It’s been some time since I had the pleasure of visiting my hometown, Toronto. Each time I return, the city seems to get bigger and bigger with new and interesting things to check out. On this visit, I went out of my way to check out Graffiti Alley, (a few steps south-west of Queen and Spadina) an alley that has dedicated about a kilometre’s worth of wall space to colourful graffiti of varying quality. Sure I’ve heard about the magical alley for years now, and yes I’ve seen pictures and videos along the way as well, but nothing really seems to have captured the magnitude of artistic feat quite like walking through the alleys on your own two feet. Lucky for me, I happened to get there just as the golden hour was setting in, so I concentrated on capturing a few good angles of the graffiti corridor before the sun went down. Of course I wasn’t the only person checking out the street art, so capturing it without people in the shots proved to be quite the challenge. So instead of trying to capture clean shots of the alley, I decided to go with the flow and work with the inquisitive pedestrians and started incorporating them into the shot instead. And the result for a couple of the shots turned out better than expected…especially the shot featured in this blog post where the sun was in the perfect spot to highlight 3 pedestrians from behind as they walked by my camera. And without staging the shot whatsoever, I love the energy that this image captures, giving the outdoor gallery even more vitality as the people interacted with it. To me, this candid shot captures the rawness of the alley authentically, which pays homage to the free flowing art that you can see for your own eyes next time you’re in Toronto for a visit!
