kids drawing an ocean on the sidewalk

I got wind of a community art project last Friday that could use some photos, so I headed over to Brockton Village (Dundas West) on Saturday to see what I could shoot for an hour. There I found artists chalking up the sidewalks, making pedestrians and cars take pause or slow down to look down. It’s the joint effort of local residents who wanted to animate their neighbourhood, which was part of a Jane’s Walk on Sunday.

I love community art. Just as it’s mentioned in the article, it helps neighbours get to know each other, especially people who would otherwise not meet. In a city of millions, it’s common not to know your neighbour, which is why events such as this are important for building community spirit.

Dundas West has some excellent murals

In the media: http://www.insidetoronto.com/news/local/article/1348105–brockton-village-chalking-it-up-to-experience

The group’s Facebook pages:
https://www.facebook.com/events/332809053452954/
https://www.facebook.com/BlockChalked

The thing about chalk art graffiti is that it’s at the mercy of the weather, and although the weather was gorgeous on the weekend, I knew it wouldn’t last. That’s where I step in, as I’m used to doing for weddings, where it is my job to photograph the work of makeup artists, hairstylists, bakers, and chefs who put their heart and soul into creating works of art which last only one day. After a wedding, only the pictures remain. Chalk art is just as ephemeral. This is something I find incredibly exciting about photography — that I am able to preserve art to be enjoyed long after it’s destroyed or fades away.

stop and read

The other thing about chalk art graffiti is that most of the chalk used at Chalk The Block is very light, which means I had to use HDR techniques to show the art properly. I’ve probably mentioned before that I’m not much of a fan of HDR, but can see its usefulness. I’ve applied the technique rather liberally to Saturday’s pictures.

Chalk The Block event photos are best viewed as a full-screen slideshow, thumbnails, or view smaller in the slideshow below.

I also took some non-chalk-art photos that day, some of my favourites are here:

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imagine the electricity bill

This house is within walking distance to Helma’s house, and it has more lights than the local airport runway. Something tells me the people who live here REALLY want Santa to find their house! I drove by it on the way in, and I just had to photograph it.

Because I didn’t have my mobile phone with me I didn’t shoot a video — consider yourselves spared from the Christmas music accompanying the light display. I imagine you’ve had enough Christmas music by now.

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centipede pumpkin

I took a time-out from Heavy-Duty Editing Mode to look at a bunch of gourds in my local park, which has been a growing neighbourhood event for some time now. On November 1, people take their Halloween pumpkins and put them on display for all to enjoy for one more night in Sorauren Park. In an animated world, the pumpkins would be mingling and socializing with each other, maybe talk about porches and candle wax and the post-Halloween blues.

This is my third year of the pumpkin parade, and every year I tweak my strategy a little bit for taking photos… because you need a strategy when there are over a thousand pumpkins side-by-side and hundreds of people, all trying to do the same thing as you are. This year my main strategy was to go late and skip the crowds. It’s near impossible to take photos in a crush of people and the pumpkins are mostly on the ground, which requires taking up more space as you crouch or kneel.

shooting the shooter

Sorauren Park is to the east of Roncesvalles Village, anchored by commercial activity along Roncesvalles Avenue. Here at the park, there are neighbours bumping into each other all the time, which gives the pumpkin parade a block party feel. That plus the dogs and kids running around.

This year was the most interactive for me. The last couple of years friends joined me for part of it, but this time I went solo and chatted with more people. Previously, strangers were curious but nobody actually asked me why I was using extra flashes, but this year a lady did, and I explained to her the advantage of backlighting. I also bumped into the cafe owner I mentioned yesterday, and someone came up to me and said he recognized me from this blog when he searched online for “Sorauren Park Pumpkin Parade”, which I thought was pretty funny. If he does another search he’ll find this post mentioning him recognizing me through this blog, which is even funnier… (to me, anyway).

lobster?

Every year there are scene-stealers, and last year it was the massacre scene and the alligator pumpkin — which was really a bunch of pumpkins rather than one. This year the massacre was back, minus the alligator, but with the centipede-like creature in the top photo that looked like it was out for blood, and this giant lobster creature.

