Taken at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The staircase is originally white but takes on various color casts that remove the purity of the white color. To bypass this problem I cranked the white balance down to tungsten and fired away. 

This one is 3 exposures, 1 stop apart blended together in Photoshop. Additional editing involved some cropping, sharpening and a great deal of clone stamping in Photoshop to remove dirt on the walls. 

Another in my series of photos from Toronto’s City Hall. This is my favourite of the lot as it accentuates the various curvatures of the complex and shows just how different the building can look with slight changes in ones point of view. 

I found this viewpoint and angle by wandering aimlessly around the building with the viewfinder glued to my eye but luckily I was constrained in my area of search. This was taken during my second visit to the area and by that point the building on the left was under construction, thus making most viewpoints inaccessible or simply not looking good. Thanks to this constraint I was able to focus on capturing the available parts in the best way possible. 

Once I had my angle down, I set the camera on the tripod as low as possible and got on the ground to see the live view. The image is 5 exposures bracketed 1 stop apart with -0.7ev exposure compensation. 

In the end it proved to be one of my favourite shots. 

City Hall

My take on this iconic Toronto building. 

For this casual shot I kept the lighting simple. Two 400w Elinchrom strobes with 70cm x 70cm softboxes attached. The key light was placed at 45 degrees camera left and 30 degrees down at 2/3 power, the fill light was set at waist height at 30 degrees camera right on half power. 

Editing was fairly simple with basic touch-up and accenting of highlights and shadows via dodge and burn, some selective smart sharpening and finished it off with exposure and fill light adjustments.  

This is a shot I’ve had in my mind for some time but finally found the right location for it at the BCE Place in Toronto. 

This particular one took 5 trips to get right during which I figured out a few tricks:

1. First off you need an ultra wide angle lens and a tripod but keep the tripod set nice and low
2. On the first trip just get the legs set up to give you an even platform on the escalator
3. On the second pass get your exposure right by choosing a baseline and bracketing by half a stop in shutter priority
4. Keep your shutter speed in the 1-1.5 second range otherwise things dissolve into an overly blurred mess
5. On the second pass try to get the camera adjusted level
6. On the third focus on timing by taking a series of shots up the escalator
7. Review the shots and select the point up the escalator that looks best
8. On the fourth pass go for the gold

Processing on this one was pretty minimal, just smart sharpening in Photoshop, boosting the yellows on the steps, boosting the contrast in Color Efex, and finished with clarity and vibrance adjustment in Lightroom.