Justfolk's photos

Me, I mean: *I* was listening to the radio. But the cat was interested in hanging about. This was last weekend. Just today we got a new hardwood floor down in this room. This was 2007-expired Konica VX200 Super in the Olympus XA.

I've known George for at least forty years -- we have moved in the same circles in the university we were both students at and eventually we both worked at. He's most of a decade older than I am and so retired a few years ago. He says, "I never retired! I quit!" but, for everyone else, that's splitting hairs. I'm still working. He dropped by my office and we chatted a while. I took three pictures of him. I didn't like the colour in any of them, and this was the best when converted.

This was six weeks ago, late one day in early April, a pretty nice day in early spring. The old people used to talk of only two seasons here, winter and summer, with winter covering the five or six months from Dec to April, and summer the rest of the year. I go along with that myself. Here it is, the 18th of May and there is still snow to be seen in dark piles but, really, it is summer, as good as it gets in May. I had been looking at these three adjacent pictures as a vertical strip since I got the film developed but tonight I put them in this faux panoramic format. The three pictures *were* taken in sequence as we drove along the highway, so they do belong here like this. This was 2007-expired Konica VX200 film in my Olmpus Pen D3.

I overlooked this picture two or three years ago when I took it. It's about 60% of a half-frame negative, on Kodak Pro Image 100 film, taken in my Olympus Pen D3. It shows my sternlaw and bernlaw late one evening while the meal and imbibation were settling in.

Bowring Park recently celebrated its hundredth anniversary, and it is just as popular today for the commemoration of rites of passage as it was in 1915. There was a long white limousine parked just outside the frame when I took this picture, and there were a half-dozen other well-dressed teenagers wandering around getting their pictures taken by parents elsewhere in the park. Pronounced "Boring Park" by most of us, it is anything but boring. It is a nice example of a European-style urban park in a city that mostly has large, square patches of grassy, treed lawns passing as parks.

Pretty tiny crop.

It was thirty degrees Celcius on the 30th of July last summer when I took this picture on 15-years-expired Ilford XP2 in my (nearly) sixty-year Yashica A. The film turned out to be in pretty hard shape. The images were thin and the scans produced a fairly narrow range of tone. I didn't try to clean up any of the dust spots or degraded areas.

My neighbour Nancy was shovelling her driveway in mid-February when I was out and about taking pictures with a roll of Ektachrome 50 (Tungsten) that had expired in November 1979. That means the film had been waiting around to be used for probably 38 or 40 years. I shot it more or less at rated speed. The images were very very thin after being developed in regular E6 chemicals this week, so I did some substantial curve management and ultimately converted them to b&w (using here a green filter). Typical of film this much expiry, there is some pretty substantial printing of the paper markings through the images. I *think* I shot them in the Yashica A, but I might have used the Mamiyaflex. I can't remember and don't think I wrote it down. The original scan of this is nearly 30 MB but I resized it way down to post it here.

I had a short chat with Alejandro and Norma, two people I exchanged picture-taking with in the front yard of a nice restaurant in Santa Marta, Cuba. It was the end of the day on El Primero de Mayo, too late in the day for us to see the parades and speeches, but still during the general festivity. I wish now I had gotten their email address to send them a copy of this.

Three or four joined houses.

The forms of English "ain't got" and "don't got" were never heard around these parts fifty years ago when I was a boy. They just were not part of the local vernacular. But they've caught on and become commom, at least among the under-35 age group. But that's not the only reason I took this picture. I like words with lots of meanings. "Shit" is definitely a word with several accounts at the semantics bank, and some of those accounts are pretty hefty. Just what this graffitist meant when she/he wrote those words is beyond me: which acount was she/he drawing on?

This, more or less, is what my wife and I did for the past week. It was a good break from freezing drizzle and cold rain.

From a roll of 15-year-old Tri-X I shot last summer, July 2014, in the Rollei Prego 125. This is *not* the same house as the last picture; they are about 200 km apart.

The neighbouring house to ours has been empty for about fifteen years, maybe more, and the owner hasn't been by in five years. A year or so ago, a local pet cat somehow got in and could not get out. She was missed but no one knew where she was. She was found three weeks later, skitzed and hungry, but otherwise okay. Someone walking by saw her in this window and opened a door to let her out. She'd been drinking rainwater from a leak in the roof. I started looking in last year just to see how things are. I took this picture one day in July 2014 with my Rollei Prego 125 and some very old Tri-X film, film I'd had around since the late 1990s. Nine months later, yesterday, I developed the film (in three-years-expired T-Max developer). The film held up fairly well. I don't think the images are as sharp as they could have been, but that softness may be the Prego, and it may be the scanning (the film was not especially flat on the scanner).

I just developed a couple of rolls of Tri-X that I shot last summer. This was Tri-X that expired in the late 1990s. I took the picture in my Rollei Prego Zoom 125.

Our fox sparrow was back today and I got a clearer picture of him.

I took these two pictures primarily because of the flags hanging out three windows. Ten-years-expired (2005) Konica Centuria 200 film in Olympus XA. The XA generally has substantial vignetting; you can see it in the middle but you cannot see it at the two ends because of the white sky.

This was Goldie sitting by, waiting for his four or five finch friends to lay off at the trough.