The Canon EF 40mm f/2.8 STM lens as a great cheap lens for budding photographers. That’s because its pancake design makes it great for street photography because of its portability and lightness. Furthermore, it’s slightly larger focal length of 40 mm allows you to capture a wider scene if you have a full frame camera, while a cropped-sensor camera would give you a medium telephoto equivalent of 64 mm.

However, since this is no longer available new, you will have to settle for the Canon EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM, which goes for $149 on Amazon. This lens is another pancake design, meaning its easy to carry around in the field. Furthermore, its wider focal length gives it an equivalent full frame focal length of 38.4 mm. While it’s not as wide as the 35mm lenses popularly used in street photography, it’s close enough to give you that feel in a cropped-sensor Canon camera.

Unfortunately, since it’s an EF-S lens, you cannot use it on full frame Canon cameras, as its deeper mount physically does not allow the lens to attach to the body. But if you have a newer mirrorless APS-C Canon camera, like the Canon EOS R7 and the Canon EOS R10, you can use this lens on those cameras with an EF-EOS R Mount Adapter.

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MILTON — Williamsport couple Michael Kinney and Missy Gray survived scorching summer-like heat, rapids, and torrential rain over the course of 25 days on the Susquehanna River.

On Friday, they paddled their canoes to shore at Shikellamy State Park Marina to finish their journey which was the full distance of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.

Kinney, who practices wildlife photography said he undertook this adventure for three reasons: “First, to raise appreciation of the river system. Number two was to increase the volume of my photograph library. More photos of the river, and wildlife, which is what I enjoy. Landscapes on the water are another target for my photography.”

The trip began at the very edge of Clearfield County.

A third reason for the trek was, “Why not? As I’ve gotten older now seemed the right time,” he said.

Kinney planned by making mile markers of the entire river.

“A good day would be either 10 or 20 miles. So every 10 or so miles ,I’d look for a campsite nearby. Many times I would end up making a base camp and travel to and from the base camp every day. In some cases, there were riverside campsites.”

Kinney’s girlfriend, Missy Gray, came along for most of the trip. This was her first long canoe trip, she said.

There was a lot of rain during the trip.

“The toughest stretch was at Moshannon Falls,” Kinney said. “One of the rocks was up and caught us off guard and we couldn’t overpower the river. It hit the side of our 14-foot canoe.”

“It weighs 75 pounds without any gear, but the canoe was loaded with about 300 pounds of gear.”

Gray wasn’t experienced as a paddler. Still, she said, “I loved the trip. I used to live in Clearfield, and when this was offered as an option, I said, ‘Okay, I’m not passing this up.’”

For Kinney, this was the longest trip he’s ever made by canoe. He’s done 25 miles. But for Gray, it was a first experience, “and I had to show her how to row,” Kinney said.

The headwaters were his favorite spot.

“We were in the middle of nowhere, but it was beautiful,” Gray said. But that’s when the rain came down.

At the headwaters, Kinney spotted wildlife, a common merganser — a bird that dives into the water and lives on fish.

“We saw a few ospreys, muskrats, and snapping turtles,” he said.

Accompanying Kinney and Gray during some of the later miles as they approached the finish line at Shikellamy State Park was Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper John Zaktansky, who said what they were doing was awesome.

“Anything that gets people thinking about the river is a good thing,” Zaktansky said.

Kinney and Zaktansky had a chance to talk as they paddled side by side, on the river at Fort Bone.

“There is a busy road on both sides of the river and everybody is worried about where they are going next and then you have this peaceful and serene river bisecting the middle,” Zaktansky said. “A way to reconnect outdoors. Kind of a way to reset. A neat experience.

“I wish more people had time to experience the river as Michael and Missy have. Even three hours on the river, somewhere outdoors in nature, helps you unplug and kind of get away from it all.”

Along the way, Zaktansky and Kinney tracked the landscape and wildlife.

How were Kinney and Gray planning to celebrate coming assure at the end of the trip?

“Probably a trip home to our bed and a shower,” Kinney said. “Missy and I are currently arguing about what is next.

“The next river trip will probably be a lot shorter. Seven days seems to be the golden range for us.”

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For Katie Sadie, owner of Rooney’s shop in Hamilton, nothing beats looking through the waist-level viewfinder of a Pentax 67.

“It’s better than real life.”

A long-time freelance photographer, who studied fashion photography in school, Sadie says there’s something about film that smartphones and digital cameras can’t capture.

It’s a feeling more Hamiltonians seem to be sharing.

Like the rise of vinyl a decade ago, film photography is having a renaissance. In the last few years, it’s hit Hamilton. 

Just look at Sadie’s business.

Her coffee shop on Main Street East, Rooney’s, serves as a hub for creatives and artists, with a focus on photography. There are photography books on the shelves, and a regularly rotating display of local shots on the wall, many of them done on film. 

As of this week, it’s now also a place you can send your undeveloped camera rolls.

The store, which only opened in 2022, has grown in popularity, to the point that independent film labs started reaching out to Sadie about a partnership.