Some of my other favourites include this one — I thought the mice were a nice touch:

pumpkin mouse house

There’s definitely a fashion to pumpkin art; every year reflects current events and icons and this year was no different. There was a Jack Layton pumpkin, I noticed a few Lady Gaga pumpkins, and someone had the bright idea to carve all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Of course, being from Winnipeg, I spotted the Winnipeg Jets pumpkin right away (I even collected the team’s hockey cards when I was a kid; this was back in the early ’80s!):

Hooray for Winnipeg!

What would a pumpkin parade in Toronto be without some Rob Ford pumpkins? Here’s a rather pointed message carved into a pumpkin:

not a Rob Ford fan

And thus concludes another year of the neighbourhood pumpkin patch. Pumpkin numbers appeared to be down from last year (which was up from the year before), but I don’t know why. It was much colder last year, so you would think the warmer temps this year would draw more pumpkins, but it seemed to be fewer pumpkins but more spectators. I shouldn’t talk, though, my pumpkin from the corn maze engagement shoot is still sitting in my car, uncarved (and uneaten)!

In case you’re wondering whether it’s only the raccoons who benefit from a parkful of hacked pumpkins and the nearest houses get rotting stench, there’s an arrangement with the City to compost all this vegetable matter the following morning.

Photos from the previous two years:

Sorauren Park Pumpkin Parade 2010
Sorauren Park Pumpkin Parade 2009

This year’s display is best viewed as a full-screen slideshow, or thumbnails, or autoplayed in the slideshow below:

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http://www.amazingpartystore.com

I was searching for a place to buy a Carnival of Venice mask for a dinner on Saturday, the very first one-of-a-kind-dinner I’ve been able to attend since the Avatar-themed dinner over a year and a half ago!

In my search for something I thought might be a little obscure, I discovered a whole SUPERSTORE full of all things Halloween and costumes:

http://www.amazingpartystore.com/

This place is a trip! It’s a warehouse crammed to the rafters with everything you can imagine for transforming yourself into pretty much anything else — zombie makeup, chain-mail suits, Dame Edna glasses, oversized clown boots, the Grim Reaper, you name it. I was only there for a mask, but I did a quick go-round the store to see what else they carried and it made my eyes pop.

As you can imagine practically everything is made in China, which makes me wonder if rubber masks will give people rashes and painted things contain lead. Caveat emptor, I guess — there’s a reason why this stuff is cheap!

The mask I did end up buying was pretty cheap, too ($15). I was going to show it here, but decided to hold off so it’s a surprise at the dinner, where I’ll take DSLR photos. If I had more time, I would’ve tried to make it myself and win the contest for best mask, but I’m forever short on time these days and I can live with buying a $15 mask. I’m more interested in tasting what Clint will come up with to go along with the Carnival of Venice theme!

http://www.amazingpartystore.com

More photos from the party store:

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No time for commentary, unfortunately, I’ll add some later and leave you with some pics for now… here are last year’s. The alligator/crocodile pumpkin creature (above) was really impressive! Being adjacent to a scene of pumpkin carnage added to the Halloween effect.

Justin Bieber really gets around, doesn’t he?

I loved the bicycle! The flame in the second wheel went out, so I put my flash behind it to light it up. You can see the flash head through the hole.

For those who don’t live in Toronto, Rob Ford is the city’s mayor-elect. No, I did not vote for him; I’m trying to ignore the sound of his voice.

I haven’t figured out who this is. He looks like a cross between Freddie Mercury and a young Vincent Price.

The photos are best viewed as a [full-screen slideshow], or just sit back and watch the smaller slideshow below (click on it to view thumbnails):

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Willfully ignoring the construction chaos just a few feet away, I bought some chicken stew from a local bakery/deli and ate dinner by the statue of Pope John Paul II. Afterwards I took out my camera and shot the scene around me with the 50mm f/1.8. For the past few years since I moved here, I’ve been continually impressed with how well-kept the area is around the statue. There are always flowers in front and candles are often burning into the night.

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What is it about trains that make me stop and take photos? Is it the Old World charm? A nod to the power of the Industrial Revolution? The singularity of a journey on one track with no traffic or real intersections? The steadiness, the speed low enough to take in surroundings (excluding the TGV in France and bullet trains in Japan, of course)? All of the above?

