In the summer of 2017, I traveled to Toronto to visit my good friend Rob (pictured in frames 3 and 5 of the sequence above.) Like me, Rob is both a chemist and a film photographer; we’ve been friends since collaborating on a research project at the University of Alberta in 2003. Unlike me, Rob is a Canon shooter. His favourite 35 mm camera, featured in frame 5, is the Canon FTb, of which he owns at least a dozen. (As a collector myself, I do not judge!)
Rob and I spent a pleasant couple of days walking around the city in the sunshine, taking photos on the street, and stopping from time to time in sidewalk cafés to enjoy a leisurely beer. Throughout the trip, I carried my trusty Nikon FM2n, which, as was typical in those days, I had equipped with a 50 mm f/1.4 AI lens and loaded with Kodak Tri-X 400 black-and-white film. In the portrait Rob made of me on his balcony during the visit, which is featured on the “About” page of this website, you can see this camera attached to my wrist and cradled in my lap. As I recall, it did not leave my hand, even when we were not taking pictures.
When I returned to Vancouver, I dutifully developed the film, and filed it away. For reasons that are now lost to time, I never got around to scanning the negatives and processing the photographs in Lightroom (a process that, unlike shooting and developing, I have always found tedious.) Instead, I carefully labelled the rolls I had shot in Toronto (and, later during the same trip, in Montreal) with a sticky note that read, in thick black marker, “Not Yet Scanned.”
I spent a couple of hours this weekend reviewing my archives and came across the note, buried deep in a 3” binder, which was stuffed to overflowing with hundreds of PrintFile (R) Archival Negative Preservers. I decided, finally, to scan the negatives I had exposed on the Toronto waterfront all those years ago. I am very happy I did. The photographs turned out better than expected, and I took great pleasure in arranging this sequence. I am especially pleased to have discovered a few good pictures of my friend, both posed and candid, which I will be sharing here over the next few days.
