Bill Smith's Photography

 It was a grey May for the most part, one weekend Jo-Anne and I went down to the Beaches, but we didn't go to the Beach proper, we stuck to Queen Street East. It started quite nice and as the day went on got more and more overcast. We had lunch at Pizzeria 900, can't reccomend it enough if you live in the East End.  To deal with the greyer skies, I switched to the Super Multi Coated Takumar 28 F3.5 lens after shooting with the Super Multi Coated Takumar 50 F1.4 lens. Both lenses are gems within the Pentax lens pantheon and that's why I've held onto my Spotmatics.  Camera: Asahi Pentax Spotmatic II, Super Multi Coated Takumar 50 F1.4 and 28 F3.5 Lenses.  Film: Fomapan 100, Rollei Supergrain 1+15. 

 I shot a ton of black and white film while in the Beaches, and I'm not done processing and you will just have to stay tuned. Fompan 400 is a nice film but I had a hell of a time with last three frames with some emulsion damage, where it came from, I don't know. Usually I don't have a problem with this situation, nothing cloning can't fix. That said, it was worth the trouble to fix in Lightroom and some of these will wind up in an upcoming 'zine issue.  Camera: Rolleifles 3.5 F Planar TLR  Film: Fomapan 400, HC110 B. 

I packed Ilford HP5 400 for my stay in the beaches with the thought to pushing it, in the end I left at my usual 320 ISO. One reason was the Minolta XD-11 only went to 1/1000 of a second, and that's fine but I was dealing with lighting all over the place which in the end keeping the film near box speed was the right call. My portrait of my friend John Meadows had me look at HP5 400 again, the tonality blew my mind and I've shot kilometers/miles of the stuff and processing it in HC110 dilution B (1+31) is my go to developer combination. I metered things just right. My stay in the Beaches was the last week of relatively normal, whatever that was. While certain events were being cancelled, the COVID 19 pandemic hadden't really hit home yet. People were still out going about their daily business. Camera: Minolta XD-11, MD Rokkor X 50 f1.7 lens. Film: Ilford HP5 400, HC110 B.

I was house and dog sitting in the Beaches a few weeks ago and by the time this blog post goes live, I'm back in the Beaches for two more weeks until Labour Day Weekend. Some members of the Toronto Film Shooters Facebook Group and I met up for lunch at Murphy's Law and went for what could be best described as "photowalk of the damned" on what could be considered the hottest day of the year. This weekend I gave my Pentax KX a good workout with colour film. I shot a roll of Ektar 100 and Cinestill 50D to see how the camera and lenses work with said films. I was blown away at what I got with the Ektar 100, I barely touched the images in Lightroom, just some cropping and dust removal. Cinestill 50 negatives needed a bit more work, I find I get a slight green cast when I scan them into TIFF files. Again Lightroom can sort them out pretty good. Camera: Asahi Pentax KX, SMC Pentax M 50 f1.4 lens. SMC Pentax K 28 f3.5 lens. Film: Kodak Ektar 100