ORWO films. I reviewed the four motion picture-specific films from ORWO as their Lomography rebadge. But in the case of Fomapan 100, I reviewed that first as KosmoFoto Mono 100 and then again as Fomapan 100. Agfa AviFotoRead More →

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I’ll admit, I love a good exotic film developer that can develop any film to their ideal conditions. But lets be honest here, some of these developers are expensive, hard to acquire and require rigorous attention to detail to make them work perfectly. And often are so fine tuned they will only work on a handful of film stocks that a also difficult to come by. Sometimes you want a developer that will do its job and nothing more than that. It doesn’t have to be fancy, compensate for over or under exposure. Produce ultra-fine grain, or enhance tonality and edge sharpness. Rather than presentRead More →

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The return of the 1990s classic trashcam that, despite being what it was, the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim became a cult classic in the rise of the toy camera movement. And while the original Vivitar run ended, and the Sproketheadz version had some serious troubles, in 2022, a new version came to the market. Produced by Hong Kong firm RETO, the RETO Ultra Wide & Slim rebirthed the classic and is probably one of the closest versions of the original. It’s all plastic, light, and has a particular flare for the strange. But if you missed the boat on the original, this camera mightRead More →

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It was raining in the city by the lake, a hard rain. A hard rain would wash the silver halides off any type of film. I was looking for something or someone for that matter. Someone contacted me about something new hitting the streets. A film stock would deliver the look of those old detective movies from the mid-century. I spent hours in the old one-screen cinema watching these films when I was a kid, growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. He called himself Shadow, Agent Shadow, although, given his love of cloak and dagger, I think the “agent” part was made-up,Read More →

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If you want a simple answer to the question, why the heck am I reviewing a camera that isn’t precisely designed for use above the water, that answer is, I’m crazy. And by crazy, I mean some lenses work both underwater and on dry land with the Nikonos III, and the lens that only lens I have available isn’t designed for dry land. But the Nikonos line holds a unique spot in photography’s history, specifically Nikon. There are two reasons for this. First, the Nikonos line was the camera that made underwater photography accessible, and two, it was the last camera to have a foundationRead More →

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When people hear the name ORWO, they mostly think of their brilliant motion picture films, UN54 and N74. Their newer offerings include the recently announced but yet-to-arrive NP100 and NP400 plus NC500. But that is only a small cross-section of their original offerings. ORWO, or rather ORiginal WOlfen is built in Wolfen, Germany, the original Agfa plant that ended up on the eastern side of the iron curtain and continued to produce films and developers after World War Two through the Cold War. Their films became popular among photographers in East German and the Soviet Bloc. My first experience with ORWO films is one ofRead More →

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This isn’t my first experience with Tasma film, I have shot NK-II in the past and their Type 25L. As a company, Tasma or Тасма has been producing photographic products since 1933. The name is a shortened version of Татарские светочувствительные материалы or Tatar Sensitized Materials, and they have carried that name since 1974. Originally operating under the name Film Factory No. 8, the Kazan-based factory continued operations through the entirety of the Soviet involvement in World War II and earned the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1944. Following the collapse of the USSR, the company reorganised as a private firm inRead More →

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I seem to be developing a soft spot for cheap and cheerful SLRs from the 1990s and early 2000s. These may not be the best or most robust cameras out there, but they aren’t hard on the pocketbook, make use of existing lens systems and deliver decent images without too much fuss. Plus, they make great loaner kits for those who want to try film photography but don’t want to invest in something or worry about all the details, such as manual focus or exposure. Well, meet the EOS 3000; you could almost say that this was the entry-level SLR that perfected Canon’s entry-level SLRsRead More →

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If you’ve been in film photography for a while, you’ve seen big companies come and go. And a pile of companies were rarely seen here in North America. The iron curtain, for many years, divided the world in two, between the west and the east following the Second World War. The Cold War kept western films out of the east and eastern films out of the west. One such brand is Forte. I’ve only seen one roll of Fortepan before; I remember using it, but it’s not on my film log, so maybe I ended up giving it away. Kodak opened a photochemical plant inRead More →