NewMindSpace: Faerie Tale Streetcar Party

Last Saturday NewMindSpace threw a Faerie Tale Streetcar Party.

About a hundred kids met up at Queen & York, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the two extended accordion-style streetcars. Once the streetcars arrived, they were boarded post-haste. Decorations were quickly thrown up, glow sticks broken out, and tunes bumped out in what quickly turned into a bit of a rave party.

A nice touch was a quick stop over at the Spacings In Transit photography exhibit on Queen E.

Once again, great work Kevin and Lori! Keep up the good work!!

What will Kevin and Lori come up with next?!?

Almost time to go home...

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Originally uploaded by fotograf.416.

I've been playing around a lot with my new circular polarizer and uv filters. This is the first shot I've posted where I've combined the two filters. I love the affect it produces on sunsets.

Yonge St. @ Night

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Originally uploaded by fotograf.416.

While driving home last night, I decided to take Yonge Street so that I could finally get a few pictures of the florescent lights arching over this busy thoroughfare.

It was very challenging to drive in traffic while operating my camera, but I managed to pull it off without killing myself. Going 40 km/h at night combined with a ~1 sec exposure produced some amazing trails.

These are also the first shots using my new polarizer lens filter, which helped reduce the reflection on the windshield.

Over The Top Festival Launch

blogTO: Over The Top Festival Launch

All my photos have been posted!

What a great show! Great Lake Swimmer kicked things off with a very soft and slow performance, but that’s pretty much what we were expecting from Tony Dekker, who happens to be my favorite Toronto singer-songwriter at the moment. His songs are incredibly personal. You can see in his face the passion he has for his work. I can’t get over how shy he is on stage. He must have said 10 words the entire performance.

Akron/Family blew my mind! Incredibly lively and entertaining. I loved their antics and stage banter. I couldn’t get over the lead singers facial expressions. He reminded me a lot of John Belushi. I’m pretty sure everyone in the band was tripping on something. They kept drinking from Starbucks cups, which I’m bet were not filled with coffee. At the end of their set they also thanked someone for the cookies. "Special" cookies no doubt. I wish I could have seen their hoedown at the back of the Great Hall, but I wasn't giving up my prime third row spot fo nut'n.

Owen was accompanied by a string quartet which gave Final Fantasy a much fuller and more layer sound than his solo shows. The quartet seemed very talented and professional, but what the fuck do I know. Owen didn't seem in top for this night. He appeared very nervous about following the highly animated performance of Akron/Family. He also was experimenting with a few instruments that were out of tune due to the heat in the Great Hall. In addition, he was performing mostly "new" songs, although I'm pretty sure I've heard him perform most of them before.

My only complaint with the concert, was that Akron Family should have headlined. The flow of the show was ruined by having the most lively and energetic performance in the middle. Having Final Fantasy billed second would have been a great build up from Great Lake Swimmer to Akron/Family.

World Peace Graffiti Van

During the boxing day (week... month...) sales that happened after xmas, I finally decided to pick up a real tripod.

To celebrate this new fangled tool, I went on a night shoot in my hood. I've always wanted to take pictures of the World Peace graffiti van on High Park Blvd.

I love how this picture looks like it was taken during the day, but was actually taken at 10pm! I used a nice long 15s exposure at ISO200.

While shooting I was fortunate to meet the artists while shooting and captured a picture of him with the van. For that pic I used a flash which caused some white balance issue with the long exposure (15s at ISO100).

Flickr Explore Top 500

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Originally uploaded by fotograf.416.

I just found a great link which searches for your photos that have been listed in Flickr Explore's Top 500 daily photos.

Scout: Find your photographs in Flickr's Explore

From this I learned that one of my favorite photos made the Top 500 back in August!

interesting/2005/8/9/page47

Code Name Laurentians

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Originally uploaded by fotograf.416.

blogTO: Code Name Laurentians

I have a tone of pictures posted from the Code Name's show at Neutral.

Many of them are very similar unfortunately. I had trouble picking my favourites. With the low light you get such interesting burrs and trails. So many of them are interesting for such subtle reasons.

Help break the code this Saturday January 14 @ Sneaky Dee's (11pm). Part of Night Moves with DJ Pamm, Jes & Jonathan

Street Car Hunting

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Originally uploaded by fotograf.416.

One of my favorite thing to do while going downtown is street car hunting with my camera.

I took a fun set on December 28th before jumping on a street car heading east from Queen St. W and Roncesvalles.

As you can see, I've created an animated gif of the series.

Beer Mile

Back on November 25th a bunch of Jacquie’s crazy track friends, and apparently other crazy track kids around the world, decided it would be a good idea to chug beer and run around a snow covered track at night.

The way it works is you start by chugging a beer. Then you complete a lap of the track and chug another beer. 3 beers, 3 laps. Sounds easy enough, right? Evidently, not so easy. The carbonated beer, combined with running your guts out, plus the negative ten degree weather, resulted in some rather painful looking projectile vomit.

As if these kids hadn’t suffered enough, a handful of them had to show just how frick'n hard core they were by running another lap naked! This is an annual tradition known as the Naked 400. For those of you lucky enough to be a 'friend' of mine on Flickr, there is a rather revealing picture you should check out.

Loser Curling

In keeping with my New Years resolution, Loser Curling pictures have finally been posted.

And here I thought curling was lame. So wrong, so very wrong. Curling with these kids is GOOD TIMES! Gloria bakes bonbons, Ryan runs around like a chicken with his head cut off explaining the rules, Christopher provides comic relief by separating his shoulder, flasks are concealed and contents consumed. Generally, it’s chaos on ice.

And no I'm not obsessed with Lev! He whored out his memory card in exchange for sexy glamour shots. If you have a problem with that, take your, uuuuh, business, elsewhere!

Happy New Years!

Happy New Years guys!

Thanks to all my friends for making 2005 a great year.

And thanks to Jacquie and Heather for throwing kick ass NYE parties!!

My New Years resolution is to get my 2005 photos posted before 2007. So far so good. I've managed to FINALLY get around to posting the rest of the Stars and Caribou pictures.

More posts to come, including:
- graf expo
- cherry beach
- air show
- lots of subway pics
- and naked pics of your mom.