Best Kept Secret Award

Gossen wins this for their tiny Digisix 2 light meter. Always on, super small, and just the thing for photographing with cameras with no light meter. If you look hard enough you can find a hot shoe adapter, but honestly, it is just easier to keep it in your pocket.

The Analogue Camera of the Year Award

Marwan and his team have shot on pretty much anything and everything. The camera that took everyone by surprise was the Minox B. Renown as a spy camera, in fact, more of these little marvels of engineering were sold to the rich and famous as cameras to impress their Monaco friends with their “flash” camera at dinner parties.

Photochemistry of the Year

Tetenal wins the Photochemistry of the year award for their tablet developer and fix combination. Nice results, great tonality, and almost infinite shelf life. These will be perfect for the occasional user and especially good for those of us who need a development fix when we travel.

Photobook of the Year

Publisher Mack Books wins this award together with the folk at the Sirkhane Darkroom, a charity that uses analogue photography to connect with refugee and orphaned children in Turkey, just across the border from Syria.

The children’s images are truly heartwarming. This book provides a feel-good factor and supports a great cause.

The Back from The Past Award

This award goes to James Lane and Zone Labs for manufacturing and distributing Jay De Fehr’s updated 510 Pyro formulation to the world.

James is so enthusiastic about this super thick developer, it is like talking to the leader of a religious sect about why you should switch to chocolate brown and white negatives.

Great for scanning and printing, fantastic tonality, and this super-concentrated developer lasts forever.

Positive Thinking

Adox is the clear winner for giving the world the Scala kit.

Here’s a set of chemistry that enables the B&W darkroom folk to reverse pretty much any Black & White film and make super cool looking transparencies.

The Industry Collaboration Award

This award goes to Richard Taylor of Nic & Trick photography based in Folkestone, England.

Richard has worked tirelessly to find solutions to help every analogue photographer. He has tirelessly promoted products including Bellini chemistry and encouraged G3P Shanghai to reintroduce 127 and 220 format film to the photographic world.

Photographed here with his partner Nikki Coulson.

Thinking Big

Our Thinking Big Award goes to Juergen Heiland of Heiland Electronic for his 8×10 enlarger. This innovative design is a vertical enlarger that comes in freestanding or wall-mounted versions.

This enlarger is the kind of device Q would have given James Bond had he needed a darkroom. The head and table move electronically, the lens has autofocus and the unit has a built-in Splitgrade Controller.

The Timekeeping Award

The Timekeeping Award goes to photographer Dave Burnett who’s tales of photography assignments and Graflex cameras with Aero Ektar lenses were so gripping that SilvergrainClassic’s  German efficiency failed. The normally ruthlessly timed Fireside Chat  that he was a guest on ran twice as long as any other episode!

If you didn’t catch our article on the other news for 2021 – the Kodak film price increase, here is our balanced view https://silvergrainclassics.com/en/2021/10/film-price-analysis/