Following on from the preview on October 2, I wanted to show you what I’ve been working on recently: Chad and Haida’s engagement photos from June 29. (I know, it’s been nearly four months. I’m still amateur status, I have to make a living!) My shooting practices have changed since then, I now shoot portraiture completely in RAW format for more control. Earlier this year I discovered that I could manipulate JPEG images in a RAW converter and opted to do that instead of spending more time, energy, and drive space working with the big RAW files (10MB or more). I’ve since completely changed my mind on this reasoning, because when shooting skin tones, mixed lighting and white clothing I need every bit of control I can get to correct exposure problems…

….ZZZZZZZ…. I know, I’m boring you to tears with the technical explanation (but if you’ve got a question, add it as a comment and I’ll answer), let’s see the photos!

I titled this photo “full circle” because Chad and Haida told me they first met at St. Lawrence Hall, so that’s where we shot their engagement photos. [View Larger On Black]

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Months and months ago I was speaking to some people about their photos only being on Facebook, which would require me to reactivate the Facebook profile I had up for all of 10 minutes last year but couldn’t delete, only deactivate. I still don’t want a Facebook profile, but it kept coming up that I couldn’t view people’s photos unless I was on Facebook, so this is my solution. Actually, I set up the profile at the beginning of August but that’s about as far as I got before the summer became even more hectic than it already was.

Today I finally added some photos and filled out Beano’s profile a wee bit, enough so people could figure out who he was and wasn’t just some random cat adding friends through Facebook.

In Real Life, Xena will be the first one to greet you at the door (except in my case, it’s usually Beano). Beano’s not immediately friendly with most strangers, he’s quite shy. Maybe that’s why he’s got the Facebook Profile and not Xena — he needs to build his social network. Xena’s a black cat, though, with zero markings and less recognisable in a tiny photo. When you see Beano’s little tuxedo cat face in the icon, you’d know right away it’s him.

If you know Beano in Real Life, add away! (If you don’t know Beano or ‘The Human’ in Real Life, don’t be offended if Beano doesn’t accept your friend invitation because, like all cats, he’s a pretty choosy feline…)

As with any large city, New York has different sides and I like to explore them all. From the gritty urban landscape to the oases of green spaces to the tight-knit communities and neighbourhoods, I think of large cities in the developed world as having more in common than those cities compared with the small towns within the same political border. For example, the city of Quesnel, BC (pop. 10,000) has more in common with the small towns of Australia than it does with Vancouver, 7.5 hours to the south. Unlike in Quesnel, people in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary are accustomed to seeing homeless people, paying for parking, and expecting to never see again the umbrella left behind in a coffee shop two days before. Such are the urban realities.

In terms of size, New York City, comprised of five boroughs, has 8.3 million people compared to 5.55 million in the Greater Toronto Area, comprised of six former municipalities. Both are the most populated cities in the country. In the USA and Canada, this is as urban as it gets.

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Yesterday it was a train ride, and today it was a long and leisurely brunch followed by a parade of zombies through the streets of Toronto. (We like to mix things up here at gailatlarge.com!)

http://www.torontozombiewalk.ca

The Toronto Zombie Walk is in its sixth year of parading zombies through the streets of the city in search of brains, and apparently every year the numbers grow. This was my first Zombie Walk — last year Arliin and I had brunch together that day and I was all set to photograph the zombies but by the time we finished brunch I was feeling like a zombie myself and I chose to go home for a nap instead.

This year I decided to walk with our little group of zombies and zombie support staff (makeup people, photographers, videographers, bag handlers) and capture some of the creative costumes milling around. You can get an idea of the size of the crowd gathered at Trinity Bellwoods Park from my cameraphone picture in the previous post — it’s difficult to estimate the numbers, but I’m guessing there must’ve been at least 1,000 people at the beginning of the walk.

I missed the zombies at Nuit Blanche, but Jan says today there was a lot more creativity and variety. Here’s what comes up in a Flickr tag search.

Some articles:
JPG Magazine: Photo Essay: Toronto Zombie Walk
Toronto Sun: Zombies take to the streets
Toronto Star: Afternoon of the (nerdy) undead

For the sake of those amongst us without the stomach for blood and guts and gore, I’m only going to post this one group pic and direct you to the rest of them via links. If you click, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

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A new autumn look! Still a couple of pages under construction (eg., Linkage), but here’s one nifty feature: the image in the middle frame of the header changes every time the page is reloaded. I’ve only got four images in the cycle for now, but I’ll add more as I go along. The new theme might be a little testy for a while before all the kinks get ironed out. Let me know about any other weirdness, please and thank-you!

After several tourist rail trips this year in the span of a few months, I could probably be described as a bit of a rail fan. First it was the train ride from Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania through the Lehigh Gorge on May 31, then it was the Flamsbana Railway a few weeks later through the mountains of Norway. I’ve also taken the historic Kuranda Scenic Railway through the rainforests of Australia, and the Hershey Electric Train in Cuba, among others.

I’ll take regular passenger trains, too, wherever I can, but it’s not the same as taking an historic train that isn’t used for transportation. For one thing, historic trains go to a point and turn around, which means whatever photo opportunities you missed the first time get a second chance.

I had no idea the South Simcoe Railway existed until yesterday, when it was posted in a forum as a Sunday expedition, but I couldn’t go tomorrow so I decided to go today. I sent messages around to some fellow Flickr photogs, but no-one I knew was able to make it. At 8pm I posted a notice in Craigslist for photographers to come along, and the messages started to pour in…

Which is how this morning I arranged to pick up three others — random Craigslisters — and drove north to Tottenham to catch a train rolling through the Ontario countryside at a relaxing pace of 12 miles an hour. But, enough talk, let’s see some pictures!

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Back in May, I hosted a brunch at my place, and there was a German woman there on her way to rural BC who asked to borrow this book. I told her this one was a good read, and quite informative about the people of Canada. I said that she could keep it for as long as she took to read it, then I promptly forgot about it. That is, until I was on my way to New York a week ago and found it had worked its way back to me, accompanied by a letter! (It even travelled to New York and back in the back of my car.)

I bought Timbit Nation for peanuts at a charity book sale at my previous workplace. How fitting that it would travel across the country on its own! With the rare exception such as travel guides, I usually only buy used books because I’m a big fan of the public library system (it was the best part of my childhood) and sharing books rather than collecting them and having them gather dust on the shelf.

When I was constantly travelling, I would get my reading material from book exchanges at hostels: read a book, leave it behind for someone else, pick up a book that someone left behind, et cetera.

While in northern Australia I shared a tent for a while with a French guy from Brittany who could barely speak English. He’d given up entirely on the John Irving book A Prayer For Owen Meany, which he turned over to me and I completely devoured. Upon finishing, I made an attempt at translating the plot for him but my French was wholly inadequate for the bizarreness of Irving’s storytelling. We had a good laugh over it, anyway. When I remember the book I can’t help but think of Bruno and his mop of curly brown hair, big smile, and teeth that would only excite a dentist. I have lots of stories like this locked up in my memory vault — stories of books and people and the intersection of both. The only thing better than having your imagination stirred is to stir someone else’s!

Related posts:
August 30, 2007: On Patriotism and Being Canadian