JAPAN!

Sakura. Chidori-ga-fuchi, Kitanomaru Park at Chiyoda-ku in Tokyo. From flickr user Yoshikazu TAKADA (Creative commons license.) Hello folks! As you read this blog post, I'm in the process of heading to Japan. JAPAN! In all my forty-seven-and-a-half years I've only been on the continent of North America and have only visited the US (of course)...

A Stub Stewart Hike, 2 Jan 2023

Happy 2023, everyone! Hope that this will be a good year. (Fingers crossed.) Emee and I stayed home this year. After a decade-plus of being out of town every New Years, this is still a big deal to me. Perhaps we'll restart this tradition again. Anyways, Emee's friends decided to do a hike on Monday...

A wrap-up of my life in film photography: 2022

Trunk sleeps three. The Cully, 2 Dec 2022 Camera: Minolta XD5 Lens: Minolta MD 50mm f/1.7 Film: Ilford HP5+ I'm just finishing up the third year that I've been back into film. It's been a fun adventure, so far. This year I bought a few more cameras, sold or got rid of a few, and...

My top three film cameras for 2022, and why

I'm not much of a joiner when it comes to internet stuff. Y'know, whatever "thing" there is to do on the internet, the thing that's shared amongst your Instagram/Twitter/What have you friends, usually prefaced by a "figured I'd give it a try." Recently it's been the whole "you rendered by AI". I just can't get...

My Minolta XD5, about a half-year in

Puzzled person. Cathedral Park, 4 May 2022. Minolta XD5/Minolta MD 50mm f/1.7/Kodak Ultramax 400 Back at the end of April I decided to get my second single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. I loved (and still love) my Minolta SR-T 101, but I wanted something different: something smaller, something that had some automatic exposure settings. Since I...

Minolta XD5: My second film SLR

It's been almost two and a half years since I got back into film photography. I've tried a bunch of different 35mm cameras during that time, including rangefinders, zone-focus viewfinders, superzooms, and half-frame. But I've only used one SLR (single-lens reflex), the Minolta SR-T 101 I got in October of 2020. I really like this...