No Frickin' Way

I didn't see them, at first. They were too far away.

I was more than a kilometre away and on the street, at the corner of Dundas and St. Patrick streets, near the Toronto cop shop. And I was finally going to make use of the camera that I had been lugging around all day.

Actually, I was carrying both of my Nikon D-SLRs, but I had actually used my D750 a couple of times through the day. It had my 24–70mm f/2.8 lens, so I had captured some street scenes as I trekked around Toronto with DW, Kid 1, and our friends, Brad and Randi. But my D7200, which had a 70–300mm f/5.6 lens attached to it, hadn't been used all day, as I hadn't spied anything from afar that I felt that I wanted to zoom in on.

Until this moment.

Without a tripod, I had to crank the ISO up to 16000, and still, I was only shooting at 1/90 of a second. At 300mm magnification, I was doubtful that I'd be steady enough to get anything.

The lights on the CN Tower were constantly changing but every few seconds, the microwave section—the band around the base of the superstructure—would display a rainbow colour for a couple of seconds before changing.

I focused, slowly let out my breath, and pressed the shutter release.

The first shot appeared crooked in my frame so I recomposed my shot, ensured that I was steady, and repeated the process.

The viewscreen at the back of the photo showed me that the tower was straight, so I didn't hold up my family and friends any longer. It was pretty nippy in the big city.

Later that night, I removed the image from my camera and edited it on my smartphone. Actually, I had very little editing to do, only adjusting the contrast so that the black of the sky was truly black. But it wasn't until I started editing that I could see people in the image.

Not looking out the windows of the superstructure (though, that would have been cool), but standing on the slanted roof, outside.

I know that there are tours of the tower that take you outside, safely secured to railings through a harness system. Being afraid of heights, myself, it's not something I can see me doing.

But I thought these tours were only performed during the day, when the participants could clearly see where they were stepping, where they could see right across Lake Ontario and see the mist from Niagara Falls in the far distance.

I'm sure the city lights must be beautiful at night, but I could only look at these people in the picture and think, no frikkin' way would you ever get me to do that at night. All the power to them.

Happy Friday!