Bill Smith's Photography

Just some quick shots from last weekend on my iPhone, yes that's moose in the bottom shot and there's more to come with them on a later post. Friday morning I went up to to Huckleberry Lookout between Bracebridge and Port Carling to meet  up with my friend Helen Grose  , she lives most of the week up in Muskoka and knows the neighbourhood cold. She suggested for the gang to meet up at Huckleberry Lookout as a spot to shoot some landscapes, something different. I was challenged at first, more so with the light, it was supposed to be partly cloudy but instead we got mostly cloud with the rare patch of blue. Later on I cut across along highway 117 through Baysville stopping by at the Lake of Bays Brewery (sorry no photos), they make fine beer and along that highway I got shots of the Lake of Bays which then took me through Dorset. I was happy to arrive at Billie Bear resort, to me that's paradise, the weekend saw a return to the Bat Lake Trail this time in the morning ...

Forks of the Credit Provincial Park is about an hour's drive northwest of Toronto near Belfountain Ontario and gets its name from where the East and West Credit Rivers meet up. Walk up Dominion Street you will come across Brimstone, formerly a village of "hard living" limestone miners over a 100 years ago, now a collection of cottages and weekend retreats along the East Credit River. From there I walk into the park along the Dominion Trail. This is one of my favourite places to unwind for a few hours. Where will I be hiking this weekend? Panorama Photo: iPhone 5S with the Google Snap-Seed app. Everything Else: Camera: Leica M4-2, Canon 50 f1.4 LTM lens, Voightlander 35 f2.5 lens. Film: Ilford HP5 400, HC110 B.

Every major software update in the iPhone ecosystem begets updates to the individual apps. Lo and behold Google re-did their Snap Seed app making it even better. What this app does along with VSCOcam is act as a third party interface for your phone's camera, now with Snap Seed you can also import photos in from your on board library and edit. I always recommend this to friends looking for a photography app.  Snap Seed is available in iTunes and the Google Play store, it's free and easy to use for both skilled photographers and those looking to add a bit of snap to their images without a steep learning curve. Now, if you are one of those tech outliers who uses a Windows phone, I'm sorry (correction, that might change with the introduction of Windows 10). If you were issued a Blackberry handset through work, there are work arounds for Google apps on certain models but most likely your IT department locked the phone down tighter than Fort Knox, sorry again, no app for you....

It's time 2014 got shown the door, while my year was pretty good in the grand scheme of things, most of my friends and colleagues had in one form or another a tough year.  Some of them it was career setbacks or relationships going sour, others bad life events, the majority it was a loss of a loved one.  If you suffered a bad case of horrible year, regardless what happened, repeat after me, "2014, I'm kicking your sorry ass to the curb, and don't come back!" I wish you all a safe Happy 2015, it's a clean page, what are you going to put on it?

I think I found paradise. It started with lunch at Huff Estates Winery , they have a really nice patio where we had lunch, in my case a roast beef sandwich with melted brie with mixed green salad. If there is ever a place that I would consider as close to paradise as you are going to get within a two and a half hour drive east of  Toronto. I tossed up an iPhone shot of the beach on Twitter and Facebook with the line, 'I think I found paradise." A couple of people and businesses  from Prince Edward County favourited that photo and a few re-tweeted it which was a nice stroke to the ego. The thing with the beach at Sandbank Provincial Park is the sand, it's sugar sand and you feel like you're on the ocean only there is no tides to deal with. We were smart going Friday because the long weekend would have been a zoo at the park. After relaxing on the beach it was time to make our way to check out Bloomfield, a gem of a small town, a perfect place to hide from realit...

After last night's rain the winter wonderland is looking a little soggy out there. I did a winter hike recently inside Forks of the Credit Provincial Park and it was a much needed break from stimulus overload and a school assignment. I've been using my Olympus OM-1n for much of this winter and I have been using the same film developer as well, at some point I have to shake things up. Camera: Olympus OM-1n, Zuiko MC 50 f1.8 lens. Film ORWO UN 54, Xtol 1+1. Shot on an iPhone 5s, with the VSCOcam app.

I just discovered my favourite backroad is open again, for the past few years Maclaren Side Road was blocked due to a culvert washout just north of a century old one lane concrete bridge. I hope the bridge is maintained and not replaced because I don't want to see this road paved and development creep in. Since this road is right in the Niagara Escarpment zone and I don't think it will ever get paved. One bit of advice is give this road a pass during spring thaw as it gets really muddy. iPhone 5s, VSCOcam with the f2 preset. VSCOcam with the c1 preset.

I love my new iPhone 5s, my plan rolled over and I had Fido Dollars to redeem. A lot of pixels have been devoted to this handset in the "smartphone wars", what grabbed me aside from the speed courtesy the A7 chip which gives way more computing power was the big leap forward with the camera which has double the number of pixels my old iPone 4 had. Now here's the deal with smart phones period you can do lots of neat things with them, I love my panorama feature on my 5s. Here's the deal it's not so much the stock camera but the apps you can use so you have greater creative control of your images and they are easy to use in terms of editing. The apps I use on a regular basis are Google Snapseed  , VSCOcam  which is a very elegant app that also includes an online community like Instagram and if you edit your photos via Adobe Lightroom, plug ins to give you to opportunity to re-create the look of different slide and negative films. Another app worth looking at for ...