Bill Smith's Photography

I love winter, truly I do, I embrace the beauty of the season, been skiing for 38 years and that keeps me sane during the winter. This year it's cold, I mean really cold as in a puffy down jacket on a cold January's night has no insulation value with arctic winds taking the windchill down -38c or some crazy number like that. If you plan to go out and partake in some winter photography, dress in layers,  have spare batteries for your camera as they drain fast in cold and keep them close to your body. I still shoot with film and my go to camera for winter and travel photography, the Olympus OM-1n has a mechanical shutter so the battery just powers the centre weighted light meter. For this series of photos I used a black and white motion picture stock as a still film from a German company called ORWO  .  The particular product was 35mm UN54 which is rated 100 ISO for daylight and I process in Kodak Xtol at a one part developer one part water ratio for 6 minutes and 30 ...

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 ...

Finally gone through the last of my post ice storm shots from over the Christmas holidays. I'm amazed at what I got out of this roll. Camera: Olympus OM-1md, various Zuiko lenses. Film: Kodak Tri-X400, Xtol 1+1.

Sorry for the silence but I got the second act of a cold I caught back in December and have been distracted over a week. Aside from the occasional Polar Vortex and the December ice storm, this has been a fun winter so far and great for skiing. In fact I think this is the first real winter I remember since the 1970s at the risk of dating myself. One thing, there's no way I'm sitting on a chairlift of the windchill goes below -18c while I am a dedicated skier, I'm not THAT dedicated. Camera: Olympus OM-1md, Zuiko MC 50 f1.8 lens, Film: Kodak Tri-X400, Xtol 1+1.

If you're looking for fancy title, you're out of luck my friend. Winter is a constant season. As I am writing this the CBC call in program Cross Country Check Up is playing in the background with the topic "Coping with winter, have we become weather wimps?"  I spent the first 12 years of my life in Montreal and cold winters were the norm. This past Monday night and into Tuesday it dropped to -40c with the windchill, I didn't go out out of common sense. I just know better, the cold doesn't last forever. I love winter just as much as Summer because the beauty in the landscapes. My only wish is we got more snow and a lot less freezing rain. Camera: Olympus OM-1md, Zuiko MC 50 f1.8 lens. Film: Kodak Tri-X400, Xtol 1+1.

The one byproduct of the great ice storm of 2013 is stunning winter photography. I enjoyed shooting between Christmas and New Years because while cold, a layer of snow over the ice covered the landscape up in Caledon Ontario. I go skiing at a private ski club in this neighbourhood and I take pictures on the drive up and on the way home, I never get tired of shooting the landscape up here and it's so close to the GTA.  What struck me was how white the landscape was, even more so then after a regular snowstorm. Hearing stories from the locals made me very thankful I was only without power for a day, west of Highway 10 the power was out for a week around Belfountain, Brimstone and Forks of the Credit Road. What left me in awe were the trees bent over from the weight of the ice which you see along Mississauga Rd. in the bottom photo. Camera: Olympus OM-1MD, Zuiko MC 50 f1.8 lens, Film: Kodak Tri-X 400, Xtol 1+1.

Four days before Christmas, Central Canada got sucker punched with a weekend long ice storm, electrical grid suffered some serious damage in parts of Greater Toronto and other regions of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. I was fortunate that my neighbourhood was only without power for 12 hours, other people were in the dark and cold for over a week. One side effect of this weather disaster is the beautiful images with the ice encrusted branches. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, I kept looking up, not so much for potential subject matter to document but to make sure a branch is not going to land on my head.  I cringe when I hear people complain about the snow, I'll take a snow storm over freezing rain every time. Camera: Olympus OM-1MD, Zuiko 75-150 Zoom lens, 50 f1.8 MC lens, Film: Kodak Tri-X400, Xtol 1+1, Location: My driveway in Oakville

I really have to wrap this series up, there's lot of neat images I want to show you soon. Walking around Boxing Day allows me to document an environment I move through once a week usually on my way to University of Toronto's St. George Campus. Documenting the construction chaos at Union Station without the commuters is a rare treat. Camera: Nikon FM, mostly the Nikkor H 28 f3.5 lens, Film: kodak Tri-X400 processed in Xtol 1+1.

More from the Boxing Day photo walk downtown, I forgot how much I liked urban photography. I want to wish all my regulars and new visitors a very Happy New Year and I hope 2014 brings great promise to everyone. A little off topic, I'm in marketing communications when I don't have a camera in my hand on in the darkroom and have been doing some professional development over the past few months to fill in the gaps with my social media knowledge so I can say I'm a digital strategist and not just playing one on TV.  My studies in University of Toronto's  Digital Strategy and Communications Management certificate program re-invigorated my blog.  Secondly I took a peak under the blog's hood and found out I was averaging over a 1200 views a month on average, that statistic blew my mind, thank you. My classmates from the first course blogged on a variety of topics and please check them out. Camera: Nikon FM, Nikkor H 28 f3.5 or Ai 50 f2 lens Film: Kodak Tri-X 400, Xt...

I love the Nikon FM series of cameras and I'm really fortunate to receive a black FM under the Christmas Tree yesterday morning. I took it with me into Toronto on Boxing Day (December 26th for those outside the Commonwealth) to run a test roll through it. It's been a long time since I did a walkabout around downtown Toronto and I found the streets quiet on Boxing Day in the financial district. I wanted to see what my new to me FM can do with one of my reference films, Kodak Tri-X 400, the results of course are below. This camera is going to get a fair amount of use with future projects and works well with my Vivitar 283 flash for low light work.

