Photowalk in Toronto’s Portlands, Oct 2023

In Jan­u­ary of this year, I start­ed orga­niz­ing month­ly Toron­to pho­towalks as part of my expan­sion of Expo­sure Ther­a­py’s hands-on pho­tog­ra­phy edu­ca­tion pro­gram. The pho­towalk I host­ed last met in The Beach­es on the after­noon of Sep­tem­ber 30th — one week ago today! These pho­towalks have been rea­son­ably suc­cess­ful at attract­ing a mod­est crowd of for­mer stu­dents and new faces. But most of all, they’re fun and encour­age me to meet new peo­ple and take more pho­tos.

It’s hard to dis­cuss this sub­ject with­out men­tion­ing the jug­ger­naut that is TorontoPhotowalks.ca. They’ve amassed a size­able com­mu­ni­ty of reg­u­lar par­tic­i­pants by orga­niz­ing biweek­ly pho­towalks for almost thir­teen years. I joined one of the three (!) con­cur­rent events they host­ed ear­li­er today. The pho­towalk was led by Jeff, and we met at the Balza­c’s cafe in the Dis­tillery Dis­trict at 09:30 a.m. After thir­ty min­utes of min­gling in and around the cafe, the group of about twen­ty pho­tog­ra­phers made its way towards Cher­ry St. and down towards the ongo­ing rede­vel­op­ment and envi­ron­men­tal revi­tal­iza­tion of Toron­to’s Port­lands. It was an in-and-out route cul­mi­nat­ing at the Pol­son Pier Sky­line View­point. Jeff took a group pho­to at that loca­tion, and we slow­ly returned.

The crowd was respect­ful and friend­ly, and I had a pleas­ant expe­ri­ence. Jeff had thought­ful­ly giv­en every­one name stick­ers. The route was rel­a­tive­ly short com­pared to the typ­i­cal dis­tances I walk, but I feel it falls into the Goldilocks zone for the age group of the aver­age attendee. For exam­ple, Porthos and I often cov­er up to 10 km dur­ing an evening walk, so this should’ve been a breeze. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it was­n’t; I was in a lot of pain dur­ing the return por­tion. That’s because I took a hard fall from my bicy­cle ear­li­er that morn­ing en route to The Dis­tillery Dis­trict. I was stand­ing cycling up a brick-lined incline when I some­how lost bal­ance and fell into the curb on my right, star­tling a woman and her dog. This is pure spec­u­la­tion, but I sus­pect my gear was too low for stand­ing cycling, giv­ing me exces­sive sway and caus­ing a loss of steer­ing. The point is that I fell and blood­ied both knuck­les, scraped my right elbow and knee, pulled some­thing new in my already-injured right shoul­der (this one trou­bles me), and bruised my right pec­toral and left ankle. I also strained my erec­tor spinae, which was­n’t evi­dent until lat­er.

My body has been aching all day, which has inter­rupt­ed sev­er­al plans. How­ev­er, it gave me time to process all the pho­tos I cap­tured.