Today was a day of firsts. I used my first rolls of self loaded bulk film…not exactly my first, but my first in over 35 years. There was also the first roll put through in my Nikon FM2n that I acquired six years ago. And it was also my first meeting with the Toronto Film Facebook group since joining them about two weeks ago.
My first roll, however, was of images taken during a walk on James St. North in Hamilton.
I ended my walk at Green Bar where I had a smoothie prepared by a friend I haven’t seen in awhile. The dim lighting required that I shoot wide-open at f/2.5, 1/15th. The shot was still underexposed by about 1/2 stop, but motion blur was a real risk. I missed focus by about two feet!
Some spirited driving took me Toronto in time to meet with the Toronto Film group for the ‘Spring has Sprung’ meetup at Downtown Camera.
The image below led to an encounter with the gentleman pushing the motorbike on the sidewalk. I’ve never encountered this kind of resistance doing street photography before. He demanded that I delete the picture, but when I told him it was film, he wasn’t sure what to say. I asked him why he was so angry and he started spouting off about our group being racist (we were actually a racially diverse group of both genders) and about the cops beating him, and the world being unfair, etc. That’s when I found a “hook” to empathize with him and said that I agreed with him that life can be unfair and that he should just hang on. He was actually in tears when I left him after about five minutes. By then my group had moved down the street waiting for my encounter to end.
