My Favourite Shots from 2023
Its 2024… Well into it actually. About halfway through last year my interest in photography was reignited during a trip to Stratford, Ontario. My wife and I, along with our friends Andrew and Jessica went on a rainy road trip to the City of Thespians. We had no plan, no reservations, no play tickets, and the weather deleted a lot of the options available at the time. Nonetheless, we had a great time. We began by gobbling down an enormous brunch of pancakes, fried chicken, eggs benny, and litres of coffee. Over breakfast Andrew and I were talking about his Fujifilm X100V that Jessica had got him as a gift….
Andrew and I are both the type of person who speed-run hobbies. Dive right in, right at the moment it peaks our interest, and then take it as far as possible as quickly as possible. Often resulting in loss of interest in the hobby once it has been ‘maxed out’; whatever that could mean.
I set up a semi-autonomous micro green farm in my 500sqft condo in Toronto within a few days of buying seeds and shelving racks. It output around 2 pounds of micro greens every week. In retrospect, a completely ridiculous thing to have in that space. The cycle of gaining interest, learning, doing, and reaping rewards (more pea shoots than I knew what to do with) was happening so fast that it got to a point where I had deemed it ‘finished’ in my head. I stopped growing the flats of greens, and the shelves sat there as storage shelves until my poor wife had to move them all to a new place (sorry Sakina <3).
Photography and Videography was something that had stuck while I was growing up. It always seemed like there was infinite depth to the subjects. I remember getting my first DSLR and camcorder. Andrew, our other friend Kevin, and I would make YouTube videos after school about anything we thought other people would want to see:
Very good Acting and Well Written Skits (tm)
How to make a TV antenna out of an orange and a coat hanger
How to make napalm….(boy we really should not have filmed that)
Hitting fruit with baseball bats in the ravine down the street
How to make tempura
It is with great sadness that I must report, we are not sure where this footage ended up. It seems YouTube took our channel down many moons ago and the videos were lost to time.
I had stopped with Photography throughout University, all the way up until the time of this brunch in Stratford, Ontario. The switch was flipped back on.
While we were finishing our meal, we began hatching a plan. How could I get a film camera that day, right now. Right across the street from the restaurant we were eating at was a photography shop. Step one done. We paid, ran over in the rain, and shot through the front door of that photo shop ready to make a purchase. “What is the cheapest film camera you have, that I can leave with today”. The clerk pulled down an absolute beauty of a camera. A bright purple Kodak i60. The ‘i’ in the name may lead you to believe that there is some semblance of technology in this camera, there is not. Instead, there is about 30 cents of injection molded plastic, a battery, and a flash. I didn’t care. It was all I needed.
I bought the camera, along with some rolls of Ilford black and white, and some Portra 400. We left the shop, I burned through the black and white roll almost instantly; the fire for the love of photography was burning bright in the furnace of my mind once more. A few days later I bought a Fujifilm XT-30II with the kit lens before moving to China for 2 months with the Prosper team.
All of that was a very long winded way of introducing the meat of this blog post:
I got back into Photography in 2023 and this post is a selection of my 5 favourite pictures.
These are presented in no order.
A Selection of Morsels, Shenzhen
As soon as I landed in Shenzhen, I went looking for some Fuji lenses at the Huaqiangbei Electronics Market. Luckily enough, there was a 35mm f1.4 and a 27mm f2.8 available for about 1/5 the cost a used one would be in London or Toronto. I snagged em up, risking the possibility that they were fake, or used to the point of being barely functional.
Excited to try out the new lenses, I found myself often wandering around the dense, market-lined streets in the area around the hotel. One one of those walks, I came across a small prawn shop in a corner booth. There was no one manning the shop, but there were two fresh steaming trays of crawdads waiting to be plucked by passing customers. A small arrangement of sauces off to the side. In the background, the boiling/steaming chambers the rock bugs were cooked in. I have no clue how the transactions were occurring, or if this was an end of day “I gotta go home, have these for free” sort of deal. Regardless, I stood back and tried to capture as many red items in the frame as possible. I kept noticing more. Whoever was working here truly loves the colour red. I wonder if the restaurant was designed around the colour of the cooked crawdads, or if the crawdads were selected as the offering to match the colour of the objects in the restaurant….we may never know.
