Some of the boys at the Smiths Falls Malleable Casting Company. Click to see the full panoramic photo/
Toronto. Group photos were often taken over the years to show the team players in a school, plant, or factory for a given year. Smiths Falls pre-WW2 was a very active Canadian factory town with a number of impressive industries. Here are the boys at the “Smiths Falls Malleable Castings Company” in 1944.
It was popular to use a panoramic photograph like the one here. Such extra wide photos were taken by a special camera like the Cirkut. The patent was taken out by William Johnston, buried here in Toronto. NB. Parks Canada have a brief story about ‘Malleable’; its founding and its demise (see pages 313/4 and look at the index near the beginning for other notes and pictures).
The PHSC journal, Photographic Canadiana, has many articles on panoramic photos such as this one titled, “Monster Panoramic Photographs Found Beneath (Ontario) Legislature Floor” found in issue 31-1 on page 20 (members get/can request a free searchable CD index of the first FORTY issues of the Journal and copies of those issues as well). The index is also available on Google.
George Dunbar spotted this interesting photo in the Smiths Falls Public Library and sent it along for all of us to enjoy. Photographs by Cirkut camera were in vogue for a few decades. And yes, there is NO apostrophe in Smiths Falls as far as I can tell.
My mother and her sister are in a c1930 school photo by Cirkut, while years later I was in a non-panoramic (group was small) plant photo (late 1950s). Our late editor Bob Lansdale often took group photos with a regular camera. I saw one case where he used a stairway to good advantage.
Long forgotten, these extra wide group photos are often collected by members and a few have popped up on our show and tell sessions.
