Film Photography News

If you’ve spent any time in New York City, or attended the city’s annual PhotoPlus Expo (coming up next week), there’s a good chance you’ve come across a dapper gentleman shooting instant photos with a 1940’s Speed Graphic camera. In the charming video below, you’ll get an inspirational look at Louis Mendes, one of our favorite photography icons.

Leica turned some heads today with the unveiling of their new Sofort instant camera—a compact, stylish model with an array of both automatic and manual features and a choice of color and black-and-white instant film.

If you’re one of those photographers with shoe boxes full of medium format negatives and can’t afford an expensive film scanner to digitize them, here’s a simple solution: Dump out one of those shoe boxes and turn it into a scanner using the ingenious (and cheap) method provided in the following video.

It was back in the 1880’s when Swiss chemist Hans Jacob Schmid developed Polachrome technology—a unique color printing process enabling black-and-white photographs to be reproduced in full color. These stunning images were provided by the Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey and are on display at their “Tour of the World in Photochrome” exhibition running through August 21.

We are big fans of the Rescued Film Project, an amazing online gallery of lost and forgotten unprocessed film from around the world. For his latest project, founder and film technician Levi Bettwieser needs some financial help to process and restore some 1200 rolls of film shot by one photographer in the 1950s.

Photographer Ron Volmershausen decided to run a speed test between a rare Nikon F3H 35mm film SLR and the Nikon D3 DSLR introduced a decade later in 2007. The results in the video below may surprise you.

It’s been called “the longest running SLR in history” and that’s no exaggeration. Everyone who discovered photography at the same time I did – the early 1980s – either owned a Pentax K1000 or knew someone who owned a Pentax K1000.