It was the winter of my discontent, made awful by leaden skies and the prospect of no work on the horizon. As a freelancer, my gigs are highly seasonal, and I found myself at the end of last holiday season with little to do but walk around the city with a camera. So it was that in early January of last year, I stood along the East River with my freshly-purchased Olympus Pen-D. I walked north from Wall Street, past the finance bros and tourists, with nothing for company but the white noise of traffic on FDR Drive, and waited. In the distance, two birds dropped from the girders of the highway ov ..read more

The Polaroid I-2 is the most advanced instant camera that Polaroid has ever made, offering much that other instant cameras don’t – full user control of exposure, fast and accurate auto-focus, and the sharpest lens ever made for a Polaroid camera (designed by former Olympus engineers, no less). That’s exciting stuff, even if the camera’s price isn’t. At $600, the Polaroid I-2 costs $450 more than the brand’s “standard” camera, the Polaroid Now+. When the I-2 released in the fall of 2023, Polaroid’s marketing team positioned the new camera as a high-end tool for discerning photographers who ..read more

I am a casual photophile, and I believe you may be one, too. If I’m right, then the subject of today’s article may pull at your heartstrings. The venerable Epson R-D1 is a digital camera that provides perhaps the most film camera-like experience in photography today. Did I mention that it has a functional shutter-cocking lever? Introduced at Photokina (rest in peace) in 2004, the Epson R-D1 can claim several world-firsts. It was the world’s first digital mirror-less interchangeable lens camera. According to DPReview’s original article on the R-D1’s release, it was the world’s first rangefinder ..read more

Four years ago, when I published my review of the Konica Tomato point-and-shoot 35mm film camera, I expected that I was finished with writing about fruit-themed cameras. But I’d forgotten about the Canon ELPH Shades Sunshine. Released in 2002 and more appropriately named the Arancia in Europe (unreleased in Japan), the Canon ELPH Shades Sunshine is a camera whose key feature is that it looks like an orange. I spent a week shooting a roll of film through this cute, little APS film point-and-shoot. It made pictures, which was neat. I held it, and it felt a certain way. I used its sparse features ..read more

The Minolta P’s (or the Freedom Vista or Riva Panorama, depending where you are in the world) is a paradoxical camera. Going by the spec sheet, it’s hard to see why anyone would choose it. Besides a wide 24mm lens, a shutter button, self-timer and flash, it’s a camera seemingly lacking in features. It intentionally exposes less area of the film negative than almost all other 35mm cameras, and it does so to achieve an arguably gimmicky effect- “panorama” photos. And yet the Minolta P’s’s interesting aspect ratio, punchy lens, and overall ethos make it a camera that I highly recommend to any pho ..read more

In the early 1990s, the Canon Camera Corporation launched their new consumer-focused Canon EOS Rebel camera with one of the defining marketing campaigns of the decade – “Image Is Everything.” The commercials featured Canon’s then-new autofocus-equipped EOS Rebel (EOS Kiss in Japanese markets) camera, wielded by a young and upcoming tennis player named Andre Agassi. And there he was, on the TV screen, all highlighter bright shirts, denim shorts and sunglasses, pulling up in a white Lamborghini Countach, firing off that famous backhand right at our freakin’ faces and telling us that yes, image i ..read more

In York County, Maine, in the town of Ogunquit, there’s a harbor bay and fishing village called Perkins Cove, which is so small that the only road in quickly circumferences the tiny peninsula before looping back on itself to become the only road out. The whole village can be explored on foot in about ten minutes, if only one is able to ignore the dozen-or-so boutiques selling Maine-themed sweatshirts and jewelry and candles, the art galleries hearkening to the area’s history as a maritime artist colony, the buttery caramel scent of the candy shops and lobster shacks, the picturesque views of t ..read more

These days, Adox is hardly recognized as a camera company. Which makes sense, since over their 100-plus year history, the German photo-chemical company didn’t make very many cameras. But somewhere in the company’s mid-life, they produced the Adox 300, a unique and interesting 35mm camera with a striking design, a respectable lens, and one very distinctive feature – interchangeable film magazines which allow us to load and unload rolls of film into the camera at any time, regardless of whether the whole roll has been exposed or not. I’ve been using the Adox 300 off and on for a number of months ..read more

I’ve owned dozens of 35mm film cameras from nearly as many brands – Pentax, Vivitar, Olympus, and my make of choice, Nikon. The last camera that I had before becoming a staunch Nikonist was the Minolta X-700; a wonderful camera, and though it was not as sturdy as I wished, it did introduce me to the wonderful world of Minolta cameras. Earlier this year, a year which I’ve described as my Year of Large Format, I decided to take a break to shoot some 35mm. It was during this brief interlude that I discovered a camera that seems overlooked by most film shooters today, the Minolta XE7. The Minolta ..read more

This year, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to travel internationally. I spent a full year researching, budgeting, and coordinating all the details to ensure I wouldn’t miss out on a single thing that I wanted to see. It was a whirlwind adventure: two weeks, four countries, six cities, and at least half a dozen security checks. Yup, you read that right, at least half a dozen security checks! So? Who cares? Has Casual Photophile turned into a personal blog/travel influencer machine? Not quite. I won’t peddle travel hacks or tell the best time of day to see the Mona Lisa (in my opinion, don’t ..read more