I met up with Peter and Lauren this evening at C’est What on Front Street, a brew/vin pub in the St. Lawrence Market area, fully expecting a tableful of muddy people eating dinner.

Let me back up a bit…

The Beer Festival is on this weekend, and if you’re in the general vicinity you’ll know it was held under POURING RAIN with a generous side of lightning. I was cleaning my apartment all day and at one point the CRACK of electrical energy was so loud I was certain it had split the front yard tree in half. The cats scattered in a fright and disappeared until the coast was clear.

Amidst the heavy-duty cleaning of today, I forgot all about the Beer Festival and the chance that anyone would be milling around in this sort of weather. That is, until I got a call that Peter and Lauren and friends were attending the festival but that they’d be at C’est What later.

I was totally ready to hang up the rubber gloves by 7 o’clock, especially since a VERY VERY NAUGHTY CAT took it upon himself to pee at the bottom of the stairs this morning to protest… what, I don’t know, likely food or litterbox-related issues or the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — it’s a mystery since Beano’s not talking. In any case, cleaning was thorough and thoroughly time-consuming. I was ready for a beer.

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A rather cruddy photo of our Couchsurfers gathering, but the only one I took, in the end. A bunch had just departed for the evening, so this is around two-thirds of our total turnout at the outside patio of the Sicilian Cafe. About seven or so of us diehards that were left closed the place down around 12:40am, but there were probably at least 20 people coming and going from 8 o’clock.

The meetup was arranged by a couchsurfer from Serbia who wanted to meet locals (of all stripes, such as we are). The arrangement itself was merely a matter of finding a place, choosing a time, posting it in the forum, and seeing who would show up.

And show up we did, to the point where we took over a series of tables so long I didn’t even get a chance to see who everyone was at the other end. As per usual the crowd was diverse, with travellers and locals mixed together, from new couchsurfers to seasoned surfers, from the newly-expatriated to the multi-expatriated several times over. The conversations are always lively, with lots of stories and information-sharing. Oh, and of course, food — after all, I couldn’t very well visit the Sicilian Cafe without ordering some antipasto…

For more about Couchsurfing, there happens to be an article published in today’s issue of the Toronto Sun online:

Toronto Sun, August 7, 2008: New era of ‘trusting’ travellers open up doors: Social networkers wake up to opportunities to see new places, people on their own turf

My new Sigma 24-60mm f/2.8 lens got a real workout over the weekend, especially on Sunday! I’ll leave the writeups until I get more time. For now, just a few of my favourite photos from Pedestrian Sunday at Kensington Market and a couple of experiments taken at the Beaches.

Kensington Market:

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(Soul II Soul’s track — arguably one of the best singles of 1989)

After about a week of laying low and working on various projects (except for the Summerlicious interlude), I decided to break the work-eat-sleep cycle and join in some meetups around town. On Thursday night after work, I took my houseguest Eve out to the Cadillac, a lounge in neighbouring Queen Street West to meet up with a bunch supporting a Burning Man fundraiser. Because of all the travelling I’ve been doing lately (28 days in a six week period!) I hadn’t seen the couchsurfing crowd in a long while.

Time to break out some Magners!

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On account of my knackered body and peeling face from Sunburn Sunday, the furthest I ventured away from home yesterday was 10 minutes’ walk to the beach to see if I could get some shots of the fireworks. I did make a separate trip to Vincent Sushi for a roll and miso soup, but it’s a couple of minutes closer than the beach.

Once I arrived at the beach with equipment in tow, I discovered that not only did I forget the mounting plate for Garry’s tripod at home, but also my spare batteries… GRRR! I got only a few shots before the batteries depleted for good, this being one of them.

Thankfully this mostly fruitless trip was a short one, with perfect weather and a pleasant lake shore ambience beside the Palais Royale.

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It’s 6 o’clock on Saturday morning and I have yet to go to bed. Why? I think my body is in some form of sugar shock.

A bunch of us invaded Maria’s place like a band of modern-day pirates, except we didn’t make off with anything except bellies full of nachos, pasta, cocktails, champagne, and a variety of chocolate, including the shipment of Dove chocolate that arrived at my door 12 hours earlier.

