The entrance to the ROM – Royal Ontario Museum – is a great place to go people watching. People are drawn to the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, so there’s a lot of tourist gawking going on. But it’s also a nice open space, with benches, food vendors, pigeons. It feels piazza-ish.
The building is interesting. But everybody and their dog takes photos of the building. The building never changes. Shoot it at night. Shoot it in the morning. Shoot in the rain. Shoot from a low angle. Whatever. The challenge is to find fresh ways to see things there. One way is to shoot the people as they interact with the space:
There’s something I’ve noticed. The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal sign is transparent. It’s five or six thick panes of glass stuck together. Combined, they have a red tint.
If you press your camera lens against the glass, you can treat it like a filter. You have to keep the shutter open for a while, because it’s so dark, but you end up with something like this:
Then there are weather contingencies, like icicles, that produce fresh opportunities.
Christmas lights, traffic, and reflections add randomness to the site.
And, of course, people add their own traces of randomness, like this empty can of Old Milwaukee at the foot of the Christmas tree.
In the end, a building’s just a building, even if it’s a really interesting mashup of old and new. But for the purposes of a photo it’s not terribly interesting until people enter the frame.
