Bill Smith's Photography

An old friend gave me some wise advice once, be the water.Well I had to be the water this past fall as I had multiple projects both personal and professional along with some professional development with University of Toronto's Digital Strategy and Communications certificate program. In fact this blog was an assignment for the foundations class and I had fun writing them, in fact they were an escape from everything else. There is a blog roll on the side here and please check out my classmates blogs, they are all great reads. So, Albion Falls, I was here back in late October with the Oakville Camera Club on a Sunday morning photo shoot. Now if you wanted to get closer you had to get to a fenced off access trail and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone with mobility or balance issues. If I were to come back I want to do it on an overcast day to even out the exposure. Camera Gear: Nikon F3HP, Kodak Portra 400 Nikon FM2, Ilford HP5 and Delta 100 Various Nikkor lenses used....

I get tons of compliments on my flowing water shots either on Facebook, various photography discussion forums and Flickr over the years, capturing the right image depends on some decent equipment and some artistic judgement. To get the silky water texture you see here you need either a nice film camera with 100 ISO film (colour) or 50 ISO if you are shooting black and white. Now if you have a DSLR most cameras will have a base ISO of 100. You will also need a decent quality tripod, either a Manfrotto, Giottos or Vanguard and they start around $300 with a  decent head.  The cheapie ghetto specials from Blacks, Costco or Future Shop are not going to cut it, the camera has to be super still. Finally you will need Neutral density filters, they can either be the screw in variety you can install on the front of your lens or the more expensive sheets that fit into a holder. The whole idea is you want to control the amount to light hitting either the film or sensor plane at the sam...