This past July I had the opportunity to travel North to Montreal, Canada. As photography was not the purpose of the journey, I knew I would be limited in the opportunities to explore when I got there. The primary limitation was that I would only be available at night. Second to that, Montreal has very strict laws on street photography, particularly not to photograph any without their permission. For these reasons I made the decision in advance that I would forgo my typical setup and travel solely with an ultra-wide angle lens. While making my carry-on significantly lighter, this would mean that instead of photographing people, I would focus solely on buildings and cityscapes.
Arriving in Montreal I realized I would only have a singular night truly free to hit the streets. While hurried, Montreal is an amazing city where you don’t need to wander far without hitting a historical building, looming statue, or captivating street art. Typically, I focus on trying to capture the golden hour in my photography, that time when the sun has just risen or is about to set that casts warm light over my subjects. However, in this urban environment I knew my key window would instead be its counterpart: the blue hour. This time period is just before the sun rises or after it sets. Instead of a warm radiance this lends a deeper cool feel to the photographs, perfect for the metal maze of a city.
Starting at my hotel near the Place du Canada, I knew I would not be able to explore everything in a single night. Instead I decided to pick a destination that would be interesting and just far enough away that a round trip walking would take a reasonable amount of time. For me, this was the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal. Instead of planning a route I decided to simply wander in the general direction I knew the Basilica was and experience the unexpected the city had to offer. My reward for this effort was stumbling into Queen Victoria Place. There I discovered the art-nouveau subway entrance cast under the orange glow of a street light. This subway entrance, it turns out, was originally conceived by French architect Hector Guimard. Guimard designed these entrances for the Paris subway system and this example was actually later moved to its current location in Montreal as a gift from the Parisian transit authority to mark the role they had in helping design Montreal’s metro system. A short walk to the other end of the park brought me to the stone titan Tai Chi Single Whip by the Taiwanese artist Ju Ming. An imposing figure, it dominates the frame when set in black and white to eliminate the distracting colored lights of the city around it.
Returning to my cozy hotel room satisfied with the night’s ventures I settled in under the assumption my photographic excursion was over. However, the dreaded bane of travellers bore its head and I awoke hours later in the middle of the night completely unable to return to sleep again. Instead of forcing myself to stare at the ceiling of my room cursing my existence I remembered the one place I wished I could experience but didn’t have the chance: the view of the city from nearby Mont Royal. A quick study of the maps revealed that if I left immediately and set a brisk pace up the Rue Peel I should be able to make the climb and reach the summit just in time for first light. I quickly grabbed my camera and set off again into the night.
Dodging past late night party-goers returning to their beds and early-morning laborers trudging in, I soon left the city behind and began the climb up the apparently ceaseless stairs leading up the mountain. The higher I climbed the lighter the forest around me began to grow as darkness receded into the undergrowth. Finally, exhausted, I emerged onto the overlook by the Chalet du Mont Royal just in time to see the city illuminated before me. As I approached the edge the sound of classical piano music filled the air as a young girl travelling with friends sat at a piano situated on the plaza nearby creating a feeling as though I had stepped into an old film. I had come here with a singular goal in mind: I wanted to make a panorama of the city. While this would earn me no points for uniqueness, this is probably the singular most popular vantage point photos are taken from in Montreal, this would be my photo. This would be the first time I got to take in the view and I wanted it for myself.
A certain amount of luck goes into outdoor photography. Great landscapes are often shot by a photographer who meticulously plans the timing and watches weather conditions often planning weeks or months in advance. I did not have the flexibility of that here, and what Nature dealt me was a giant rolling fogbank. As the fogbank began to cover the city I shot a few test shots to find that the combination of the bright fog and the dark foliage was detracting from the quality of the city itself stuck between the two. Instead of making a simple panorama then, I would stitch multiple exposures of each frame together to make a high-dynamic range (HDR) panorama. For each photo in the panorama I would take it “normally”, underexposed to bring out the detail in the sky, and finally overexposed to bring the foreground foliage to life. In the end it took 25 individual images to then construct my panorama.
As I turned to leave the mountain behind me I realized that the fog I cursed in my cityscape could actually be a blessing in disguise. Here I was in the early morning alone in the woods and the fog was making everything around me turn ethereal. I only needed a subject! I remembered that nearby on the map there stood the giant Mont Royal Cross and decided to explore how it would appear standing in the mist. This cross, rising over a hundred feet in the air, stands in the spot where a cross was first built back in 1643 by the city’s founder Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve. When I arrived I knew I was onto something but my photographs were coming out flat. I circled around the cross until I found that if I positioned myself just right then the sun, glowing like a flame through the fog, would line up perfectly to illuminate the base of the structure like a giant lantern. When I descended the mountain and into a city come awake I knew that by forcing myself out of my comfort zone, limiting my technical options and taking the opportunities where they arose I was leaving with images that held impact as well as personal value.