Flying has always been to me this wonderful metaphor. In order to fly you have to trust what you can’t see. Up on the mountain ridges where very few people have been I have thought back to what every flyer knows. That there is this special world in which we dwell that is not marked with boundaries; that’s not a map. We’re not hedged about with walls and desks. So often in an office the very worst thing that can happen is you could drop your pencil. Out there’s a reminder that there are a lot worse things that can happen, and a lot greater rewards.

–Richard Bach, television interview

I don’t have any aerial photos to show this time, not because we were grounded by the hazy weather but because I was sitting in the pilot’s seat.

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The last shot on the roll before I got it put to CD this evening. Taken in Dundas Square around 6 o’clock.

Have lots to accomplish tonight, the photo processing will have to take a back seat for now.

Tomorrow my older brother is turning 36, and David would’ve turned 40. I have a plane booked for 6:30-8:00 tomorrow evening to fly over the city, Lake Ontario, and the general area. Since I can’t get to Rhinebeck tomorrow, this is the next best thing: get up in the sky.

You Are Beautiful is sort of an art-meets-life campaign, by the way.

As seen on the TTC enroute to work. I now carry three cameras every day, and I shoot with the smaller one (Canon A520) if I don’t want to be seen or heard. I say heard because the mirror and the AF motor on the Pentax K100D (DSLR) is quite loud. The Pentax K-1000 film SLR’s mirror is louder, but on a streetcar I want mute equipment. I’m carrying the film camera because I have a partially exposed roll from Wings & Wheels on Saturday and I want to finish it and get the whole thing transferred to CD. The K-1000 is heavy metal and the K100D has a metal chassis, so you can imagine how much it all weighs…

It’s worth it, though. Photography makes me look forward to solitude, yet it has a way of sparking conversation with total strangers.

Yesterday in the Distillery District, we climbed several flights of stairs in an historic building to find one of the areas featured in Open Doors. We didn’t find it, so we peeked in at one of the galleries participating in CONTACT. At one landing on the way down, I took a photo of an artifact on a ledge and a man remarked to me that he encountered a woman huffing and puffing after climbing the stairs, complaining that she climbed all those steps and there was nothing to see! He thought it was an amusing thing to say, since the people with cameras all found things to photograph along the way.

It’s been a big weekend of photography, attending exhibits and visiting venues for two major annual events that ran both Saturday and Sunday — Wings & Wheels, Doors Open — and dipping into a third, Contact (which runs all of May). Aviation, architecture, and photography, what could be better?

After all this running around I’m in serious need of a nap, so I’ll post a few of my favourites over the past two days for now:

Technorati tags: Doors Open, Wings & Wheels, Toronto, architecture, aviation

Wings & Wheels 2007
Toronto Aerospace Museum
Downsview Park

The full story of this Canadian aviation legend can be found here. The story behind the replica is here.

The photo set thus far from Day 1 of Wings & Wheels 2007 can be viewed using PictoBrowser:

Technorati tags: Avro Arrow, replica, aviation

Wings & Wheels 2007
Toronto Aerospace Museum
Downsview Park

This fellow asked me to take a picture of him in his MG in front of the Arrow replica. Far be it from me to say no when someone actually asks for his picture to be taken! (Doug, I will send you the links to full-size versions of all the photos by email.)

1970 Jaguar in "The Hangar"
Wings & Wheels 2007
Toronto Aerospace Museum
Downsview Park

I love the ribbon of hangar reflection across the hood.

A fountain on the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition, aka “The X”) grounds. I was driving home and decided to go through the CNE, and spotted this lit fountain that changed colours every so often. Of course, I had to stop…

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I have so many things to write about I don’t know where to start. Last week? The week before that? Start with today and go backwards? Sure, OK. I’m yawning uncontrollably, so we’ll see how far I get.

When I walked out of my office building after work today, there were people EVERYWHERE. I mean, unusual numbers of people, as if there was a massive convention and everyone spilled out of the Metro halls all at once and flooded the streets. I was half-expecting a film crew to broadcast that we were in a credit card commercial or something, but as I walked I overheard someone say the subways were all shut down. Which would explain the intersections crammed with people and buses filled to the brim, but I still don’t know why the subways were closed. (Anybody know?)

I decided to skip the crowded sidewalks and hit Eaton Centre to try and replace some of my ratty clothing. I worked from home for years and stopped buying “business casual”, but now I have to bite the bullet and go shopping again. Ugh. It has to be done, and I’m one of those must-try-on people who can’t order clothes online. I had something to eat to fortify myself for the rigorous task of scanning racks and racks and racks of apparel that look all the same, then had a flash of inspiration and ducked out to indulge it.

I went to church — the Church of the Holy Trinity. It’s located adjacent to Eaton Centre — or, rather, Eaton Centre is located directly beside it since the church has been there since 1847. The door was open so I snuck in and took a few pictures. I’m not religious, but I’ll take the inside of a church over a mall any day of the week.

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