Low Profile
It's good to dip out now and then.
I haven’t been as active here lately, in fact I haven’t been very active online at all. I spend a lot more time hanging with friends, hosting photowalks with my photography club, Lucky Shot, taking a lot of photos at home and while travelling, shooting some film once in a while and then chucking finished rolls into the closet and moving on.
All of this has been very beneficial for my mental, that is to say, I’ve been feeling great and feel it’s time to put out a proper Stay Focused catch up as my last few articles have been very low effort affairs. Not a bad thing, but I certainly haven’t put the time and effort in that I usually do, but the break was nice ngl.
So, I hope you like photos, cause I got a lot. I recently got a schwack of film back from development and have been scanning and editing at a nice, casual pace. Some rolls go back as far as March and the most recent are from a trip to Alberta that I took in June. I’ve shared some of what I shot on my D750, as well as my phone. You can have a look at those here, and here.
For now, to keep things relatively clean, I’ll keep most of the travel photos for some separate articles, as I have a lot I’d like to write about there. So here are some photos from March until May, and maybe June too…who can say.
Note: If this newsletter appears truncated in your email, be sure to click “View entire message”. If you’re reading this on the Substack site on desktop (and you really should!), please click on all of the photos to see them nice and big, the benefit of a newsletter like this!
March
It’s equally one of my favourite, and least favourite months. There are many birthdays that month, including my own…but the weather is typically horrible and so you can’t get out much. You coop up indoors and think about the things you wish you were doing, like documenting slowly disappearing, region specific corner stores.
Having had it with the near constant -20 degree celsius weather, I packed up, grabbed the MJU, and hit the road into Halifax to photograph the Hydrostone area Kwik-Way Groceteria. I’d missed documenting one of Halifax’s oldest and beloved Kwik-Way’s last year before it was torn down and I wasn’t about to let that happen again.
While out that way, I also popped by De Mones barber shop to take some photos from the window outside, as it was early and nothing was open yet.
As luck would have it, the barber pulled up and asked if I was looking to get a hair cut, but having been recently shorn, I declined and instead asked if it’d be ok if I took some photos inside after I’d explained what I was doing there in the first place. He was nice enough to walk me in and let me know a bit of the history. I told him to just do his thing and that I'd be in and out in a jif.
Coffee with my best bud, we start almost every single Sunday this way. We talk about life and work, but mostly we riff and pitch each other on our latest ideas, giggle like school kids in our little corner, and then after caffeination, we hit the pavement with our cameras.
Lastly, one cold day at the end of March, I got the Lucky Shot gang together for a walk, we were joined that day by several new faces, all of whom were awesome. It was a pretty good time.
May
I’ve already shared a few photos from Aprils photo walks here and here, so jump ahead to mid May and things are decidedly warmer, the sun is sunning and the need for layers is finally at an end.
After another Sunday coffee with my best bro, we strolled the south end and I shot some 250D for the first time since I was in Tokyo last October. I’ve been stocking up on both 50D and 250D, as Kodak is putting an end to the respooling of these stocks. 50D has already been stopped, so I’ve been buying up as much as I can from my local film spot after they put out the word.
Nearing the end of May, I had a few frames left on the roll and on a whim decided to go catch the cherry blossoms in Dartmouth before they were gone. While down that way, I walked around the down town and snapped some off as the late day light was popping off.
Having just 4 frames left of the 250D, I brought it along to the Lucky Shot photo walk at the end of May, along with another camera that had a roll of Lucky Color 200 and a spare roll of Lucky SHD 400, which I ended up shooting half as well.
And a few from the Lucky roll, which I gotta say is not my favourite stock. I keep trying and it keeps giving me colours that are to me, very unappealing. I’ve seen others get remarkable looking lab scans so I’m going to be trying some things with my last two rolls in the fridge.
I guess we made it to June after all, so here’s a few of the first frames I shot on my trip to Alberta. I arrived in Strathmore, Alberta in early June and had the MJU in my pocket the whole time. I shot a roll of Ultramax with it and used it more as a random shot taker whenever I saw something cool, if I didn’t have the FM2N on me, or even if I did.
I’ve already got a small stock pile of rolls, and some still in cameras just itching to be finished up, but I'm in no rush lately and I’m ok with that. I think there’s an inherent pressure with sharing stuff as soon as you shoot it or scan it (I thought that way until only recently). But photos are the opposite of the immediate, they freeze the time you are in and keep that moment locked to be shared whenever the time is right, even months or years later - if at all. That’s how I'm treating it anyway.
Stay focused.