I don’t have enough brainpower to upload more than two photos from the evening, even though I’ve got heaps of good ones. The rest will have to wait! But this one of Nadja the Chocoholic basically sums it up:

My three visitors got stuck in traffic across the border and arrived around 4am, so they are all out like a light now. Even the cats are impatiently waiting for me to go to bed. Beano’s laying across my arm as if to say, “I’ll just cut off the blood flow to your fingers, then you’ll go numb and stop typing, right?”

Umbrella Drink (not mine)
Swan & Firkin Pub
Bloor West, Toronto

Whoa! The past two weekends and the weekdays in-between have been the busiest I can remember since I moved here. I didn’t even get a chance to write about the previous weekend, and now another weekend has passed and it’s Monday?? How can this be?

Well, first things first: I’ve said before that I’m not much of a meme-r, but I promised Anf I would do his meme back on April 25. Yikes, that’s a week and a half ago.

Here goes:

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Flickr’s Community Manager Heather Champ is in town partly because she’s speaking at a conference up north and Flickr is also a sponsor for Toronto’s annual CONTACT Photography Festival taking place all of May. She invited us to have “a drink and chat” at the tequila bar called Reposado on Ossington between Dundas and Queen, which of course is like a cattle call to… cattle. Free drinks on Flickr? See you there! It’s beginning to look like a running theme, here. The lure of “free” is too great for us mere mortals.

The event officially finished at 8:30, and I got in just under the wire (read: last call) in the crush at Reposado. As it is with any Flickr event, flashes were going off left, right, and centre. While I was waiting for my drink at the bar, the girl beside me said, “Hey, you’re one of my contacts on Flickr!”

For someone who’s been on Flickr for nearly four years, I don’t have that many contacts, and the last time I attended a Flickr meetup in Toronto was AUGUST 2006!

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The weather forecasters were all wrong about the weekend, and this time it was in our favour — it didn’t rain! In fact, it didn’t really rain until today, which is fine because it’s Monday and most of us are working.

The fact that the TTC was on strike didn’t seem to deter people from getting out and about over the weekend. Motor vehicle traffic was heavier, as expected, but there were plenty of people around town. I was barely at home so the stories and photos from the second half of the weekend will have to wait a little while, but here’s a little preview of the literally HUNDREDS of photos I took (700+ yesterday ALONE!):

Saturday night was a Ta-Ta-For-Now party at a restaurant/lounge on Yonge Street for a quartet of CS friends leaving for adventures further afield:

For the last week or so, my shutter has been sticking but it wasn’t affecting my photos. Now it is! But only on the longer-exposure or wider aperture shots, for some reason. The photo above is of the four people we threw the party for, and I liked this sticky-shutter accidental double exposure shot more than the normal one.

On Sunday I went to Dundas Square for International Dance Day, where our very own Neesa was performing the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. The weather was fantastic, and we stayed all day in the square. I was in shooting heaven (I love photographing dance), with plenty of room to move around (unlike bigger events with barricades and 10x more photogs):

Here’s a short clip of the audience (you can see five of our group in this clip) learning the zombie dance.

It was a great weekend! More to come!

Jose-Jose’s fortune cookie is right — he is travelling far and wide. Actually, we all are, but he’s going the third-soonest after Anf and Rosie, who are leaving next week. That’s one thing I love about the CSers: everyone is either catching a flight soon or just got off a plane. Everyone’s on the move — road trips, day trips, camping trips, photo walks, cross-country trips, international trips, you name it, someone’s doing it. That’s the spirit!

A bunch of us gathered at Full Moon Restaurant on Dundas Street West for some nosh, and of course I showed up last since I work the oddest hours. There are always some leftovers, though, and I got my fill of Chinese veggies while I gabbed on about cameras and lenses and whatnot. I mentioned in conversation that I believe equipment and technical skill isn’t everything; good results come largely from creativity, and technical skill can (but not always) overcome equipment limitations.

Just how much processing is happening, you might ask? Well, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and show you. Here are some photos from the evening produced with a $400 (Pentax K100D entry level DSLR) camera, a $200 lens (Pentax 50mm f/1.7), and Photoshop 10 (CS3). Images were shot in JPEG, mostly processed in Adobe Camera Raw, with a bit more processing in Photoshop. I’m going to post links to the original files, which are uploaded to Flickr but not public, so you can see how much processing is going on.

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