Bill Smith's Photography

 I love Belfountain, been going through on the way up hiking or skiing in the winter, stopping for lunch, coffee or an ice cream cone. It's quaint little hamlet in the heart of regional municipality of Caledon in the north end of Peel Region. While pretty, Belfountain is under pressure from both development and over tourism. Just off Mississauga Road where it tranistions into Main St. there's a parcel of former farmland that's been passsd from one developer to another over the years. The current project is to build mansions and make some sort of rural super luxury neighbourhood. There's one little problem, every household and business in Belfountain gets their water from wells, and the water table is pretty much maxed out. Any new development will cause havoc for the locals.  The other challenge is over toursim, over the past 10 years, I've seen what best could be described as the BlogTO effect,  where Toronto regional news blog. Even pre pandemic, Belfountain was a...

 I needed to get out of dodge and I have a bit of a project documenting the Credit River Headwaters land within the GTA Greenbelt which covers large parts of Caledon, the north end of Halton Region and the eastern corner of Wellington County. Part of the plan was to get up to Erin, shoot it on my Mamiya C220f and head over to Belfountain for lunch at Higher Ground Cafe because I had a craving for their grilled pesto chicken wrap. I brought my Olympus OM-1n with MC Zuiko 50 f1.8 lens loaded with some Kodak Color Plus 200.  Part of the Headwaters Project is documenting the small towns within the watershed and the pressures facing them. Erin is a village at the east end of Wellington County of just over 11 thousand people, the main industry is still farming but the town is fast becoming a suburb of Brampton, Mississauga, Guelph, even many years ago I worked with an account director at Carlson Marketing Group who commuted down  from Erin. That's happening more and more as peo...