Bill Smith's Photography

 I haven't shot much with the Spotmatic much but since it feels more like early May than  mid April, I wanted to burn a roll of bulk loaded Rollei RPX 400 I found in the bottom of a camera bag recently. I was loaned a third party lens by my friend and Classic Camera Revival cohost John Meadows. The Polaris 7-230 zoom lens is a boat anchor, the classic cusp of the 1970s third party lens usually marketed with some sexist advertising in quarter page ad towards the bottom of the page in one of the photography magazines of the day. I think the cheesecake glamour photography was a distraction from the fact a lot of third party zoom lenses in the very late 1960s and early 1970s were dogs, there were some exceptions. I have my opinions on this lens, you will just have to wait and hear the episode in a couple of months.  The other thing I managed to capture was a decent photo of my brother Alex and my nephew Marcus. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the reality my nephew is...

Technology sometimes isn't our friend. I use Vuescan scanning software and after the most recent update, my Epson V600 Photo started crashing. I even went back a release, no such luck. I wound up downloading the Epson scanning software for Mac OS and managed to get it configured, and it looks I'm using that going forward for the next little while because starting from default settings every time you fire up the scanner to digitize some negatives or slides, tedious. Speaking of scanning my workflow, I scan my negatives into a TIFF file on an external hard drive and process in Adobe Lightroom, usually just cropping, dust removal and a bit of sharpening and export as a Jpeg for web use. If I'm printing black and white, and I'm 11x14 and smaller with paper, I'll do it old school in a darkroom, with colour and bigger prints, I farm it out to a print studio. Yorkville is an interesting neighbourhood to photograph, the end result from early gentrification, I've ni...

I got weak spot for Pentax Spotmatics, one day while at Burlington Camera picking up some colour film I had in for processing, Joan (aka my camera pusher) said, "Did you want to see something neat?" Of course I said sure and she pulled out this old camera bag that just came into the store, and it had this black Pentax Spotmatic SP.  It had been overhauled at some point in the last 10 years and the only thing that need replacing was the bumper foam, an easy enough fix, so I bought the camera. The meter works but isn't accurate (no surprise for a camera the same age as I am) but the shutter was bang on. Again, Super Multi Coated Takumar glass rocks colour film nicely. Anyone who says Toronto is boring for photography isn't looking at the right places. Camera: Asahi Pentax Spotmatic SP, Super Multi Coated Takumar lenses. Film: Lomography 400 C-41

I confess I'm a camera collector as well as a user. One of my systems is the Pentax or M-42 screw mount system, I own a Spotmatic F, a pair of SVs, a S1a and an Asahi Pentax model K from the late 1950s (not to be confused with the K1000) which is a rare beast. So my brother (and worst enabler) told me an independent Leica Repair tech out of the US mid west was selling a batch of overhauled Pentax Spotmatics for $40USD. Granted this was before the Canadian dollar started melting in currency markets so it came to about $55Cdn with postage, how can you go wrong? The Asahi Pentax SP was considered the first SLR camera to offer through the lens metering (TTL) in the mid 1960s and I would consider it the VW Beetle of cameras. Now here's the deal with the Pentax screw mount lens family, their optics were on par with Leica and Zeiss. It the day comes I add a digital body to the camera kit, it will most likely be a Sony A7 MkII with an adapter. Camera: Pentax Spotmatic SP, Super M...