Exit Stage Left, London
On one mild October night after I finished up at the Warehouse, I decided to hop on the Victoria line and head down to Kings Cross for a short walkabout to snap some pictures. There is a photo spot here that produces a myriad of shots focusing on the Red elevator rising and falling from the rooftop bar at The Standard hotel. I must admit, I was there to grab a few of those exact pictures. I took about 20 of the exact same picture that I had seen on instagram, but I was not satiated. I noticed that where I was standing, there was a stoned wall lined with a pattern that contained deep tubular holes. I decided to have a look if it appears on street view and whaddyaknow. There it is:
I lined up the shot, and sat there waiting for someone to walk by at the perfect moment. It’s quite a busy spot, so I was waiting for some time before there was just a single person walking past in the shot. But then I got it.
Looking at the shot later was when it dawned on me how neat it ended up being. The hole provided a heavy vignette, that ends up looking almost like a fill light that is emanating from the street lamp. It creates the feeling of the entire composition being a set of some eerie night-time play. I really enjoy it.
High levels of Lean Detected, Toronto
Now here is a picture I REALLY like. It’s simple, there’s nothing special about the composition. And yet, I can’t look away when I see it. Perhaps it’s because the subjects are two people who I love very dearly. I think that is definitely a large part of it, yes. However, there is some other quality here that I think I can try to explain. This ‘lean’ is a pose that my wife and friend Jessica (the same Jessica from above) trademarked and copyrighted during a recent trip to Valencia. Every time the ‘lean’ makes its appearance, Sakina is leaning a little deeper. If you had 5 dollars left to your name and had a chance to double it by beating these ladies in a limbo competition, well lets just say you better keep that 5 dollars and get outta dodge before you’re embarrassed and robbed of the last dollars to your name at a limbo competition. It’s a silly pose, and in this photo, Sakina and my brother Tanner are showcasing it perfectly. I love the facial expressions. I love that the background and scene looks like The Backrooms; completely void of any pattern or substance, save for the small sign in the background showing room numbers. I love that the shadows on the floor split and radiate from the centre of the two of them. It's just great, and it definitely makes it into my top 5.
Steamed Alive, London
Every winter, an absolutely massive carnival takes over a section of Hyde Park in London. This year, Sakina and I decided to head on over to this Winter Wonderland to really give it a once over and make sure everything was in order. Sakina arrived from Munich earlier that week, and ready for a break from Bavaria. Well, wouldn’t you know it, a large section of Winter Wonderland is themed after a caricature of Bavarian culture! She was right back into it, down to the tall pints of beer and a lovely, kitschy musical beer garden that had one man singing strange songs for the entire time. We could not believe how massive the temporary park installation was. Humans are wonderful little odd creatures, capable of insane feats in order to keep ourselves entertained.
This is another one of those photos that isn’t really anything special. I think I am choosing it more for the memory that I have attached to it, and hey, that’s alright. Sakina and I boarded onto the Disney Plus ferris wheel (what a crossover), and slowly got moving. While we did feverishly inspected the pins, welds, and fasteners that were holding up this structure on the first few go-arounds, eventually we go comfortable enough to start noticing the lit up park around us, as long as we didn’t make any sudden moves. I enjoy this picture because it looks like the people aboard the ride in the bottom left are being steamed alive in a cloud of neon. Along with the fact that the porta potty’s are extremely well lit. I got a number of photos from our ride on the Disney Plus ferris wheel, but this one keeps standing out to me.
Leave the Lights On, Wymondham
First off, it’s pronounced ‘Windom”, not “Why-mond-ham”. Now that that’s out of the way…
My brother Sean flew over from Toronto to the UK for a visit before the holidays. This coincided with a time that Sakina was in town, so we decided to head up Norwich way and visit our relatives in Wymondham (remember that pronunciation and it rolls of the tongue). We took a train from Kings Cross to Cambridge, then from Cambridge up to Wymondham Central Station (pictured below).
I’ve really got to write up a post that just documents this trip, and legendary pub crawl. While we were hopping from pub to pub, as the darkness of night had welcomed us with open arms, we walked past this gap in the close packed houses in the downtown core. In the distance was this perfect shape of light, that was completely separate from the black around it. It looked like a floating shape in the sky. I gathered all my strength that I could muster after that many pints, zoomed all the way in, squeezed down on the shutter, and was left with this marvellous shot. I really enjoy this. Of all the photos in the top 5, I think this is the most abstract, and dare I say artsy.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these photos and snippets of tales that accompany them. I think that it really helps to cement these memories in my mind by having my camera to snap snippets of them. The process of remaining in the moment, enjoying the process of getting the photo, and then remembering where I was in time and space each time I see the photo again. It's a fantastic art form, and I am thankful to my friends Andrew and Jessica, and wife Sakina; for entertaining my impulse decision to buy that cheap plastic Kodak on a rainy day in Stratford.
Cheers,