So, I made an app. I made it because I needed it. And I’m hoping you’ll find it helpful too. (Spoiler: it runs on both iPhone and Android! Don’t be put off by the iPhone pictures.) Look, analog photography requires, in addition to artistic vision, a technical mastery of a wide range of equipment and …
Crown + Flint: The digital companion for analog photography Read More
When on vacation, one of my favorite activities is hitting the second hand markets for good deals on used camera gear. And, if you’ve never been, Namdaemun Market in Seoul does not disappoint. Home to several dozen used camera dealers ranging from large, well-appointed stores to tiny counters buried in the basement of packed market halls, the dealers in Namdaemun have nearly anything you could want at surprisingly reasonable prices.
I’m fascinated by the idea of using unusual film stock to achieve a specific look. While shopping around online for Kodak Ektar 100, I stumbled upon a small, funky camera store in Nijmegen (Netherlands) that, in addition to the Ektar I was looking for, markets its own brand of film under the “Brownie Camera Guy” (BCG) mark. They have two lines, P-400 which is a fast panchromatic film, and PHC-50, a high contrast, super-panchromatic film. Both are evidently hand-rolled from ORWO stock. While I can’t determine what stock the P-400 is rolled from, the PHC-50 is pretty clearly ORWO Tf12d technical film for audio recording. Needless to say, I couldn’t resist trying something so weird out. (Note: I have no affiliation with this store, except as a happy customer.)
I got out of film something like 15 years ago. I can’t actually remember when precisely I put my film cameras down. My go-to color film was Fujicolor Super 100—plentiful and cheap at the time. This film was discontinued in 2009, so that puts an upper limit of the last time I got out with a film camera.
I’m a street photographer with a preference for manual-focus 50mm-equivalent lenses. I got my start with a Zeiss Contax rangefinder (w/ 50mm Sonnar f/1.5) and Pentax MX SLR (w/ 50mm SMC Pentax-M f/1.7), and loved the compact size, minimal feature set, and high degree of manual control both of these cameras offered me. Today I …