A very merry Christmas and best wishes for a great 2014.

I love snow, then again I ski so of course I love snow and winter photography as well. Here's little photography tip on capturing snow well. Cameras are dumb technology, even a top of the line Nikon D4, why? When you meter a scene, the on board meter no matter if it's centre weighted like an old manual focus film camera or matrix metered like a top of the line DSLR will read snow as mid point grey under normal exposure, hence grey snow in black and white and blue snow if you're shooting in colour. To get around this, you deliberately over expose by a stop and a half. If you are shooting say film rated at 400 ISO you expose at 250. In case of shooting on a DSLR it's a different ballgame, when you meter you have to make sure you use the exposure compensation feature and set it a stop and half over, now you have a proper exposure, you will have white snow in your photographs. Camera: Olympus OM-1MD, Zuiko 28 f2.8 lens and MC 50 f1.8 lens. Film: Fuji Superia 400. ...

I'll let the pictures to the talking. Camera: Olympus OM-4, Zuiko 28 f2.8 lens, Film: Kodak Tri-X 400, HC110 B.

A small confession, I haven't taken all that many photos over the past few weeks due to getting over a recent cold but discovered some work I haven't uploaded to here. Back at the end of the Summer I was a waiting for a friend for dinner mid town, she was running behind so I decided to take a wander through Rosedale, it's one of my favourite neighbourhoods for exploring. One of the wealthiest postal codes in the country Rosedale has remained largely intact in terms of the re-development craze of the last decade and a half where nice houses get torn down and replaced by larger tackier imitations of Lake Como or Loire Valley estates. Camera OM-4, mostly the Zuiko 28 f2.8 lens Film: Kodak Tri-X 400

What you see below is the end result of a very busy fall. I'm president of the Oakville Camera Club and every year we hold an annual photography competition open to the public called Capture Oakville  which as been going on for the past seven years. This year the club put the event on hiatus, first off Capture Oakville was in dire need of a re-fresh and secondly we wanted to try Queen Elizabeth Park Community Cultural Centre 's main gallery with an internal exhibit with the theme My World in Transition. It was a pretty wide open topic to facilitate a large number of entries from club members. Now, curating, framing, hanging 80 prints and putting on a smaller event that drew my guess about 150 people on opening night is no easy feat, the Capture Oakville Director stepped down due to professional commitments and thankfully the committee responsible stepped up. I can't thank Kieley Hickey, Walter Sawka Wojtek Ziobicki enough for curating and hanging the exhibit, I know t...

Have you ever been out and you got everything weather wise thrown at you? About a month ago I went out on a hike at one of my favourite spot at Forks of the Credit Provincial Park, needed a break from a few projects I was working on. My path of choice is through the minuscule hamlet of Brimstone at the south end of the Park. Over the course of the morning I experienced rain showers, clear patches and then sleet. Yes sleet, when that fell I decided it was time to walk back to the car and go have lunch in Belfountain. I did however manage to take some pictures along the way, including my favourite spot along the Credit River. Camera: Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss 80 f2.8 Planar Lens, Film: Ilford HP5, HC110 B.

That is the eternal debate in my head as an analogue photographer, will I go digital at some point? With the recent release of the Nikon Df   left me looking at that question. On the surface, this camera was made for me, a full frame DSLR with a flagship grade sensor, no video capability (not really interested in video), manual controls and the ability to use Nikkor Ai and Non Ai lenses which I have plenty of. Now there's the challenge, the camera is retailing for about $3000 in Canada and I estimate I would have to spend another $1500 to get up to speed. So ok $4500, that's a lot of coin, in fact I can buy a Nikon FM3a which is the last manual focus film camera Nikon made in house (the FM10 is made by Cosina) and a supply of black and white film and chemicals to keep me going until the year 2024. So what would have I to buy along with the Df to be in the "digital" world? My shopping list would include multiple terabyte external hard drives because RAW files are b...

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....

Lest everyone get the idea the only subjects I shoot are landscapes and urban environments I do portraiture as well on occasion with the Friends of Bill Project. Say you have a friend or family member for that matter shove a smart phone or a camera into your hands and want you take their picture, here are some great tips. Understand what your camera can and cannot do, doesn't matter if it's a iPhone or Android handset or a Nikon D4, it's the person using the device that makes the photo. First off understand the rule of thirds, if you are shooting horizontally or in landscape, you don't want your subject's head smack in the middle, I usually shoot slightly off centre.  The second thing you want to do is make sure your subject's eyes are sharp, this is more the case with a proper camera than with a smart phone. Finally you want to make the light work for you, contrary to popular opinion overcast days have great light for portraiture as the light is diffused,...

It's been a while since I wandered around the downtown core with a camera in hand. Usually when that happens it's during the week, in this case it was late Saturday afternoon before the annual Toronto Photowalks party. Downtown was packed with Toronto Maple Leafs fans, more so than usual before a game which surprised me a bit. One thing I must do more often is wander more downtown, due to the pace of change, familiar landmarks are disappearing too quickly for my liking. In fact I recently noticed one of my favourite art deco office buildings owned by Oxford Properies got torn down recently on Adelaide just north of First Canadian Place. The entrance was an architectural gem, I hope it will be preserved as part of the new building. The immediately above was shot on an Olympus OM-1md, Zuiko 28 f3.5 lens Kodak Tri-X 400 processed in HC110 B. Everything below was shot with the same film developer combination but with my Leica M4-2 and Canon 50 f1.4 LTM lens.