Boy, time flies. I’ve barely been here in Toronto, and this was my third Toronto Flickr meetup! I wasn’t living here yet when I attended February’s at the Red Room, and last month I wasn’t here for even two weeks before the meetup at Gypsy Co-op then went to Europe only a couple of days after, so the Flickr meetups seem to mark my comings and goings. Fortunately, they’ve happened to fall on a time that I’m here.
With each gathering I meet a few more people, recognise a few more from the forum, and some from the previous meetup. I’m also — little by little — getting my bearings, after consulting maps of where each meetup is located and the best routes to get there. I know there are many benefits to going to such events, but yet I find a part of myself unwilling to go. The part of myself that’s practical and a good sport has to persuade the unwilling side of me to get out of the apartment, and this time the unwilling side nearly won. It’s not that people aren’t friendly, or the locations are far away, or times inconvenient. Not at all. In the two previous meetups, I’ve come away with positive feelings. I always have a good time, I talk to people. I seem to recall feeling this way before the other two meets, but once I got there everything was OK.
But this time I was so reluctant to go, I phoned China upstairs and convinced her to leave her work behind and join me. I was feeling so indecisive I was hedging all the way through the scheduled photowalk at 6:45 (which I said I’d go on) and watched the clock tick past 7 o’clock before I rang her up. By then, she’d already completely settled in for an evening of work, but I said “Let’s go for an hour” and she finally said yes. I wasn’t sure if I’d have gone if China had stayed home. I haven’t been feeling very social lately, but these meetups only take place once a month. It was also the warmest evening in the city so far this year and the best time for us to be out and about.
The Green Room (upstairs) is a better setup for large groups versus the Red Room, with more tables than Gypsy Co-op, which has ample floor space but mostly standing room. It’s accessed from an alley off Brunswick Street and parallel to Bloor, in a bustling part of the neighbourhood called The Annex. The area was Bustle Central, especially with the long weekend underway.
Not surprisingly, we stayed much longer than an hour. Electing to squeeze in at the tables full of Flickr folk rather than at tables on the periphery made all the difference — even with the music, we could converse with other people without resorting to shouting in their faces. We were introduced to quite a few people and I was able to actually continue conversations with people I’d met before instead of starting all over again. What a relief! I only suggested leaving when the place started to get jammed with revellers and the music was cranked too loud to talk over.
There are also a fair amount of commercial photographers and “serious photophiles” in the local Flickr mix, so there’s guaranteed to be a wide range of equipment on hand, especially at the higher end of the scale. I was talking to one guy about how much it cost to purchase his Canon 5D plus necessary accessories, and it’s in the ballpark of buying a small car. One major difference, however, is that with skilled use the equipment can pay for itself many times over… oh, and you also can put it into a bag and take it to Europe.
