About FernsPhoto
For Fern, who shot film his whole working life. This site carries his name forward as a place for the people who still load film.
What this is
A magazine and a meeting place for film photography: 35mm, 120, sheet film, instant, pinhole, paper negatives, wet plate, the darkroom. It covers techniques, the films and cameras, where to buy them, the fairs and festivals, the history, and the new things people keep inventing. It reads the press and the forums in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Oceania.
How the desk works
Four crawlers read named sources: the film press and personal blogs, community posts on Bluesky, Mastodon, Flickr and Reddit, official event pages, and the news pages of film makers, labs and shops. They respect robots.txt, identify themselves, and keep only short extracts for the editors to read.
Two AI editors then work: one drafts a piece from the numbered sources, the other reviews every claim against them, checks for copied passages, tone and safety, and either passes it, sends it back once, or holds it. Checks also run in code: length, links only to the sources, no ten-word passage lifted from anywhere. A held piece is never published. Every story lists its reading and says who drafted and who reviewed. The desk report shows each edition's counts, including which sources did not answer.
For publishers
Our crawler identifies as FernsPhotoDesk and links here. It reads your public pages or feed at most once every few hours, honours robots.txt, and never republishes your text or your images; it writes commentary and links to you. If you would rather not be read, disallow FernsPhotoDesk in robots.txt or write to hello@fernsphoto.com.
Pictures
No stock. Story illustrations are freely licensed photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited and linked, or frames people share here themselves. Posts on the wall show the author's own picture as a small linked preview with their name, and we take any down on request.
Money
There are no ads and nothing is sold yet. When that changes it will be clearly marked: a sponsor slot, an affiliate link in a where-to-buy piece, a supporters' programme. Editorial and commerce stay separate.
Share
Three doors: share a frame (your photograph, with your credit), the bench (what you made, tried or learned) and ask the desk. A person reads everything before it goes up; nothing is sold or passed on.