Montreal
With reading week already half-way through I needed a distraction. Ottawa is a wonderful town, but I think I may be reaching a point where it’s getting a little old. With that in mind, Montréal was a huge change. The only time I have, had to go to the Greyhound station has been en route to Toronto to go home. The twenty or so minutes I spend in Toronto each way hardly counts as a visit, and TO isn’t my favourite city…
Last time I was in Montréal I was 17, what a change this was, although completely by accident I stayed two blocks from where I stayed four years ago. Thanks Hotwire.
The two photos below are my favourite. The first was shot on St. Laurent Blvd. looking north towards Chinatown. I tried to fit in the Chinese characters as well as the lion head on the left…I think the key identifier in this photo though is the fact that it says, “Chinatown” in the middle of the frame…
It’s also my first successful HDR image. High Dynamic Range photography is an exposure technique which exposes both the high and low lights of an image. For example, I shot one RAW file, in that picture the clouds in the background were just white and most of the colour in the shadows had lost their brilliance. By developing that RAW image three times into corresponding JPEG’s (Underexposed by two stops, exposed, overexposed by two stops) I was able to blend them in PhotoMatix to expose the image, true-to-life.
This next image was shot on my final night in town. We were only there two nights… We went to Laurier Ave. area and visited an old friend of mine from highschool. Turns out she is dating a pretty rad guy and is friends/host to some pretty cool people and talent. Anyways, we were predrinking prior to heading to some bar nearby. Suddenly this guy Phil pops his head out of the other room and says, “Me and Sam are gonna jam.” Like that they start playing some Arcade Fire covers then Phil played his own stuff and Sam jammed overtop. After most of us went to Casa Del Popolo back on St. Laurent.
This is a photo of Sam improvising over top of Phil’s guitar playing. The unfortunate thing about this photo is that it’s a little dark and not sharp enough. I had left the batteries to my flash in their charger back in Ottawa (stupid, stupid, stupid).
I still really like this image but if I had been able to light the room quick and close the shutter faster, the image would be a lot sharper and I’d be a lot happier.
Peace,
Adam Dietrich
Adam Dietrich 