Not sure how it happened, but I’ve managed to acquire quite a few camera’s over the years.  There’s no specific event, but moving to Florida and discovering snorkeling from the beach was definitely a catalyst.  I was traveling globally quite a bit for work and bought a Canon G7 as a compact, high quality camera to capture my travels so I could share them with my wife and kids.  Keep in mind, this is before iPhone’s and Androids.  Canon made a cool waterproof case for the G7 so I picked one up and obsessed over snorkeling at any chance I could and taking photo’s while doing it.  It was really a lot of fun to be under water until I was thoroughly waterlogged and then rush home to see what I captured.  (As I wrote that, I realized how similar shooting film is and the common attraction for me).  I developed a nice work flow to import the pics, clean them up in Photoshop and then share them on Facebook and an old site I used to run.  At some point, my waterproof case had a failure so I upgraded to a Canon G9 and kept plugging away on both land and under water.

I used the excuse of my youngest being born to severely upgrade my kit from the G9 to a Canon 7D with a couple of L lenses.  We joke that my youngest is the most photographed kid in the world.  With the power of digital and having both wide and telephoto lenses I moved out of the water and on to land in a big way.  I got into everything from portrait, street, landscape and sports photography.  Everywhere I went, I had my camera backpack slung over my shoulder and often with a tri-pod attached.  I packed extra batteries including two flash units, carried all of my lenses with various filters and accessories that might be needed at any point to ensure I was prepared.  My family and I still laugh about it.

At this point, I still shoot with my Canon 7D, however, I’ve slowed down a bit and my tastes have certainly changed.  Rather than upgrade to the new Canon 7D Mark II or one of the slick Canon 5D’s or one of the mirrorless models or even to one of the Sony’s which get great reviews and produce incredible images, I’ve moved to film.

Film is both rewarding and incredibly frustrating.  In either case, it’s much more work than anything in the digital space.  I’ve been developing in B&W for a while now and I’m still refining my approach.  It’s very similar to brewing beer in that everything you do matters and each step counts.  A lot of things have to align to get a good negative.

For the most part, this site is a way for me to keep track of what I have going on in the film space with an ancillary benefit for others to gather information on the various camera’s I own, the film I’m using, the development processes I follow and any other data related to vintage camera’s and film photography.

Enjoy and reach out with any questions, comments or information worth sharing.

Thanks-

B