My Third Eye

I’ve been shooting more 35mm lately (in addition to medium format), and of course with the smaller negative, grain becomes more of a reality. One can either embrace the grain, or try super fine grain film. For today’s image it is the latter: it was made using Adox CMS 20 film (with a speed of ISO 20, so it is very slow and wants a lot of light). It’s basically high contrast microfilm stock, but developed with a special developer to allow continuous tones. This type of film requires some taming, but I love the look! I used my Leica IIIb and a 50mm lens for the image, taken in Guild Park, Scarborough, Ontario Canada.

Thanks to “The Scarborough Dude” for the photo!

It was a great day for the Kodachrome photo-walk in Morningside Park in Scarborough, Ontario yesterday; we couldn’t have ordered better weather, and we had a really nice group of people in attendance. The most popular cameras were Nikons, from a Nikkormat FT2 (mine) to a beautiful F100. A couple of folks had Pentax cameras, and one lucky attendee (here from Texas!) had a gorgeous Leica M6 rangefinder.

What was also really neat to see was over one century-old view camera brought along by one attendee; he wasn’t able to shoot Kodachrome, but instead was shooting paper negatives. Imagine, in an era where digital cameras are declared obsolete after a few years, here was a camera from around 1901, still being used to make images!

The leaves were beautiful, and I can’t wait to see the images. Waiting is part of the experience of course; it will be about a month before we get our slides back. By then the leaves we made images of today will long since be gone, but thanks to Kodachrome the colours will last a long long time!

Scarborough, Ontario, has been given (often unfairly) a reputation of being rather bleak. There are many areas of hidden beauty within Scarborough, but there is still plenty of concrete and asphalt, and in this image of the Kennedy Subway station passenger drop-off, it felt to me like a decayed echo of a space age vision; a future which did not gracefully become the present.

Nikkormat FT2, 24mm f2.8 lens, Ilford XP2+ film