Yesterday, UK-based film manufacturer Ilford released an official company statement regarding its handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic. And while the statement covered all of the important updates, Ilford also took the opportunity to strike a cheeky, lighthearted note.
When I’m out photographing, my concentration is on making individual frames that matter, working the scene with my eye before shooting, and staying patient for the right moment. I’m not averse to taking multiple frames of the same scene, but I find it’s a better use of my time and film to put the work into getting things right the first time.
Most unfair camera comparisons these days pit smartphones against APS-C or full-frame digital cameras. But for their latest video, Sonder Creative took it a big step further: they're comparing an 8x10 large format film camera against three digital cameras that, let's be honest, never stood a chance.
The recent release of the Fujifilm XPro3 camera coincided with me getting some recently re-released Fujifilm ACROS 100II film. Given my love of Fujifilm digital cameras, film photography, and ACROS film, I desperately wanted to shoot and compare the new XPro3 alongside a rangefinder film camera.
Chris Niccolls over at DPReview TV recently got a chance to try out Nikon's $140 ES-2 'Film Digitizing Adapter': a convenient attachment that works with Nikon's DSLRs to let you quickly and easily "scan" your old 35mm slides and negatives.
French photographer Hadrien Picard was recently put to the test by his friends at Red Bull. In one of their recent "Pressure Shot" episodes, Red Bull challenged Picard to capture a full photo essay with BMX star Matthias Dandois. The catch? He had to capture the whole thing in a single roll of 36 exposures.
The hybrid processes from the transition to digital photography generated lots of garbage, cheap stuff to experiment with. This story is about one of these discoveries.
San Francisco-based landscape, aerial, and timelapse photographer Michael Shainblum made this gorgeous 3-minute 4K star trail timelapse titled "Drifting Through The Night." It features years of Shainblum nighttime shoots presented in a "time-blended" way.
Our minds are so rarely silent. For those of us with anxiety disorders, the noise is constant. From what we’ll cook for dinner to the specifics of how our lives will end, there’s no shortage of things to worry about. But how does the creative mind function amid all this static?
Analog photography company escura wants to "take instant photography to a new level," so they've taken to Kickstarter to fund something called the Hasselblad Portrait: "the first fully compatible instant film back for your Hasselblad V-System camera."
YouTuber Mathieu Stern recently discovered a 'time capsule' in the basement of his old family home. The box—dating from about the year 1900, by Stern's estimation—contained two glass plate negatives, which he decided to try and develop using one of the oldest photographic printing methods in existence: the Cyanotype.
Fujifilm is following Kodak's lead and warning photographers about the new CT scanners being used at many US Airports starting this year. In a notice posted to the Fujifilm website, the company says the new scanners "may provide more damaging to unprocessed film and Instax film than previous generations."
Fujifilm Japan has issued a "Notice of discontinuation of some photographic film products," which states that the company will no longer sell 3-packs of Fujicolor 100 and Superia Premium 400 film as of March 2020, "due to a long-term decline in demand."
Kodak has inked a new deal with five of the six major movie studios, re-upping an initial agreement made in 2015 and ensuring that we won't see celluloid completely replaced by digital in Hollywood any time soon.
Film photographer, educator and YouTuber Nick Carver doesn't shoot digital, but he does scan his film for printing. So he recently embarked on an experiment to figure out which scanning technique is best: drum scanning, fluid mount flatbed scanning, or scanning your film using a DSLR and macro lens.
Kodak Alaris has posted a detailed warning for film photographers, explaining that the new CT scanners being installed to check carry-on bags across the United States will almost certainly ruin your film, even after a single pass.
I’m not going to wax poetic about the Leica M6 TTL .85. I don’t need to.
NBC documentary unit Left Field has created an interesting deep dive on the renaissance of film photography in the digital age. In the short doc, the Left Field team try to figure out why the analog process—so time consuming and expensive—has seen such a strong resurgence in recent years.
As the name of the filter alludes to, these lens filters do indeed lower the overall contrast of a shot. To clarify what that means in relation to photography: these filters will reduce the darkness of the shadows by allowing light to bleed into them from surrounding highlights.
At the end of every year, I get to see, for the first time, all the things I’ve already seen. New Year’s Eve is my final film pickup day for One Second, an ongoing project in which I, an otherwise sane, rational, working modern photographer, make one photograph, and only one photograph, on film, every day, with no do-overs and no second chances.
It’s called Bertha, and it will be the protagonist of the largest slide ever made. A gigantic camera born out of a desire to find out what photography can reveal when it's pushed beyond certain limits.
Shooting a long term project, whether personal or professional, is a wonderful way to explore areas of photography you might not have previously considered. I know of photographers who have experimented with different types of filters, post-processing techniques, actual shooting methods (long exposure, panning, unfamiliar/conventional focal lengths), and so on, as their projects evolve.
In an early morning press release, Kodak Alaris has announced that the recently revived Kodak Ektachrome E100 film stock is now available in medium (120) and large (4x5) formats in addition to the 35mm format that launched last year.
Photographer Jon Crooks of Prime Studios put together a helpful walkthrough that shows you exactly how to use the Nishika N8000 3D film camera, and how to turn the resulting images into cool 3-dimensional GIFs.
A few years ago, I saw an article on water-damaged film that claimed the damage was due to bacteria and fungus eating the film. Having a bit of experience with fungus and bacteria from various scientific projects over the years, I thought I would explore this topic. Could I speed up the process? I also wanted to know which film aged the fastest, and was bacteria or fungus really responsible for the damage?
I had been working at a liquor store to get away from myself and all the photography things I knew well. The extra money was nice, however, my photography burnout had my creativity hostage and didn’t seem to have an end anytime soon. So when Dogfish Head announced their Super 8 Beer and the claim that you could develop film in it, I had to try it. Not actually develop film in it -- hell no! I’ve been digital for twenty years and a film cameras’ place was on the shelf for decoration and memories.
