Author name: Dmitri Tcherbadji

Russian-born Canadian, former Thai ex-pat. Infatuated by film photography, travel, motorbikes, climbing, music, art, and science. Founder, editor, and web dev at Analog.Cafe. My day job is app engineering at a med-tech company in Vancouver.

Film Log wet app screenshots

Film Log: A Free App for Film Exposure Record-Keeping – by Dmitri Tcherbadji

I started my film photography journey with a Canon QL25 — a slower sibling of the popular QL17 GIII 35mm rangefinder. Unfortunately, my old QL’s lightmeter wasn’t working, so I relied on an iPhone app to give me shutter speed and aperture options. My pocket computer helped me get accurate exposures, which was very encouraging, especially for a beginner like me.

But as my camera collection grew, I began to lose track of my film. “What film’s in this camera, and did I mean to shoot it at box speed, push, pull, or over-expose this roll?” — this became an inevitable row of questions whenever I picked a camera. Someone with a better long-term memory might’ve remembered everything for months across 7+ loaded cameras, but that isn’t me, unfortunately.

Moscow Dayze photo book cover shot

‘Moscow Dayze’, From Russia With Film: Bringing a Self-Published Photo Book to Life – by Dmitri Tcherbadji

This book, like any other, is a neat stack of paper with a thin layer of printer ink covering 76 pages in photographs and type. Wrapped at its spine with a bright-red cardstock — reminiscent of my expired Soviet passport and the flag it represented. Inside these pages is a story of my deep cultural shock amidst family death on the eve of the global pandemic.

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