A shop window in this city is never just a window. It is two pictures at once, the people inside living their evening, and the whole street behind me printed over them in the glass. That is the reason I keep coming back to Toronto window reflections. You get the diner and the sidewalk in one frame, the warm and the cold, the inside and the out, stacked on top of each other like a double exposure I did not have to make.
The City Doubles in the Glass
Stand back from a window, not up against it, and the glass turns into a mirror laid over whatever is behind it. A red-brick Victorian floats inside a modern lounge. A hydro tower hangs across the reading tables of a library. A Walmart minivan slides through a fast-food counter while a woman drinks her coffee, oblivious to all of it. None of that is a trick. It is just what the glass does when you give it room and read the layers before you press the shutter.
How I Shoot Toronto Window Reflections
The one thing I never do is walk up and put the lens against the glass. That kills the reflection, and it puts you right in a stranger’s face, which is rude and sometimes worse. I work from across the sidewalk or the street, on the Leica Q3 and the Q2, and I move a step at a time until the reflection lands where I want it, usually over a dark part of the interior so it reads. Then I wait for a person inside to settle. Available light only. I expose for the brightest thing in the frame, the neon, the menu board, the sky behind me, and let the rest fall away.
Who Is Inside, Who Is Outside
That is the question every one of these frames asks. A young person on a bubble tea bench with headphones on, lost in a phone, the towers across the road laid over their white shirt. A man in a mustard sweater at a counter with the empty colonnade beside him. A woman in a toque cradling a coffee while the street slides across the window in front of her. They do not know I am there, which is the whole point. The reflection puts my world and theirs in the same rectangle, and you are left deciding which one you are looking at.
This is the second set of my Toronto window reflections, and it leans harder into them than the first one did. It is a mix of the Leica Q3 and the Q2, colour and black and white, shot downtown. If you want to know how I work and what I carry, that is on the gear page, and the rest of the work is in the projects.
Thanks for looking!
