Bill Smith's Photography

 Tried out a new to me developer, Rollei Supergrain, where have you been? I tried this with the July Frugal Film Roll which was shot up in Beaverton in the north end of Brock Township and in Uxbridge at the site of the former York Durham Heritage Railway which sadly went bust recently, the rolling stock and locomotives haven't been sold off yet, only a matter of time.  The north end of Durham Region, Brock Township, is where my family settled in Upper Canada and became leading citizens in Cannington and Beaverton. Sadly both villages aren't doing so well. Of the two Beaverton is in better shape with a slightly more happening downtown, the Short/is Cafe is offering dinner options and is doing its best to spark some life into the main drag. The big problem is, the supermarket is out by the Trans Canada highway and not downtown. Also some ambitious developer wanted to put a subdivision in, but went bust after the ground was prepped and the brick delivered.  What Beaverton co...

I wanted to roll through Beaverton solo before heading back to the city, I reloaded my XE-7, thinking it was Portra 400 like the last roll. Spoiler Alert, it wasn't. Dumb me didn't look closely at the cannister to notice it was actually Portra 160, and I underexposed by 2/3 a stop. Consulting the hive mind of the film photography community, I opted for a one stop push because I usually over expose Portra 400 at 250 ISO. Burlington Camera came to the rescue with some developing magic. My Great Uncle Mason Smith M.D. is on the Beaverton anniversary wall on the side of the now closed and up for lease movie theatre, he was the town doctor up until the mid 1940s. My great aunt Mary-Elinor hates that image, says it looks nothing like him. Needless to say with the future of the anniversarywall up in the air, there won't be a late night replacement of my great uncle's likeness which also shares the same wall as Hockey Night in Canada broadcast pioneer Foster Hewitt. Most l...

The trip up to Cannington and Beaverton I talked about last week was a pilgramage of sorts. It was a gathering of cousins and one great aunt to fill in the blanks of family history. The Smith family settled what is now Brock Township in Cannington since about the early 1830s (thought it was the early 1820s but I was a decade off), and being a large family were quite prolific, even if a bunch of us did scatter over the decades, in my branch, grandddad moved to Montreal for work after World War One, hence the generational detour through Quebec. Relatives also settled in Toronto including the Great Grandparents after they sold the feed busienss in Cannington settled in what is now Corso Italia on St. Clair just east of Dufferin. It was a family history lesson for me, I know a lot, but I'm filling in the blanks as I am for my cousins. I hope this happens again next year becuase it's my chance to see great aunt Mary Elinor. I know both my cousins Anne and Janet it was their first...