It's Monday. Start of a new week. I'm in my office wasting time since my dear coworker does his job half assed. I would really like to know if I'll get the work I requested on Friday by today, mind you, this work should have been completed of Friday. But anyhow, I don't give a hoot. I've just finished editing and posted my pictures from the weekend.
Speaking of the weekend... I went to Photo
Service to pick up chemicals and black and white film. As much as I appreciate Corlab, I definetly want to get back to developing my films. Firstly because I develop them as soon as I get home; none of this waiting 2 days to go pick them up cross town. Secondly because, well, to develop one black and white film I think costs me somewhere of 1.50$ in production costs. But, thirdly, I want to do black and white because it's a more expressive medium than color is. It's true, color film make everything look "pretty". With black and white, one really has to concentrate more on texture, composition, the general feeling of an image.
Saturday, after having picked up all my chemicals and my film loaded into their cassettes, I grabbed my grey card, tripod and camera. I set up a basic scene outside on the patio. I had to make a film test in order to determine how the combination of the camera's meter, the film processing (agitation, chemicals, hardness of water) and the camera's metering system will work. I had done this previously with other films, but not with the final medium being a scanned image. Well, before now, my medium of choice was paper! Well, it still is, but circumstances being what they are, I don't have the option of setting up my enlarger. For now, the scanner and my computer (or my website) will have to do. Here are the results of the film test:
With test in hand, lots of film in my pocket, on Sunday I set out to take pictures. I didn't really plan on taking pictures, but I got stood up for climbing. Anyhow, I headed towards Old Montreal
in the afternoon. As usual, I started walking around but, since I'm not working with color, I was seeing a bunch of new images appear to me. I've walked pretty much every square foot of the Old Port and I can always make 
a different picture. I started out like my previous outing. Getting off on the outskirts of the downtown business district and headed towards the river and the Old Port. Turning on alley ways and little cobble stone streets, which is the charm of Old Montreal, you know, life in the 1800's. It was an amazing day. Nice and warm without a single cloud in the sky, which was not entirely good for me as I would have liked some texture in the sky lines. But I'm not complaining, I take what I can get.
Before long, I get to the real tourist section of the Port. A large crowd is gathering up surely to watch a street performer do his show. I go and join in, poking my lens between the 
people standing. Sure enough, it's a street performer. I had seen him previously, he is quite good. His show consists of comedy, fire juggling and riding a unicycle. The crowd is rather large around him and he looks to be enjoying what he is doing, after all, he is an artist and to have a crowd like that come and watch your work is pretty satisfying. Unfortunately, I had gotten to his show a bit on the late side. I did not have a good vantage point on him despite of circling the crowd to find a little hole I could squeeze in. I decided to go on with my tour. I was going to go along the boardwalk and see if there are any shots worthwhile. I did manage to find a few! I also saw a guy who sets up an outdoor climbing wall. It looked to be about 30 feet high, no texture on the wall and dead easy. I would figure at best a 5.7 in difficulty. I didn't bother to take any pictures of that, in fact, I had to crop that structure out of a frame. Mind you, that picture did not make the final selection. I kept walking. I arrived at the over pass, well, at least I call it an over pass. It's this second level walkway overlooking the port. Boats are docked on the water and people keep strolling by. To tell you the truth, it's a pretty relaxing walk! Granted, I've never really walked there just for the sake of walking. Most of the time I've always had a camera in my hands.
Coming to full circle from where the street performer was, I decide to go mingle with the crowd. A bunch of people walking around is bound to be interesting, besides, I needed people close up in my frames. As I'm walking, I hear that same performer start screaming: "Show is about to begin!" I think to myself: "Rad!" as there was no one around him. I snap a picture of him. He did notice me taking pictures, but he didn't mind at all, he was actually pretty easy going. Not like the "free hugs" guy from a few weeks back. I take a place and squat down on the floor. I was not going to miss this show. I take a few more frames. Now, the crowd has gathered around him. Like before, there is a bunch of people but this time, 
I have a front row seat. I quickly check the frame counter on my camera and I notice that I'm at around frame 20. I figure, at best I have 10 shots left. I decide to sacrifice them and change the roll for a fresh one. Now, film loaded, I begin to snap pictures! I try not to burn film, but instead I was selective to the frames I snap off. As I mentioned before, I had
noticed this performer before, on previous outings, but I don't think I had ever sat through one of his shows in it's entirety. I did on this one. The guy is pretty good! He uses comedy, he engages with the audience and, of course, he has his stunts going. The show lasted for about 10 minutes, the finale being him riding a unicycle and juggling pins. The crowd dissipated and I went on my merry way to finish off the roll of film I currently had in the camera. I had a great Sunday afternoon, even better, getting home and getting right to processing my films. It's the beauty about working with black and white. It's a do-it-yourself'er.
