Rides, originally uploaded by jezza323.

Summer time in Toronto is also time for The EX. The EX is the annual exhibition, filled with rides, games, shows, and truely horrible (but tasty) foods.

Some of the food highlights include deep fried Mars Bars, deep fried Cola, deep fried butter and a Krispy Kreme Bacon Burger (Krispy Kremes for buns). I wanted to try out the deep fried Cola but couldnt find it, same went for the Krispy Kreme burger, although I doubt I would have been able to bring myself to order it anyway! I did try some deep fried Mars Bar though, was good!

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City Hall, Toronto, originally uploaded by jezza323.

This was taken on one of my first walks home after work in September after we moved from High Park into downtown. It was a great evening, the clouds were amazing so I stopped and took a few shots. This is Toronto City hall with Nathan Phillips in front.

There was a group laying on the ground covered in bread trying to get the birds to eat it off them (they seemed quite worried about the birds though!). I’m not sure what the point of it all was though.

Both shots are 3 exposure HDR’s taken at +/- 2.0 EV with my Pentax K200D and Sigma 10-20mm f4.0-5.6 lens. Blended using Photomatix with final editing in Lightroom.

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1. Osgoode Hall
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Good fun at the Parade, originally uploaded by jezza323.

Another one from the summer Caribana parade in Toronto. This one is a bit more of an amusing candid than anything else.

This lovely couple were grinding their way up the street for the parade, and I just happened to catch the rather unimpressed young girl in the background, along with a great expression on the guys face!

Have a giggle and enjoy

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1. Caribana Parade

Caribana Parade, originally uploaded by jezza323.

Here is the annual Toronto Caribana Parade, which this year ran along Lakeshore (not sure if it has always run along here?). It was relatively small in number of paraders, but there were plenty of people out for a look on what was a very warm summer day.

Most seemed to be having a great time. This was 1 of the larger groups dancing their way down the street. I just held the camera up high and took a quick snap or 2. I processed this in Photomatix as a single exposure HDR, it really made the bright, loud Caribana colours pop.

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Husky Cross, originally uploaded by jezza323.

This is a lovely dog I came across at a little espresso coffee place near Dundas West during the summer here in Toronto.

After a little chat to the owner we discovered that it was a Husky/Foxhound cross, which is quite suprising, because apart from the very obvious Husky eyes there is nothing about this dog that would have you believe it was part Husky!

A quick pat and a photo or two and we parted ways. I shot this one with the Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 lens, zoomed in to help generate some out of focus (OOF) area in the image. Unfortunately I couldn’t get an angle where the background wasn’t too blown out, but this one came out ok with a bit of tweaking in Lightroom.

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Golden Evening

Last week I was lucky enough to have some time to go for a lovely walk through Koreatown in Toronto in the late evening with the camera and take a few pictures. I haven’t been out shooting as much as I would like the last few weeks, but I am hoping to get out more soon. I haven’t even had a chance to use my newly acquired tripod yet! What about that photowalk you say? Well I may or may not have missed that due to some Jagerbomb caused, self inflicted illness…

An Evening at Bloor & Christie, originally uploaded by jezza323.

HDR

Both of these shots are HDR’s as I thought they would show off the lovely soft golden evening light the best. Both shots were taken handheld with my usual Pentax K200D, and I used a lens I haven’t used for a while, the Tamron 17-50mm f2.8. I took the 3 shots for the HDR using bracketing at +/- 2.0 EV. To process them I imported into Lightroom 3, then used the Photomatix Lightroom plugin to export the 3 base images to Photomatix for blending. I used the standard Tone Mapping method to generate the final HDR’s which the plugin automatically re-imports back into the Lightroom library for you. I made a final crop and adjustment before exporting to JPG and uploading to Flickr.

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1. An Evening in Old Montreal
2. Absent Photographer
3. American Falls

Just a quick post with some updates. I managed to get hold of a tripod yesterday, a great 20+ year old Manfrotto ART190. It is a bit beat up and scratched up but it works great, everything is smooth (much smoother than my old tripod!) and it seems very solid. It has a very old 3 way head on it at the moment, which I will replace with my Benro ball head as soon as I find myself a screwdriver of the appropriate size to undo the locking screws on the head baseplate. This was a great craigslist find, and only cost me a quick $40 and a detour 2 subway stations out of my way on the way home. A big thanks to the seller, by far the most organised craigslist seller I have encountered thus far.

Photowalk

In other news, I am planning on attending my first ever photo walk on Saturday. More so in an attempt to meet some new people in Toronto than to get any photos, but I am sure I will take some of those as well. I discovered a local Flickr user who appeared to have been attending a number of photowalks (based on their photostream) in 1 of the many Flickr Toronto groups. I sent him off a Flickr mail and received a reply back with links to a local Photowalk Flickr group and their website – torontophotowalks.ca. The next event is on Saturday, and happens to be in my neighbourhood, so I will join in and say “G’day”!

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1. Choosing a Tripod