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 developer
I enjoyed the Open Streets Toronto festival last Sunday; nice to walk in the middle of the streets. All images taken with Nikon F, F3 and F4 cameras, on either Fomapan 100 or ORWO UN54 film.
My Third Eye 