Sunday morning in Toronto moves at a different speed. The same streets that push commuters through on a Monday are full of people who showed up because they wanted to. Nobody has a meeting. Nobody is late. The city belongs to whoever decides to come out and walk around in it. That is what this series of Toronto Sunday street photography is about.
Chilling on a Sunday
The Chilling on a Sunday project is Toronto Sunday street photography built around one observation: the city shows you a different version of itself on weekends, and Sunday is the most honest day of the week. The images in this first set come from a few different spots on the same kind of afternoon. Yonge-Dundas Square in the early evening, Spadina heading south toward the skyline, a side street near the Entertainment District, and one location I keep going back to, the old North Toronto Station building on Yonge just south of St. Clair, which has been the Summerhill LCBO for years now. The Beaux-Arts architecture has outlasted the trains by decades, and on a Sunday the plaza out front is as quiet as anything the city offers.
Nobody Is in a Hurry
That is the through-line in this set. The man at the fountain outside the Summerhill LCBO, leaning forward with his phone, completely absorbed, the afternoon light coming across the stone facade behind him. Two drummers, Griffin and Ryan, set up full kits in the middle of Dundas Square and played for whoever felt like stopping. They were not at a venue. They were on a concrete square on a Sunday because that is what they wanted to do with their afternoon. The crowd around them was loose, the same way the whole city is loose on these days.
The elderly woman and her companion walking along Spadina with the downtown skyline stacked behind them. The woman in the pink skirt on a side street near the Entertainment District, phone out, not performing for anyone. None of them are in a rush, and that relaxed state is exactly what makes toronto sunday street photography worth doing. You are photographing people who have given themselves to the day.
Toronto Sunday Street Photography on the Fuji X100V
The Fuji X100V is the right camera for this kind of work. Small, quiet, fixed 35mm lens, no mirror, nothing about it reads as a serious camera to anyone walking past. On a Sunday afternoon that matters. You want to be as unhurried as the people you are shooting, and a compact camera lets you move that way. You can have it out in your hand all afternoon without it becoming a thing.
Several of the images in this set are HDR processed, which gives the city scenes more range in the highlights and shadows than a single exposure would. Dundas Square in particular throws up a lot of contrast, bright digital billboards overhead, crowds in relative shadow below, and the HDR treatment handles that well. The church image is straight, single exposure, because the grey sky and the old stone did everything on their own.
More Sundays Coming
Toronto has a lot of Sundays in it, and this is the first set in what will be an ongoing series of toronto sunday street photography from wherever the city takes me on a given weekend. Different seasons, different neighbourhoods, different versions of the same idea. If you want to see the other street photography projects on the site, have a look at the projects page. The cameras are on the gear page.
Thanks for looking!
