Bill Smith's Photography

 Less than wonderful weather makes for better photography.  I drove up to Cannington Thanksgiving weekend to meet up with my cousins Leslie and Wendy for coffee as well as clean up the family cemetary plot on Consesssion 11 just south of town.  Cannington is a small farming town in the northern end of Durham Region and my family has roots in this part of the world, The Smith family owned a feed store on Cameron Street which while my great grandfather William George Smith sold the business before World War 1 and settled in Toronto. The building that housed the business burned down in the early 1990s and is still a vacant lot. Sadly in some ways the town is now a bedroom suburb for Newmarket and Aurora or Oshawa and there's little activity.  Camera: Nikon FM2n, Nikkor AIS 28 f2.8 lens.  Film: Eastman Kodak Vision 3 250D, ECN2 processed by Graination Lab. 

  This is one of the last rolls of pushed film from the backlog. I never pushed Kentmere 400, usually it's Kodak Tri-X and in the past few years Ilford's HP5. Kentmere 400 processed in Ilfotec HC developer is good for a one stop push. It was a very muggy late August day and my friend Dana was in town for dinner and we did a bit of a photo walk around the old part of Toronto. The visibility was almost November like at the tail end of Summer, flat grey light with high humidity. In the end by the time we got the C'Est What for dinner, the heavens opened up.  I sat on this film for months along with three rolls of HP5 that needed push processing (just have one to go). When you get outside the standard developing times, you just, procrastinate. The backlog is almost gone now, and I feel lighter.  Camera: Nikon FM2/T, Nikkor AIS 28 F2.8 lens.  Film: Kentmere 400, pushed to 800 ISO, Ilfotec HC 1+31.  ...

Haven't shot much with Ilford HP5 of late, it feels like a comfortable pair of Sperry Top Siders and I know what this film can do with different developers, especially pushed an the big bonus, the negatives dry flat. There always is a post on social media somewhere comparing Kodak Tri-X to Ilford HP5, to the point it has become an almost clickbait cliche. I'm on team HP5, for the record, and the results below shot at 320 ISO and processed for the 400 ISO times in Ilfotec HC 1+31 just plain sing.  Nikon F4, 40 F2 Voigtlander Ultron SL II Lens, Nikkor Ais 28 F2.8 lens.  Film: Ilford HP5 400, Ilfotec HC 1+31.