Whatever it is, I sure do take a lot of train photos. These three were all shot on film in Wakefield, Quebec, last Saturday.

http://www.steamtrain.ca/

This is (one of) the last steam-powered train left in Canada and there are only 1-2 scenic rail departures a day, so we were very lucky to be near the tracks at all when it went by, but we were doubly lucky to have cameras at the ready. Thanks, H!

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I completely forgot last week was my fourth anniversary of moving into this neighbourhood, until today when I heard the singing. I moved to Roncesvalles Village on June 1, 2007. My friend Arliin helped me move and told me that locals call it “Roncy” for short. She said I’ll really like it here, and she was right.

The first Sunday of June is when I hear the singing (if I’m around), a group of voices singing in Polish. It’s quite a large crowd that gathers, but the only sound you’ll hear is the singing, there’s no chatter. They go from one house to another in a processional. I don’t know how the houses are selected, but for the last four times I’ve observed them in my area it’s been the same houses. (Post from 2007.) This time there was a girl handing out pamphlets about Katyn, and probably also the plane crash that claimed the Polish president and nearly a hundred others a couple of months ago.

I went back to my archives and found some video clips from the 2007 I hadn’t uploaded (I don’t think Flickr had the video feature back then).

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I have a category in my sidebar for ‘Local Colour’ which was originally a subcategory of ‘Expat Life’. I was writing about what it was like to live in semi-rural Pennsylvania and my observations of little eccentricities like gigantic inflatable crabs on seafood restaurants nowhere near the sea. Now that I’m not living there anymore, I wasn’t sure what to do with ‘Local Colour’, and decided recently to promote it from subcategory and expand it to include local colour from wherever I live.

I have a mental list of places I need to visit while I live here, and Communist’s Daughter is one of them. It’s a tiny bar that’s popular with the locals and within walking distance of my own neighbourhood. I haven’t been there yet because I’m not really a barfly, and the fact that it’s small and often jam-packed is somewhat of a deterrent. Apparently the only way to get a seat is to go early on a weeknight. Sometime this summer, maybe on the way home from work, I’ll wander over there and check it out myself. In the meantime I found this video online, shot by my friend Sai, that’ll give you an idea of why it’s so popular.

Review on Yelp: http://www.yelp.ca/biz/communists-daughter-toronto

What made me think of this place was a conversation from last night, which turned out to be an unexpected evening with documentary filmmakers. What began as a key drop-off at a pub (I was lending my car) turned out to be seven hours of commingling with doc people, which for me is always interesting. Photography and videography are bedfellows, and the driving forces behind documentary films are the same for photojournalism: non-fiction storytelling. While I do far less story-telling here than I have in the past, in person I tell more stories than ever — mainly because as I get older there are more stories to tell. Thus the evening grew longer and longer…

The gathering at Pauper’s Pub in the Annex was a monthly meeting for doc people, and from there Jan and I went to a coffee bar a few doors down to meet another documentary filmmaker. The Green Beanery closed at 10pm (it used to be a bank — check out The Vault), so she suggested we head over to a place further west called Three Speed, which was hopping. The back patio was the only place left with seating, but it was perfect for a spring evening — spacious yet cozy.

For someone who claims not to be a barfly, last night was practically a pub crawl.

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View larger.

I had been in town barely a few hours, only long enough to dine at Kirin Restaurant (City Square) for a fancy dim sum, when Eliza took me to False Creek to photograph around Science World and the Olympic Village area. We needed to walk off the food coma. There was a group of people standing at the railing over the water, but we had no idea what they were looking for. Someone walked by and all I heard was “whale” but I didn’t think they were referring to one located in the water beneath us.

Here’s the CTV news piece about it (video and photos): Grey whale wanders into downtown

I saw the media choppers circling above False Creek, so no doubt they had the best views of the whale.

Then all of a sudden it appeared not more than 20 metres away from us and I was so shocked by the sight (and closeness) of it and startled by Eliza’s shrieking that by the time I tried to take a photo it had submerged. I stayed on the Olympic Village side of False Creek and watched the whale surface about five or six times. These are the best three photos I could manage with the wrong kind of lens (I needed a telephoto for this) and a bunch of cropping.

View larger.

View larger.

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