The first was Toronto-based Graination, which this week placed a drop box for film canisters inside. Customers can drop off their roll, and every week, a truck will take the deposits to the Chinatown lab for development. Then, an envelope of prints will be trucked back a week later.

In the first two days, Sadie says six customers dropped off rolls. And she’s hearing lots of excited feedback from her regulars.

Look of film ‘still unmatchable’

Graination co-founder Neil Guo says the partnership was a way for his new business to branch out beyond Toronto’s film market, which he says is already saturated with film labs. The company has already four more drop boxes they’re about to send to other markets outside the city.

Guo has his own theories behind film photography’s resurgence in the age of Instagram.

As phones have made picture-taking almost free and limitless, Guo thinks the finite, practical nature of film has brought meaning back to photography. Especially for younger photographers who grew up in a digital world.

“When it comes to film, [people] have to take photos of what they think is more valuable, that are worth $2 a shot,” he said.

“We scan thousands and thousands of prints every single day,” he said. “We don’t really see people taking photos of [their] breakfast.”

And then there’s the quality of a film print.

“The look, I feel, is still unmatchable,” Guo said.

Though the new drop-off box in Rooney’s might signal a growing demand for film photography in Hamilton, the town has always had a place to get film developed.

Also in the east end, on Ottawa Street North, people have been able to drop their rolls off at Bell Arte Camera since 1972.

Ottawa Street shop developing 500 rolls a week

They still develop film in-house, though owner Robert Bagliolid says the service was on life support for a time.

In the late 2000s, he says, the store was developing about 50 rolls a week, which made just enough money to keep the equipment running.

Since the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, he says, the weekly average has gone up to 500 rolls, coming in from Niagara, Toronto, Brantford and beyond. 

Bagliolid says the younger customers he talks to mention similar draws to the analogue medium: it’s more tactile, it’s private, and it takes time and focus.

“It’s not just a click and instant gratification,” Bagliolid says. “It’s a click with a mystery.”

For him, nothing beats watching his customers go through their developed photos.

“It’s like watching them open up a Christmas gift.”

Local photographer and writer Steacy Easton, who’s teaching a photography course in June at the Dundas Valley School of Art, says both shops are helping to grow the number of film enthusiasts in the Hamilton area. 

One of the best things to come out of the town’s growing film community, they said, is sharing the passion. 

“You can exchange and show [your creations] to other people, almost like trading cards.”

‘Peter Hujar lived in the Ukrainian neighbourhood in New York, yet few Ukrainian-Americans knew about him or his work,’ says Peter Doroshenko, director of The Ukrainian Museum in New York, where there is currently an exhibition covering the first 15 years of the artist’s career. ‘Focusing on his early work, it was important to show Hujar’s three important series of photographs, because he used these groups of images as a foundation for his later portraiture and other varied work. There have been important Peter Hujar exhibitions over the past thirty years, but never focusing on his formative years.’

Three bodies of work created in the 1950s and 1960s are the focus of Peter Hujar: Rialto, with many photographs from Southbury (1957), Florence (1958), and the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo (1963) previously unseen. Also on view are Hujar’s black and white portraits of the characters who frequented bohemian downtown New York, including Iggy Pop and Janis Joplin.

Born to an immigrant family in New York, Hujar was raised by his Ukrainian grandmother, who spoke only the Ukrainian language to him for the first five years of his life. His later struggles with an unstable upbring led him to seek refuge in his photography, which he married with his immersion in the subcultures of New York where he felt most at home.

‘I believe that Hujar’s formal Ukrainian upbringing created various systems and control for his photographic work during his lifetime,’ Doroshenko adds. ‘Ukrainians are very critical and hard on themselves. Hujar had the same critical DNA with his use of the camera and later darkroom production. Peter Hujar lived and worked in one of the most active and creative epicentres of New York, yet he was ahead of his time in many ways.’

‘Peter Hujar: Rialto’ is at The Ukrainian Museum, New York until 1 September 2024. See more New York exhibitions on now.

theukrainianmuseum.org

In 2007, an amateur historian and flea-market enthusiast named John Maloof purchased the contents of a storage locker—sight unseen—at auction. It contained approximately 150,000 prints, negatives, transparencies, and rolls of undeveloped film. This stash was the work of a professional nanny who was obsessed with photography but who chose to show her pictures to no one. Her name was Vivian Maier, and after Maloof’s astounding discovery of her oeuvre she was soon acclaimed as an important 20th-century artist. On May 31, Fotografiska New York becomes the first institution in the United States to present a major retrospective of Maier’s work. Offering a complex portrait of this enigmatic figure, who died in 2009, the exhibition includes more than 200 photographic prints, Super 8 footage, and sound recordings.

While biographical information on the mysterious Maier is scant, we know that she was born Vivian Dorothea Maier in 1926, in the Bronx, New York. After her parents separated, and when Vivian was still young, her mother moved them to her native France, where her daughter began to hungrily document the world with her cardboard Kodak Brownie. In 1951, Maier came back to New York and the next year procured a twin-lens Rolleiflex. With the square-format camera held inconspicuously at hip height, she flourished photographically.