Snapshots of Toronto

Two weeks ago, I jetted off to Toronto for work. The whole thing was a mad rush. My boss booked my flight just days in advance. We were meeting a prospective client. Some of my colleagues, who had been preparing for weeks, knew what to expect. I didn’t. It was a twenty-four hour trip, partly over a long weekend, and while I felt frantic the whole time, I was determined to make the best of it.

It wasn’t always easy.

My goal was to experience one non-work-related thing in Toronto. I failed to achieve it. I arrived under grey skies, in pouring rain. My actual destination was Don Mills, not Toronto, which would have meant an expensive taxi ride into the city. After my flight, my motivation waned. I wandered the neighbourhood near my hotel, but it wasn’t so much a neighbourhood as a series of big box stores on two sides of a freeway. In the end, I settled on wine from room service and bad TV. An hour later, I went to a meeting that lasted until nearly midnight.

All that to say that I experienced nothing at all in Toronto aside from work and my hotel room. But in my effort to make the best of it, I compiled a photo diary from my trip, anyway. I nearly missed my flight home after our presentation ran long and I was absolutely shattered for the rest of the week. And yet, based on the photos alone, it looks like I had a reasonably good trip. Such is the magic of photography. Anything can look beautiful if you catch it from the right angle. And I think life can be like that too, with the right attitude. (Although maintaining that kind of positivity on a regular basis isn’t exactly realistic, I know.)

I loved these shots more than I expected to. It’s rare that I love my own photos, and rarer that I love iPhone photos. But there is no doubt blogging ignited my passion for taking pictures. It also, very often, makes me pursue an unreasonable degree of perfection in the photos I share. That perfectionism seems to get worse every year and when I saw these photos, taken hastily on my phone, I really wondered why.

So I bought myself a new camera just after I got home. It is small and pokey, nothing like the beautiful, professional-grade Nikon Ian shoots with. And that’s okay. My regular, everyday life doesn’t need to be professionally photographed every step of the way. Sometimes, I travel for work or want to take twelve photos of a pretty pastry, because that’s a normal thing to do, obviously. And the fun is in the taking of the photos, in capturing an ugly city like Don Mills at a beautiful early morning moment when all the neon lights over it make it glow. Whether they look magazine-worthy doesn’t actually matter.

I didn’t really experience Toronto because I was so busy working. But the trip was memorable and I’m glad to have these photo souvenirs from it. I’m not sure how many iPhone photo posts are in the future for me. But I admit that it feels good to share something without concern for whether it’s perfect, just because it makes me happy.