Bill Smith's Photography

I look forward to shooting with Adox CHS 100 II I picked up recently which is the same film as this, a silver rich single layer black and white film harkening back to the 1950s but made on a much younger coating than Efke was. It's nice to experiment with film I used to shoot with, thing is, I can get similar results from ORWO UN 54 and it's easier to find. Efke is gone, the last of the old inventory is gone, and Adox CHS 100 II is a tough film to find. I plan to try a roll out in the near future, stay tuned Camera: Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko lenses.  Film: Efke 100, ID-11 1+1

 Efke 100 has been gone for a few years now, I was gifted an expired roll a few months ago and I had the prefect couple of days to expose the film. Now this emulsion isn't really gone, Fotoimpex under the Adox brand has the CHS 100 II black and white film which is the same stuff pretty much but coated on machinery much younger than the old Efke coating line in Croatia.  Oakville has come to life in the spring in year two of the pandemic, truthfully some of the restrictions have no logic behind them like banning people from using their sail boats. The same line of thinking that killed the ski season this past winter in Ontario. I already have one Covid Vaccine dose, I can't wait for the second one so I'll feel much more at ease. In the meantime, I'm avoiding downtown Oakville on the weekends like the plague. It's crazy busy with day trippers from elsewhere giving the downtown a holiday getaway vibe which isn't weird until you realize we're still in the middle...

The Nikomat EL (or Nikkormat outside of Japan), was part of the first wave of Automatic exposure cameras in the early 1970s, others included the Pentax Spotmatic ES(II), the Olympus OM-2 of 1975, the Canon EF of 1973 (they were weird being big fans of shutter priority) and the Minolta XE-7. All these cameras were aimed at advanced amateurs looking for cutting edge (for the time) tech for their camera gear. These cameras delivered. The Nikomat/Nikkormat EL harkened to further design choices Nikon made with their prosumer cameras with the Nikon FM(2), FE(2), unlike the mechanical Nikkormats the EL had the shutter dial on top and the meter reading is just like the later FE's. The one achilles heal with the EL is not the 6v 4SR44 battery specced for the Canon A series and the New F-1, Nikon decided the best place to put the battery is under the mirror box and you had to access by locking the mirror up, what could possibly go wrong? The EL was discontinued in the late 1970s with the ...

Winter started out harsh, the long term forecast was for lots of snow, well, they missed on that one. Aside from the stray snow fall between now an Easter this season is pretty much done and dusted. You will still see snow on the slopes at Caledon Ski Club into early May by then we're hurtling towards Summer. I love how Efke 100 processes in Rodinal 1+50. Considering this film expired three years ago, I'm still getting super tonality and it loves bright lighting conditions. Camera: Olympus OM-1n, Zuiko lenses Film: Efke 100, Rodinal 1+50.