In my second post on the beach at Bluffer’s park I am featuring a number of images of driftwood that caught my in the early morning sun this past Saturday. One piece of driftwood in particular really stood out, and is featured in multiple frames. All images created using my Hasselblad 500C/M, shot on Rollei RPX25 film.
Yesterday morning I went out early to the beach in Bluffer’s Park in Scarborough, Ontario. I was shooting on a low speed film (Rollei RPX 25), so everything was on a tripod with slow shutter speeds. The combination of the slow shutter speed and a decent onshore breeze (making for active waves) made for an interesting effect on the water.
Hasselblad 500C/M, 80mm/2.8 Planar lens
Rollei RP 25 film, developed in Rodinal
I tend to not do a lot of night photography, and I really have to change that! It is a real gap in my work. I did do a night shoot the other evening with fellow photographer friend Bill Smith: I love the night time look of the Murphy’s Law pub in Toronto at Queen St / Kingston Road. We set up our cameras on tripods across the street an shot during gaps in the traffic.
Hasselblad 500C/M, 80mm/2.8 Planar lens
Lomography 400 C-41 film
If you’re a 35mm film shooter you’ve been here: you have a couple of blank frames on a roll of film, and you don’t want to waste them so you look for something, anything to shoot to finish the roll. That was the case for this image: I wanted to see the other shots on the roll, had a few shots left, so on a day where the sun shone brightly onto a table in our sunroom, I got the idea of putting a mask in the sunlight and shooting it with my 55mm Micro-Nikkor macro lens. Very happy with the results!
Nikon F4S, 55mm/3.5 Micro-Nikkor lens
Orwo UN54 film developed in Tmax Developer
OK, one FINAL shot from the White Water Walk 🙂 What I like about this image is the fact it got accidentally photo-bombed by the young girl in the lower left hand corner, and originally when working with this image I cropped her out. As I looked at the image again though, I liked the sense of story created by having her in the image, looking down the trail.
Hasselblad 500C/M, 50mm/4 Distagon lens
Rollei RPX 400 film stand developed in Rodinal
1+100, 1 hour
When I finished up and developed a roll of RPX 400 film that had been in my Hasselblad film holder for a few weeks, I found a few more images of the White Water Walk close to Niagara Falls that I had forgotten about. A pleasant surprise!
After a fun Nikkormat – themed photowalk with my friend Bill Smith, we ducked into a pub for a beer. From our table facing the front of the restaurant I couldn’t help but notice a couple who seemed oblivious to each other, and were glued to their phones. I couldn’t resist the image, so I picked up the Nikkormat  with a 105mm/2.5 lens, and shot a few frames wide open at 1/60th of a second, guessing on the exposure (since the camera did not have a functioning meter) and hoping  I could get one frame of Tri-X sufficiently sharp. I got lucky.
This morning my good friend Ori and I met up for an early morning shoot in Scarborough bluffs in Eastern Toronto. These two images were shot using my Nikon F4S, a 28mm/2.8 Nikkor lens, and an oddball film: Eastman 2366, a film meant for creating motion picture positives from negatives, but usable for still photography with developers such as Xtol.
We’ve all seen it: A live performance of some kind, with the adults standing back passively watching, then a child comes up and gets close to the performers and perhaps join in, without the slightest hint of self-consciousness or acceptance of the dividing line between performer and audience. I witnessed one such moment at last weekend’s Open Streets festival as a young girl was entranced by a street band. It was a challenge to create the image; I just had the wide angle on the camera at the time, and I felt I had to take the image from the vantage point of the rest of the audience, so it would appear that I was merely taking photographs of the band, given the antipathy of so many to street photography today, especially when children are involved.
This image has been through a couple of treatments, and this is the final version, with a fair amount of cropping, but leaving enough space to show how the child had become an audience of one.
Nikon F4S, 28mm/2.8 Nikkor lens
ORWO UN54 film developed in Legacy Pro EcoPro developer
I love the shape of the branches of this tree in Ashbridges Bay; they look like tentacles to me.
Rolleiflex 3.5E3 (Xenotar lens)
Tri-X @ EI 320, developed in Legacy Pro MicX developerÂ
My Third Eye 