Toronto Skyline at Sunset on a Perfect Summer Day

A Room With a View

It’s nice to have friends, or as in this case, it’s nice to have a sister with cool friends who have awesome penthouse apartments with amazing views like in this photo. Even better is when those cool friends of your sister get you the keys to the place, so you can go grab a sweet sunset photograph from one of the coziest terraces in the city. I had such a nice time in Toronto on my recent visit. I met up with some old friends, some new friends from the online travel community and got a chance to hang out with my sister for a bit which doesn’t happen all that often. The weather for that week was near ideal on most days, and in the case of the day that I shot this Toronto skyline photo, I could not have designed more wonderful weather if I tried. The clarity in the image is something that I’m particularly happy about. So often when photographing cities in the summertime, there is a lot of haze and smog. The ideal time to avoid these conditions is at sunrise, not sunset, so I was really fortunate to have a day where it was windy, not humid and sunny. Since most of my meetings were late morning, afternoon and evening, I did not see one sunrise while in Toronto. This is a bit odd for me when I’m on the road, but in my defense I did have a few late nights out, and my sister and brother in law are very generous hosts who have an impressive wine collection… Just sayin ;)

Setting up

Taking these kinds of photos that you see on my blog usually involves waiting and patience. It’s not glamorous and to be honest it can be quite frustrating to get to the place you want to photograph and have to wait for:

• clouds
• sun
• people or no people
• people in the right position
• traffic or no traffic
• rain to stop
• security guards to go away
• Wind to stop blowing
• or a combination of any of these things

So on this day it was nice to have no pressure of shooting for a client, sitting around with my sister, playing with my brand new iPhone. Fun stuff this iPhone, I think I’m a new addict. I held out as long as I could but my old cell phone was dying and it was time for an upgrade. While there are a million things you can do with an iPhone, one of the things that I love the most is the fun snapshots that you can take with the camera. Even cooler are the apps that allow you to manipulate the images like in the one above that I shot using Instagram. Another cool iPhone app for taking these type of photos is Hipstamatic.

I’m enjoying these fatures on my iPhone, and it’s making it possible for me to share some fun casual snapshots form where I happen to be shooting my real photographs. I’m hoping to be able to do more of this kind of fun photography and share these pics on Twitter and Facebook, so look for them there.

Here are just a few more examples of what you can do, the possibilities are quite limitless:

What are your Favourite iPhone Photography Apps?

I’m looking for more fun iPhone Photo apps and would love to hear what you are using and loving. Let me know your favourites in the comments below and I’ll make a list to share with everyone in a future blog post.

If you want to send me your photos that you have taken with your iPhones and any of the cool photography apps, send them to me in an email: info [at] kenkaminesky.com

I’ll share them in the blog post and credit the photographers.

Special thanks to my sister and her friend Bob for allowing me to get such a sweet shot of Toronto!