Pedantry Digest

From the first photography class I ever took starting at age 13, I used a fully manual, 35mm (film) SLR camera and was rather self-righteous about that for years. I looked down on people who had 35mm SLR's with an automatic setting and used it with such reckless abandon. But, while I still think that anyone interested in photography should first learn things the old fashioned way--how to manage a camera without automatic settings of any sort and understand exactly how to frame a scene and how to manipulate available light, how to develop film (including "pushing" and "pulling"), how to develop photos and edit them with chemicals and further attention to composition, etc.--I did finally snap out of of that arrogance (mostly). I realised just how impractical such manual cameras are when I want to actually take part in my life, instead of just documenting it (which just turns into me documenting the lives of other people as I stand by, waiting for the perfect shot or playing with settings).

Strangely, though, since I got my point-and-shoot digital camera, I've exclusively used the automatic settings (albeit without the flash--flash is evil). For social situations, automatic is the way to go. But for a lot of the photography that gets posted here, it's peculiar that I've been content with doing so much editing after-the-fact and just accepted that I wasn't doing any technical work beyond composition while shooting. Only in the last two or three weeks have I started to understand how to work the manual settings on my camera--I don't do owner's manuals if I can avoid them--so I'm quite pleased to be I am posting these without having done any editing, other than cropping. They're far from perfect, but it's getting better.

Looking in a number of directions around the intersection of Sussex Avenue and Robert Street. This is a relatively true representation (ha!--"true" and "representation" as a single idea) of just how colourful Toronto is during autumn, especially when it rains. I know it's unusual to associate grey and rainy days with bright colours, but I swear that everything on a rainy day either fades to a shade of grey or jumps out in deafening technicolour. Got to love a good contrast...