Bill Smith's Photography

 What a stinky hot day in the Beaches late last August, this wasn't a sultry Summer heat people pine for at the tail end of winter, it's the nasty super humid, the night time low is 25c and you can't change lenses as it would fog everything instantly hot.  It was my last day house and dog sitting at my brother's place in Toronto. Usually late August in Southern Ontario is a pleasnt time of year, not last year. It felt a lot like Houston Texas in August hot. I shot the whole roll on my Pancake Ais Nikkor 50 f1.8 lens with my Nikon FE2, the camera is one of my workhorses. For some reason I didn't process this roll until last week.  Summer will be back, along with heat.  Camera: Nikon FE2, Nikkor Ais 50 F1.8 lens.  Film: Fomapan 100, D76 1+1. 

I borrowed Alex's F5 again and I'm so screwed.  Ok, lets back up a bit, back at the end of August in my late Summer dog and house sitting stint in the Beaches I borrowed Alex's F5 to run some slide film. I was in over my head with the camera and wasted a third of a roll of Velvia 50. Yeah put the camera back where I found it and moved on. I love my F100, F90x's and F4.  Fast forward to the Christmas break, I'm back in the Beach, asked Alex if I could borrow his F5 again, I ran a roll of Japan Camera Hunter Streetpan 400 and Lomography 400 colour film. I'm screwed, so screwed because I want one now. What's the difference between then and now? I took the time to get the know the camera, and of course peek at the owner's manual I pulled up on my iPad. The F5 became a much more comfortable camera to shoot with, knowing what all the controls did I pushed the camera a bit.  If shooting with a Nikon F or F2 is like driving a vintage Porsche 911, the F5 is a Mac...

 Flash back to the mid 1960s, Camera manufacturers were in a race to have the coolest camera on the market. While Nikon went the route to be the most reliable with the F and Nikkormat, other companies like Minolta and Topcon were pushing bounderies with TTL metering. Canon was looking for something to keep up with Nikon, they had a great rangefinder line based on Leica Screw Mount lenses but that platform was nearing the end. While the Canonflex was Canon's answer to the Nikon F, it wasn't keeping the engineers at Nippon Kogaku up at night, they were experimenting with different technologies. Here we have the Pellix, an interesting camera with what amounts to dead end technology.  The Pellix has what's called a Pellicle mirror, meaning light can transmit through the mirror and hit the film plane. Big plus, there's no mirror mechanism going up and down, the mirror just stays there. Such technology would be great in Australia, The US Southwest, Middle East, Spain, Portuga...