Bill Smith's Photography

 A tale of two former hippie havens, the Republic of Rathnelly that stopped the Freeway construction in its tracks, and Yorkville, the home to Joni Mitchell, and other musical icons. Now, Rathnelly is the home to quiet money and Yorkville is Toronto's Rodeo Drive or Magnificent Mile.  On my walk down, I cut through the Davenport Triangle past the corner of Bedford and Davenport which has number of ghosts. If you grew up and came of age in Toronto, you would remember the Just Desserts shooting. A bunch of guys, one of them packing a 12-guage sawed off shotgun robbed an updscale desrsert cafe on a week night in the spring if memory services correct, shaking patrons down for cash and jewellery as well as whatever was in the cash register. The kid with the shotgun was a little trigger happy and shot a 24 year old woman on a date with her fiancé (again if memory serves), in the torso, killing her on the scene. After that, building was cursed, the cafe folded, sat vacent for a while...

 I didn't shoot Acros 100 (the OG stuff) in 35mm that often and I wound up with this roll kicking around so on an afternoon in the city I decided to shoot it through my Minolta XD-11 I started out downtown then took the Line One Subway up to Dupont  to dry run a potential future photo walk. As for the route, it is still a work in progress, figured out the starting point, part of the route, but the ending point, that needs some work still.  The Northeast part of the Annex and heading into the Republic of Rathnelly is not my usual stomping grounds, the amount of construcion on Dupont surprsied me and didn't surprise me at the same time. The Republic of Rathnelly itself has an interesting history. A tiny pocked between Yorkville and Forest Hill South, the local residents stopped a proposed crosstown expressway from being built which was a great thing. These days Rathnelly is not cheap to buy into but the history is way more intresting than neighbourhing Forest Hill.  Ca...

 Kodak took a price increase recently, and if you are primarily a  colour film shooter, they are for now the only game in town as Fuji Film is still doing its slow walk towards the exit and it has plenty of people steamed about it. I'm a black and white shooter who does shoot a fair bit of colour negative (C-41),  read the recent article by Ludwig Hagelstein on the Silvergrain Classics site , and I agree with a lot of what he said. Both C-41 (Colour negative) and E-6 (Slide or positive) film are chemically complicated beasts compared to black and white film like Ilford's HP5 or Foma 100 both in the front end process and with the chemistry to process. Aside from the obvious rise in silver on commmodity markets over the past few years, other raw ingredients got very hard to find during the pandemic, and we're talking about the plastics family of ingredients to make the acetate base for the emulsion coating that goes on top.  The other problem and I'm looking at Kodak i...