I posted this on the Facebook page that I have been working on for my word and thought that I might share it here also :)

I have been exploring photography for many years, originally it was with digital cameras in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. I had tinkered with my mothers Canon AE-1 but at that time it just wasn’t for me. My first serious digital was a Nikon D70, that camera and I got to see some pretty cool stuff in Vancouver in the early 2000’s. Life happened and I stopped shooting for quite a while. In 2017 I relocated to Toronto and during my transition to Eastern Canada I found photography again. At first with digital, I had the lenses from my D70 but it had died long ago but I found a nice Nikon D300 online and got reacquainted with my old friend. During this newly invigorated courtship with photography I started learning more about Jason Lee and his work with Polaroid Instant film’s. I was hooked, I wanted to shoot 8x10’s just like him. Holy hell are they expensive though, so I started with a regular Polaroid. That started a shift though and since then I have fallen deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of film. It is by no means dead, it is alive and in some ways thriving. A lot of my work is done on 35mm and 120mm along with various instant films. I recently acquired a large format 4x5 camera as my first steps to move towards my dream of an 8x10. There is a beauty, a romance of sorts that film has. I am completely taken by it and want to share my view of the world as I see it on all of the different film mediums I can get my hands on during my time on this globe.   

The two pictures in this post are some of the first shots I’ve taken with my Cambo 4x5 large format camera.  They are both peel apart pack film, the color one is Fuji FP100c and the B&W one is Polaroid 665.  They are both expired films, sometimes with expired films your results vary as can be seen.  I really love experimenting with expired films though because of this randomness and risk.  There are so many variables to how the film will behave when exposed depending on how it was cared for and what it has experienced in its time since production.  These things further instill my personal feeling that film is alive.  I feel lucky to have the opportunity to work with such beautiful and rare things.

-MDB