In the morning John took us to a nice place for breakfast then he showed us a cool dirt jump park in High Park. The dirt jumps totally needed to be fixed up a bit so we skipped those and went back to the car and drove to a skate park called Stan Wadlow park which from the researched we did looked pretty fun.
When we got their it was full of young skaters averaged around the age of 10 and they where all rocking T-shirts. Their shirts all said “We Skate our Hood” with a little skate board picture on it, It was pretty cool too see. Anyway we rode the park for awhile, when we got bored we continued on to roam the streets of Toronto and eventually made our way back to John’s so I could pursue a photo idea I had.
What I wanted to do was get was a point of view shot of Luke riding his fixed geared road bike threw the streets of Toronto. I was excited to do this but gear wasn’t working the way it should.
Luke Point of View in Toronot - © Nick Vail
My magic arm (which is a tool to clamp the camera to the bike) wasn’t locking properly, the lock lever broke on us, so we had to position the camera and tighten what used to be the locking arm with allen keys. Once we got the camera positioned we did some test runs around the block.
Luke Point of View in Toronot - © Nick Vail
To add to the chaos my wireless triggering device (Pocket Wizards) wouldn’t hold a signal more than a block away (and their range is suppose to span 1600 feet) then my Vivitar 285 flash which was mounted to the camera kept falling of the camera due to vibrations from the road.
All in the entire photo shoot was a lot of stress and a big pain-in-the-ass but I got the shots that I wanted.
Luke Point of View in Toronot - © Nick Vail
After the photo shoot it was close to 4pm which is when we heard Shannon was getting out of school so we went back to Kensington to search for red arrow bikes which wasn’t easy to find but Shannon was their, surprised and happy to see us.
We then got to meet a lot of his clientele (which is majority of the Toronto bike messengers). We chilled around the shop for awhile talking to some of the bike messengers, one of the messengers Dennis told us about this new sport that’s developing called bike polo which sounds pretty fun, and apparently a lot of cities play it all across the world.
After awhile we all went to drink some beers on the patio of a pub just around the corner in Kensington. When it was getting dark we headed back to the alley by the shop to talk some more, then one of the messenger dudes and I went to the beer store and bought a bunch of 40s of Corona‘s to bring back to sip on and chill in the shop.
Before the night was over Shannon gave me and Luke one of his band tee shirts and we biked back to Johns place threw the city streets of Toronto around 1am. I got lost and Luke got a flat tire but we both met up outside of John’s place at the exact same time. What a coincidence.
