Philosophy & Reflections Archives

27 August, 2024

A Collector’s Journey From Microscopes to Cancer to Cameras

By David Smith

My passion for film photography began with a different sort of vintage lens, the kind you mount to an aged brass microscope. I’m a biologist and have always been fascinated with...

12 August, 2024

The Camera that Launched my Career… and Nearly Devastated me.

By Jeffery Luhn

I’m talking about the EXA 1-A, my first ‘grown-up’ camera. Don’t confuse this model with classic Exacta cameras with leaf or focal plane shutters. The Exa has no real shutter. T...

20 July, 2024

Is the Revolution Here Again? (I’m really serious about this.)

By Tony Warren

I read Hamish’s recent review in 35mmc of the new Pentax 17 half frame 35mm camera with interest being an inveterate user of film nowadays. In fact, it stirred in me feelings ab...

Snow scene with parked cars in Chicago Illinois ca. 1940.

10 July, 2024

Save those negatives. You never know…

By Doug Anderson

When I started taking pictures at about age 8 my mother and I would take the roll of Verichrome Pan I shot with my Kodak Brownie 127 to Walgreens and in a few days would go back...

29 June, 2024

One camera, One Lens – Testing the Photo Adage in Japan

By Floyd K. Takeuchi

Photography is chock full of sayings, adages, call them what you will. F8 and be there. Sunny 16. Most are grounded in some reality. But the one that I think has some applicatio...

13 June, 2024

On Composition – Or: the eye sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend

By Andrea Monti

This shot, taken during the Italian Road Running National Championships, is a fair application of the French philosopher Henri Bergson aphorism to composition: the eye sees what...

11 June, 2024

What does it take to be a Photographer?

By Tony Warren

In photography’s infancy, the mark of a photographer was black fingers from contact with the chemicals used (and probably a pale complexion). In the later 20th century, a kind o...

31 May, 2024

Seeing in Black and White

By Geoff Chaplin

I was photographing in colour for over 50 years. Occasionally I’d put a B&W film in the camera but I was still photographing in colour, there just happened to be B&W fil...

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