Agfa Optima Sensor 535 overview

During my mad rush for a compact rangefinder, I went on a hunt for an Agfa Optima Sensor 1535, one of the more unique- and interesting-looking, and one of the last, compact rangefinders out there. They’re fairly rare, and usually in the $100+ range, so when I spotted one on Etsy for $50, I jumped …

Unboxing ‘Suburban East Tokyo’

Dominic Teagle‘s “Suburban East Tokyo” zine documents the Edogawa district of Tokyo, a not-yet-gentrified part of the sprawling metropolis. I don’t know much about Tokyo, but this area looks like every other suburb of a large, sprawling city I’ve ever seen, a humble, working class melange of homes and small businesses—Teagle refers to them as …

Unwrapping ‘The Life and Death of Buildings’

I found Joel Smith’s The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time at a Half Price Books some months ago. It was still shrink-wrapped from the publisher and looked like it might fit in with something I’ve been thinking about lately (and that Jim Grey touched on recently at Down The Road), so I …

Kodak Plus-X 125

Kodak Plus-X 125 was a fine grained, sharp, black & white that Kodak discontinued back in 2011. It was the last of the low speed, traditional grain black & white Kodak stocks. If you want slow, black & white Kodak film now, T-Max is all you get (or you can go with some hand-rolled expired …

Unboxing ‘Beyond Caring’ (Errata Editions)

In Beyond Caring, Paul Graham chronicles the breakdown in the British Social Welfare system during the heyday of Thatcherism in the early- and mid-1980s. This Errata Editions version (Books on Books #9) reproduces every page in the original book, alongside essays by David Chandler and Jeffrey Ladd, and it’s a great way to experience the …