John Boyd emigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with his family in the late 1860s.

[1] The oldest of 14 children, Boyd left school at the age of 15 in 1880, to work as a messenger at the Grand Trunk Railway's (GT) Freight Office.

[3] He built his first camera out of an oblong box covered in black oil cloth, and went on to design and build such items of equipment as an exposure timing chart, a lens shade, and a fixing tank.

His photographs depict aspects of recruitment and military training such as: parade drilling, artillery exercises, signalling, trench digging, and camp life.

While most of the photographs were taken in Toronto, some images were shot in Barriefield and Kingston, Camp Borden, Niagara, London, and Guelph in Ontario, and in Montreal, Quebec.