Chasing Luck At Toronto City Hall

This is a followup to yesterday’s post. There, I suggested that street photographers can engineer their luck by going to heavy traffic locations when light is good, and then shoot and shoot and shoot. If they persist, they get good shots. Yesterday, I featured shots from the intersection of Yonge & Dundas Streets. Today, it’s the area around Nathan Philips Square at City Hall.

For the first shot, I stood on the west side of the pool with the sun at my back. I kept my head low, gazing down into the rear LCD viewfinder, doing my best to appear disengaged from everything happening around me. Every time somebody passed through the frame, I released the shutter. Back home, I had a long series of identically composed images to choose from. Most were garbage, but I was quite struck (not literally) by this woman who stared at me as she walked past.

The second shot follows the opposite strategy. Instead of trying to appear disengaged from everything happening around me, I was very much engaged in this scene. Everybody in the scene knew I was there and knew what I was doing. The girl on the right (cropped at the neck) has just doused the man (her boyfriend? husband?) with water. You can see the water splashed on the pavement. She tosses the empty bottle over the dousee to the man standing on the left. The dousee is reclined on a vent, using it as a giant blower to dry his soaked pants. Strangely, there is another man in the top left corner who is running away from the scene.

I shot the third image from above, swapping out my 35mm street lens for a 100mm Canon lens on a Metabones adapter. I was able to isolate the photographer from everything else in the scene. It makes for a clean image.

Finally, a man has barely got the chocolate-dipped ice cream cone into his hands before it goes straight to his mouth. He’s well-dressed and carries a Harry Rosen bag. Clearly not a tourist.