This beautifully-shot film from 2017 has been making the rounds again this morning, showing the making/assembly of the Leica M10. And like all "making of" videos that take us inside a camera or lens factory, it offers a mesmerizing look at the attention to detail that goes into assembling each digital rangefinder that Leica makes.
Fujifilm killed off its beloved ACROS 100 black-and-white film last year and then surprised photographers earlier this year by announcing a reboot of the line. Now that return is nigh: NEOPAN 100 ACROS II will be landing on November 22nd in both 35mm and 120 formats.
It’s been around a year since I switched to photographing on 35mm film for the majority of my work. Beyond a couple of false starts and some misconceptions, I think I’ve adjusted well, and I’m really happy to have made the change. Now that I have a good amount of work to reference, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the adjustments I needed to make in order to adapt to a film mindset.
VSCO has partnered with Snap Inc. to release its first ever Snapchat lens. Dubbed 'Analog,' the sponsored lens is free to use and "designed to celebrate the imperfections, mistakes, and happy accidents found when shooting with film."
Kodak released its Q3 revenue report yesterday, and while the company is reporting a year-over-year loss of $5 million on total revenues of $315 million, there's a very interesting bright spot in the finances: revenues for Kodak's film business grew by 21 percent year-over-year for Q1 through Q3.
Here's an inspiring 7-minute video by SmugMug Films titled "Imagination Unbound." It looks into the life, mind, and work of Russian photographer Kristina Makeeva and follows her as she visits Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, Russia.
Harman Technology today announced a number of new products, including ILFORD Ortho Plus film in 35mm and 120 formats, the 5th generation of its popular MULTIGRADE RC paper, and more.
Lomography has released a new DIY medium format cardboard camera called the LomoMod No. 1, and it comes with a really neat "accessory" up its sleeve: a liquid-filled lens module that Lomo is calling "perhaps the wildest and most innovative lens in the world."
Photographer Scott Graham recently put together a video that you'll either find incredibly boring or oddly satisfying. In preparation for the sale of a large number of his older analog and digital cameras, he created a video showcasing 37 different shutter sounds in 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
Polaroid Originals—the artist formerly known as The Impossible Project—made a sad announcement on its blog yesterday. After determining that the wide-format Polaroid Spectra cameras out in the wild "are now coming to the end of their useful lives," the company has decided to discontinue production of Spectra instant film.
Photographer Usman Dawood of Sonder Creative recently teamed up with film photographer Adam French to put together an intriguing portrait comparison: high-resolution full-frame digital vs 4x5 large format film. They shot both cameras at about the same FF equivalent focal length, and then compared the resulting images side by side for your viewing pleasure.
Photographer and YouTuber Mathieu Stern recently got to visit one of the coolest places on earth for camera collectors: The Camera Rescue Project, one of the largest vintage camera collections in Europe.
In the heyday of film photography, Kodak was a major advertiser in magazines -- people flipping through all kinds of publications would see ads for its film. But over the past several years, both the camera film and the magazine industries have struggled to adapt to a changing and increasingly digital world. So news of a new Kodak film ad in a print magazine may seem anachronistic, but it's real.
After going back and forth for months (read: years) between Sony and Fuji, never being entirely happy with either one, I ended up with... a Nikon system.
Introduced in 1988, the Nikon F4 was the world’s first professional autofocus camera, and it made its way quickly into the hands of many working photographers. But despite the incredible leap in technology it represented, it was apparently quickly overtaken by the competition, which built on the solid foundation the F4 offered.
Polaroid Originals has released its latest product, and it's an instant printer... with a twist. Rather than just printing digital files, this so-called "miniature table top darkroom" actually turns digital files into analog prints by projecting your phone screen onto a piece of instant film.
If you're new to film photography, or you're curious about the variety of film stocks that are out there, there's a useful new website you should definitely check out. It's called Filmtypes, and it's a database of emulsions that wants to help you find your next roll of 35mm film.
If you've got some money to burn and you insist on keeping your film safe and stylish at the same time, design firm RAMA WORKS has something for you. It's called, simply enough, the RAMA WORKS film canister, and it's probably the coolest, most expensive way to carry around your rolls of film.
I have a working collection of 52 film cameras—some of them quite rare and unique, others just yard sale garbage, all of them loved and fun. I recently decided to take all of them out and push some celluloid through them, documenting the process one week at a time as I breathe some life back to these dope little beasts. I’m calling it the Vintage Camera Quest.
After my recent success at mixing vintage Verichrome Pan film with Kodak Instamatic film, I wanted to try this splitfilm trick again. And I wanted to create something that was a “day versus night” exposure, using the lights of an amusement park or the midway of a county fair to build my image.
If you're just getting started with medium format film photography, NYC-based photographer and YouTuber Willem Verbeeck created a useful comparison video that may help you decide on your first 120 film purchase.
A young fan of the popular Netflix show Stranger Things earned a bit of Internet fame (or is it infamy?) this weekend when they asked a question about that strange "red room" in the show where Jonathan goes "to 'refine' his photos or something." In other words: a darkroom.
If you're looking for the cheapest possible way to digitize your 35mm Negatives and Slides, the Kodak Mobile Film Scanner is probably it. Costing just $40, this cardboard contraption lets you digitize 35mm film using just your smartphone and a couple of AA batteries.
UK-based film and photo paper manufacturer ILFORD Photo has released a new short film titled "Behind the Film" that takes you inside the HARMAN technology factory in the village of Mobberley, England, where all of the ILFORD and Kentmere B&W film, photographic paper and chemicals are made.