Shoot Film Co.

Great article about the survival and resurgence of film photography, with interviews with folks from Kodak, Ilford, and some amazing photographers like Todd Hido. One of the many interesting points: Fujifilm Instax sales have doubled every year for the past three years. Here's a link to the full story.

Special Preorder Pricing NOW. Ships September 8th 2015.

I'm proud to present the newest patches: The All Hallows Eve Special Edition. Two new patches, illustrated by Andrew Denholm. https://youtu.be/B2m0ovlFDJc I've been waiting a long time to announce these, and now that it's September, and the Halloween season is upon us, they must be revealed to the world. I started working on the ideas of these months ago, and when I saw Andrew Denholm's inspiring work, I knew he was the one I wanted to illustrate them. We worked together and the final result are the two newest patches in the lineup, which I am proud to announce to the world today.

The vital stats:

• 3-inch circle
• Custom embroidered
• Heat seal backing
• Made in U.S.A.
• Glows in the dark

Order yours today! Special preorder pricing until September 8th, 2015.

To help celebrate today's announcement, we've asked Andrew himself to talk about his work:

1) Please tell us about yourself and how you came to be an illustrator. As a child i was encouraged to draw at home by my parents and would spend hours either copying cartoons or making my own characters. This developed into making sketch books full of drawings as a teenager with my style constantly shifting and changing depending on what i was interested in at the time. I began to paint a lot in high school and was accepted into Edinburgh College of Art to study for four years. I initially wanted to do fine art painting but i discovered that illustration was my true passion as i loved to tell stories through images. I had not even considered illustration to be a possible career growing up by looking back i realise i had been training all my life for it.

  2) Who are some artists, in any medium and artform, that you take inspiration from in your work? I have had many influences throughout my life that have helped shape the way i create my work. I particularly enjoy the work of Keith Haring as his graphic style is really exciting and full of energy. I really enjoy images with lots of movement and emotion like Guernica by Picasso and his work is so varied it is a constant source of inspiration. Artists like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat are great artists to study for character design. I also like many Scottish artist such as Peter Howson and John Bellany.

3) Was it fun to work on the Halloween-themed film patches? The patches were great fun to develop. Both of the characters had lots of mood and darkness to them but i was also able to be playful, adding a sense of fun to them. Trying to incorporate cameras into the patches were a challenge as the composition was a little tricky but i feel they work really well.  Halloween is such a great area for character design so it was enjoyable to research the subject before designing the patches.

4) What new projects are you working on now? I am currently developing a storytelling kit for children that will encourage them to write and illustrate their own stories. It has a basic structure that will guide children through the different elements of a story while allowing them to tell it in their own way. I hope to help children enjoy drawing as much as i did when i was their age. I have studied the theory of Vladimir Propp and how fairy stories are structured to help develop the project which has been very interesting. Check out Andrew's work and follow him:

Two high end 35mm point and shoot film cameras go head to head in this video review! The rundown: The legendary and highly sought-after Yashica T4 Super, an all-plastic wonder with a razor sharp lens vs the less-popular but comparably-priced Rollei AFM35, an all-metal rebrand of the original Fujifilm Klasse. Which one do I choose to keep? Check out the video below.

The short story: high quality 35mm point and shoot camera with a sharp lens and Rollei's HFT lens coating.

The long story: A small point and shoot released in the 90s that, at the time, competed with the likes of the Contax T2. It weights about 9 ounces, it has a more curved grip than the Contax T2. This camera is actually designed by Fujifilm, and is absolutely structurally identical to the original Fujifilm Klasse (not the Klasse S or Klasse W). It is, in essence, a rebranded Fuji camera. The one difference: it uses Rollei's HFT coating on the lens, instead of Fujifilm's EBC coating. Rollei's HFT coating is said to be the same as Zeiss' highly regarded T* coating.

The lens is a 38mm focal length slightly wider than "normal," but not that wide. Max aperture is f/2.6, slightly faster than most of the fastest point and shoots with models like the Olympus MJU II/Stylus Epic and the Contax T2 being f/2.8. Minimum focus distance is 15.7 inches. Shooting modes are Program Auto (the camera chooses both the aperture and shutter values--full auto, basically) or Aperture Priority, where you choose the Aperture and the camera chooses the shutter speed. Reads DX code from 35mm film cassettes and sets ISO accordingly, from anywhere between ISO 50 and 3200.

There is no way to manually override the film speed like you can on the newer Klasse S and Klasse W, so if you want to do push/pull processing or want to shoot at lower-rated ISOs with your stock of expired film, you're out of luck. It  has a built-in flash with a guide number of 11. Meter is very accurate, as are most point and shoots from the 90s. Flash has a red-eye reduction mode. Highest shutter speed is 1/1000th of a second. It DOES NOT have an exposure compensation function; instead, it has a +/- half-stop or full-stop bracketing feature, where the camera takes three pictures total: 1 picture at the proper exposure, one picture below, and one picture above.

I was originally put off by this because I like using exposure compensation. I realized with color negative, there is so much latitude that it doesn't matter much to me in practical use. I've never used (and probably never will use) the bracketing feature. It uses a CR2 battery. For my point and shoot of choice (for now at least), I chose this over a Contax T2. I owned both for several months, and I wanted to go with the highly loved and appreciated T2, especially because it has exposure compensation. I had a LOT of trouble focusing the T2. About 1 in 5 pictures were mis-focused or back-focused. I thought something was wrong with my camera so I bought another--same problem. I talked to a couple friends that had T2s and I asked them if they had issues--they both replied with a resounding "YES," that they had issues with a lot of pictures being out of focus, and they both independently remarked that they felt like maybe was something wrong with their cameras, or that maybe people just didn't want to talk trash about the T2 because it's such a well-loved camera.

Don't let this turn you off getting a Contax T2 if that's what you want--by all means, try one, because you might love it. Take everything I say with a grain of salt because sometimes I don't know what I'm doing (that was for you Contax lovers; I said it for you so you don't have to!). By the way, I really loved the T2. Very much. I just didn't like the out-of-focus pictures I sometimes got. But I digress. I ended up selling this Rollei in favor of the T2, and frustration with the T2 made me sell that camera and I ended up getting the Rollei again. I decided I could live without exposure compensation. My one nitpick outside of the lack of exposure compensation: the lens assembly moves into place and locks focus on the half-press after a split-second delay, as opposed to other point and shoots like the MJU II/Stylus Epic where the lens does its focus move after a full press (inevitably causing shutter lag). However, after locking focus on the half-press, there is absolutely NO delay from between when you do the full-press to when the shutter opens. You could call it a quirk or an advantage (or both), but after getting used to it, it is nice to be able to have essentially no shutter lag as long as your focus is already locked.

Overall and fun camera to use. It's very sturdy and definitely nice looking. The silver color might be too bright for some people, but you can get the original Fujifilm Klasse in silver OR black. This is not a camera you hear a whole lot about, but it fits right in there in the lexicon of high end film point and shoots. The newer Klasse models have more features and custom functions, but naturally command a much higher price. Thanks for reading! Please visit the shop to help support this site.

Check it out! Shipping to every corner of planet Earth, and just in time for summer, let's help keep 35 alive with this custom embroidered patch!

These make a great addition to your  camera bag, jacket, or hat. They have an iron-on heat seal backing.

Get one for yourself or get one as a gift for the film photographer you love!