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You will have to pry my Rolleiflex from my cold dead hands. But as wonderful as they are to use and the top-notch images, they aren’t the cheapest camera. But the folks at Rollei (Franke & Heidecke) realised that the cost of their cameras put them out of reach of many photographers. Enter the Rolleicord, the low-cost TLR, in the greater Rollei ecosystem, is the lowest tier, with the 2.8 Rolleiflexs at the top, followed by the 3.5 Rolleiflexes next and then Rolleicord. But that doesn’t mean you should turn your nose up at these cameras. While they never reached the same level of technologicalRead More →

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This past year has been a lot of fun looking at different cameras. While some of these cameras I will have already released a review, others will be coming out next year. But that’s the thing about writing these reviews is that I’m often working 2-3 months ahead of the actual release. I put a lot of work into these reviews, between looking up specs, shooting multiple rolls of film through the cameras and trying to get the best results so I can give a fair and balanced review. But a group in the film photography blogging community decided to put out a series ofRead More →

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The first thing you’re going to think when you take a look at a C220f is that this is going to be a heavy camera, and then you’re going to pick it up and notice that it is relatively light for its size and form factor. I love a good system camera, but outside of the SLR world, there isn’t much in the way of system cameras in the medium format realm. At least until you look up Mamiya’s rather interesting C-Series of TLRs, they are proper TLRs in every way, but it’s also a complete system camera with interchangeable lenses, grips, and finders; theRead More →

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I’ll be the first to admit that pinhole photography and I have not gotten along well in the past. It’s a bit hit or miss with me, and I don’t always associate photographic success with the gear I use. Sometimes having the right equipment will make you enjoy the format. Pinhole is one such format. My first attempts were bit misses, using a pinhole body cap adapter on my Pentax 645, and then again on various Nikon cameras. It wouldn’t be until I got my hands on a dedicated pinhole camera that I started to see results that I actually liked. So when I startedRead More →

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I’ll admit, I have a soft spot for manual focus Minolta cameras. And the Minolta lineup is a unique cross-section of camera technology through the post-war 20th Century. All my early experience with photography came in various Minolta cameras, from my family’s Riva Zoom to my first personal camera, the Hi-Matic 7s and the first SLRs in the SR-T 102 X-7a. More recently, the XE-7 has been my Minolta SR-Mount of choice. But the XE-7 lead me down the rabbit hole of the 1970s of Minolta’s technology-sharing agreement with Ernst Leitz because, of course, there was something better. And that something better is the MinoltaRead More →

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Oddly enough this is not the first Praktica SLR that I’ve had in my collection, one of my earliest SLRs that I never actually got around to using was a Praktica Super TL that ended up going into one of the early giveaways for the Film Photography Podcast in their first season along with a LOMO Lubitel 2. So when the LTL showed up at my doorstep, I decided to give the cameras another go. The LTL is, given its age, a bit of an anachronism. By the 1970s, most camera makers west of the iron curtain and Japan used open aperture TTL metering. Yet,Read More →

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Over the previous year, I worked hard to expand my knowledge of black & white film developers and find myself down a deep rabbit hole. Some good, some meh. Some I didn’t care for or I found them to be too specialised for average use. And while I have several up for review later this year and you can check those out later, here are seven that have stood out in my head as worthy of using again and of getting you out of the rut of using the more vanilla developers like D-76/ID-11, HC-110/Ilfotec HC, and Rodinal. 1 – Adox FX-39 II Based onRead More →

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Several years ago, when I was starting to branch out in my home film developing, I would try a lot of different, strange, and odd-ball developers. Sure I went with the basics, D-76, HC-110, Rodinal. But as I continued to listen to the Film Photography Podcast, I started to get my hands on stranger items, PMK Pyro being the first speciality developer and from there Pyrocat-HD which has become a fast favourite. But then I heard Matt talk about a developer call FA-1027. The next trip I made to New York City, I popped into B&H and got myself a bottle. Sadly I have onlyRead More →

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It’s funny how some developers just drop right into your lap. One of my readers, Jon Porter, wanted to know my thoughts on FX-39. And at the time I had never even heard of Adox FX-39, so I hopped onto my source for the rarer chemicals, Argentix.ca, and found that yes they did carry Adox FX-39 II. Is this new version any different from OG FX-39, not on the surface, it just has been adjusted to last longer. But that wouldn’t be a problem. I went through my first 500mL bottle quickly and in a couple of months. FX-39 is based on Neofin Red (createdRead More →

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These days I will rarely work with Ilfosol 3, but it remains a developer that I always keep in the back of my mind. After learning how to develop my own black & white film from my good friend Julie using Kodak D-76, it would be a few more years before I started taking on the process full time. When I went into Burlington Camera to get all the equipment I needed to take on the daunting task some eight years ago, Joan pointed me towards Ilfosol 3 as a good starting point when you didn’t want to keep a large quantity of developer mixedRead More →