Bill Smith's Photography

 Less than wonderful weather makes for better photography.  I drove up to Cannington Thanksgiving weekend to meet up with my cousins Leslie and Wendy for coffee as well as clean up the family cemetary plot on Consesssion 11 just south of town.  Cannington is a small farming town in the northern end of Durham Region and my family has roots in this part of the world, The Smith family owned a feed store on Cameron Street which while my great grandfather William George Smith sold the business before World War 1 and settled in Toronto. The building that housed the business burned down in the early 1990s and is still a vacant lot. Sadly in some ways the town is now a bedroom suburb for Newmarket and Aurora or Oshawa and there's little activity.  Camera: Nikon FM2n, Nikkor AIS 28 f2.8 lens.  Film: Eastman Kodak Vision 3 250D, ECN2 processed by Graination Lab. 

Been a while since I shot with Kodak Pro Image 100, it was a bright sunny long holiday weekend, and Jo-Anne was up in North Bay visiting family, so I loaded up my Nikon F2SB and drove up to Cannington with my friend Dana who is the owner of Whitney Weaving , who makes woven cmaera straps.  The camera for this trip was my Nikon F2SB, more I think about, it's the pefect Nikon F2, it has the meter of the later AS but takes native Pre Ai Nikkor glass, and newer Nikkor manual focus lenses as long as it has the metering prong, or rabbit ears as I call them. I'm totally rethinking what I'm taking up to Billie Bear this year in terms of equipment.  I have a personal connection to Cannington, my family settled there in the early-mid 19th century and opened a feed and grain store. My great granddad sold the business in the early 1900s and retired to Toronto. Sadly Cannington is in trouble, in the past few years, it has become more a dormitory for Lindsay, Newmarket, Aurora and the so...

I've tried to go to Cannington at least once or twice a year.  My family settled there in the early/mid 19th Century and owned the feed store at the corner of Anne and Cameron Sts. up until the early 20th century when my great granddad William G. Smith sold the business and retired to Toronto living in what is now Corso Italia just north of St. Clair east of Dufferin. The building that housed the feed store burned down back in the early 1990s and I've been trying to track down an exterior photo with no success as of yet.  When I rolled through after seeing my cousins Cannington felt quiet compared to Beaverton. This is a true small Ontario farming town, not a toursit attraction like Elora. That said there are people with weekend retreats, the late Canadian author Timothy Findley and his long time partner had a hobby farm just outside of town. Where exactly, don't know.  Camera: Nikon F2AS, Nikkor Ai 50 F2 lens.  Film: Bergger Pancro 400, HC110 B.  ...