Bill Smith's Photography

I have been going on a tear with the darkroom, I printed three photos from my one and I think only Don Valley Brickworks visit late last Summer. I got a lot of grain with these photos courtesy Classicpan 400 but I think it enhances the look. There is no way I can go above 8x10 with enlargement. With 20/20 hindsight I should have gone with Ilford HP5 and push two stops but the end result would have been different. I scanned in as a colour photo on my cheapie scanner and converted two of the three into greyscale and I left the Junction Boxes Brought to You by the Letter F alone giving an almost sepia look.

More Prints I got into a groove last Friday night and cranked out a pile of prints, I am sharing two here today I took along Dominion St. which leads into Forks of the Credit Provincal Park. I nickname this part of the world around Belfountain "Middle Earth", it's hard to describe but I find this part of the world very relaxing and there are lots of photos waiting to be taken. I am going to adjust my shooting style to accomadate the crop to the 8x10 image.

I went back into the darkroom last weekend and pumped out the prints posted below. I am getting better at enlarging, I did not waste as much paper. I shot both pictures on Tri-x back on my birthday last year with my brother's Leica R4. I scanned the prints directly with a Canon flatbed so I hope to give an accurate representation of what I made.

Part two of the the Kodachrome 64 roll. I used a Pentax Spotmatic F with Takumar glass down in the Financial district early one Sunday morning before Christmas.

This is a roll left over from last year. Kodachrome takes time to have processed as it is processed in a lab called Dwaynes in the US and it's the only one on planet earth that does it. Kodachrome has been in production since the late 1930's and is the standard for archival stablity for colour film. I plan on buying a pile of the Kodachrome and use it while it can still be processed. These slides will outlast me, perhaps my kids if I have any. I love how colour is reproduced, it has almost a retro feel to it, something I have only seen with another Kodak product E100VG. Granted this set was taken with a Pentax Spotmatic with a variety of focal lengths.

My last roll of Forte 200. I never really got a chance to get aquainted with this film, I only had four rolls and this the last one. I put yellow filters on my Zuiko lenses for my OM-1, almost too much contrast in the photographs, it will be fun printing them. I will be shooting around Forks of the Credit while ski season is in full swing. I like the Badlands in Winter shot.

Fun with night photography in Chinatown. For a change I shot with Fuji Provia F 400 slide film that has been pushed to 1600 ISO with a small 1970's vintage fixed lens rangefinder camera called a Canon Canonet QL 17 GIII and I used a hand meter to get the correct exposure. It took a month due to the holidays to get the slides back but it was worth the wait.

I am annoyed, I apologise for stepping on the soapbox but I am pissed at the moment. I belong to an online photographic community called the Analog Photography Users Group, a spot for those of us who still use film for making pictures. I log on this afternoon to see what is going on and there was one thread that caught my interest under product availablity. A member trading under the handle unraniumnitrate posted a message stating that Forte film of Hungary is shutting down and produced a letter in English with the salutaion xxxx'ed out to hide the poster's identity. There were about eight pages when I added my two cents most mourning the loss of Forte papers for darkroom printing. Then the PR/communications professional in me kicked in, why is so much being put into an announcement by someone who does not participate in the community that often and hides behind an alias? I don't even know where this person lives and what their connection is to the photographic industry. ...

I did it! I killed the lights and fired up the Durst enlarger. I made my first prints old school, with Multigrade paper, a qhick burst of light and a bath of chemicals. What surprised me was the quality of the pictures from the low light environment. I plan to re-print the two low light shots with a longer enlargment exposure and higher F stop. The Benches print resulted in going through eight sheets of 8x10 paper until I got it close to what I wanted. I want to show it to one of my Public relations instructors and fellow amateur photographer named David Turnbull and see where I can improve.