Photographing the Hidden Mountains of Toronto

So here we are, middle of winter. Winter is not really a great time to do photography. It's often a time of hibernation you know because the light isn't usually that great. The sun is further south and um oftentimes it's cloudy or you know snowy or whatever but you shouldn't let the weather kind of dictate or restrict you in terms of your photography. And that's why I thought I would make this video. The theme of the video is how to do landscape photography without having dramatic landscapes around you. When you often see great landscape shots you think of you know amazing mountain ranges or nice calm beaches but maybe you don't live near a mountain range or near to the beach. So what do you do in that case? What if you live in a flatter place? So I'm here in Toronto. There's rolling hills in Toronto but there's not that much elevation in terms of mountain ranges. So I thought I'd make a video on how to counteract that. It's tied to the whole idea of you know in photography you should be adaptable and and use what you have. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to use what you have. Now we don't have dramatic mountain ranges here in Toronto but we do have a lot of snow as you can see around me here. This video is inspired by a Japanese photographer called Yuji Hamada and what he did was essentially he lived in Japan and he received postcards from a friend who lived in Switzerland and the postcards had these amazing mountain ranges very dramatic very awe-inspiring and obviously flying all the way to Switzerland is quite expensive. You know he can't go to the mountains. The mountains aren't going to come to him. So he made mountains to photograph. He took the most basic of materials some aluminum foil and shaped it into the shape of a mountaintop and then he took his camera from a low angle took pictures of the tin foil mountain against the sky. Now because there's no frame of reference on the picture it's just a mountain in the sky. It actually looks pretty decent. It looks like a real mountain. So I'm going to show you in this video some tips on how to do that but it's going to be a Canadian version of that video so instead of using tin foil we're going to be using snow. Now whenever there's a big snowfall in Canada or at least in Toronto the snow plows are out and all the snow on the roads and the sidewalks gets cleared up and piled up into these massive mountains of snow. They're not that tall. I mean they're probably as tall as as maybe my height or as an average person but over time as the weather gets warmer and it stops snowing the base snow on the pavement clears up but these mountains remain and they melt and they change with time and when I was walking by these these mountains of snow I often thought well you know they really do look like real mountains because it's not a case of it being soft snow but it's a bit more jagged more distinct as the the snow melts and turns into ice and quasi-snow. It becomes more like a rugged cliff face or a rugged mountainside. So seeing as we have these partly natural partly man-made mountains around you can take advantage of that and taking a page from Yuji Hamada's book take pictures of these little piles of snow in such a way and such an angle that it actually looks like a mountain. Now you can't just use any kind of snow as I mentioned there has to be snow that's piled up so if you go to a park such as this one you can see that there is a lot of snow however it's not piled up it's all flattened out and you need that kind of elevation difference to make it look like a mountain. So where do you go? There are a couple of places where you can go and generally you have to think of places that where the snow has to be cleared so sidewalks is one, parking lots could be another one, bus stops is a big one because oftentimes they they move all the snow into piles right by the bus stop sign and you can get some nice triangular piles of ice which is what you want you want triangular or to be more precise cone-like piles of snow. Once you're there you have to make sure the lighting is right as well right because to give the mountain a three-dimensional shape you want and in order to get shadows you need harsh light in order to get harsh light you need a sunny day so what are we looking for? We want a sunny day after a big snowfall in a place where snow is piled up. Once you have that you have your camera and you find these cone-like piles of snow you can go ahead and take a picture. Now what settings do you want on your camera? What lens do you want? What focal length? Well you don't want a lens that's too wide because if the lens is wide then you see more of the surroundings of the pile of snow and then suddenly you realize hey it's not a mountain it's just a pile of pile of snow so you want a focal length that's a bit more narrow. What I used was a 50 millimeter equivalent that will give you a nice tight crop on the image without sacrificing image quality. So you've taken your pictures already and now you want to edit them. Well I'm going to give you some tips to make the pictures look more you've come away with some new ideas for photography to do in the winter time. At the same time I hope it's allowed you to see things around you in a different way. Some things that are quite mundane such as piles of snow when seen from a different angle with different lighting can be something much greater and that's the takeaway of this video.