Plenka: daily film photos

What it is

Plenka (Russian for "film") is a Telegram channel of film photography made up of readers' submissions. You send photos through the channel's bot, there's a separate chat for discussion, and a sister channel for phone photography. It has over 12,000 subscribers and more than 80,000 photos in its media archive. New posts go up every day, usually several.

The format is strict and handy: an album of frames, then usually the place, camera, film stock and the photographer's handle. For example: "Karelia, Hasselblad 500cm, Planar 80 2.8, Sonnar 180, Fomapan 100, Ilford Delta 400". Or: "Pinhole Ranica Mir 6F, Minsk". Captions are in Russian, but camera and film names are written in Latin letters, so the feed is easy to follow without knowing the language.

Why we picked it

This is one of those rare places where the captions are worth more than the likes. Want to see what Kodak Vision3 250D, a motion picture film that photographers load into still cameras, looks like? It turns up in an autumn Ufa shot on a Praktica MTL5 and in St Petersburg on a Nikon F80. Curious about CineStill 800T after dark? There's Minsk on a medium-format Pentacon Six. The channel works as a living catalogue: the same Canon EOS 300 shows up in Beijing loaded with Ilford and in Tambov with Kodak UltraMax.

We also like the range of cameras, from Soviet Zenit 122 and Lomo models to a Hasselblad, a Voigtländer Bessa R3A with a Rokkor 40mm lens, and pinhole cameras. The places vary as much: the Leningrad region, the small Volga town of Plyos, Thailand, Beijing's Shichahai area. It isn't a polished gallery of hand-picked masterpieces, just an honest feed of people shooting film right now. Some frames are sharp, some soft, some overexposed or dark: city walks, dachas, trips, portraits of friends. That's exactly why it's useful to learn from. You see how a film stock behaves in ordinary life, not in perfect conditions.

Credit is always given. Every album carries the photographer's handle, and some include a link to their own channel, so it's easy to follow someone whose eye you like.

Where to start

• Scroll through a week of posts and note which film stocks you like the colour of.
• Search the channel for a film name such as Portra or Fomapan to compare results side by side.
• If you shoot film yourself, send your frames through the channel's bot.
• Drop into the chat if you need advice on a camera or developing.

One more nice detail: some captions name the lab that developed the film, and sometimes the author adds a line about the day. We didn't see any ads in the past week of posts.

Who it's for

People who shoot film, or want to start and are trying to choose a camera and stock. Anyone who enjoys quiet everyday photography without the usual social media look. The captions are in Russian, but the gear names tell you most of what you need.

Quick answers

What language is it in? Captions are in Russian; camera and film names are in Latin letters.

Whose photos are these? Readers' photos, and every post credits the author.

How often does it post? Daily, usually several albums.