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.