Welcome to the new look 'Advance/Rewind'

Welcome to the new look 'Advance/Rewind' newsletter from Kosmo Foto.

It's been a little quiet of late because I've been moving the newsletter from Mailchimp to its new home on Beehiiv, and working out what I will be publishing here in 2026.

The world of online publishing has changed as much as film photography has over the past 15 years or so since Kosmo Foto began.

To a blog like mine with a cohort of regular readers – that's you, so thank you – it makes sense to publish some of the stories I might have once put in the blog here. I want to publish some stuff here before it goers on the blog, and I also want to publish newsletter-exclusive pieces too.

What will that look like? Probably some opinion pieces on recent developments in the film photography world, for starters. I'd like to also publish photo posts with results from recent rolls – either from cameras in the collection or ones I'm testing for Cameraburo. We're all here for the cameras and the photos, right?

Kosmo Foto and a newsletter take a not insubstantial amount of money to run, so you may find the odd advert in newsletter posts – this really will be crucial to helping keep the blog free to read. Ads on the blog have helped, but the rise of AI Search has had a huge effect on blogs like mine – large language models scrape my content without payment or permission, use it to help create AI-written results, and stop people from clicking through to the blog.

I will keep ads to the minimum, but please understand they're not there to fund a Kodak Ektachrome addiction – they're paying for all the little bits and bobs that a modern blog needs.

You'll also have the chance to help support the blog by taking out a newsletter subscription. Subscribers will be able to read these exclusive posts, but I'll also publish plenty of updates that won't be behind a paywall.

When I started Kosmo Foto back in 2012 (or Zorki Photo as it was back then) I didn't dare dream that so many people would be ready the blog month after month, that I'd get to build a film brand, or that film photography would be back in such good health after the years of digital-fuelled decline. Hopefully we'll see more reasons to be cheerful in 2025. 

(If there's things you'd like to see on the newsletter, please let me know by dropping me a line at [email protected].)

The Lomography LOMO MC-A

It's been a particularly busy year for film photographers (including new colour films from both Harman and China Lucky Film) and one of the biggest bombshells is the premium-looking compact camera Lomography has been developing in secret: the LOMO MC-A.

The MC-A is no plastic fantastic, but a bona-fide attempt to get film fanatics walking away from the surviving Contax T2s. It's got a robust metal frame, a 32mm f/2.8 lens, auto exposure and autofocus AND manual focus. You can even shoot it fully manually if you want. When it launched in October it caused quite the splash.

The LOMO MC-A isn't out yet (it looks like the first examples will ship in January) but Kosmo Foto has been lent one to test. A full review will be coming to the site in January, but in the meantime you can see our first impressions in this recent post. 

Expect to see more from this camera in the coming updates!

All the best

Stephen Dowling
Kosmo Foto