Bill Smith's Photography

 Kentmere 400 is a cheap and cheerful film you can find pretty much anywhere and it's made by the same people who make Ilford products, Harmon. I found a time for HC110 B and it the results are quite nice. Nice to have in your back pocket as a lower cost alternative to Ilford HP5 and Kodak Tri-X and you can't find Ultrafine Extreme 400. Do I love shooting with it? Kentmere 400 is nice, I don't know, I've shot enough UFX 400 to know its strengthes and weaknesses. I actually prefer shooting with Fomapan 400 which has a bit more of a 1970s Kodak Tri-X character, and I look forward to shooting with more of that.  I'm not damning Kentmere 400, it's a nice film to shoot with for photowalks and you just want to bang some frames off, you'll get great results every time.  Camera: Canon EF, FD lenses.  Film: Kentmere 400, HC110 B. 

Now the one drawback with Kodak Tri-X 400 in HC110, for me it curls, with Xtol not so much. The dreaded curl can be solved with flattening with heavy Pubic Relations textbooks for a few days. The weather in Toronto in late November-early December is capital G grey. If the Inuit have a thousand words for snow, Torontonians have a thousand ways to describe the grey skies (pale anthracite, polished cement, pale pewter, off black anyone?). Pushed Tri-x is great for shooting in this weather, and I'm willing to put up with the curl. I forgot how nice Tri-X is to photograph with. Camera: Nikon F3HP, Nikkor Ai 50 f2 lens, Ais 28 f2.8 lens. Film: Kodak Tri-X 400, pushed to 1600 ISO, HC110 B.

On a whim a few months back I picked up a Pentax ME super off the classifieds on the Pentax Forums for the all low price of $35. I already have a couple of K mount bodies (a pair of KX's and an MX), it would cool to have an AE body in the line up. This is a fun camera to shoot with on AE, actually quite intuitive. Switching over the manual, you realize quickly there's a bit of a learning curve because, instead of a dial Pentax went with two buttons to control shutter speed. It is a no tears,  no regrets camera, I paid very little for it, works great for now but if something goes wrong, I'll be more pissed at losing the roll of film and not the camera. Camera: Pentax ME Super, SMC Pentax 50 f1.7 lens. Film: Ilford HP5 400, HC110 B.

I really like shooting in this neighbourhood, and I got really lucky with a PCC streetcar on its way to the Harbourfront LRT route. Camera: Nikon FM, Nikkor Ai 50 f2 lens. Film: Efke 100, HC110 B.

Canon FTb's I love them, I even wrote an article on the Film Shooters Collective regarding this body. I never really bonded with Canon A-series bodies, I learned on a AE-1, sold it, bought another one years later, sold it again. Canon FTb's and F-1's stick around, both are built like tanks and easy to work with. Camera: Canon FTbn, FD 50 f1.4 SSC lens. Film: Ilford HP5 400, HC110 B.

I finally got a chance to shoot a roll of Eastman Kodak Double X 200 Daylight motion picture stock at the end of May. If you're wondering what this film was used for, remember opening sequence of the James Bond Film Casino Royale, and Schindler's List back in the 1990s, both were shot on Double X. It has grain but pleasing grain to my eye, and I want to get some in a bulk roll for bright sunny days in the city. Processing is easy, HC110 Dilution B for five minutes, in fact I processed it with a roll of RPX 400 in the tank as well. Camera: Nikon F3HP, Nikkor Ai 50 f1.4 and Ais 28 f2.8 lens. Film: Eastman Kodak Double X 200, HC110 B.

I spend New Year's Eve in the Beaches, my brother takes his family to Montreal, I look after Rufus and the house. It's a nice change of scenery any time of the year and I decided to compare JCH 400 to Rollei Retro 400s (upcoming blog post). I do want to support Japan Camera Hunter's film. It's good for film photography to have another emulsion on the market. There has been some controversy within the community, some photographers think JCH400 is dead stock Agfa product when it's a traffic surveillance film put back into production. I think people are annoyed at paying $15 a roll for a niche film. It's not cheap but the more people buy the cheaper it gets due to the volume in the manufacturing process. So let's hope Bellamy of Japan Camera Hunter gets an opening order for a skid load of Street Pan 400 from B&H Photo. Camera: Nikon FM, Nikkor Ai 50 f2 lens. Film: JCH 400, HC110 B.