I’m not a farmer, not in any sense of the word. I’ve never driven a tractor, milked a cow, ploughed, harvested or anything. And yet, Milton despite the insane growth over the past decade and a half the town remains firmly rooted in its rural foundations. And while the sprawl has reached out and struck through many of the farms that once surrounded the town’s core. Where I live now used to be a farm field for most of the years I’ve been alive. Yet you don’t have to go far to see the farms still that surround Milton. Plus we have several big farmsRead More →

While Milton itself doesn’t have any real involvement in the significant events in Canadian history, our existence is thanks to the War of 1812. Following the war’s conclusion in 1815, the Colonial Office in England began to encourage increased colonial expansion into Upper Canada. After the widespread purchase of large tracts of land from the Mississauga’s of the Credit, a section designated at Lot 14, Concession 2 of the Trafalgar Township went to Jasper Martin. After emigrating to Upper Canada along with his wife Sarah and two sons, Joseph and Edward, Jasper would settle on his plot in 1821. Within a year Jasper had aRead More →

I’m usually on the ball with things like this, but I’ll be perfectly honest, Expired Film Day(s) nearly slipped past my radar. And to think, I even had a roll of film waiting to be used just for this specific day. Back last summer I got a couple of rolls of Kodak Tri-X that expired back in 1982 that were manufactured here at Kodak Canada and were from the exact same lot. There were actually several rolls but I only got two, another two went to another member of the Toronto Film Shooters community. We both commented that this may have been the first timeRead More →

Long before Europeans arrived in what would become Canada, the land was far from empty. Thankfully these days we do have a record of the history of our region, passed down now only through the oral history of those peoples and archaeological evidence. Here in Milton we still maintain that link to the pre-contact past in the form of a 15th-century village built by the Haudenosaunee or People of the Long House. If that name seems strange to you, that’s okay, you better know them as the Iroquois. Archaeological digs discovered in 1971 the remains of this village after the area once home to theRead More →

What is home? It’s a question that many people have asked and those well versed in philosophy and have come up with many answers. Is home where you live, or where you were born? Or maybe it’s where your parents live? If you’re looking for that answer here, you’re in the wrong place. This is a project about my home, a town called Milton. The sign that welcomed people to Milton has changed a lot since I first arrived here with my parents; my dad wanted to deface the sign by painting a giant one making the population 30,001. He didn’t, and that sign isRead More →

The first SLR camera I owned, a Minolta SR-T 102, came with the non-X version of this lens. Aside from a Kiron zoom lens, the Rokkor PF 50/1.7, was the lens that lived on that camera. And when I got the newer version, I made sure that even though I gave up my Minolta bodies, I kept a lot of my good Rokkor glass. And I’m glad I did, while these days I use the 45/2 pancake more, I make sure never to let this general-purpose, everyday use, fast prime that will never let you down. Lens Specifications Make: Minolta Model: MC Rokkor-X PF 1:1.7Read More →

There were plenty of photographers out there who seemed happy that Kodak ColorPlus 200 came to the North American market. But the real question among many was what is the film stock exactly? If you look at the box lots of the standard text is not only in a foreign language but even in foreign characters. Once I opened up the box and popped out the canister, the mystery would be solved, the film canister clearly says Kodacolor 200! Kodacolor itself is an old film stock and was Kodak’s first colour negative film released and produced from 1940 to 1963. The next version, Kodacolor-X wasRead More →

When it comes to basic bare-bones developers, you don’t get any more simple than Kodak D-76. Kodak D-76 is the common factor between professional and student photographers and everyone in between. It’s a staple in most darkrooms, you can develop film and prints with it, and for me, it was the first developer I ever used for both film and prints. And for a while, I had stopped using Kodak D-76 in my processing, but after I started reviewing films, I got back into the stuff. The reason it gives what you expect, a baseline. It also is relatively inexpensive and economical for long termRead More →

When it comes to game-changing cameras there is nothing more iconic than the Olympus OM-1, it ushered in the small format for the SLR world, and not to be outdone by Olympus, Pentax released their versions of the small SLR, the first two being the MX and the ME. But the ME had a lot of limitations including the lack of a manual mode, enter the ME Super. I’ve had both a ME and ME Super come through my collection in the past, one went to a friend (not sure if she still uses or even has it) and the ME Super met its endRead More →

When it comes to Kodak’s film catalogue, there are many films in it that we have never seen much of in North America. Among those, the one that confused me the most was ProImage 100. Despite the name, Kodak documents in no way claim that ProImage 100 is a professional film, but then again what makes a professional film? Maybe because it does not come in sheet film format, like Ektar and Portra? That said, I feel ProImage 100 is a great film to shoot in a professional setting, the soft contrast, excellent colour rendition, and slow speed make it a fantastic hybrid of PortraRead More →