Digital Photo Tip #2 By Bruce Kirkby Apr 1, 2005

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An hour in downtown Toronto? Plenty of photography options!

Last month I was in Toronto on business and had a spare hour between meetings. Wanting to experiment with digital photography and test the premise that good shots can be found anywhere, I set off with camera in hand.

It was a cold late-winter day, and the afternoon sun, bouncing from high office towers, created interesting pools of light all over the downtown core. I shot reflections of the street in glass doorways, and turned to shoot directly at the sun, hovering beside the CN Tower. (A note for more advanced users: if you want to exaggerate the star-like streaks of light coming from the sun, set your camera to Aperture Priority mode, choose the highest f-stop available, lock the exposure with the sun just out of frame, and then recompose and shoot.)

The St. Lawrence Market provided plenty of inspiration—stacks of fresh fish, workers filling barrels of olives, great rounds of cheese. Outside, I shot abstracts of high office towers, compressed by zooming in on the most detailed overlapping lines.

Finally, I ducked out of the cold and inside BCE Place. Its soaring white arches created a cathedral-like atmosphere. The automatic white balance provided by today’s digital cameras means taking photographs inside buildings is easier than ever, and there is no longer the worry of colour shift due to tungsten or fluorescent lighting. At the end of an hour, I had taken 290 images. I downloaded them to my laptop and started again.